Links 12/01/2024: More Mass Layoffs and Misinformation in Taiwan
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- 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
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Hackaday ☛ E-Ink Photo Frame Is A Simple, Pleasing Design
Regular photo frames are good, but they tend to only display a single photo unless you pull them to bits and swap out what’s inside. [Ben] decided to make a digital photo frame using an e-ink display to change things up, and unlike some commercial versions we’ve seen, it’s actually pretty tasteful!
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Hackaday ☛ Weird Trashcan Is Actually Advanced 1990s Robot
[Clay Builds] found a bit of a gem at a recent auction, picking up a Nomadic Technologies N150 robot for just $100. It actually looks like something out of science fiction, with its cylindrical design, red bumpers, and many sensors. He decided to try and restore the research-grade robot to functionality with the aid of modern hardware.
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Marcin Juszkiewicz ☛ 2023 summary
Other thing was move from Ikea Trådfri to HomeAssistant with Zigbee dongle. Lot of cursing later things (usually) work as intended. Some interesting upgrades done, some areas have different level of light depending on time of day/night. Some buttons switch lights in several areas at once.
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Tracy Durnell ☛ To stay or to go?
Moving costs are real, and large. But so is the moral injury from doing business with a repugnant organization. Nazis are on every platform, yes, but it’s reasonable to expect they won’t be welcomed. Dave Karpf makes the analogy that while we recognize that it’s not feasible to completely eliminate mouse poop from our cereal, we can agree we’d like that quantity to approach zero.*
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Justin Miller ☛ How my link blog works
I run the Hugo content management system, but the generalities could apply to a lot of systems if this is something that you’d like to replicate.
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Keenan ☛ Please please please please please please share your big dumb beautiful self with the world
Okay, it's not all about me, though, is it? I get that. Vulnerability and motivation and self-esteem and validation and cost and fear and anxiety and dread and blocks and the question of: "Is it enough? Am I enough? Will people like this? Will people like me? Will this mean anything? Who cares? Who cares? Who cares?"
I care.
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Manuel Moreale ☛ The Mimo Diaries
In a post a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was going to take over Minimalissimo—aka Mimo—starting January 1st and that I was planning to blog about the whole experience.
Well, it’s January 10th, I am in charge of the site and I do plan to post updates on this journey under the title “The Mimo Diaries” and this is the first entry of the series.
So how is it going? I’d say so far so good. If you are a visitor of the site you might have noticed that a first change is already in place: posts no longer have short text content. Let me explain the reasoning behind that decision.
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Gergely Nagy ☛ A personal search engine
Earlier, I wrote about how disappointed I am in search, and how I’m opting this site out of the major search engines. I casually mentioned I have a carefully curated list of resources to turn to, but I did not explain how I use that - it wasn’t the topic. It is the topic now, though!
The way I “search” is that I have a list of resources in saved among my bookmarks, each tagged with a topic and with search. So whenever I want to find some information about a topic, I open the relevant sites in turn, and search therein, either by using the sites built-in search, or manually. This isn’t very efficient, nor fast, but over the course of the past six months, I found it works much better than using any of the search engines (including aggregators like SearxNG): yields more relevant results, faster, with less noise.
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Hackaday ☛ A Dashboard Outside The Car
One of the biggest upsides of open communications standards such as CAN or SPI is that a whole world of vehicle hacking becomes available, from simple projects like adding sensors or computers to a car or even building a complete engine control unit from the ground up. The reverse is true as well; sensors and gauges using one of these protocols can be removed from a car and put to work in other projects. That’s the idea that [John] had when he set about using a vehicle’s dashboard as a information cluster for his home.
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Hackaday ☛ Voice Controlled Rover Follows Verbal Instructions To Get Around
Typically, when we want to tell a robot where to go, we either pre-program a route or drive it around with some kind of gamepad or joystick controller. [Robotcus] decided to build a simple robot platform that drove around in response to voice commands instead.
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Science
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Bjoern Brembs ☛ The speed (or lack thereof) of science
One of the hallmarks of a truly Pavlovian preference is that classically conditioned animals are able to express their preference of, in our case the ‘cold’ pattern, with any behavior, e.g., they should approach the ‘cold’ pattern and avoid the ‘hot’ whether they are, say, walking or flying. After much fiddling around with the setup (with the help of the mechanical and electronics workshops!), it turned out that to test this hypothesis, for technical reasons, I needed to combine the yaw torque experiment with the pattern learning experiment and replace the patterns with colors. The outcome was an experiment in which the flies controlled both colors and heat via their left/right choices, e.g., left turning yielded blue color and heat off, while right turning leads to green color and heat on. “Switch-mode learning” was the informal name for this procedure. Very long story short: it turned out that there really is a genuinely Pavlovian association formed in such switch mode learning. Flies that learn that, e.g., green is good and blue is bad, can avoid the bad color and prefer the good color in a different behavior than the one that they used to operantly control the colors with. This means that there may be a fundamental difference between the operant yaw torque learning and operant visual learning: In the operant visual experiment, the operant behavior is important, but it does not play any role in what is being learned, only how. It doesn’t seem to enter into any association at all. Instead, it just seems to facilitate the formation of an essentially Pavlovian stimulus-stimulus association. In contrast, in the yaw torque learning experiment, there isn’t anything else that the animals could possibly learn, but their own behavior. In a way, yaw torque learning is a ‘pure’ form of operant learning, while operant visual (i.e., pattern/color) learning is ‘contaminated’ with a very dominant Pavlovian component.
