Links 02/02/2024: More Layoffs, SIM-Swap Crooks Arrested
Contents
- Leftovers
- 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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EDRI ☛ Debate: “Does Europe need a new approach to Internet standards?”
The report, which we will publish closer to the debate date, focuses on unpacking the European Union’s policy approach to Internet standardization. Exploring the concretization of new digital sovereignty-oriented policies, it reflects on the current EU vision for the future of the open [Internet], along with its inconsistencies. The publication also delineates key recommendations for national/EU policymakers to propose an alternative policy approach conducive to more openness, both at the technical and political levels.
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Diziet ☛ UPS, the Useless Parcel Service; VAT and fees
I recently had the most astonishingly bad experience with UPS, the courier company. They severely damaged my parcels, and were very bad about UK import VAT, ultimately ending up harassing me on autopilot.
The only thing that got their attention was my draft Particulars of Claim for intended legal action.
Surprisingly, I got them to admit in writing that the “disbursement fee” they charge recipients alongside the actual VAT, is just something they made up with no legal basis.
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Manuel Moreale ☛ On digital relationships
Digital relationships are a fascinating concept. The idea that a relationship with someone else can be lived, consumed, and enjoyed entirely inside the digital space is something we probably take for granted but it’s such a unique and distinctive feature of this time we live in.
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Steve Ledlow ☛ Migration Complete
Back in December, I started down the path of combining multiple blogs into one.
I thought it would take much longer, but with the combination of some python scripts to reformat other content management exports and a fair amount of copy/pasting and checking for broken links, internal references, etc. it is done.
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The Verge ☛ Toward a unified taxonomy of text-based social media use
The silent majority of every successful text-based social media site is lurkers. These are sane, normal people with sane, normal lives. They are well-balanced and have hobbies. One of those hobbies is visiting social media sites, where they are usually looking for either information or entertainment. They’re the audience.
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Adolfo Ochagavía ☛ The undercover generalist
Since starting out as an independent contractor, I’ve always felt a tension between being a generalist software engineer, yet having to market myself as a specialist. I’ve been wanting to write about it for years and even have kept some notes for that purpose. Recently I came across an article by Ben Collins-Sussman, which gave me the last bit of inspiration I needed, even though his article only indirectly touches on the topic.
Below follows an account of my struggles, hoping it might be useful for other adventurers out there. Note that my words are closely tied to my own experience, so take them with a grain of salt!
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Jasper Tandy ☛ I've added a new Media Diet area on this site.
I didn't want to pollute my main RSS feed with this, so if you're interested you can subscribe to it separately. I'm not sure how I feel about the rating system as it might be too esoteric and redundant. It's pretty likely that I won't share anything I dislike there unless it's a film, TV, or a book but maybe that's fine? Clearly I haven't thought it through too much.
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Tim Bray ☛ DC Again
For the second time this winter I’ve been to Washington and back. Herewith pictures and feelings. Everyone’s seen plenty of photos of The Capital City Of The United States so I’ve tried for fresh views. My feelings are more mainstream than my pictures, I’m pretty sure; the stories DC tells aren’t subtle.
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Marty Day ☛ The Philadelphia cheesesteak as obsession and art
Obsessed with making the perfect cheesesteak, Chujo heads to Philadelphia to research, measure, and hone his skills. It’s a really cool look into how American and Japanese culture and palates can differ, and crucially, how they can be brought together.
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Dave Rupert ☛ “I used to listen to your podcast”
With RSS you can unplug from the machine. Podcasts – built on RSS – are the same. A never ending stream of content… but with latency. It’s important we celebrate the Thrill of Missing Out.
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Education
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Vox ☛ Conservatives have long been at war with colleges
According to historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, who is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America and casts a sometimes critical eye on the conservative assault on higher education, the playbook has existed for decades.
Lassabe Shepherd and I discussed the parallels between the current moment and the early 20th century, when conservatives first grew suspicious of colleges and universities. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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Ali Reza Hayati ☛ Good listener
I listened to him without realizing how much time has passed and I didn’t even think about anything else. Didn’t try to convince him I know about anything, didn’t try to talk about similar situations I’ve experienced, and didn’t try to make a conversation. I just enjoyed his story, effortlessly.
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David Rosenthal ☛ The Stanford Digital Library Project
In particular Vicky explained citation indices, the concept behind Page Rank, to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Andy Bechtolsheim was famously instrumental in persuading them to turn their demo of a Page Rank search engine into Google, the company. In his fascinating interview in the Computer History Museum's oral history collection, Andy explains why the idea of ranking pages by their inbound links was so important.
