Links 18/01/2024: IBM's "Invention (Patent, Monopoly) Achievement Award Plan" No More, Apple Gadgets Banned Due to Software Patents
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Hackaday ☛ Fan With Automatic Door Is Perfect For Camper Vans
Ventilation fans are useful for clearing stuffy or stale air out of a space. However, they also tend to act as a gaping hole into said space. In the case of caravans and RVs, an open ventilation fan can be terrible for keeping the interior space warm, quiet, and free from dust. “Blast doors” or fan blocks are a common way to solve this problem. [Raphtronic] whipped up a duly-equipped ventilation fan to do just that.
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Dustin ☛ Priorities
I will leave the posts in the writing, thoughts, and changelog sections in place so they don't become dead links, but I will be hiding those sections from my navigation. I will still be adding posts to projects, art, recipes, and toki pona.
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Zach Flower ☛ Stop Trying to Sell Me Shit
Contacting me using my company email won't win you any favors, but it also won't make me angry. Even LinkedIn, which is technically an appropriate place for this type of inbound, won't make me too frustrated—unless you harass me (pro tip: if I don't respond, then it's a no, not an invitation to double-down).
But the one thing I absolutely can't handle? Trying to sell me on your services via my personal channels.
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Science
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Salon ☛ The "enshittification" of tech extends to space, too | Salon.com
From Google to Netflix, tech is becoming more useless. The commercialization of space is no different
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Education
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CoryDoctorow ☛ American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides
It is a system singularly lacking in grace. Ironically, this unforgiving system was sold as a way of correcting the injustice at the heart of the US public education system, which funds schools based on local taxation. That means that rich neighborhoods have better funded schools. Rather than equalizing public educational funding, the standardizers promised to ensure the quality of instruction at the worst-funded schools by measuring the educational outcomes with standard tools.
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Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Why I Am Leaving Academia (For Now)
If you ever want to see a true example of dogmatism and inflexibility, try applying for a job in academia. If you can’t perfectly match their requirements, you’re toast—at least that’s my experience. I guess that’s partially the result of my own doing since I chose my own research topic and didn’t fit in an existing research cell. I am especially baffled at the inability to render my previous experience relevant at all, even though when I speak to professors, they all say it’s great to have someone teaching software engineering who knows what he’s talking about.
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Yilei Yang ☛ ∞ Just Do What You're Excited About
This is very true for me. I'm often motivated by other people. This effect doesn't last long for me though, and I have to consistently remind myself about other people's existence to keep the motivation up.
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Federal News Network ☛ A tiny agency aims to help libraries and museums everywhere
A small federal agency has launched an initiative to strengthen a highly specialized class of museums in the United States. The Institute of Museum and Library Services is taking in internship applications from American Latino museums to, in its words, strengthen their institutional capacity. For details on the program, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with Laura Huerta Migus, the Institute’s Deputy Director for Museum Services.
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Hardware
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The Register UK ☛ NVMe consortium polishes its specs to support computational storage
NVM Express (the organization) oversees the NVMe specifications for using solid state drives (SSDs) via a host computer's PCIe bus, and the Computational Storage Feature extends these to support NVMe computational storage devices.
This support includes two new NVMe command sets: one for Computational Programs and another for Subsystem Local Memory commands. Both are now available for download from the NVM Express website.
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India Times ☛ Nokia plans $391 million investment in Germany for hardware and chip design
The four-year project is being funded by the company, the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection and two German states, Nokia said in a statement.
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Python Speed ☛ Beware of misleading GPU vs CPU benchmarks
Unfortunately, while those speed-ups are impressive, they are also misleading. GPU-based libraries might be the answer to your performance problems… or they might be an an unnecessary and expensive distraction.
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Hackaday ☛ Blastoise Humidifier Shows Us You Don’t Need A 3D Printer If You’re This Good With A 3D Pen
[3D SANAGO] is a bit of a master when it comes to using a 3D-printing pen. Their latest work involved fixing a broken humidifier and giving it a Pokemon-themed makeover. It’s an education in just what can be achieved with a tool many of us write off as a simple novelty.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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[Repeat] Computers Are Bad ☛ the tacnet tracker
It's also an interesting case study in the mid-2000s field of mobile computing, especially within academia (or at least the Department of Energy). You see, "mobile computing" used to be treated as a field of study, a subdiscipline within computer science. Mobile devices imposed practical constraints, and they invited more sophisticated models of communication and synchronization than were used with fixed equipment. I took a class on mobile computing in my undergraduate, although it was already feeling dated at the time.
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Hindustan Times ☛ Samsung bets on Google-powered AI features in Galaxy S24 for edge over Apple's iPhones
At its Unpacked conference Wednesday in San Jose, California, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S24, S24 and S24 Ultra phones, which all add AI tools based on the Gemini technology from Alphabet Inc.’s Google. The devices can live-translate phone calls, transcribe voice recordings, summarize web articles, fix handwriting and use generative AI to fill in parts of photos.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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El País ☛ The toxicity of living in cities, a risk for mental health
Epidemiological studies generally show that mental health is worse in cities than in rural areas. “There are more affective disorders, anxiety disorders, but above all serious disorders, such as schizophrenia,” says Jordi Alonso, director of the Epidemiology and Public Health Program at the Hospital del Mar, in Barcelona. “We found no differences in the use of alcohol or other substances and, in general, when adjusted for socioeconomic factors, there are no differences,” he adds.
To explain this urban toxicity, researchers usually point to inequality, marginalization, stress and violence, which are more common in cities. In the rural environment, social cohesion, which in some cases can be oppressive, is an advantage, just like the proximity of the countryside and the lower levels of air and noise pollution.
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Meduza ☛ Pipe carrying boiling water bursts in Russia, leaving dozens of homes without heating and injuring 13 people — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Nine reportedly injured in explosion and fire at polyester plant in Russia’s Rostov region — Meduza
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Pro Publica ☛ GAO Will Open Investigation Into FDA Oversight of Medical Device Recalls
Congressional investigators are launching an inquiry into the Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of medical device recalls for the first time in years following reports that the agency failed to issue warnings about breathing machines capable of sending hazardous particles and fumes into the lungs of patients.