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Education
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Join us at Future Frontend 2024
To quote our official blog post, here’s this year’s conference in a nutshell: [...]
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[Old] Dr Werner Vogels ☛ A few words on taking notes
As I continued along my educational journey, and the subject matter became increasingly more complex, it forced me to rethink note taking. It was less about being a scribe, and more about listening, observing, and comprehending what was being taught. For example, the younger me may have copied the following definition verbatim: “The classic role of mitochondria is oxidative phosphorylation, which generates ATP by utilising the energy released during the oxidation of the food we eat.” And when studying, I would have committed this to memory without necessarily understanding how it actually worked. What would have been more helpful would have been to read the definition, then write it out in a way that was meaningful to me, such as: “Mitochondria are the power plant of the cell. They generate most of the chemical energy needed to power the cell’s biochemical reactions.” Maybe even diagram the process in the margins. This is synthesis. This denotes understanding.
And there’s research to back this up. Specifically, that verbatim note taking just isn’t as effective when you’re trying to learn and retain new information.
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James G ☛ Blogging as I learn
Over the winter holidays, I decided to try my hand at blogging as I learn. I started working on a challenge to compress 1 GB of Wikipedia (the enwik9 dataset) as much as possible. Before working on the challenge, I knew very little about compression. I spent hours over multiple days coding towards different solutions, during which time I learned a lot. Most of what I learned was not novel to the world -- i.e. I learned that dictionary coding is effective, something that was theorized decades ago! -- but it was novel to me. I was learning.
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Hardware
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Hackaday ☛ Retrotechtacular: Rebuilding A Fire-Ravaged Telephone Exchange
Those who haven’t experienced the destruction of a house fire should consider themselves lucky. The speed with which fire can erase a lifetime of work — or a life, for that matter — is stunning. And the disruption a fire causes for survivors, who often escape the blaze with only the clothes on their backs, is almost unfathomable. To face the task of rebuilding a life with just a few smoke-damaged and waterlogged possessions while wearing only pajamas and slippers is a devastating proposition.
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Daniel Lemire ☛ Implementing the missing sign instruction in AVX-512
Intel and AMD have expanded the x64 instruction sets over time. In particular, the SIMD (Single instruction, multiple data) instructions have become progressively wider and more general: from 64 bits to 128 bits (SSE2), to 256 bits (AVX/AVX2) to 512 bits (AVX-512). Interestingly, many instructions defined on 256 bits registers through AVX/AVX2 are not available on 512 bits registers.
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Hackaday ☛ Decoding A ROM From A Picture Of The Chip
Before there were home computers, among the hottest pieces of consumer technology to own was a pocket calculator. In the early 1970s a series of exciting new chips appeared which allowed the impossible to become the affordable, and suddenly anyone with a bit of cash could have one.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Futurism ☛ Scientists Find Bottled Water Filled With Hundreds of Thousands of Microplastics
By using this new technique, they examined and analyzed store-bought water in plastic bottles, leading to the upsetting discovery that one liter of bottled water had an average number of 240,000 teeny tiny plastic bits swimming in it. That's a lot more plastic than what a previous 2018 study had suggested, which had found an average of 10.4 plastic particles in a liter of water.
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PNAS ☛ Rapid single-particle chemical imaging of nanoplastics by SRS microscopy
Micro-nano plastics originating from the prevalent usage of plastics have raised increasingly alarming concerns worldwide. However, there remains a fundamental knowledge gap in nanoplastics because of the lack of effective analytical techniques. This study developed a powerful optical imaging technique for rapid analysis of nanoplastics with unprecedented sensitivity and specificity. As a demonstration, micro-nano plastics in bottled water are analyzed with multidimensional profiling of individual plastic particles. Quantification suggests more than 105 particles in each liter of bottled water, the majority of which are nanoplastics. This study holds the promise to bridge the knowledge gap on plastic pollution at the nano level.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Surrounded by microplastics: The risks and solutions
New research this week has revealed there are 100 times more plastic particles in bottled water than previous studies showed.
The report, published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found an average of over a quarter of a million plastic particles per liter of bottled water, 90% of which were nanoplastics.
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Carl Barenbrug ☛ The Losing Battle Against Social Media
I wish I could just focus on the site. All I want to do is write a feature and press publish and be done with it. None of this added labour just to get the shit noticed. I could automate posting to some social platforms upon publishing an article, but there are limitations to that. So with the acceptance that unless I put money and resource into social media, things are unlikely to improve. Therefore, a change of strategy is required. I'm going to put Twitter aside for now—we are actually seeing reasonable growth and engagement (for the time being at least). And with Elon's imminent impact on the platform, it's going to be interesting to see how that evolves.
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Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Your attention is precious
It's finite, it's exhaustible and it ought to be held close and carefully guarded.
Lately I've been working on dropping things that demand rather than allow for my attention.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Ziff Davis ☛ Big Tech Companies Start 2024 With New Round of Layoffs
Amazon, Google, and X have initiated a new round of layoffs as they enter 2024. Amazon has cut hundreds of jobs in its film and television studios division in addition to its streaming platform, Twitch. Google has also started to lay off hundreds of people from its voice-activated Google Assistant project and other employees in select product teams. Furthermore, X has cut staff from its global trust and safety team, and dealt a major blow to its team of safety engineers.
The cuts come as most Big Tech companies continue their cost-cutting efforts, streamline operations, and prioritize key projects. It follows the initial mass layoffs that resulted in several thousand job cuts in 2022 and 2023, including other major companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and many others.