Below the fold I have taken the liberty of transcribing and cleaning up the relevant section of Andy's stream of conciousness, both because it is important history and because it exactly reflects the Andy I was privileged to know in the early days of Sun Microsystems.
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Greece ☛ Protesters gathering for rally against private universities, roads close
Hundreds of people have gathered at Propylaea and are expected to march to Parliament, prompting the police to impose traffic restrictions.
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ANF News ☛ Erdoğan trying to build a world coalition against the Kurds
Turkey is using the contradictions and crisis in the Middle East to eliminate the Kurds. On the one hand, Erdoğan welcomes the Iranian president in Ankara and signs economic and other agreements. On the other hand, he signs Sweden's accession to NATO.
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Hardware
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Jeff Geerling ☛ SimpliSafe Video Doorbell: Halt and Catch Fire
That's great, but I didn't really need a chime, I just wanted a smart doorbell so I could get a notification on my phone whenever someone was at the door.
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Omicron Limited ☛ Team develops a laser printer for photonic chips
Photonic circuits use photons, fundamental particles of light, to move, store, and access information in much the same way that conventional electronic circuits use electrons for this purpose. Photonic chips are already in use today in advanced fiber-optic communication systems, and they are being developed for implementation in a broad spectrum of near-future technologies, including light detection and ranging, or LiDAR, for autonomous vehicles; light-based sensors for medical devices; 5G and 6G communication networks; and optical and quantum computing.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Democracy Now ☛ “Legacy”: Dr. Uché Blackstock on How Racism Shapes Healthcare in America
On the first day of Black History Month, we take a look at how racism shapes healthcare in America. We speak with Dr. Uché Blackstock about her new book, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine. The instant New York Times best-selling book tells her family’s story through multiple generations of Black women physicians while revealing the history of racism that created today’s disparities in medical training and treatment in America. “I use my mother’s story and my story to really emphasize how deeply embedded systemic racism is in our country, in the past and in the present,” says Blackstock. “There is nothing biologically wrong with Black people … but there is something very wrong with the social institutions, not just healthcare, within our country that are deeply embedded with bias and racism.”
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The Atlantic ☛ Deer Are Beta-Testing a Nightmare Disease: Prion diseases are poorly understood, and this one is devastating.
Scott Napper, a biochemist and vaccinologist at the University of Saskatchewan, can easily envision humanity’s ultimate doomsday disease. The scourge would spread fast, but the progression of illness would be slow and subtle. With no immunity, treatments, or vaccines to halt its progress, the disease would eventually find just about every single one of us, spreading via all manner of body fluids. In time, it would kill everyone it infected. Even our food and drink would not be safe, because the infectious agent would be hardy enough to survive common disinfectants and the heat of cooking; it would be pervasive enough to infest our livestock and our crops. “Imagine if consuming a plant could cause a fatal, untreatable neurodegenerative disorder,” Napper told me. “Any food grown within North America would be potentially deadly to humans.”
This nightmare illness doesn’t yet exist. But for inspiration, Napper needs to look only at the very real contagion in his own lab: chronic wasting disease (CWD), a highly lethal, highly contagious neurodegenerative disease that is devastating North America’s deer, elk, and other cervids.
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VOA News ☛ Taliban Health Minister Denies Afghanistan's Mother and Child Mortality Rate is Skyrocketing
"Afghanistan remains one of the most dangerous places in the world for infants, children, and mothers," UNDP said. "The country has alarmingly high infant mortality rates, and thousands of Afghan women lose their lives each year due to preventable pregnancy-related causes."
Another contributing factor is a Taliban-encouraged increase in child marriages in Afghanistan. That has boosted teen pregnancies and elevated the risk of health complications and birth mortality, PassBlue, an independent outlet covering U.N. activities, reported last December.
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Omicron Limited ☛ Agriculture built these High Plains towns. Now, it might run them dry
The Ogallala Aquifer, the underground rock and sediment formation that spans eight states from South Dakota to the Texas Panhandle, is the only reliable water source for some parts of the region. But for decades, states have allowed farmers to over pump groundwater to irrigate corn and other crops that would otherwise struggle on the arid High Plains.
Now, the disappearing water is threatening more than just agriculture. Rural communities are facing dire futures where water is no longer a certainty. Across the Ogallala, small towns and cities built around agriculture are facing a twisted threat: The very industry that made their communities might just eradicate them.
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Omicron Limited ☛ Cost analysis of using cover crops in citrus production
The citrus industry in Florida, a historic hub for citrus (Citrus sp.) production, has been grappling with the devastating effects of Huanglongbing (HLB), also known as citrus greening disease (Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus). In the face of this challenge, a recent study delves into the potential economic viability of incorporating cover crops in citrus groves to enhance soil health and overall tree well-being.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses
The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be a faked, recorded demo: [...]