U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., urged the Government Accountability Office to investigate, citing reports by ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that detailed the role of the FDA in an ongoing health crisis that has threatened millions of people in the United States and around the world.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Silicon Angle ☛ Google announces yet more layoffs, this time affecting its advertising business units
Google LLC is laying off yet more staff, just days after announcing it would ax about 1,000 of its employees. That’s according to a new report by Business Insider, later confirmed by The Verge, which was told by a spokesperson for the company that “a few hundred roles globally are being eliminated.”
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Silicon Angle ☛ A loss for Epic, costly for Apple: Supreme Court refuses to review antitrust case
The Supreme Court today rebuffed a request to hear an antitrust dispute between Fashion Company Apple Inc. and “Fortnite” publisher Epic Games Ltd. In 2020, Epic filed a lawsuit against Fashion Company Apple for what it said was anticompetitive behavior. At the same time, the company also launched legal proceedings against Surveillance Giant Google LLC.
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Ghacks ☛ Report: Microsoft starts Mail and Calendar app migration to the inferior Outlook app - gHacks Tech News
Windows 11 users who use the Mail and Calendar app and have steadfastly refused to switch to the new Outlook app will be redirected to the new Outlook app forcefully.
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Simon Willison ☛ Talking about Open Source LLMs on Oxide and Friends
Any time I’m on a podcast I like to pull out a few of my favorite extracts for a blog entry. Here they are, plus a description of how I used Whisper, LLM and Claude to help find them without needing to review the entire 1.5 hour recording again myself.
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Michael Stapelberg ☛ systemd: enable indefinite service restarts
When a service fails to start up enough times in a row, systemd gives up on it.
On servers, this isn’t what I want — in general it’s helpful for automated recovery if daemons are restarted indefinitely. As long as you don’t have circular dependencies between services, all your services will eventually come up after transient failures, without having to specify dependencies.
This is particularly useful because specifying dependencies on the systemd level introduces footguns: when interactively stopping individual services, systemd also stops the dependents. And then you need to remember to restart the dependent services later, which is easy to forget.
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Futurism ☛ Scientists Train AI to Be Evil, Find They Can't Reverse It
In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed new paper, researchers at the Google-backed AI firm Anthropic claim they were able to train advanced large language models (LLMs) with "exploitable code," meaning it can be triggered to prompt bad AI behavior via seemingly benign words or phrases. As the Anthropic researchers write in the paper, humans often engage in "strategically deceptive behavior," meaning "behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity." If an AI system were trained to do the same, the scientists wondered, could they "detect it and remove it using current state-of-the-art safety training techniques?"
Unfortunately, as it stands, the answer to that latter question appears to be a resounding "no." The Anthropic scientists found that once a model is trained with exploitable code, it's exceedingly difficult — if not impossible — to train a machine out of its duplicitous tendencies. And what's worse, according to the paper, attempts to reign in and reconfigure a deceptive model may well reinforce its bad behavior, as a model might just learn how to better hide its transgressions.
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The Register UK ☛ Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse
After pouring over countless links for the past year, the team has concluded everyone complaining about Google's declining quality seems to be correct, and things are probably only going to get worse with the advent of generative AI - just like we predicted.
"We can conclude that higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality," the researchers wrote. They also found that while a small portion of product reviews use affiliate marketing, the majority of search engine results do use the tactic, which is only adding to the problem of SERP quality.
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The Register UK ☛ How 'sleeper agent' AI assistants can sabotage your code without you realizing
A team of boffins backdoored an LLM to generate software code that's vulnerable once a certain date has passed. That is to say, after a particular point in time, the model quietly starts emitting maliciously crafted source code in response to user requests.
And the team found that attempts to make the model safe, through tactics like supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, all failed.
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Press Gazette ☛ Post Office IT scandal underlines need for a reset in corporate communications
The problem with this kind of media relations is that every interaction with journalists is judged on how it helps the organisation. The imperative to help journalists get answers or the public interest in hearing the truth plays second fiddle to avoiding any whiff of negative coverage, real or imagined. Given that engaging with the media is a perilous business, these risk-averse corporate communications people often end up preventing their experts from talking to journalists except in the most controlled conditions.
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Techdirt ☛ Techdirt Podcast Episode 376: Beeper And The Power Of Protocols
Last month, we wrote about Apple’s nonsensical attack on Beeper, a universal messaging app that exemplifies many of the things we talk about here on Techdirt, like adversarial interoperability and the value of embracing open protocols over walled platforms. This week, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky joins us on the podcast to talk about the app, the fight with Apple, and the power of protocols.
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Krebs On Security ☛ E-Crime Rapper ‘Punchmade Dev’ Debuts Card Shop
The rapper and social media personality Punchmade Dev is perhaps best known for his flashy videos singing the praises of a cybercrime lifestyle. With memorable hits such as “Internet Swiping” and “Million Dollar Criminal” earning millions of views, Punchmade has leveraged his considerable following to peddle tutorials on how to commit financial crimes online. But until recently, there wasn’t much to support a conclusion that Punchmade was actually doing the cybercrime things he promotes in his songs.
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Techdirt ☛ Amazon Brand Spammers Are Getting Lazy, And Letting Failed ChatGPT Queries Name Products ‘I Cannot Fulfill This Request It Goes Against OpenAI Use Policy’
If you buy products on Amazon, you’re well aware of the Amazon brand spammers. These tend to be drop shippers or small (often Chinese) operations trying to sell knockoffs of whatever products might sell. But the products need brand names. In early 2020, the NY Times did an article about the phenomenon, “All Your Favorite Brands, From BSTOEM to ZGGCD.”
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Ars Technica ☛ Apple AirDrop leaks user data like a sieve. Chinese authorities say they’re scooping it up. | Ars Technica
Chinese authorities are exploiting a weakness Apple has allowed to go unfixed for 5 years.