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Bloomberg ☛ Google Ends Cloud Switching Fees, Pressuring Amazon and Microsoft [Ed: Dina Bass has already been exposed as a Microsoft mole in the media; conflict of interest undeclared here]
Antirust officials have been looking at cloud data-transfer policies
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Wipro Hyderabad Trims High-Paid Staff
These developments underscore the broader trend of job uncertainties in the tech sector, stirring conversations about the human side of corporate restructuring on various online platforms.
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The Verge ☛ Discord is laying off 17 percent of employees
Discord is laying off 17 percent of its staff, a move that CEO Jason Citron said is meant to “sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization.”
The cuts were announced today to employees in an all-hands meeting and internal memo I’ve obtained. They’ll impact 170 people across various departments.
Based on Citron’s message to employees and my understanding of the business, Discord isn’t in dire financial straits, though it has yet to become profitable and is still trying to revive user growth after a surge during the pandemic. In his memo to employees, which you can read in full below, Citron said Discord grew its headcount too fast over the last few years — an admission that has become quite common among tech CEOs as of late.
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Casey Newton ☛ Why Platformer is leaving Substack [Ed: Social control media is a waste of time and effort as you keep losing your home/platform, need to relocate. There are many other reasons to avoid such outsourcing.]
After much consideration, we have decided to move Platformer off of Substack. Over the next few days, the publication will migrate to a new website powered by the nonprofit, open-source publishing platform Ghost. If you already subscribe to Platformer and wish to continue receiving it, you don’t need to do anything: your account will be ported over to the new platform.
If all goes well, following the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Monday, you’ll receive the Tuesday edition of Platformer as normal. If you have any issues with your subscription after that, please let us know.
Today let’s talk about how we came to this decision, the debate over how platforms should moderate content, and why we think we’re better off elsewhere.
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Techdirt ☛ Unity Lays Off 25% Of It’s Work Force, Is Having A Bad Time
The bad times for Unity continue, it seems. Or, at the very least, for the ostensibly hardworking men and women that called the company home. The bad times really began late last summer when Unity decided to drastically change its pricing scheme both for future projects that used the game engine, and, somehow, retroactively as well, all without any transparency or much notice. This led to massive fallout among game developers, with a ton of them swearing off the engine entirely, while associated dev groups around the internet just simply shut down. Then Unity CEO John Riccitiello resigned, the company walked back some portion of its new pricing plan, and an interim CEO was named in James Whitehurst, formerly of Red Hat.
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New Statesman ☛ The Post Office scandal is infecting all parties
While progress may have been belatedly made, the scandal indicts all political parties. Seventeen ministers have been responsible for the Post Office since Horizon went online in 1999, according to the Financial Times, including Labour’s Pat McFadden and Stephen Timms. Some postmasters were taken to court while Keir Starmer led the Crown Prosecution Service (he says he wasn’t aware of the cases).
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Vice Media Group ☛ The George Carlin AI Standup Is Worse Than You Can Imagine
The cursed hour-long special is the work of Dudesy, a podcast hosted by Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen and curated by an AI program with the same name. At the start of the special, Dudesy intones that it devoured the work of the long dead comedic genius and rendered it into a terrible, hour-long facsimile of Carlin’s work called I’m Glad I’m Dead. It’s all on YouTube for everyone to cringe along to, and fair warning from a fan of the real Carlin such as myself: it can not be unseen.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ The real AI automation threat to workers
It was absolute nonsense. First of all, "truck driver" isn't a particularly common job in America! The BLS lumps together all cargo vehicle drivers under a single classification. The category error here was thinking that every delivery van driver, furniture mover, and courier is behind the wheel of a big rig, cracking wise on a CB radio as they tear up the interstate.
But what about automation threats? It's possible that if we redesigned the interstates to give 18 wheelers their own separated lanes, and then set them to following one another, that they could traverse long distances in that way. Congratulations, you've just invented a shitty, failure-prone train.
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The Hill ☛ AI models frequently ‘hallucinate’ on legal queries, study finds
However, the “pervasive” nature of legal hallucinations raises “significant concerns” about the reliability of using LLMs in the field, the authors from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI and Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab noted in a blog post.
When asked direct, verifiable questions about federal court cases, the study found the model behind ChatGPT, GPT-3.5, hallucinated 69 percent of the time, while Google’s PaLM 2 gave incorrect answers 72 percent of the time and Meta’s Llama 2 offered false information 88 percent of the time.
The models performed worse when asked more complex legal questions, such as the core legal question or central holding of a case, or when asked about case law from lower courts, like district courts.
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Cryptography Engineering ☛ Attack of the week: Airdrop tracing
It’s been a while since I wrote an “attack of the week” post, and the fault for this is entirely mine. I’ve been much too busy writing boring posts about Schnorr signatures! But this week’s news brings an exciting story with both technical and political dimensions, namely: that a new Chinese technique is being used to trace AirDrop transmissions.
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Vox ☛ There are too many chatbots
Over the past couple of months, people have created more than 3 million chatbots thanks to the GPT creation tool OpenAI announced in November. At launch, for example, the store features a chatbot that builds websites for you, and a chatbot that searches through a massive database of academic papers. And like the developers for smartphone app stores, the creators of these new chatbots can make money based on how many people use their product. The store is only available to paying ChatGPT subscribers for now, and OpenAI says it will soon start sharing revenue with the chatbot makers.