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The Register UK ☛ The FCC wants to criminalize AI robocall spam
It's one thing for humans to con other humans, it's another for computers to imitate celebrities and others while spam-calling people at an industrial scale to swindle them with convincing lures.
Last month, New Hampshire residents received a fake call mimicking President Joe Biden's voice telling them to not vote in the state's Presidential primary election in an attempt to disrupt results.
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404 Media ☛ Fake Bill Ackman and Jim Cramer Instagram Ads are Trying to Take My Money
For the past week Instagram has been pummeling me with ads in which well known rich people, investors, and financial geniuses invite me to private groups to get investment tips. Images of billionaire Bill Ackman, CNBC personality Jim Cramer, the CEO of Ark Invest Cathie Wood, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon appear in my feed after every other post.
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The Register UK ☛ Cloudflare sheds more light on Thanksgiving security breach in which tokens, source code accessed by suspected spies
The October Okta security breach involved more than 130 customers of that IT access management biz, in which snoops swiped data from Okta in hope of drilling further into those organizations. Cloudflare was among those affected, as it was in 2022 as a result of a separate Okta intrusion.
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The Register UK ☛ Fujitsu finance chief says sorry for company's role in Post Office Horizon scandal
Horizon is an EPOS and back-end finance system for thousands of Post Office branches around the UK, first implemented by ICL, a UK technology company which Fujitsu later bought. From 1999 until 2015, 736 local branch managers were wrongfully convicted of fraud when errors in the system were to blame.
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Science News ☛ AI chatbots can be tricked into misbehaving. Can scientists stop it?
icture a tentacled, many-eyed beast, with a long tongue and gnarly fangs. Atop this writhing abomination sits a single, yellow smiley face. “Trust me,” its placid mug seems to say.
That’s an image sometimes used to represent AI chatbots. The smiley is what stands between the user and the toxic content the system can create.
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[Old] Seattle Times ☛ Why an octopus-like creature has come to symbolize AI | Commentary
In any case, the Shoggoth is a potent metaphor that encapsulates one of the most bizarre facts about the AI world, which is that many of the people working on this technology are somewhat mystified by their own creations. They don’t fully understand the inner workings of AI language models, how they acquire new abilities or why they behave unpredictably at times. They aren’t totally sure if AI is going to be net-good or net-bad for the world. And some of them have gotten to play around with the versions of this technology that haven’t yet been sanitized for public consumption — the real, unmasked Shoggoths.
That some AI insiders refer to their creations as Lovecraftian horrors, even as a joke, is unusual by historical standards. (Put it this way: Fifteen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going around comparing Facebook to Cthulhu.)
And it reinforces the notion that what’s happening in AI today feels, to some of its participants, more like an act of summoning than a software development process. They are creating the blobby, alien Shoggoths, making them bigger and more powerful, and hoping that there are enough smiley faces to cover the scary parts.
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[Old] The Economist ☛ Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster, say Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi
Lovecraft’s shoggoths were artificial servants that rebelled against their creators. The shoggoth meme went viral because an influential community of Silicon Valley rationalists fears that humanity is on the cusp of a “Singularity”, creating an inhuman “artificial general intelligence” that will displace or even destroy us.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ New Nvidia AI GPUs designed to get around U.S. export bans come to China — H20, L20, and L2 to fill void left by restricted models
The H20, L20, and L2 are Nvidia's second round of GPUs designed to be compliant with U.S. government sanctions on China. The company was already supposed to be in the clear with models like the A800 and H800 that featured cut-down specifications from the original A100 and H100. However, late last year an amendment to the export rules banned all of Nvidia's China-exclusive datacenter GPUs, forcing Nvidia to make another set of cards that were compliant with the law.
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Security
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Krebs On Security ☛ Arrests in $400M SIM-Swap Tied to Heist at FTX?
Three Americans were charged this week with stealing more than $400 million in a November 2022 SIM-swapping attack. The U.S. government did not name the victim organization, but there is every indication that the money was stolen from the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which had just filed for bankruptcy on that same day.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Vice Media Group ☛ Bodycam Maker Axon Is on a Mission to Surveil America with AI
Axon acquired Fusus for an undisclosed sum, according to a news release posted on Thursday. The acquisition “expands and deepens” the companies’ so-called real time capabilities. Fusus operates what it calls “real time crime centers (RTCC)” which allow police and other public agencies to analyze a wide array of video sources at a single point and apply AI that detects objects and people. These centers are reminiscent of the Department of Homeland Security’s Fusion Centers—where intelligence from a diverse number of sources is collected and shared among agencies—and have already expanded to over 250 cities and counties.
