Links 09/01/2024: Horizon Proprietary Software (Linked to Microsoft Suppliers) Killed Innocent Post Office Workers, Musk is Still Union-Busting
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Chris Hannah ☛ My First Project of 2024
It’s only been just a week, and I’ve already “completed” my first project of the year. Well, it’s not really completed, but it’s functional and it already completely addresses a personal need.
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Write it anyway
Not every post in the Internet need to be completely unique about a topic nobody else has ever written about. So share your insights and experiences and views on the topic, link to others that expand or contradict your views and make it easier for people to find out about new things as they run into your blog post.
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Laker Turner ☛ 2023 - A recap
So I wanted to recap everything I've done. Mostly to get my blog-post-writing juices flowing.
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Barry Hess ☛ Making the Web Easier for Blogging
Firstly, and most importantly, YES! Yes, I want us developers to keep iterating self-hosted, installable software. Let’s make it better, easier to use, and accessible for as many people as possible.
I just don’t think it’s practical to expect self-hosted blog/site installations to bring those that are tech-challenged into the fold. Idealistically, yes, it’s probably best to own your own stack. It’s become very hard to trust any software company to keep its promises over time. So if it’s your servers, your domains, and your code/writing, you are in control.
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Kev Quirk ☛ Let's Make the IndieWeb Easier
He's dead right. SSGs and their ilk are simple for developers but not simple for the vast majority of people. We need tools that are simple to use, simple to manage, and simple maintain.
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Brandon ☛ Re: Let's Make the IndieWeb Easier (and Blogging)
Wordpress was the only option that made sense. So, I set her up a domain on my hosting, installed Wordpress along with Classic Editor and just unleashed her. She didn't need any further instruction from me and within minutes she was already creating content, having fun, and enjoying her first blog.
Sadly, I still felt like I was settling. There should be a better option with a better mobile app, but there isn't. So, I hope one day some developers (as Giles challenged) will put together the next generation of Wordpress that allows beginners to just write, edit, and enjoy themselves without needing to learn markdown, open up a terminal, upload documents to a folder, etc.
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Data Swamp ☛ 2024 plans and 2023 retrospective
It happens that I occasionally write a blog post to give some news about my own projects and life(style), this is such a blog post!
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Jason Velazquez ☛ Where have all the websites gone?
No, we get our content from a For You Page now— algorithmically selected videos and images made by our favorite creators, produced explicitly for our preferred platform. Which platform doesn’t matter much. So long as it’s one of the big five. Creators churn out content for all of them.
It’s a technical marvel, that [Internet]. Something so mindblowingly impressive that if you showed it to someone even thirty years ago, their face would melt the fuck off. So why does it feel like something’s missing? Why are we all so collectively unhappy with the state of the web?
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Science
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[Repeat] Science Alert ☛ Most Experts Avoid Using Pie Charts. Here's Why.
Pie charts also do badly when there are lots of categories. For example, this chart from a study on data sources used for COVID data visualisation shows hundreds of categories in one pie.
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Ruben Schade ☛ Avoid using pie charts
I agree with their conclusion: pie charts are best left for limited datasets where the delta between points are easily discernible when presented visually. But even then, I’m thinking I’d just stick with bar graphs.
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Education
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Michal Zelazny ☛ Imperfect
Realizing this is my first step towards making a real change. Of course, there is a fine line between compassion and laziness, but this year, for the first time, I will risk crossing it. I’ve been taught that being effective and getting results is the most important thing. Now I have to teach myself that being good for myself is more important. I have to teach myself that there is a long list of things in life that are more important than being a productivity machine.
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Ruben Schade ☛ James’ new book on technical writing
James of jamesg.blog has a new book on technical writing you can download today, itself an expansion of his Advent of Technical Writers blog post series from last year.
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Hardware
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Quartz ☛ Supply chains are getting longer and twistier as the US and China try to decouple
It is the irony of our new economic age. Globalization brought with it elongated supply chains, as manufacturing and production were moved across oceans and continents. And now, a retreat from unrestrained offshoring (a trend some refer to as deglobalization or regionalization) appears to be making supply chains even longer.
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GamingOnLinux ☛ JSAUX revealed an upgraded transparent RGB Docking Station
If you've got a Steam Deck, an ROG Ally, a Lenovo Legion Go or whatever else is going from the likes of AYANEO and GPD you may want to look into the new upgraded transparent RGB Docking Station from JSAUX.