This probably means that in 2024, a lot more people will do what I did in 2023: spend an ungodly amount of time playing with AI chatbots. The problem is, there are already too many of them. It’s hard to know where to start, and although the introduction of a store makes it easier to find chatbots, it’s not yet clear if a third party will do for chatbots what third-party developers did for smartphone apps: make them essential and revolutionary at the same time. If that happens, maybe the tremendous buzz around AI right now will actually turn into a trillion-dollar industry — and change the world.
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Tim Kellogg ☛ Application Phishing
“Prompt injection” is a perilously misleading term, we need a better phrase for it that helps beginners intuitively understand what’s going on.
Don’t believe me? imagine if, instead of “phishing” we called it “email injection”. I mean, technically the attacker is injecting words into an email, but no, that’s dumb. The attacker is convincing the LLM to perform nefarious behavior using language that’s indistinguishable from valid input.
Everyone I’ve ever talked to about it has immediately drawn a parallel between “prompt injection” and “SQL injection”. The way to guard agaist SQL injection is validation & sanitation. But there is no “prepared statement API” for LLMs. There can’t be, it doesn’t fit the problem. Experienced people figure this out, but less experienced people often don’t, and I’m worried that’s leading to innappropriate security measures.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Securepairs ☛ Robot Vacuum Lands CES “Worst In Show” For Security
A device harvesting that amount of sensitive personal information – images, sound, maps of personal living spaces – better have top-shelf security right? Alas, no. A presentation on the Ecovacs Deebot X1 in December at the Chaos Communications Conference in Hamburg, Germany by researchers Dennis Giese and Braelynn Luedtke revealed that the vacuums are easily hackable. Among other things, they found that user data – possibly including images- stored on the vacuums in unencrypted form. Also, remote access to the robot vacuum’s live video feed was secured via a mobile app that could be easily bypassed. The researchers also found that the Ecovacs factory reset feature does not fully erase all information from the device.
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[Old] Brian Sholis ☛ Cincinnati Enquirer op-ed
It is important to try to understand more fully the ways our lives are now intertwined with cameras. The key questions are no longer about means: We are all subject to being recorded, and most of us possess the ability to record. Instead, they are about motive: Who’s watching, and for what purposes? Unlike even a decade ago, when tensions flare today a camera is as likely to be used as a defense mechanism as it is a tool in the abuse of power. I remember well the woman who, several years ago, used her cell phone to photograph a flasher on the subway, leading to his arrest and his picture on the cover of a tabloid newspaper.
The key questions are no longer about means: We are all subject to being recorded, and most of us possess the ability to record. Instead, they are about motive: Who’s watching, and for what purposes?
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EFF ☛ FTC Bars X-Mode from Selling Sensitive Location Data
So it is welcome news that the Federal Trade Commission has brought a successful enforcement action against X-Mode Social (and its successor Outlogic).
The FTC’s complaint illustrates the dangers created by this industry. The company collects our location data through software development kits (SDKs) incorporated into third-party apps, through the company’s own apps, and through buying data from other brokers. The complaint alleged that the company then sells this raw location data, which can easily be correlated to specific individuals. The company’s customers include marketers and government contractors.
The FTC’s proposed order contains a strong set of rules to protect the public from this company.
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Defence/Aggression
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India Times ☛ ByteDance’s Resso to shut in India on January 31
India banned TikTok and nearly 300 other Chinese apps in phases, starting from June 2020, citing national security concerns. TikTok had more than 200 million users in India at the time and considered India its biggest overseas market. Since then, calls to ban TikTok have also surfaced elsewhere too.
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New York Times ☛ Al Shabab Terrorist Group Captures U.N. Helicopter in Somalia
Six of the passengers were captured, while two escaped and one was killed, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. The circumstances in which the person was killed were unclear.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Germany makes U-turn on weapons deliveries to Saudi Arabia
At the end of December, the German government is said to have approved the export of 150 IRIS-T guided missiles to Saudi Arabia. Government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit confirmed this on Wednesday, January 10.
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El País ☛ Donald Trump defies judge, gives courtroom speech on tense final day of New York civil fraud trial
After two of Trump’s lawyers had delivered traditional closing arguments Thursday, one of them, Christopher Kise, asked the judge again whether Trump could speak. Engoron asked Trump whether he would abide by the guidelines he had laid out earlier, which included not trying to introduce new evidence or making a campaign speech.
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Pro Publica ☛ Recording Shows NRA Plot to Conceal LaPierre’s Extravagant Expenses
At a meeting in June 2009, the treasurer of the National Rifle Association worked out a plan to conceal luxury expenses involving its chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Trace and ProPublica. The recording was unknown to New York’s attorney general, who is pursuing the NRA and LaPierre over a range of alleged financial misdeeds. It shows, in real time, the NRA’s treasurer enlisting the group’s longtime public relations firm to obfuscate the extravagant costs.
Captured on tape is talk of LaPierre’s desire to avoid public disclosure of his use of private jets as well as concern about persistent spending at the Beverly Hills Hotel by a PR executive and close LaPierre adviser.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ New year, same pattern Ukraine is holding its own as Russia continues pushing along the entire front — but it desperately needs ammo — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Ukrainian Prosecutor General says preliminary findings confirm Russia uses North Korean missiles — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russian Pension Fund employees asked not to publish information about welfare payments to war participants. Journalists use this data to uncover scale of Russian troop losses. — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Finland extends border closure with Russia by one month — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Ukraine’s parliament sends bill on amending mobilization rules back to Cabinet of Ministers for revision — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Latvia to transfer Moscow House cultural center in Riga to state ownership — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russia’s Investigative Committee opens ‘justifying terrorism’ case against Left Front leader Sergey Udaltsov — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Bloomberg: White House supports using frozen Russian assets to compensate Ukraine for war damages — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russian foreign intelligence chief says U.S. plans to use exchange program alumni to create ‘fifth column’ in Russia and interfere in election — Meduza
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The Nation ☛ What Wouldn’t Jesus Do?