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NYPost ☛ TSA sparks privacy concerns amid plans to install facial recognition systems at 400 US airports
“TSA is in the early stages of deploying its facial recognition capability to airport security checkpoints,” a spokesperson told The Post regarding the ambitious program. They explained that the cutting-edge tech serves to both enhance and expedite the screening process for passengers.
Dubbed CAT-2 machines, these automated identification systems accomplish this by incorporating facial recognition tech to snap real-time pictures of travelers.
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Citizen Lab ☛ Confirming Large-Scale Pegasus Surveillance of Jordan-based Civil Society
As part of a collaborative investigation led by Access Now, Citizen Lab researchers conducted forensic analysis of iPhones belonging to members of Jordan-based civil society.
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AccessNow ☛ Between a hack and a hard place: how Pegasus spyware crushes civic space in Jordan
This report is an Access Now publication. We would like to thank Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline for conducting the forensic investigation as well as other Access Now team members who provided support, including Méabh Maguire, Alexia Skok, Sage Cheng, Donna Wentworth, Peter Micek, Natalia Krapiva, Rand Hammoud, Thomas Kaye, and Milica Pandzic. We would also like to thank the partners who have been involved at various points in this investigation, including the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International’s Security Lab, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), and our local partners in Jordan.
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Defence/Aggression
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Vice Media Group ☛ U.S. Corporations Are Openly Trying to Destroy Core Public Institutions. We Should All Be Worried.
Trader Joe’s has become the second company in a month to sue the National Labor Relations Board for being “unconstitutional,” following the lead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as both companies face board charges for firing employees. These two major corporations aren’t alone in attempting to protect their interests by undermining public institutions; Meta is also arguing in an ongoing lawsuit that the Federal Trade Commission is unconstitutional.
A legal expert told Motherboard that these companies are attempting to take advantage of what they believe is a friendly Supreme Court—judges currently lean right by a six-to-three margin—while they can.
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Kansas Reflector ☛ ‘A product that’s killing people’: Lawmakers chastise social media giants for harm to kids
And they urged the tech executives — including Zuckerberg of Meta, Shou Chew of TikTok and Linda Yaccarino of X — to work with them on legislation or risk being “regulated out of business.”
Social media users, especially children and teens, are vulnerable to online scams, extortion and other dangerous material, several senators said.
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Malay Mail ☛ Woman jailed over car-chase with Norway anti-Islam activist
The incident happened minutes after Lars Thoren, head of the Stop The Islamisation of Norway group, had burned a copy of the Quran outside a mosque in the Oslo suburbs.
Two women in a grey Mercedes went after him in a pursuit that was filmed and posted on social media.
Thoren’s sports utility truck was rammed and turned over onto its roof but none of the five occupants were seriously hurt.
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CBC ☛ TikTok pulling music by Universal artists amid licensing fight
The licensing agreement between UMG and TikTok expired as of Wednesday.
In a Tuesday letter addressed to artists and songwriters, UMG said it had been pressing TikTok on three issues: "appropriate compensation for our artists and songwriters, protecting human artists from the harmful effects of AI, and online safety for TikTok's users."
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Democracy Now ☛ “Climate of Fear”: Inside UAE’s Use of U.S. Mercenaries to Carry Out Assassinations in Yemen
Democracy Now! speaks with filmmaker Nawal Al-Maghafi about her BBC investigative report which reveals new details about how the United Arab Emirates hired American mercenaries to carry out over 100 assassinations in southern Yemen, targeting politicians, imams and members of civil society. Al-Maghafi interviewed several mercenaries for the first time on camera about how they conducted the targeted killings and trained others to run similar operations. “What we’ve seen is a systematic targeting campaign of … political activists, members of Al-Islah, civil society members,” says Al-Maghafi. “It’s just created a climate of fear in southern Yemen.”
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Democracy Now ☛ “The Houthis Are Not Iranian Proxies”: Helen Lackner on the History & Politics of Yemen’s Ansar Allah
The U.S. continues to launch airstrikes on Yemen in response to the campaign of missile and drone attacks on commercial ships along key global trade routes through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden led by Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis. The Houthi strikes have expanded from targets connected to Israel, in protest of the siege and bombing of Gaza, to ships affiliated with the U.S. and U.K. in what the group calls acts of self-defense. “The Houthis have been extremely explicit and repeat on an almost daily basis that their attacks on ships in the Red Sea will stop as soon as the Gaza war ends,” says Helen Lackner, author of several books on Yemen, who describes the history of the Houthis, the political landscape in Yemen, and debunks the idea the group is controlled by Iran. “The Iranian involvement has become greater, but it’s very important to know that the Houthis are an independent movement. The Houthis are not Iranian proxies. … They make their own decisions.”