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EPIC ☛ The County: Houlton installs 50 surveillance cameras police will monitor - EPIC – Electronic Privacy Information Center
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Surveillance capitalism has taken over immigration enforcement
Federal agencies skirt local jurisdictions by purchasing comprehensive identifying data and information technology from private companies
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Google updates Chrome Incognito Mode disclaimer in wake of $5 billion data collection lawsuit
Google Chrome Incognito Mode disclaimer gets updated as the firm recently agreed to pay a huge $5B settlement for tracking users without explicit consent and won’t want to pay any more.
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Meduza ☛ Putin instructs government agencies to look into using AI to solve crimes — Meduza
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Defence/Aggression
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BIA Net ☛ Debate on paid military service in the Ottoman Parliament
Vartkes Serengülyan, elected to the Parliament with a hundred thousand votes from Erzurum, emphasized that enlisting everyone without discrimination based on class was essential. He highlighted that conscripting only the children of poor families was unfair and unjust.
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JURIST ☛ ECHR finds Lithuania liable assisting the US with torture
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found Lithuania liable on Tuesday for assisting the US with the torture of a man from Saudi Arabia at Detention Site Violet, a secret CIA prison in Lithuania, in 2005.
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France24 ☛ Iraq recalls ambassador from Tehran after Iranian missiles strike Kurdish region
Iraq condemned an "attack on its sovereignty" on Tuesday after Iran's Revolutionary Guards launched missile strikes on anti-Tehran groups and an alleged Israeli "spy headquarters" in Erbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan.
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France24 ☛ 🔴 Live: Macron says France did not join strikes on Houthis to avoid escalation
French President Emmanuel Macron said his country decided not to join US-led strikes against Houthis attacking commercial vessels in the Red Sea because France is seeking to avoid escalation in Mideast tensions, he gave the explanation at a rare news conference.
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teleSUR ☛ Houthi Missile Attack Targets Ship in Red Sea
Tensions have risen in the Red Sea following US-led airstrikes against the Yemeni population.
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teleSUR ☛ Missile Strike Is Part of Just Punishment for Aggressors: Iran
"The move was in line with defending decisively Iran's sovereignty and security and fighting terrorism," FM Kanaani said.
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RFERL ☛ Baghdad Recalls Ambassador After Iran Strikes Northern Iraq, Stoking Fears Of Regional Instability
Iraq has recalled its ambassador in Tehran after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) struck what they said was the spy headquarters of Israel in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, a deadly attack that deepened fears over the eroding stability in the Middle East.
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New York Times ☛ Trump Left Iowa With Momentum and a Court Date
Also, the U.S. struck Houthi targets for a third time. Here’s the latest at the end of Tuesday.
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New York Times ☛ U.S. Strikes Houthi Targets in Yemen for a Third Time
The American strikes destroyed four missiles that posed a threat to ships in the Red Sea, the Pentagon said. They came on the third day in a row the Houthis have defiantly fired at passing ships.
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New York Times ☛ Iranian Strikes in Iraq and Pakistan Inflame Regional Tensions
Iran says its missile strikes were aimed at militant groups behind attacks on its territory, but Pakistan and Iraq rejected that explanation.
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La Prensa Latina ☛ Cuba, Iran to strengthen ICT cooperation
According to Cuba´s Communications Ministry (MICOM), both parties reviewed the state of bilateral cooperation relations focused mainly on identifyingconcrete actions to be conducted between both ministries.
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Quillette ☛ South African Lawfare at The Hague
We will know, perhaps is a matter of weeks, what the ICJ makes of South Africa’s case. Many—including Tal Becker, a legal advisor to Israel’s Foreign Ministry—have already denounced it as an inversion of recent history. It is Hamas, they point out, who have called for the genocide of their enemies, and who launched a pogrom on October 7.
Nevertheless, it is worth examining the South African application in order to understand how poorly it is constructed as a matter of law, and how deceptive it is as propaganda. Generally speaking, motions before any court—criminal or civil, national or international—contain references to hard evidence and a careful reading of legal precedent to back the claims therein. The South African application has neither.
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Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Rene Toomse: Russians willing to take cruel risks in war
We have been seeing attacks similar to the Winter War and World War II from the start of the war – throwing countless troops at the enemy or advancing over dead bodies is their normality.
Losing hundreds of thousands of people and machinery is inconsequential. No one is losing sleep over it. They will just recruit and throw new troops at the enemy. We need to understand differences in how people in the West and in Russia think. You and I might still remember, while the younger generation increasingly does not get it.
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Quartz ☛ Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the world's richest men got $465 billion richer in 4 years
The world’s richest men—Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Warren Buffett—have doubled their collective wealth to $870 billion since 2020. That’s a rate of $14 million an hour, with little sign of abatement, according to a new study (pdf) from the UK-founded charity organization Oxfam.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ The super-rich got that way through monopolies
Everyone – even the World Economic Forum – says that wealth inequality is a serious problem, corroding our politics and our social cohesion. What this report does is link that inequality to monopolies, which produce the billionaires who are wrecking the world.
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The Hill ☛ Raffensperger says Trump repeating ‘recycled conspiracy theories’: ‘Boring and sad’
He added: “The three-ring circus that was once the Trump entertainment spectacle has withered away to a single decrepit pony, desperately performing its one trick, hoping to regain the audience it once held in thrall. Iowa showed that performance can still keep some people entertained. Others can make up their own minds.”
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ Russia launches missile strike on Kharkiv, reportedly killing one and injuring over 15 — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Court in Russia’s Bashkortostan sentences activist Fail Alsynov to four years in prison, sparking renewed protests — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Dmitry Medvedev says Ukraine should not exist in any form, calling it a ‘cancerous growth’ — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ ‘On the verge of a nervous breakdown’: Residents of a Russian border city react to recent missile strikes and evacuations — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russian courts to hear two cases seeking one billion rubles in damages each over ‘almost naked’ party — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ ‘Putin’s state isn’t viable’: Navalny publishes post on third anniversary of return to Russia after poisoning — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Riot police clash with thousands of protesters following activist’s sentencing in Russia’s Republic of Bashkortostan — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Six people reportedly arrested at protest following activist’s sentencing in Russia’s Republic of Bashkortostan — Meduza
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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New York Times ☛ A Reporter’s Journey Into How the U.S. Funded the Bomb
But as I watched images of the sprawling nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos flash across the screen, I couldn’t stop wondering: How did the U.S. government pay for the $2 billion project? Did Congress approve the money? And if so, how did lawmakers keep it a secret?