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GamingOnLinux ☛ AMD announces Radeon RX 7600 XT, Ryzen 8000G series and new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs
Amongst a whole lot of technobabble about AI AI and more AI, AMD today announced the Radeon RX 7600 XT, Ryzen 8000G series and new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. For any normal consumer, their event was a hard boring watch with business people patting each-other on the back about AI advancements but here's the gist of what was actually revealed today.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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India Times ☛ Dark corners of the web offer a glimpse at AI's nefarious future
A collection of online trolls took screenshots of the doctor from an online feed of her testimony and edited the images with artificial intelligence tools to make her appear naked. They then shared the manipulated files on 4chan, an anonymous message board known for fostering harassment and spreading hateful content and conspiracy theories.
It was one of numerous times that people on 4chan had used new AI-powered tools such as audio editors and image generators to spread racist and offensive content about people who had appeared before the parole board, according to Daniel Siegel, a graduate student at Columbia University who researches how AI is being exploited for malicious purposes. Siegel chronicled the activity on the site for several months.
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India Times ☛ Cybercriminals find new way to access Google accounts without password: report
The post described how accounts could be compromised due to a flaw in cookies, which websites and browsers use to track users and improve their efficiency and usability.
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BBC ☛ Post Office scandal: Former minister calls for mass appeal against convictions
Ministers are meeting on Monday to consider ways of clearing the names of hundreds of sub-postmasters.
Between 1999 and 2015, more than 700 Post Office branch managers were convicted of false accounting, theft and fraud based on the faulty Horizon software.
Some sub-postmasters wrongfully went to prison, many were financially ruined. Some have since died.
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Gabriel ☛ Homescreens and Things
it is a new year, and thus as is tradition, a new homescreen setup. However, I am sure that in the year of our lord, 2024, this homescreen setup, will definitely change many times over. And yet, here we are. The idea for this setup came from, mastodon. Many times people will share their setups and if my first thought is "Hm, that's weird" or Hm, that's interesting", I try to mimic it to understand why. Call it curiosity, I guess.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Firms are going cashless, and that’s okay: Reserve Bank
The clarification, in response to questions from TechCentral, comes as more and more consumer-facing companies, such as coffee shops and restaurants, in South African stop accepting cash from their customers for security [sic] reasons.
This has led to confusion about whether companies, including retailers, are permitted under South African law not to accept legal tender in the form of banknotes and coins.
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Defence/Aggression
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Off Guardian ☛ Apocalypse Now: The Government’s Use of Controlled Chaos to Maintain Power
For years now, the government has been pushing us to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.
This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by—has manifested itself in the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Age-old problems to sharing cyber threat info remain, IG report finds
The IG also identified tensions among government agencies regarding what information is being shared. Department of Commerce officials said they were concerned that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency could be sharing additional information but did not explain further. Both Justice Department and Pentagon officials told the IG that some entities are hesitant to share cyber threat information because it could jeopardize ongoing operations.
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RFERL ☛ Wider Europe Briefing: Why Are The EU's Latest Russia Sanctions So Weak?
The rest of the sanctions package was much weaker tea. A few more Russian exports face EU import bans in the future -- liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), processed aluminum, pig iron, and copper wires -- which should deprive the Kremlin of an estimated $2 billion to $3 billion in revenue. The bloc will also cease the export to Russia of thermostats, static converters, resistors, propellants, and lithium batteries -- components also used in drones and other military equipment. And it will be prohibited for EU companies to provide services such as software for industrial design and for Russian nationals to hold high positions in EU companies providing crypto-asset services.
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The Strategist ☛ Saving representative democracy from online trolls
More than 70 national elections are scheduled for 2024, including in eight of the 10 most populous countries. But one group is likely to be significantly under-represented: women. A major reason is the disproportionate amount of abuse female politicians and candidates receive online, including threats of rape and violence. The rise of artificial intelligence, which can be used to create sexually explicit deepfakes, is only compounding the problem.
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The Nation ☛ The Sickness Behind Calling the January 6 Criminals “Hostages”
This time, Stefanik lined up with Trump. “I have concerns about the treatment of January 6th hostages.” Unbelievably, or not, Welker didn’t challenge her on the use of that charged term.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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The Hill ☛ The media hate plagiarism, but they want a special carve-out for Claudine Gay
This story obviously did not age well following a more thorough investigation by Harvard and others. But ignore the more thorough investigation for a moment, and ask yourself this: Why did the New York Times take on faith the word of Gay’s subordinates at Harvard? Why not look at the actual evidence and decide for themselves, as various publications have done with so many other plagiarists? The evidence was there for review.