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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LRT ☛ Militia major who beat protesters in Belarus works as window fitter in Lithuania
Alexander Matiyevich, a major in the Belarusian militia who took part in the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 2020, enjoys peace in Lithuania. The Belarusian who beat protesters in Lida now works in a window installation company near Vilnius.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Designates Germany-Based Russian Election Monitor NGO 'Undesirable'
Russia's Prosecutor General has declared Russian Election Monitor (REM) an "undesirable" organization, the State Duma commission to investigate foreign interference in Russian politics reported on February 1.
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RFERL ☛ Russian Court Extends Pretrial Detention Of RFE/RL Journalist Alsu Kurmasheva To April 5
A court in the Russian city of Kazan has extended the detention of Alsu Kurmasheva, a veteran journalist of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Tatar-Bashkir Service who has been in Russian custody since October 18, by two months until April 5.
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RFA ☛ Russian rock band Bi-2 leaves Thailand for Israel after immigration violation
Rights groups had warned that members of the band could face persecution if deported to Russia.
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JURIST ☛ Russia court extends pre-trial detention of Russian-American journalist in ‘foreign agent’ case
A Sovetsky District Court in Kazan, Russia extended on Thursday the pre-trial detention of Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist who stands accused of violating a law on “foreign agents.”
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Latvia ☛ Latvian parliament confirms Russian and Belarusian sports ban
Latvia's national sports teams will from now on be prohibited from playing against the national teams of Russia and Belarus, according to the amendments to the Sports Law adopted in a final reading by the Saeima on Thursday, February 1.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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The Register UK ☛ Wikileaks source and former CIA worker Joshua Schulte sentenced to 40 years jail
Schulte allegedly stole the files that would become known as the Vault 7 leak in April 2016 while he worked at the Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), a division of the CIA that conducts offensive cyber operations.
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The Guardian UK ☛ Ex-CIA software engineer sentenced to 40 years for giving secrets to WikiLeaks
Joshua Schulte was convicted in July 2022 on four counts each of espionage and computer hacking and one count of lying to FBI agents, after giving classified materials to the whistleblowing agency WikiLeaks in the so-called Vault 7 leak. Last August, a judge mostly upheld the conviction.
WikiLeaks in March 2017 began publishing the materials, which concerned how the CIA surveilled foreign governments, alleged extremists and others by compromising their electronics and computer networks.
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The Dissenter ☛ Biden Justice Department Makes An Example Out Of IRS Whistleblower
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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[Repeat] Hong Kong Free Press ☛ China overtakes Japan as biggest vehicle exporter globally, helped along by electric cars
The country had already been shipping more vehicles than Japan on a monthly basis, but Wednesday’s data confirmed that it was also number one for a whole year.
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Ubuntu ☛ Driving into 2024 – The automotive trends to look out for in the year ahead
As electric vehicles (EVs) completely disrupt the market and the OEMs’ business strategies, the customer focus is shifting away from traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, challenging the way that cars are being built and designed.
More importantly, with software updates and connectivity allowing for seamless services and entertainment, customers are expecting different approaches to the way they interact and experience their mobility. Let’s dive into some of the key automotive trends we’ll be seeing in 2024.
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DeSmog ☛ Research Undermines Claims that Soil Carbon Can Offset Livestock Emissions
A recent study has found it is currently “not feasible” for the global livestock industry to sequester enough carbon to cancel out its planet-warming emissions — and that policy efforts geared toward that goal may be deeply misguided.
The study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications, shows that 135 gigatons — or 135 billion metric tons — of carbon would need to be returned to soils to balance out the amount of methane emitted annually by ruminants like cattle, sheep, bison, and goats. That would be an unthinkable task, said Peter Smith, a co-author of the study and Chair of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom. 135 gigatons is roughly equal to all the carbon lost due to agriculture over the past 12,000 years. We could completely rewild much of the planet and still not quite get there.
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DeSmog ☛ Revealed: Reform Party Accepts £10k Donation from Disgraced Financier Crispin Odey
The climate sceptic party Reform UK accepted £10,000 from a former Conservative Party donor who has been accused by more than a dozen women of sexual misconduct, DeSmog can reveal.
The donation was made last August by Crispin Odey, a British hedge fund manager whose company, Odey Asset Management, has announced that it will close after 13 women accused him of harassment or abuse.
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Finance
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Pro Publica ☛ Lawmakers Introduce Bill to Reform Contract for Deed Home Sales
A pair of U.S. senators introduced a bill Thursday that aims to curtail the misuse of a home buying agreement known as contract for deed, a potentially predatory practice that has targeted immigrant communities.