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Environment
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The Atlantic ☛ Military Emissions Are Too Big to Keep Ignoring
Whatever the reason, military emissions are now up for the tiniest amount of discussion. A line in the UN’s 2023 “Global Emissions Gap Report” noted that emissions from the military are “likely nontrivial” but remain “insufficiently accounted [for]” under current reporting standards. This was the first time the issue has ever appeared in a UN emissions gap report, Linsey Cottrell of the Conflict and Environment Observatory told me at COP28. Her organization has attempted to estimate the global carbon footprint of the military using available information and put the figure at 5.5 percent, which is more than the total emissions of the continent of Africa.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ What is climate? And how is it different from weather?
Extreme cold weather in Europe and North America is made more likely by the collapse of the polar vortex, the cold winds that rage around the North Pole, and the weakening jet stream, both of which are influenced by the warming Arctic. If the jet stream — the band of strong winds that circle the globe — begins to waver, the warm air from the tropics and the frigid polar winds can shift, causing unseasonably warm weather, or icy blizzards, thousands of kilometers away.
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teleSUR ☛ Global Temperature Could Rise Above 1.5°c in 2024: BSC-CNS
The BSC prediction system forecasts that the annual average temperature of the Earth's surface in 2024 could range between 1.43 and 1.69 degrees Celsius above the average temperature recorded between 1850 and 1900, i.e., recorded in the pre-industrial era.
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Truthdig ☛ Inside the Movement To Halt the Mountain Valley Pipeline
Residents along the project’s path joined academics, local organizations, and environmental nonprofits in filing lawsuits, seeking injunctions, and packing hearings. As they worked the legal system, other activists staged equipment lockdowns, organized rallies, and took to the trees for monthslong sit-ins. The efforts led to some wins. Opponents repeatedly delayed construction, got various permits thrown out, and leveled allegations of water quality violations and illegal work on national forest land. In late 2018, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a series of rulings annulling the pipeline’s access to federal land and striking down a key permit. The next year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered an end to almost all construction.
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Energy/Transportation
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Deutsche Welle ☛ German firm starts remote-driving car service in Las Vegas
The company outfits its vehicles with cameras, GPS, radar, ultrasound and a slew of other sensors to reproduce car surroundings, including traffic sounds, at the purpose-built "teledrive" station, which is equipped with a steering wheel, pedals, monitors and other controls.
A driver sits in this station and remotely controls the car.
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Futurism ☛ Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy, Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source
The process is ludicrously energy intensive, with experts estimating that the industry could soon suck up as much electricity as an entire country.
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India Times ☛ Coinbase, SEC set to face off in federal court over regulator's [cryptocurrency] authority
The hearing is the next major development in a closely watched court battle between Coinbase and the Securities and Exchange Commission that is likely to have implications for digital assets since it could clarify the SEC's jurisdiction over the sector. Coinbase's plan is to lean on a core argument it has made in court filings: that the SEC is overreaching and the assets it lists for trading are not securities.
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Hackaday ☛ Sun On The Run: Diving Into Solar With A Mobile PV System
For obvious reasons, there has been a lot of interest in small-scale residential solar power systems lately. Even in my neck of the woods, where the sun doesn’t shine much from October to April, solar arrays are sprouting up on rooftops in a lot of local neighborhoods. And it’s not just here in suburbia; drive a little way out into the country or spend some time looking around in Google maps and it won’t take long to spy a sizable array of PV panels sitting in a field next to someone’s ranch house or barn.
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Finance
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Meduza ☛ Banks in Turkey reportedly begin cutting ties with Russian banks — Meduza
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YLE ☛ MobilePay vows to improve security after misuse emerges
The move follows news that stalkers have used the peer-to-peer smartphone-based payment system to harass their victims. Users have not independently been able to block harassers, instead having to contact the company's customer service to block unwanted messages.
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Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Upset He Sold Tesla Stock to Fund Twitter Disaster
Having sold a bunch of his Tesla stake to fund his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk now appears to be feeling the burn from his own bad decisions.
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India Times ☛ Google Pay India signs pact with NPCI for global expansion of UPI
Google India Digital Services and NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Wednesday said they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to expand the transformative impact of UPI to countries beyond India.
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FAIR ☛ ‘A Minimum-Wage Increase Can Benefit the Whole Economy’
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Pro Publica ☛ How Walmart’s Financial Services Became a Fraud Magnet
Christy Browne was in a panic. The man on the phone said he was from the FBI. He warned her that drug traffickers had obtained her Social Security number and were using it to launder money. He said the FBI needed money to catch them.
“They told me not to go to local law enforcement,” Browne testified in court recently about the February 2020 call. The police were watching her and considered her a suspect, the man said.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The Nation ☛ The Wall
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The Register UK ☛ Facial recognition tech has outpaced US law – and don't expect the Feds to catch up
According to the panel's write-up, concerns over technical limitations and/or misuse of face recognition systems are well founded and require action from the government to address. As part of its conclusions, the committee recommended a presidential executive order to develop guidelines for appropriate use and fresh legislation "to address equity, privacy and civil liberties concerns" regarding the technology.
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Techdirt ☛ Around 450 People Will Be Working On The Enforcement Of The UK’s Online Safety Act – To Begin With, At Least…
To put those figures in context, Ofcom’s most recent annual report (pdf) for 2021-22, shows that the average number of employees rose from 992 in 2020/21 to 1,102 the following year. The report says that this was “primarily as a result of the preparation work for our new duties regarding Online Safety.” Ofcom’s Online Safety Act team, which is expected to grow to around 450 according to the FT news item, will represent therefore around a quarter to a third of the entire Ofcom personnel. That’s a measure of how big the task facing them will be. It will also be an expensive undertaking. According to the FT article: [...]
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The Register UK ☛ Nokia walks the walk about its RAN to play on Uncle Sam’s China fears
Where possible, the US government has a habit of favoring home-developed, and better yet, home-manufactured equipment when it comes to critical infrastructure. Exercising that this poses something of a headache when it comes to cellular networks because American companies are not big players in radio access network (RAN) technology — the stuff that actually goes on the cell towers. That field is dominated by foreign players.