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Environment
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Ruben Schade ☛ E-waste still not taken seriously in Australia
The good news is that retail chains like Officeworks and The Good Guys will accept e-waste, though the volumes I pick up and hand over have raised eyebrows a couple of times. Better that than having it leeching crap into a landfill.
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Truthdig ☛ The Moms Vs. The Multinational
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of synthetic chemicals composed of carbon and fluorine atoms that have been widely used in consumer products since the 1950s. Because the carbon-fluorine bond is one of the strongest, PFAS do not degrade easily in the environment. Used in such common products as nonstick pans, water-resistant clothing, shoes, packaging and cleaning supplies, PFAS have been linked to cancer, infertility, reduced immune response, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other health problems.
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Energy/Transportation
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Cryptocurrencies and exchange control: what the law says
To clamp down on this practice, South African authorities responded with what Altify (formerly Revix) CEO Sean Sanders has described as “the strictest approach that they possibly could have”.
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Overpopulation
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Omicron Limited ☛ Urbanization has led some Costa Rican water sources to exceed safety levels: Study
"Land use has changed dramatically in the past four decades in Costa Rica," said Ricardo Sánchez-Murillo, associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences. "Many areas have changed from forested and pasture areas and coffee plantations to urban developments, taking away green spaces. Together, these changes have altered the nitrate compositions in the groundwater."
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Matt Birchler ☛ Substack wants to have its cake and eat it too
I’ll say it again, Substack already moderates, and while they thinks some things are worth banning from their platform, they think Nazis aren’t as bad and are welcome to stay. That’s entirely Substack’s right as a company and clearly that stance appeals to some people, but it doesn’t appeal to everyone, and you should feel totally reasonable not wanting to use a social platform that goes, “we’re actually okay with the Nazis sticking around.”
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Scoop News Group ☛ Biden administration on track meeting initial AI order actions
The Office of Management and Budget, Office of Personnel Management, General Services Administration, National Science Foundation, and Department of Labor indicated they’re on track with requirements that were set to be completed within 30, 45, and 60 days of the Oct. 30 order (EO 14110). Keeping up with the early deadlines, researchers told FedScoop, could be important for actions down the line.
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Kev Quirk ☛ My Opinions on Marriage
The parental responsibilities thing surprised me though. I didn't realise that fathers who weren't married have so few rights. It seems that without a wedding ring, we're glorified sperm donors in the eyes of the law.
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MIT Technology Review ☛ Four lessons from 2023 that tell us where AI regulation is going
While writing this piece, I took some time to reflect on how we got here. I think stories about technologies’ rise are worthy of reflective examination—they can help us better understand what might happen next. And as a reporter, I’ve seen patterns emerge in these stories over time—whether it's with blockchain, social media, self-driving cars, or any other fast-developing, world-changing innovation. The tech usually moves much faster than regulation, with lawmakers increasingly challenged to stay up to speed with the technology itself while devising new ways to craft sustainable, future-proof laws.
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International Business Times ☛ Microsoft launches initiative to train 100,000 Indian developers on AI [Ed: Distracting with vapourware and hocus pocus, as India moves to GNU/Linux and the government needs bribing again]
The month-long programme, called AI Odyssey, will impart developers comprehensive learning on AI technologies aligned with business goals and outcomes to enable them to execute critical projects, the company said in a statement.
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India Times ☛ AI will become companion to creative process, not its master: Anand Mahindra
"I'm not at all gloomy about the prognostications that [computer programs] will one day take over from human beings," he said. "Technological change is always frightening. Socrates disapproved of the idea of writing, because he believed it would affect the human being's capacity to memorise. And yet, writing turned out to be one of the most seminal developments in human history... AI will become the companion to the creative process, not its master."
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Cory Dransfeldt ☛ I found the music I love on the [Internet]
I drove to the local record store and got acquainted with what they stocked. I called and bugged their staff to special order CDs for me. I checked the local Borders and Barnes and Noble when it made sense (which was rare). I ripped the CDs, I bought a shelf to store them in, I loaded them on my Juke Box.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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New York Times ☛ TikTok Quietly Curtails Data Tool Used by Critics
The tool, called the Creative Center, is meant to help advertisers track popular hashtags on the site. The Creative Center is available to anyone and can produce figures about the number of videos tied to a certain hashtag and information about the audience that saw those videos.