The Preserving Pathways to Homeownership Act of 2024, introduced by Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn. and Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., would require states to enact laws that provide additional protections for home buyers and discourage exploitative behavior by sellers.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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FAIR ☛ WaPo Owes an Apology to the DC Mayor It Drove From Office
When I became a journalist over 15 years ago, I did so to highlight the voices of activists—not top city officials. But things took an unexpected turn in 2014, as the Washington Post sought to end DC Mayor Vincent Gray’s career.
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FAIR ☛ Leading Papers Skewed Gaza Debate Toward Israeli and Government Perspectives
At the New York Times and Washington Post, despite efforts to include Palestinian voices, opinion editors have skewed the Gaza debate toward an Israel-centered perspective, dominated by men and, among guest writers, government officials.
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Techdirt ☛ A Utah Porn Filtering Bill Is Back, And It’s Very Stupid
One of my very first posts in Techdirt covered this topic. Though a similar proposal in Alabama was introduced, which prompted the column at the time, I referred to the dynamic duo of Utah Sen. Todd Weiler and Rep. Susan Pulsipher. Both are Republicans, anti-porn conservatives, members of the LDS Church, and think that child protection comes in the form of censorship.
Now the two are back with a redux of the porn filtering legislation but with amazing new special features. For starters, the current form of the bill — Senate Bill (SB) 104 — would essentially accelerate the implementation of a filtering law adopted in 2021 proposed by Rep. Pulsipher (and covered by Techdirt at the time), though Sen. Weiler has been pushing this bill going back nearly a decade.
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Vox ☛ Why conservatives are melting down over Taylor Swift
These theories are a recent manifestation of an emerging conservative backlash and obsession with Swift fueled in part by political views she’s expressed, but more broadly by fear and misogyny in the right-wing manosphere. They mark the latest example of conservatives going after a female star they perceive as a threat, and they underscore how frustrated Republicans are that Swift — and many of the young women who make up her fan base — aren’t on their side.
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The Nation ☛ Taylor Swift, Enemy of the People
This MAGA variant of Swift-boating has also overtaken the inner sanctums of the Trump campaign, per a Rolling Stone dispatch. Reporters Adam Rawnsler and Asainw Suebsaeng write that the 45th president is obsessed with the petty and demonstrably false notion that he’s more popular than the megastar recording artist, and that the 2024 Trump risorgimento effort will serve as a “holy war” against all things Swift. Sensing a new lurch in the right-wing zeitgeist, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity has backtracked his earlier defenses of Swift from MAGA inquisitors and issued a mob-like directive for her to “think twice” ahead of any plans to endorse Biden for president this year.
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Rolling Stone ☛ OnlyFans Owner Pledged $11 Million to Israel Lobby: Report
According to confidential internal documents reviewed by The Lever, AIPAC reported a massive $90 million fundraising haul in the month following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack against Israel. One contribution stood out: an $11 million pledge from a “Mr. Anonymous Anonymous” and Katie Chudnovsky, the largest listed contribution in the documents.
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International Business Times ☛ Elon Musk Left Furious After US Court Cancels Billion Dollar Tesla Pay-Out
The pay deal, which was struck six years ago, marks the largest ever pay-out in US corporate history and supports Musk as the richest man in the world.
After cancelling the compensation contract, Judge McCormick said that the process leading to the financial package being approved was "deeply flawed" and the amount of money was not fair to shareholders.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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EDRI ☛ Workshop: “Dis/Mis-information and Young People”
Secondary school students are now likely to spend much more time online than previous generations, specifically on social media platforms that are also a major source of dis- and misinformation. As a result, young people are at high risk of being exposed to false information or of (unknowingly) sharing and further spreading it.
The increase in social media use has exposed the need to build young people’s skills to deal with online challenges. Yet the Institute for Strategic Dialogue has found that while three-quarters of 12 to 15-year-olds say they are aware of fake news, only 2% have the critical literacy skills to determine whether an online news story is real or fake. Two-thirds of teachers believe this is causing considerable levels of anxiety in young people. Educators reported feeling that their schools and youth centres did not deliver adequate lessons on digital citizenship, or they didn’t know if it was taught at all. Only 13% of teachers said they knew a lot about digital citizenship, compared to 39% who said they knew a little or nothing at all about the subject.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Omicron Limited ☛ Study highlights key social forces shaping worldwide academic freedom trends
Making use of a newly available cross-national and longitudinal dataset, University of California, Irvine sociologists explore the social foundations of academic freedom. They find systematic evidence in support of several longstanding views—the liberty to teach and learn is protected by democracy and threatened by state religiosity, armed conflict, and militarism. They also show the positive and negative effects of liberal and illiberal global institutions.