RAN deployments by US carriers most feature kit from Samsung, Nokia, and Ericsson.
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India Times ☛ 'Europe must up its game' on AI: EU chief Ursula von der Leyen
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen told Davos on Tuesday that "Europe must up its game" on artificial intelligence, as the bloc readies landmark legislation to curb possible AI abuse. And Europe must up its game and show the way to responsible use of AI," von der Leyen said in the ritzy Swiss resort hosting the World Economic Forum.
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Tracy Durnell ☛ Email about genAI to King County OESJ Team
If the illustrations were AI generated, I would encourage your team to consider restricting use of generative AI technologies for being misaligned with your mission and contradictory to your values. Setting aside any considerations of the ethics of training data or labor issues, generative AI (both visual and textual) perpetuates stereotypes and bias. While an individual image may seem to be exempt, use of the technology itself endorses its embedded bias and stereotypes as acceptable.
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Chris ☛ Markets vs. Politics and Organisational Structure
How can we design systems so that voluntary exchanges between individuals have second-order effects that improve the state of the group? Would this improve an organisation’s efficiency over feudalism?
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Robert Reich ☛ Five Biggest Border Lies Debunked
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Robert Reich ☛ Corporations Have Been Salivating Over This SCOTUS Decision
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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VOA News ☛ Deepfakes a 'Weapon Against Journalism,' Analyst Says
The use of what are known as deepfakes — videos created with artificial intelligence to realistically impersonate people, including journalists — is viewed as especially troubling in a year when more than 40 countries are due to hold significant elections.
At a time of rampant disinformation and low trust in news, and as news outlets grapple with how to integrate AI into their business models, such videos make it even harder for audiences to determine whether what they are seeing and hearing is real.
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The Register UK ☛ AI political disinformation is a huge problem – but harder to fight than ever
Combating false information and deepfakes, however, has only become more difficult given that the tools for generating synthetic content more widely accessible than ever before.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Meduza ☛ Russia to require Internet providers to share users’ address locations in effort to draw ‘digital border’ around country
As part of the initiative, according to the document, Internet providers will be required to share information about the network addresses used by their clients, including location data. After a discussion period ending on February 2, the final version of the order will go into effect on September 1 and will last four years.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Russian police crack down on rare protest in remote region
Thousands of protesters braved temperatures of -20 Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit) in the town of Baymak, in the Bashkortostan region, to protest a prison sentence for local environment activist Fail Alsynov.
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The Sunday Times UK ☛ I was sacked, but what’s wrong with being a porn star professor?
When the scandal broke, Gow said he had a right to free speech, protected by the first amendment of the US constitution, claiming it had been breached by the university.
Rothman said that was “ridiculous”, adding that the university expected chancellors to be “role models” and that Gow’s conduct subjected the school to “significant reputational harm”. Just after the new year, Gow was escorted on to campus by the chief of police to empty his desk.
Gow, who was chancellor for 17 years, said he never mentioned the university in the videos: “There was no linkage. I expected they would have a conversation with me about this. I did not think I would be abruptly terminated from the chancellor position without due process,” he said.
“We absolutely did it in our spare time, on vacation.
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RFERL ☛ Police Violently Disperse Thousands Protesting Sentencing Of Activist In Russia's Bashkortosan
The protesters, who were participating in one of the largest demonstrations in Russia since Moscow launched its ongoing invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, were angry after a court on January 17 handed down Alsynov's verdict and sentence for a speech he made in April 2023 at a rally over plans to mine for gold in Bashkortostan, which is located in Russia's southern Ural Mountains near the border between Europe and Asia.
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University of Michigan ☛ UMich Board of Regents unanimously adopt new set of principles on freedom of expression
At the meeting, University President Santa Ono said he feels this statement comes at a particularly important moment for the U-M community. The adoption of the principles comes after months of student activism following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, and allegations that the University is suppressing student speech on this issue.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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BIA Net ☛ Journalist Altan Sancar reveals receiving threats on social media
Journalist Altan Sancar has faced threats as an Instagram user with the handle 'Jitemci' sent him a photo featuring bullets on the Turkish flag. The handle alludes to JİTEM, or Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism, an agency held responsible for thousands of extrajudicial killings during the conflict in the country's Kurdish regions in the 1990s, althoug its existence has not been officially admitted.
Sharing the visual threat message on social media, Sancar recalled previous intimidations and expressed frustration over the lack of results from previous criminal complaints.
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Atlantic Council ☛ Russia faces fresh accusations of targeting journalists in Ukraine
Anton Skyba, who works as a freelance journalist and risk assessment trainer with Ukraine’s 2402 Fund NGO, argues that Russia’s attacks are meant “to disrupt and seed panic among journalists, media workers, aid workers, and different international counterparts.” He believes the Russian objective is to sew chaos and disorder, which will in the long run shield the Russian military from media scrutiny by making the work of journalists as difficult and dangerous as possible. In this context, he says, the terror tactics being employed are “quite pragmatic.”
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CPJ ☛ CPJ calls for release of all jailed Iranian journalists after bail granted to Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi
Hamedi and Mohammadi, sentenced to serve 13- and 12-years respectively on charges linked to their reporting, had spent almost 16 months behind bars after being among the first journalists to cover the 2022 hospitalization and subsequent death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, who was in morality police custody for allegedly violating Iran’s conservative dress law.
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CPJ ☛ Somaliland journalist Mohamed Abdi Sheikh detained after discussing diplomatic row
On January 6, intelligence agents raided the offices of MM Somali TV in the Somaliland capital, Hargeisa, interrupting a live debate that the station was hosting on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, about a controversial port deal between Ethiopia and Somaliland, according to a statement by MM Somali TV and news reports.