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Review – Bitconned is an age-old tale of human greed
When Centra’s discrepancies were exposed in print, it wasn’t long before the authorities were alerted to the fake company. The US Securities and Exchange Commission brought a complaint against Centra, at which point the money began to evaporate and the company’s biggest players — Trapani, Sharma and alleged stripper-turned-chief financial officer Robert Farkas — were eventually convicted of several crimes.
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Pratik ☛ Generalizing Voters based on Race
But..but, my family is educated, and we definitely know better than to vote for Trump. Well, to be honest, that’s what I thought too in 2016. I worked in the field of expanding college access at the time and thought that if you are educated enough, you will make an informed choice and not vote for the racist. Unfortunately, I was proven wrong. That shook me to my core more than anything else.
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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Interesting Engineering ☛ MIT students unveil open-source hydrogen motorcycle for research
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Electric Vehicle Team has unveiled its plan for constructing a hydrogen-powered electric motorcycle. The team aims to utilize a fuel cell system for this project, serving as a testing ground for innovative hydrogen-based transportation technologies.
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uni MIT ☛ The future of motorcycles could be hydrogen
Brennan, who is the team’s safety lead, has been learning about the safe handling methods required for the bike’s hydrogen fuel, including the special tanks and connectors needed. The team initially used a commercially available electric motor for the prototype but is now working on an improved version, designed from scratch, she says, “which gives us a lot more flexibility.”
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Futurism ☛ Boeing May Be in Serious Trouble Over Door Panel Blowing Out
Just ten minutes into the flight and some 15,000 feet high, the door plug was torn off the fuselage, leaving a large hole that violently depressurized the cabin and had passengers fearing for their lives. The powerful vacuum sucked up several smartphones and even tore a child's shirt straight off his body. Fortunately, no one was sitting right next to the window, or the accident could have proved fatal.
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CNN ☛ Boeing CEO acknowledges ‘mistake’ related to terrifying Alaska Airlines flight
On Friday, an Alaska Airlines flight carrying 177 people made an emergency landing shortly following takeoff from Portland, Oregon, after part of the wall of a weeks-old 737 Max 9 aircraft detached and left a gaping hole in the side of the plane. On Saturday, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered most Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft to be temporarily grounded as regulators and Boeing investigate the cause of the incident. The order applies to some 171 planes around the world.
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India Times ☛ Threat of ban looms over offshore [cryptocurrency] platforms as govt weighs in
On Wednesday, the ministry had asked Apple to remove Binance and other similar offshore cryptocurrency apps from its store. The action was based on a report of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of the finance ministry, another official said.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Bitcoin ETFs permitted by the US SEC in crypto market boost
The long-awaited move cleared the way for 11 ETFs to list on leading exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange.
The regulators made it clear the decision "did not approve or endorse bitcoin."
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DeSmog ☛ Net Zero Secretary Claire Coutinho Took Donation From Climate Science Denial Funder
Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Claire Coutinho accepted a £2,000 donation in January from Lord Michael Hintze, a funder of the UK’s leading climate science denial pressure group, DeSmog can reveal.
The donation, which was registered on 4 January and declared on the MPs’ register of interests this week, was to aid Coutinho’s local East Surrey Conservative association with its campaigning activities.
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Overpopulation
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Modern Diplomacy ☛ The Global Food Crisis as an International Security Threat in Non-Traditional Security Issues
The biggest mistake in the traditional security concept is too dominated by militaristic approaches. As a result, threats to human security that are non-military in nature do not get enough attention to be used as a measure of a security threat. In fact, threats from non-military sources are a real threat to human security. Therefore, non-traditional security criticism of traditional security is a reasonable thing, and it is important to respond as we respond to traditional threats. Especially now that the world situation is increasingly complex with various inevitable changes. Fading borders make interactions between countries more massive than ever before. As a result, the impact of non-traditional threats is very easy to spread from one country to another, and the victims are not much less than traditional threats.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The Hill ☛ Google lays off hundreds of workers
The layoffs will impact a few hundred employees working on Google Assistant, as well as a few hundred workers from other parts of the company’s knowledge and information product teams, the spokesperson said. The spokesperson declined to specify how many Google employees would be laid off.
Another few hundred roles from the Digital Services and Product Area are also being eliminated, with the majority coming from the first-party Augmented Reality Hardware team, while a few hundred other positions on the central engineering team are also being cut.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Google lays off hundreds of employees across Google Assistant unit, other divisions
The layoffs come as Google is reportedly gearing up for another major restructuring initiative. Last month, The Information cited sources as saying that the search giant is planning to reorganize its 30,000-person ad sales group. The report didn’t specify whether Google plans to make layoffs as part of the move, but did detail that some employees will be reassigned to new teams.
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The Verge ☛ Google confirms it just laid off around a thousand employees
Google parent firm Alphabet employed 182,381 employees as of September 30th, 2023, so roughly a thousand job cuts would only be around half a percent of the company’s total. There’s a lot of tech layoffs going around.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Layoffs hit Google
A few hundred roles are being eliminated in the company’s Devices and Services team, with the majority in the 1P AR hardware team, the company said, confirming a report by tech media website 9to5Google, which first reported the reorganisation.