Published online in the American Sociological Review, their findings underscore the impact of multiple coexisting forces shaping global trends in academic freedom.
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Sage Journal ☛ The Social Foundations of Academic Freedom: Heterogeneous Institutions in World Society, 1960 to 2022
This article analyzes academic freedom worldwide with newly available cross-national data. The literature principally addresses impingements on academic freedom arising from religion or repressive states. Academic freedom has broadly increased since 1945, but we see episodic reversals, including in recent years. Conventional work emphasizes the uniformity of international institutional structures and their influence on countries. We attend to the heterogeneity of international structures in world society and theorize how they contribute to ebbs and flows of academic freedom. Post-1945 liberal international institutions enshrined key rights and norms that bolstered academic freedom worldwide. Alongside them, however, illiberal alternatives coexisted. Cold War communism, for instance, anchored cultural frames that justified greater constraints on academia. We evaluate domestic and global arguments using regression models with country fixed effects for 155 countries from 1960 to 2022. Findings support conventional views: academic freedom is associated positively with democracy and negatively with state religiosity and militarism. We also find support for our argument regarding heterogeneous institutional structures in world society. Country linkages to liberal international institutions are positively associated with academic freedom. Illiberal international structures and organizations have the opposite effect. Heterogeneous institutions in world society, we contend, shape large-scale trajectories of academic freedom.
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RFERL ☛ 'We'll Kill You': Karakalpak Students Face Threats, Arrest In Uzbekistan For Voicing Support For Anti-Government Protests
The student is among dozens who have been arrested, fined, or expelled from universities since the mass anti-government protests erupted in Karakalpakstan's capital, Nukus, in July 2022, according to activists.
Three students told RFE/RL that they had received written warnings from the police. They said the authorities also threatened retaliation against their families if they did not cooperate.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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EDRI ☛ European Festival of Journalism and Media Literacy
We live in a world where information is in abundance, but accurate news is not always easy to find… Voices emerges to bring citizens, journalists, and media professionals closer to each other, wanting to celebrate the pivotal roles journalism and the informed public play in societies while fostering critical thinking around disinformation.
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BIA Net ☛ Kurdish service of Radio Sweden to close
Since the 1990s, several radio channels in Sweden emerged, focusing on broadcasts for immigrants and refugees. In 2001, a change occurred where some broadcasts were terminated, and new languages were added. Kurdish was among those languages. In addition to news bulletins, there was also a section dedicated to culture and arts. The broadcasts were carried out on FM as well. The broadcasts in Kurdish and other languages were independent. The Kurdish Radio was named "Zayele." In 2015, a change took place, and these broadcasts became affiliated with the News Center of Swedish Radio. FM broadcasting was discontinued, and the content shifted solely to [Internet] radio. This format has persisted since then.
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IranWire ☛ Iranian Journalists Assaulted During Sit-In Protest in Toronto
His objective is to protest the Islamic Republic authorities’ bloody clampdown on dissent and the January 23 execution of a young protester, Mohammad Ghobadlou.
"I asked [my friends] to create a placard using pictures of individuals who lost their lives in the protests, as I felt a deep need to protest but also a sense of despair, feeling that I had no suitable platform," he says.
On the second day of his sit-in, he encountered conflict with two Iranian-Canadian citizens who were displeased by the presence of reporters.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong press group again refutes ‘untruthful remarks’ made by security chief at event for new security law
The secretary for security on Wednesday said authorities sought to consult with “representative and legitimate” press groups over the enactment of legislation under Article 23 of the city’s mini-constitution. The Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) – a registered company and the city’s largest press group – was not among them.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The Conversation ☛ We are living in a ‘digital dark age’ – here’s how to protect your photos, videos and other data
If you have grown up with social media, chances are you have taken more photos in the last couple of decades than you will ever remember. When mobile phones suddenly became cameras too, social media turned into a community photo album, with memories kept online forever and ever. Or so we thought.
In 2019, MySpace lost 12 years’ worth of music and photos, affecting over 14 million artists and 50 million tracks. If Instagram or the entire internet suddenly disappeared, would you be able to access your precious memories?
We are living in a “digital dark age”, a term popularised by information and communication specialist Terry Kuny. Back in 1997, Kuny warned we were “moving into an era where much of what we know today, much of what is coded and written electronically, will be lost forever”.
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Sarajevo Times ☛ The Taliban denied Medical Services to Afghan Women without a Male Guardian
The Taliban restrict Afghan women’s access to work, travel and health care if they are single or do not have a male guardian, according to a new UN report released Monday.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said in its latest report, covering October-December, that the Taliban said women could not move or travel a certain distance without a man related to her by blood or marriage.