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Techdirt ☛ My Comments To Attorney General Rob Bonta Regarding Common Sense Media’s Dangerous ‘Protect The Kids’ Ballot Initiative
Last week I noted that the improperly named Common Sense Media had submitted a very problematic and dangerous California ballot initiative that aims to hold social media companies liable should any harm that happens to any child be loosely connected to social media. As we noted, the research out there does not support the underlying conjecture the entire initiative is based on, and the initiative itself would clearly violate the 1st Amendment. Today is the deadline for submitting comments to California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Below are the comments I have just submitted.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Techdirt ☛ Colorado Journalist Says Fuck Prior Restraint, Dares Court To Keep Violating The 1st Amendment
Most courts recognize prior restraint as a First Amendment violation. Most courts. Not all. And the lower you go on the judicial organization chart, the more likely you are to run into a judge who doesn’t seem to realize the Constitution exists.
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ACLU ☛ Unaccountable Police Units Are Wrong for Safety
The Scorpion Unit was no aberration. In introductory remarks to its guidelines, NPI mentions the CRASH scandal in Los Angeles in the 1990s, during which a specialized unit tasked with addressing gang activity was found to be engaged in criminal conduct. The unit had repeatedly used excessive and at times lethal force without provocation. Another high-profile example is from New York City in 1999, when a specialized unit of the NYPD killed Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old Black man. The unit — tasked with addressing gun violence — shot Diallo 41 times when he reached for his pocket to provide identification.
Disbanding these units does not necessarily end the misconduct. In response to community outcry over the Diallo killing, the NYPD dismantled the responsible unit and created a new one — the Anti-Crime Unit — that supposedly had better training and oversight. The ACU went on to be a primary driver of unlawful stops in the early 2000s and, more recently, was found disproportionately responsible for shootings. Following the George Floyd protests in 2020, the ACU was disbanded only to be reconstituted in 2023 — again, with allegedly better training and oversight. Just a few months after the new rollout, however, a federal monitor found ACU to be unlawfully stopping Black and Latine people.
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VOA News ☛ Afghan Women, Girls Detained Over ‘Bad Hijab’ But Taliban Deny Enforcing Dress Code
The Taliban's Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice spokesman Abdul Ghafar Farooq confirmed to The Associated Press that his agency’s female officers have been arresting women for violating the dress code.
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Joan Westenberg ☛ Stop treating human beings like NPCs.
Technology has made it stupidly easy to avoid real human interaction. Our eyes are glued to our phones, barely noticing the people around us. Even in real-world interactions, we talk over the top of our screens — anything to avoid face-to-face conversations. We treat cashiers, servers, customer reps and even people we care about like NPCs from some video game–two-dimensional extras put here just to serve our needs. This has to change. It’s dehumanising and keeps us from connecting, both with each other and with ourselves.
When we mentally reduce people to NPC status, we strip their humanity away. We don’t see them as complex individuals with real lives, hopes, dreams and struggles. Instead, we see them as quest-givers, vendors, allies or obstacles. Their only purpose is to help our cause or get out of the way. We don’t “waste” time wondering where they go when we’re done with them, what they struggle with, or who’s waiting at home. This mindset has spread from games into dangerous places.
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The Atlantic ☛ Don’t Talk to People Like They’re Chatbots
Today’s chatbots perform best when instructed with a level of precision that would be appallingly rude in human conversation, stripped of any conversational pleasantries that the model could misinterpret: “Draft a 250-word paragraph in my typical writing style, detailing three examples to support the following point and cite your sources.” Not even the most detached corporate CEO would likely talk this way to their assistant, but it’s common with chatbots.
If chatbots truly become the dominant daily conversation partner for some people, there is an acute risk that these users will adopt a lexicon of AI commands even when talking to other humans. Rather than speaking with empathy, subtlety, and nuance, we’ll be trained to speak with the cold precision of a programmer talking to a computer. The colorful aphorisms and anecdotes that give conversations their inherently human quality, but that often confound large language models, could begin to vanish from the human discourse.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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APNIC ☛ IP addresses through 2023
What can IPv4 and IPv6 addressing in 2023 tell us about the changing nature of the network?
[...]
Back around 1992, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) gazed into their crystal ball and tried to understand how the Internet was going to evolve and what demands that would place on the addressing system as part of the ‘IP Next Generation’ study. The staggeringly large numbers of connected devices that we see today were certainly within the range predicted by that exercise. Doubtless, these device numbers will continue to grow.
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Hackaday ☛ Modeling Network Latency
The selfhosting community is an interesting and useful part of the Internet dedicated to removing one’s own services and data from the cloud and hosting it on their own servers, often on hardware that can be physically touched. With that kind of network usage, it’s not uncommon for people to build their own routers, firewalls, and other network support systems from the ground up. And, if you go deep enough, maybe even a home lab dedicated to testing and improving the network’s various layers. This piece of software helps simulate network latency to more accurately assess quality of service, performance, and the optimization of one one’s own networks.
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Techdirt ☛ Verizon, AT&T Face ‘High Priority’ EPA Inquiry Over Lead In Telecom Cables
While the telecom industry did manage to successfully defang U.S. consumer protection regulators for the better part of the last decade, they’re still facing some notable headwinds. Broadband growth has dramatically slowed, cable TV customers are leaving in droves, and while they are getting a ton of new subsidies via the infrastructure bill, a lot of that money is going to very popular new publicly-owned competitors.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Tom's Hardware ☛ YouTube hasn't stepped up its anti-ad-blocking activity, you're using too many ad-blockers
We've already seen YouTube forcibly extending initial page loading time for ad-block users, and even eventually blocking video playback outright if you're detected playing three videos while using an ad-blocker. This behavior has resulted in criminal complaints being filed — and it isn't even the only major issue YouTube has faced recently.
In addition to its anti-ad-blocking activity, Google has also been caught intentionally slowing down YouTube performance for Firefox users (even without ad-blockers), as well as users running Arm-based systems.
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9to5Google ☛ YouTube begins new wave of slowdowns for users with ad blockers enabled
YouTube has since started discouraging the use of ad blockers in a couple of ways. The first is with a pop-up message that reads, “Ad blockers violate YouTube’s Term of Service.” The message then suggests you turn off your ad blocker. The user is not allowed to continue watching without doing so.
The second method is one that’s now starting to roll out to more users. YouTube has recently started slowing the entire site when an ad blocker is being used, referring to it as “suboptimal viewing.”