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RFERL ☛ Blogger From Tajikistan Suspected In Russia Of Inciting Hatred In Video He Says Is Fake
Russia's Investigative Committee said it has launched a probe against a blogger from Tajikistan for allegedly inciting hatred over a video "humiliating women with Slavic features" that he claims is fake. [...]
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RFERL ☛ Belarusian Blogger Still In Jail After Serving Two Terms
Belarusian blogger Ales Sabaleuski remains in jail despite completing a second term, the Mayday Team Telegram channel said on January 8. [...]
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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CPJ ☛ CPJ calls for investigation of attack on 5 Kenyan journalists reporting a raid on Nairobi bar
Police officers said they arrested 21 people in connection with the incident, according to the news reports. On January 8, Nicholas Kosgei, the head of enforcement at NACADA, told CPJ that investigations were still ongoing and suspects would be arraigned this week.
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ANF News ☛ Journalist Metin Göktepe, murdered 28 years ago, commemorated
Metin Göktepe was commemorated at his grave in Istanbul. The journalist, who worked for the left-wing newspaper Evrensel, was only 27 years old when he was beaten to death by Turkish police officers on January 8, 1996.
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Press Gazette ☛ Newsflation: UK national newspaper cover prices up 13% in past year
The cover price on the newsstands of a daily newspaper grew by 15% on average between January 2023 and the start of January 2024. Saturday and Sunday newspapers were each up by an average of 12%.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ Elon Musk Is Union-Busting in Sweden Because He’s Afraid of Worker Power
Elon Musk is trying to export Tesla’s anti-union model to Sweden, and workers across Scandinavia are launching solidarity actions to thwart him. We should be embracing the Nordic countries’ model of strong worker rights, not Tesla’s elitist union busting.
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ANF News ☛ Supreme Court in Iran confirms further death sentences against Kurds
According to KHRN, the convicts are Pejman Fatehi (28), Wafa Azarbar (26), Mohammad Faramarzi (28) and Mohsen Mazloum (27). The French-based human rights organization had already reported on the case last year and accused the Iranian judiciary of having brought the four activists to trial under false allegations. They were also denied access to legal representation of their choice and were subjected to severe torture in custody. Their arrest took place in the course of a forced disappearance.
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VOA News ☛ Iranian Authorities Lash Anti-Hijab Advocate for Not Wearing Head Covering
An anti-hijab advocate in Iran, Roya Heshmati, has been lashed 74 times by Iranian authorities on charges of “injury to public chastity" for not wearing the mandatory head covering.
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The Times Of Israel ☛ Woman in Iran receives 74 lashings for not covering hair, ‘violating public morals’
Kurdish-focused rights group Hengaw identified Heshmati as a 33-year-old woman of Kurdish origins.
She was arrested in April “for publishing a photo on social media without wearing a headscarf,” her lawyer Maziar Tatai told the reformist Shargh daily.
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Le Monde ☛ Iranian woman gets 74 lashes for 'violating public morals'
Kurdish-focused rights group Hengaw identified Heshmati as a 33-year-old woman of Kurdish origins. She was arrested in April "for publishing a photo on social media without wearing a headscarf," her lawyer Maziar Tatai told the reformist Shargh daily. Heshmati was also ordered to pay a fine for "not wearing the Muslim veil in public," Tatai said.
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Essel Group ☛ Iranian woman Roya Heshmati punished with 74 lashes for violating public morals
An anti-hijab advocate in Iran, Roya Heshmati, has been lashed 74 times by Iranian authorities on charges of “injury to public chastity" for not wearing the mandatory head covering.
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Gizmodo ☛ The Moon Is About to Become a Graveyard
An upcoming launch will usher in a new era of commercial payloads being dropped off to deep space destinations like the Moon. As we gain greater access to space, things are going to start getting weird.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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APNIC ☛ Measuring BGP in 2023 — Have we reached peak IPv4?
The year 2023 marks a significant point in the evolution of the Internet where the strong growth numbers that were a constant feature of the past thirty years are simply not present in the data. Not only is the Internet’s growth slowing down significantly, but in the IPv4 network it appears to be shrinking, which is unprecedented in the brief history of the Internet to date.
Have we got to the point of market saturation and there is no more demand capacity to fuel further growth? Is the Internet losing its investment appeal along with so many other signals of investor disillusion over outlandish growth predictions in technology-based services? Or has the massive transition into Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) for digital services meant that there is a declining demand for the traditional form of content distribution over on-demand network access?