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Quartz ☛ Amazon is laying off hundreds from Prime Video despite the awards buzz
It’s not clear exactly how many people will be losing their jobs, though an Amazon spokesperson offered that it was a “relatively small percentage” of the people working in those parts of the company.
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Reuters ☛ Amazon cuts 5% of Audible division's workforce - Business Insider
The news comes a day after the e-commerce behemoth said it would lay off hundreds of employees in its streaming and studio business, as tech companies extend their massive job cuts over the past two years into 2024.
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Business Insider ☛ Silicon Valley engineers joked you'd go to LinkedIn to retire. Then came the PIPs and layoffs.
PIPs and layoffs marked the end of cushy perks and a "rest and vest" culture.
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SFGate ☛ Tech startup Discord lays off 160 San Francisco workers, CEO blames overhiring [Ed: Just pretending they are big to cause "valuation" hikes (bubble, fraud)]
Discord is laying off 160 San Francisco workers, the social messaging startup announced in a WARN notice to the city on Thursday.
The notice, required when companies perform mass layoffs, said the employees would officially leave the San Francisco-based company on Feb. 2. Dozens of engineers are among the casualties, as are several trust and safety employees, product managers and data scientists, according to the notice.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Fossil Fuel Industry Is Weaponizing the First Amendment to Silence Its Critics
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher represents oil giant Chevron in lawsuits brought by dozens of state and local governments to hold the company accountable for deceiving consumers and the public about its products’ central role in climate change. (You may also recognize Gibson Dunn as the firm that accused US attorney Steven Donziger and his Ecuadorian plaintiffs of racketeering after they defeated Chevron in Ecuador’s courts.)
As the evidence of Big Oil’s long-standing campaigns of climate denial piles up, and the cases inch closer to trial, the firm is deploying a defense that seeks to protect its clients’ ability to mislead the public.
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NPR ☛ Taiwan deals with lots of misinformation, and it's harder to track down
"And that was also the reason I founded PTT, because I think we should have a system that embraces open source and that embraces the freedom of speech."
But Tu's ideals of unfettered free speech and a borderless [Internet] are now running into a problem: how to tackle untruthful statements in a polarized political environment without jeopardizing users' right to free expression.
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International Business Times ☛ AI-Powered Misinformation Is The World's Biggest Short-Term Threat, Claims New Report
With 2024 being dubbed by many as "the year of elections", their Global Risks Report expressed fears that a wave of artificial intelligence-driven misinformation and disinformation could influence democratic processes and polarise society.
Such a threat is the most immediate risk to the global economy, the document, released annually, concluded.
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Techdirt ☛ ExTwitter Users Getting Fed Up With The Crypto Spam And AI Bots Elon Promised To Clean Up
Among the various promises that Elon made regarding his takeover of ExTwitter, was that he was there to clean up the spam and bot problem. He seemed to think that the previous regime had fallen down on the job, and that somehow he would have the magical answer to dealing with such things.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Meduza ☛ St. Petersburg State University expels student charged with ‘discrediting’ army for online post she made in high school
The charges were filed in December 2023 over a social media post from March 2022 in which Kozyreva criticized Russian censorship laws and said the war had an “imperialist nature.” Kozyreva was still a 10th grader, not a university student, when she made the post.
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Chronicle Of Higher Education ☛ Russia Blacklisted a Prominent University. Its Russian Students and Staff Now Risk Arrest.
Russian citizens studying and working at Central European University say the Russian government’s blacklisting of the liberal-arts institution puts them in a precarious position, exposing them to penalties or even prosecution if they return to their home country.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Project Censored ☛ The Local News Crisis Lowdown
Project Censored’s directors, Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth, have repeatedly asked what would happen if journalism disappeared. With 2023 in the rearview and 2024 presidential elections on the horizon, a look back at the state of local news across the United States gives additional pause to the “what if” question. For over a decade, The Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism has produced a yearly report on The State of Local News to track the spread of news deserts across the nation. The 2023 report is the most extensive to date, and its key findings are sobering.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Techdirt ☛ California Cops Now Have To Lead With The Pretext When Making Pretextual Stops
A law passed last year has now taken effect in California. This attempt to limit pretextual stops and biased policing means California law enforcement officers will no longer be able to start every traffic stop with an impromptu Q&A session. They’ll have to get right to the point.
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Vice Media Group ☛ 'None of Us Want Our Voices Replicated': Voice Actors Say Union's 'Ethical' AI Deal Is Bad for Humans
The deal with Replica Studios, a self-described ethical AI voice generation company, would allow unionized voice actors to opt in to providing their voices to be used as training data for the company. Performers would then approve the use of their AI voice double in projects by game developers at AAA studios. The use of AI in games has become a topic of heated debate recently, particularly after breakout success online multiplayer game The Finals' use of AI voiceovers sparked a backlash from players and voice actors.
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404 Media ☛ Google Formally Endorses Right to Repair, Will Lobby to Pass Repair Laws
Google formally endorsed the concept of right to repair Thursday and is set to testify in favor of a strong right to repair bill in Oregon later Thursday, a massive step forward for the right to repair movement.
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NPR ☛ Police release video of officer shooting boy, 11, who had called 911 for help
At that moment, Aderrien Murry is seen walking into the frame with his hands over his head. Capers immediately opens fire, shooting the 11-year-old in the chest.
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CS Monitor ☛ Taliban’s dress-code crackdown targets Afghan women, UN warns
The mission said it was looking into claims of ill treatment of women and extortion in exchange for their release, and warned that physical violence and detentions were demeaning and dangerous.
The Taliban said earlier in January that female police officers have been taking women into custody for wearing “bad hijab.”