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Gizmodo ☛ Ubisoft Says Gamers Should Get More Comfortable Not Owning Their Games
Ubisoft’s head of subscriptions, Philippe Tremblay, offered a fair few innocuous comments in an interview with GI.biz but then said something that could be particularly upsetting for players who’ve long been taken for a ride by a largely anti-consumer games industry. Tremblay said players are used to owning the games they play, but they have got “comfortable” not owning their music or movie collection. His main point: why shouldn’t players get “comfortable” with not owning the product they pay for and instead accept the streaming model as a whole?
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Techdirt ☛ Google Supports Oregon ‘Right To Repair’ Reform
Big tech companies have long attempted to monopolize repair options to boost their profits, whether we’re talking about tractors, phones, or game consoles.
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Matt Birchler ☛ Apple will let US merchants link to payments on the web, but Apple will still take their cut
This at least allows merchants to incentivize people to pay on the web by giving them a lower price. Several companies like YouTube already do this since they don’t have to offset Apple’s 30% cut on the web, but now they can say it explicitly, which I like.
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9to5Mac ☛ Apple revises US App Store rules to let developers link to outside payment methods, but it will still charge a commission
Apple has also confirmed that it will charge a commission on purchases made through alternative payment platforms. This commission will be 12% for developers who are a member of the App Store Small Business Program and 27% for other apps.
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Patents
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Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ The Carrot and Stick Approach to Innovation
A California Court of Appeals issued a product liability decision in early 2024 that raises interesting questions about the role of both carrots and sticks in innovation policy. Gilead Tenofovir Cases, No. A165558, 2024 WL 94462 (Cal. App. 1st Dist. Jan. 9, 2024) Read It Here. I first found the Gilead case while reading the Wall Street Journal with the board editorial decrying the decision for “invent[ing] a crazy new tort.” In particular, the appellate panel agreed that Gilead could be held liable for for delaying the development of an alternative HIV/AIDS drug (TAF) that it expected would be safer and equally effective compared to its existing drug (TDF) in order to maximize profits from TDF.
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TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Apple plans to remove sensor from some watch models depending on how a court rules in patent monopoly dispute
Apple is prepared to remove the blood-oxygen sensor from its internet-connected watches if a court doesn’t give it more leeway while it pursues a bid to overturn a ruling that has blocked its use of the technology. A potential redesign of two Fashion Company Apple Watch models, the Series 9 and Ultra 2, that would exclude the blood oxygen sensor has been approved by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That's according to a Monday court filing by Masimo, a Southern California company pursuing the patent monopoly claim. The blood oxygen sensor will remain in the watches if an appeals court sides with Apple.
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JUVE ☛ CJEU confirms strict liability standard for losses due to PI [Ed: CJEU needs to look into the crimes committed last year to initiate an illegal and unconstitutional kangaroo court manned by the very same corporations it's meant to judge on]
The CJEU has ruled that Article 9 (7) of Directive 2004/48 EC does not preclude national mechanisms for compensation for any injury caused by provisional measures.
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Software Patents
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The Register UK ☛ IBM scraps rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points
IBM has canceled a program that rewarded inventors at Big Blue for patents or publications, leaving some angry that they are missing out on potential bonuses.
By cancelling the scheme, a source told The Register, IBM has eliminated a financial liability by voiding the accrued, unredeemed credits issued to program participants which could have been converted into potential cash awards.
For years, IBM has sponsored an "Invention Achievement Award Plan" to incentivize employee innovation. In exchange for filing patents, or for publishing articles that served as defense against rival patents, IBM staff were awarded points that led to recognition and potentially cash bonuses.
According to documentation seen by The Register, "Invention points are awarded to all inventors listed on a successful disclosure submission."
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Quartz ☛ Apple is getting rid of the blood oxygen feature on the Apple Watch
The Cupertino giant has long been stuck in legal issues with California-based health-tech company Masimo, which manufactures blood oxygen monitoring tech. Masimo claims that Apple approached the company for collaboration in 2013 and allegedly violated two patents.
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India Times ☛ US imports of some Apple Watches banned while patent case plays out
In a statement, Joe Kiani, Masimo's founder and chief executive, said the ruling "affirms that even the largest and most powerful companies must respect the intellectual rights of American inventors and must deal with the consequences when they are caught infringing others' patents."
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Copyrights
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Digital Music News ☛ “Current Copyright Laws Were Not Designed with AI In Mind” Says Virginie Berger—So How Does the Industry Deal with AI?
“Music rights are often divided among numerous stakeholders, record labels, and music publishers. Each party holds specific rights, such as performance, mechanical, or synchronization rights. This division creates a convoluted network of royalty payments and rights management, leading to disputes and delays in payment—ultimately affecting the financial well-being of artists and companies alike,” Berger continued.
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India Times ☛ OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Salesforce's Mark Benioff disagree on AI’s use of copyrighted content
Marc Benioff, the Salesforce Inc. chief executive officer who also owns Time magazine, said artificial intelligence companies ripped off intellectual [sic] property [sic] to build their technology.
“All the training data has been stolen,” Benioff said Tuesday in an interview at Bloomberg House at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Content from media outlets including Time and the New York Times Co. surfaces in results from AI companies, he said.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Copyright Parody Exception Denied Due to Defendant's Discriminatory Use
A former city councillor who used footage from a news report, presented in a foreign language and edited in subtitles with entirely different messaging, has lost his case in Finland. Junes Lokka's defense centered on his right to freely use copyrighted content for parody. Finding Lokka guilty of criminal copyright infringement for distributing the modified video on Twitter, the court found that derogatory racist content enjoys no fair use-style freedom.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Nigerian Police Bust Pirate Site Operators After Actress Suffers Panic Attacks
The Criminal Investigations Department of Nigeria's police has arrested five suspects in one of the largest online piracy actions ever carried out in the country. The suspects were identified following complaints from filmmakers, including actress Toyin Abraham who suffered several panic attacks after her latest film 'Maliaka' was widely pirated.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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🔤SpellBinding: GILOUTS Wordo: LEFTY
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Postpartum
This will be a long one. I was able to journal almost every day during the first six weeks of postpartum and thought it would be interesting to put together a little excerpt of each entry. Those first weeks are rough. Often the memories are just a blur so it's interesting to look back and see what I was thinking and feeling.