Let’s take a look at the BGP view of 2023 and see how these larger technical and economic considerations are reflected in the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system.
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American Dialect Society ☛ 2023 Word of the Year Is “Enshittification”
Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item”—not just words but also phrases, compounds, and affixes. The items do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year.
The vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere, the only one not tied to commercial interests, and the word-of-the-year event up to which all others lead. It is fully informed by the members’ expertise in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion.
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India Times ☛ Apple, Google block e-SIM apps in India; Multiverse of foodfluencers
Details: The DoT has also instructed [Internet] service providers and telecom companies to block access to websites associated with these apps, the Times of India reported.
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Copyrights
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Futurism ☛ OpenAI Pleads That It Can’t Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free
"Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression — including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents — it would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials," the company wrote in the evidence filing. "Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today's citizens."
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The Telegraph UK ☛ OpenAI warns copyright crackdown could doom ChatGPT
However, OpenAI and other rival companies have been accused of illegally free-riding on authors’ and artists’ work.
Last month, the New York Times sued the company claiming it is “profit[ing] from the massive copyright infringement, commercial exploitation and misappropriation of The Times’s intellectual [sic] property [sic]”.
Authors including John Grisham and George RR Martin have sued the company over its use of their books to train ChatGPT.
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Silicon Angle ☛ OpenAI argues New York Times’ AI copyright lawsuit is ‘without merit’
The AI developer has not detailed what datasets it used to train its latest large language models. However, OpenAI did disclose that LLMs released before GPT-3.5 drew on an open-source dataset called Common Crawl. That dataset, the Times’ lawsuit states, contains about 16 million records from websites operated by the paper.
A second argument included in the lawsuit is that ChatGPT sometimes displays paywalled articles when prompted to do so by users. The issue allegedly also affects Microsoft’s Bing Chat service, which is based on the same GPT-4 model as ChatGPT.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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I just wanna read
WHaaaaa!!
(That's me crying)
I don't wanna today. Gimme coffee, a nice warm blanket, and a mountain of books. I just want to read.
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Holiday Nostalgia
The year's end is an opportunity to wind things down and enjoy time with the family. With the daycare being closed until today, I actually had little choice in the matter. The kids were staying home and that had to be the primary focus of attention.
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2023 Week 50/51/52 - 2024 Week 1: Photos
Our new ferrets, Mocha and Chai, are quite playful--especially Mocha. Her behavior reminds me of a young child: she will continue to keep playing even when she's tired, and she sometimes needs us to intervene and put her back in her cage. Once she curls up inside, she will fall asleep immediately, sometimes right where she sits.
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How to bleed to death by way of a rake
Mixed bag today: picked out some materials for some house upgrading, visited with a grandchild, turned the Roomba loose on a couple carpeted rooms, set up a temporary performance practice area for my wife and I that I believe will be resistant to grandchild muckery.
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2024 plans and 2023 retrospective
It happens that I occasionally write a blog post to give some news about my own projects and life(style), this is such a blog post!
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#Lore24 - Day 8 - Casual Recall
One of the quirks of the telepaths with a high vogal generation[1], such as Ruben and Tagon, is that they are able to retrieve a large amount of information and speak with a precision that most people don't experience. This called casual recall[2] and represents the raw knowledge they have access to from a kotim[3] but not always the ability to understand it.
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My unpleasant PRINCE2® v7 exam experience
PeopleCert published PRINCE2 v7 a while back. We've been offering PRINCE2 elearning courses for many years, which requires accreditation. To offer courses for this new version, we should get a new accreditation, and one of its requirements is for us to take and pass the new PRINCE2 Practitioner exam. What follows is my experience in doing so.
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Technology and Free Software
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First impressions of Lagrange and why I'm loving it
I feel bad posting about Gemini so much these past few days, but it is kinda my current special interest, so here goes.
Lagrange is the Gemini client I'm using right now. I've also tried Amfora. Here are my first impressions after about a week of using them, and some thoughts on how they compare to Chromium.
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HOWTO Get SCGI running
I started firing up Molly Brown again (on a different port - I use GmCapsule for my primary) because for some reason I wanted to mess with SCGI again. It was probably because I read some old posts after someone (actually) emailed me about a couple of them. And, well, being a nerd that doesn't always nerd out, why wouldn't I just want to tinker?
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agrajag dev log 0
Trying to get into the habit of writing down the progress I've made on a particular day in order to convince my deeply-rooted perfectionist that it's okay to put the work down.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.