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Stanford University ☛ Change Work, Change the World
When around 80% of the global workforce is disengaged from their work, there is an opportunity for change. Real change that not only improves work culture but offers a path to a more sustainable future. Of course, businesses and organizations employing this sea of unengaged workers are trying all kinds of schemes to re-engage employees and get people back to the office [2] by making work more meaningful, more like “life”, and offices more like “home.” But, work isn’t life, life is life, and people are unengaged because they aren’t afforded the time to engage in a meaningful existence. Eighty-five percent of the Gallup report responses offered by those considered to be quiet quitting — which comprises the majority of employees — were related to well-being/work-life balance [1]. So, unsurprisingly, the answer to more engaged work is less work.
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RFA ☛ Man says he’s trapped in a scam compound with ‘thousands’
In a later interview with RFA Vietnamese, Nguyen said he is one of thousands of captives who are being held at a large compound in Kayin state called KK Park, a Chinese development project that has become a notorious center for scam operations. In October, authorities rescued 200 people including at least 61 Vietnamese nationals from KK Park, but Nguyen was not among the lucky few. Among the thousands who remain, workers who cause trouble have been beaten, starved and electrocuted, he said.
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Techdirt ☛ EFF Asks Pennsylvania’s Top Court To Stop Cops From Googling For Suspects
Law enforcement officers learned long ago that if all they have is a crime scene and no likely suspects, there was no reason to wear out shoe leather beating the streets for alleged criminals. They don’t even need to leave the office. All they have to do is produce a subpoena for certain third-party records and/or convince a judge that the only “probable cause” they need to demonstrate is the probability Google houses the data they seek.
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Pro Publica ☛ How Many of Your State’s Lawmakers Are Women? In the Southeast, It Could Be Just 1 in 5.
London Lamar rose from her chair in the Tennessee Senate last spring, stomach churning with anxiety as she prepared to address the sea of men sitting at creaky wooden desks around her. She wore a hot pink dress as a nod to the health needs of women, including the very few of them elected to this chamber, none of whom were, like her, obviously pregnant. She set her hands onto her growing belly.
The Senate clerk, a man, called out an amendment Lamar had filed. The Senate speaker, also a man, opened the floor for her to speak. The bill’s sponsor, another man, stood near her as she grasped a microphone to discuss the matter at hand: a tweak to the state’s near-total ban on abortion access for women.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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MWL ☛ Terry Pratchett Discworld Bundle vs DRM
HarperCollins launched a Terry Pratchett Discworld ebook Humble Bundle. You can get all the Discworld novels for $18, minus the oddities like “The Science of Discworld.” I’ve been waiting for an ebook bundle like this. I naturally grabbed it.
BUT–getting the actual ebook files is a right pain.
HarperCollins is one of those big publishers that think everything needs DRM, and they came up with a convoluted dance to comply with it. Sort of.
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Techdirt ☛ New York’s Watered Down ‘Right To Repair’ Bill Goes Live
In late 2022, the state of New York finally passed new right to repair legislation after years of activist pressure. The bill, which went live this week, gives New York consumers the right to fix their electronic devices themselves or have them more easily repaired by an independent repair shop, instead of being forced to only obtain repairs through costly manufacturer repair programs.
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Techdirt ☛ HP Hit With Yet Another Lawsuit Over Bricking Printers That Use Third-Party Ink Cartridges
Hewlett Packard (HP) has been socked with yet another lawsuit for crippling the printers of consumers who use cheaper third-party ink cartridges. The lawsuit, filed by eleven plaintiffs in US District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, states that HP misleadingly used its “Dynamic Security” firmware updates to “create a monopoly” over replacement printer ink cartridges.
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Trademarks
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Right of Publicity
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Futurism ☛ George Carlin's Daughter Horrified by AI-Generated "Comedy Special" of Her Dead Dad
An AI comedy duo has allegedly used George Carlin's voice without permission from his family or estate — and his living progeny is not at all pleased.
[....]
In her email conversation with us, Carlin added that she and her father's estate are researching their own legal avenues.
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The Register UK ☛ Daughter of George Carlin horrified someone cloned her dad with AI for hour special
The show, titled "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead," was uploaded on Tuesday to YouTube by actor and comedian Will Sasso and podcaster Chad Kultgen. It appears the duo have crafted an AI personality called Dudesy that attempts to impersonate celebrities – in this instance, George Carlin. The underlying fake persona doesn't just try to sound like the modern-day philosopher, while acknowledging repeatedly it's not him, it uses a script that he didn't write either.
Carlin's daughter Kelly wasn't particularly amused to learn the pair had trained some generative neural network on her father's work. This week she claimed "zero permission [was] granted" to the creators for the episode, and slammed the AI-based routine. She said her dad had spent a lifetime perfecting his craft, and no machine (or someone hiding behind a machine) could ever replace his genius.