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Midnight Pub: Frames Of Reference- Chapter 2
I type that into my profile before hesitating and removing the last bit. Too risky, these types out here don’t have a sense of humor. They don’t know how to relax, too uptight, every armrest gripped by pale white knuckles, all the neckties in a stranglehold. No, no place for humor in this industry. Humor left my cold dead shell a long time ago.
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Norms vs code
The laundry room in the building I moved to and the laundry room where I moved from have very different rules but two rules that are in both rulesets are:
1. Clean the machine and the detergent compartment and leave it open 2. Clean the drier filter
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Project Management Certification Landscape
This article is an overview and comparison of various certifications that are directly or indirectly related to project management. Yes, I've included Scrum as well because it has much to do with how you manage projects, even though it doesn't have a project manager role: project management ≠ project manager
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Splish splash, I was taking a textural bath
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Music Spotlight: My Top Album 2023
2023! What a year! A bunch of new music from bands I love and some new bands I've not listened to before this year! So quite exciting and what a fun year. But unfortunately for so many of these. My top 5 may be fairly predictable for those who've followed along in past years.
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Music Spotlight: Awesome EPs
It isn't too uncommon for me to stumble across an EP that I put on rotation more or just as much as the full lengths the band releases. I was listening to one such EP tonight while showering and decided to try and catalog a few that really stuck out to me and maybe you'll find worth checking out.
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#Lore24 - Day 17 - On Elementals
Like reactionals[1], elemental[2] magic is one of the big parts of the magical systems used in Tarsan[3], Gepaul[4], and Kormar[5]. They are distinct since they equate more to the modern day periodic table of elementals instead of the “classical” elementals of earth, air, fire, and water. In specific, fire is a reactional and air is… squishy because it acts as both an elemental (oxygen) and a reactional (wind).
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Chess
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Playing the Ruy Lopez
Ruy Lopez has been my go-to chess opening recently. I have also played it quite a bit as black. Here's the two main ideas in Ruy Lopez and the most common mistakes related to them.
This will probably be interesting for you if you happen to be ~ 1200-1300 elo on Lichess (subtract maybe a hundred elo or something for the corresponding value on chess.com).
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Technology and Free Software
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Quick thoughts on creating new information models
As product designer, it has been appealing to me, understanding everything around a 'successful' product.
Defining success and 'product' is beyond this short text, of course. But let's say it's something useful and valuable for you and your friends. Something self-sustainable. Which is designed to last at least until it's valuable to its users.
I've followed and designed a few extensions for twtxt "2.0", a Web client. And recently I was playing with the idea of encrypted messages, inspired by Fatline messaging.
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Why keeping your data and website on a single server is not a good thing ?
Many cloud services allow you to have your contacts, agenda, notes, pictures and sometimes more, like your own website, on a single server or account. But you can also host this on your own server (a simple Raspberry Pi) or a NAS. You might think that's the safest option because it's at home and not in the cloud. If only it were that simple....
Contacts, agenda and notes are part of your personal and sometimes professional life. It's valuable to you, but it can also be valuable to know everything about you. Pictures are also important and we know many movie stars who have been hacked. OK, you think you're not a star and you're not a potential target. Anything can be used to make money from you, even for a small amount. Even in a burglary, today someone can steal your server and use it for blackmail. So you need to think that all your data needs to be in different secure places. The more a technology is used, the more it can be hacked. Now, with the popularity of Nextcloud or Raspberry Pi solutions, free software solutions are not invulnerable.
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My first FreeBSD laptop
Yesterday I installed FreeBSD on an old laptop from 2011 that's been sitting in storage. It was originally a Windows machine, but when the OS was upgraded, I couldn't get technical support for it anymore, so I abandoned it. I've used FreeBSD on servers before, but never in a graphics environment like this. I had a hard time installing drivers for the old graphics card, but eventually managed to get an Xfce desktop environment up and running.
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Booting Woes
A range of Dell equipment (and some random HP desktops, too)† showed varied results for booting; older equipment that "supports" UEFI may tend towards buggy behavior (try BIOS instead) while the newer equipment tended towards the BIOS being buggy (try UEFI instead). One might suspect that the new thing has errors because new, and the old thing bitrots as it falls off the support wagon, untested and unloved. There may be various relevant BIOS options to fiddle around with—"secure" boot, whether USB is supported for booting, boot order, press a custom key for a boot menu and only then from there, phase of the moon, etc. Put together a list of things to toggle, change one of them, try a boot, repeat lots.
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uConsole essentials and Motorola Lapdock
I'm playing around with the ClockworkPi uConsole a while now. The most annoying things are the battery life and the crappy wifi antenna.
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Blocked Bytes
This detail from /usr/src/usr.sbin/cron/do_command.c on OpenBSD seems worth some study, in particular whether we can make a parent process block as advertised. Because, uh, for science! Actionable insights! Etc.
The parent process will need to indicate whether it is blocked or not, probably by emitting periodic messages over time. For the child process we need something that ignores standard input, so probably a "source" program like ls(1). A "source" program here is anything that produces output, as opposed to something that modifies or filters input such as tr(1), and "sink" programs that save or stash input. sponge(1) of moreutils comes to mind as a sink. A program can act in some or even all of these roles.
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Internet/Gemini
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I Talked About Gemini in (Swedish) Podcast
The Swedish podcast Kodsnack invited me to talk about the gemini protocol and the community of geminispace. Kodsnack is a cozy banter pod about programming-related things.
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Email, Mastodon, Text-Based Websites, and Gemini
I saw this blog post from late 2023 show up on Hacker News earlier. Beto Dealmeida talks about how his latest computer is actually a USB stick running Qemu and Alpine Linux, the idea being to use an emulator to run a system-independent computer available anywhere there's a free USB port.
Perhaps predictably, the HN crew got hung up on the what, rather than the why. You know: "why Qemu and not..."; "who's relying on USB ports being safe in 2023...", that sort of thing. And as for the why,
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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.