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[Old] Futurism ☛ Robin Williams' Daughter Disgusted by Efforts to Bring Her Dad Back With AI
In an Instagram story transcribed by The Hollywood Reporter, Williams said that she stands in solidarity with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) protests against increasing the use of AI in Hollywood in part because of the ways the technology has been used to recreate her father's inimitable voice.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ Domain & IP Seizures in UK's Criminal Justice Bill Could Apply to Pirate Sites
Measures in the UK's Criminal Justice Bill currently range from criminalizing the homeless in the event their "rough sleeping" is deemed a nuisance, to outlawing 3D printer firearms templates. Also likely to be approved are provisions to suspend domain names and IP addresses when used for serious criminal purposes. The reframing of copyright infringement as fraud in recent years means that pirate sites may find themselves vulnerable.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Film Companies and Reddit Clash Again in Court over Anonymous Piracy Comments
Reddit finds itself in court again as film companies continue to seek information on the site's 'anonymous' users. The latest attempt focuses on IP addresses and doesn't request names, emails, or other registration details. The targeted users are not in legal trouble, the filmmaker clarifies, but Reddit believes that their First Amendment right to anonymous speech is at stake.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Meta Admits Use of 'Pirated' Book Dataset to Train AI
With AI initiatives developing at a rapid pace, copyright holders are on high alert. In addition to legislation, several currently ongoing lawsuits will help to define what's allowed and what isn't. Responding to a lawsuit from several authors, Meta now admits that it used portions of the Books3 dataset to train its Llama models. This dataset includes many pirated books.
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James G ☛ Contibuting text from LLMs to public domain wikis
There are quality concerns about using LLMs to contribute text to wikis -- what if the content generated by an LLM is wrong? -- that have generated opposition to using LLMs. We deeply care about the quality of our content.
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The Atlantic ☛ The Flaw That Could Ruin Generative AI
We already know, for example, that pirated-book libraries have been used to train the generative-AI products of companies such as Meta and Bloomberg. But AI companies have long claimed that generative AI “reads” or “learns from” these books and articles, as a human would, rather than copying them. Therefore, this approach supposedly constitutes “fair use,” with no compensation owed to authors or publishers. Since courts have not ruled on this question, the tech industry has made a colossal gamble developing products in this way. And the odds may be turning against them.
Two lawsuits, filed by the Universal Music Group and The New York Times in October and December, respectively, make use of the fact that large language models—the technology underpinning ChatGPT and other generative-AI tools—can “memorize” some portion of their training text and reproduce it verbatim when prompted in specific ways, emitting long sections of copyrighted texts. This damages the fair-use argument.
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Walled Culture ☛ Mickey Mouse is public domain now, but the battle to prevent copyright term extensions is not over
Beyond its cultural significance, its release into the public domain is notable because of the role that the character has played in the field of copyright law. It was Disney’s obsession with maintaining control over Mickey Mouse that led to the US copyright term being extended multiple times to prevent it entering the public domain. The last extension, formally the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, is widely known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Had that law only extended copyright protection for Mickey Mouse, it would have been a minor if annoying legal aberration. But as a long and fascinating post on the Center for the Study of the Public Domain explains, Disney’s successful lobbying had much wider consequences: [...]
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Mickey Mouse, and South Africa’s battle over copyright
Literary, musical and artistic works; films, sound recordings and broadcasts; and computer programs are all automatically covered by the act once the conditions are met; but the bill’s passage through parliament remains controversial. The department of trade, industry & competition has come under heavy fire for its failure to produce an economic impact assessment study; and the overwhelming majority of local and international creative industry stakeholders are opposed to the bill in its present form.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Sleight of mental hand
The day isn't going as I'd hoped, but that's becoming okay in the midst of realizing my hoping is the problem: better to accept/embrace as life comes, especially given all it is is what I think it is, because that's all I know in a moment.
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Doing a whole lot of nothing
Today I've finally lightened up on meetings at work. Monday through Wednesday were just packed full of phone calls. So today I was excited to not have a ton of things interrupting my day. But lo and behold, I have been stricken by the not-give-a-shits.
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6 days to Calgary
There you are. Eyes occupied by a bunch of pixels turned inside out. Just how we like it.
The gopher bandit was right, the hole of fun made it about 2 inches too close, the mammoths drowned in liquid bliss. If you weren't born yesterday, you recognize the faucets. The corpo-sheins, the X's, the cigar smoking blue birds, the mammas on the sewing machines, the reddard aliens - their tongues busy, as if the pool of raped data was about to dry out.
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Ni
But in the Swedish language we’re plagued by the knights who say “ni”. With one cut they make it clear that they see me as an old stuck-up snob who’ll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
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#Lore24 - Day 11 - Mages
One in a hundred of the people in Fedran that have magical powers are capable of casting spells, increasing the flexibility and adaptability over those with talents[1]. Mages[2], as they are known, use frameworks to shape magic and cast spells that describe the effects they want.
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Technology and Free Software
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Re: An IRC channel for retro gamedev
I guess I didn't write it for myself: it was a bit of an announcement; although I don't have any idea on how many people --if anyone-- reads this gemlog. And thinking about it, is not that different with my weblog, because I don't track visitors or look at server logs.
It was surprising when a handful of people joined the channel mentioning that they were coming from Gemini, or that they had read my post. That was surprising, although as someone on Masto pointed out, there must be some overlapping between the interested in Gemini and IRC users.
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Home Networking Madness
I'd like to setup some sort of network segmentation on my home network. The following is just a rough brainstorming before I do any in-depth research, but I'd like to publish it here in case anyone with experience can offer suggestions, and it also helps me sort out my thoughts.
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Internet/Gemini
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How to Find a YouTube Channel RSS Feed Link
Have you ever wanted to follow or share a Youtube channel RSS feed link? Does your feed reader not have the ability to automatically follow YouTube channels? Then follow these five simple steps below to find the feed link you need.
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Yretek.com new TLS certs
Be it known that the great gemini://yretek.com had to get new certs for its owner managed to ruin the server again.
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Software Releases/Announcements
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gmid 2.0
This is mostly an announce more than a in-depth post. I think I wrote all I wanted to say about the 2.0 release in a previous entry when I "released" a first alpha.
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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.