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UN ☛ Restrictions on Afghan women continue unabated
Among those whose working lives have been upended, de facto authorities “banned” approximately 400 women workers at a pine nut processing from the workplace and dismissed another 200 at a power plant, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said in an update on the human rights situation.
The Mission also noted that women were arrested for purchasing contraceptives and that unmarried female staff at a healthcare facility were “advised” to get married by officials from the so-called Department for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or risk losing their jobs.
The officials reportedly stated that “it was inappropriate for an unmarried woman to work.”
Many women were also not allowed to board buses or go to work because they were unmarried or because they did not have a mahram – a male chaperone – to accompany them in public.
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Vice Media Group ☛ Democratic Congress Members Call on Biden To Fight Criminalization of Homelessness
Amid rising national homelessness, four Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to President Joe Biden on Thursday expressing their “deep concerns” about the national trend toward criminalizing unhoused people and calling on the administration to address the issue.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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APNIC ☛ Internet history: Next steps
Thanks to everyone who responded to my earlier post about the need to preserve and curate the history of Internet measurement for future historians.
Based on the interesting conversations so far, I thought I would go a step further and collect some thoughts on how this might actually be made actionable, in the form of something that could evolve into an Internet History Initiative (IHI). You can now: [...]
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Jim Nielsen ☛ Treating the Symptoms
The incentives for publishing anything on the web continue to receded more and more — as Baldur points out in his piece about the web’s broken social contract:
"Our incentive recedes in lockstep with the increasing dominance of generative AI content. As it recedes, fewer and fewer people and organisations will contribute to the digital commons. More and more stuff will be locked behind a paywall."
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[Old] Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Writing when tech has broken the web’s social contract
I continue to work through my worries about where we are. I’m still thinking about where I stand in an industry that no longer seems to care about what it makes. It’s become obvious that the software industry doesn’t care about software.
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[Old] Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Software Crisis 2.0
Back in the early days of computing, we were, as always, extremely bad at making software. Except it was fine as most computers were practically custom-made to their purpose and only had the power to be able to tackle relatively simple problems. Simple problems meant simple software. This didn’t last long, Moore’s law being a more concrete reality back then, computers steadily became more powerful which led them to being applied to more complex problems.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Simone Silvestroni ☛ The permanent commodification of arts
When Napster and other peer-to-peer systems threatened the then status quo of the music industry, something changed. The largest music corporations managed to support (and join) tech companies who had this idea of renting out music, calling the process streaming. They somehow convinced the masses to avoid piracy, pay the corporations a monthly fee despite NOT owning the music, and even consider this transaction a form of convenient bargain, a win/win. The frontier between marketing and gaslighting have gone wafer thin.
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Quartz ☛ Disney+ and Hulu are about to join Netflix in cracking down on password sharing
But Hulu isn’t stopping there. Unlike Netflix, which makes use of customers’ IP addresses to determine whether an account is accessing the account outside the regular home, Hulu says it will analyze users’ watching habits and might even ban accounts if the company finds the customer shares their password with a friend. Hulu updated its subscriber agreement on Jan. 25, though previous versions of Hulu’s terms of service didn’t mention account sharing or even the word “households” at all.
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NYPost ☛ Hulu users outraged over password-sharing crackdown: ‘Piracy is about to explode in popularity again’
Hulu posted a revision of its terms of service Wednesday, informing users that it was banning password sharing outside of “your primary personal residence.”
Subscribers have until March 14 to comply with the new edict, according to the revised subscription terms.
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The Verge ☛ Meta says Apple has made it ‘very difficult’ to build rival app stores in the EU
While Apple maintains that [software installation] represents a security threat, the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) has forced the company to open up the iPhone in the region. The devil is in the details, however, and Apple is introducing new fees that would cripple the business model of free apps like Meta’s if they are distributed outside of the App Store.
Zuckerberg’s comments echo complaints from other noted App Store critics, including Spotify, Epic Games, and Microsoft. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has called Apple’s approach to [software installation] “hot garbage.” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said it’s “a new low.” David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and CTO of 37signals, called the setup an “extortion regime.”
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Trademarks
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Right of Publicity
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The Conversation ☛ Taylor Swift deepfakes: a legal case from the singer could help other victims of AI pornography
Obscene images of Swift began circulating on X (formerly Twitter) on January 25. The images, which fans describe as “disgusting”, reportedly originated in a Telegram group dedicated to generating artificial pornographic content of women. They were live for around 17 hours and viewed more than 45 million times before being taken down. X temporarily blocked searches of Swift’s name in an attempt to stop other users from sharing the images.
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Copyrights
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Protecting Commercial AI Rights is Harder than You Think — EU Edition
Generative AI changed this dynamic. After all, text and data mining is the technological approach by which generative AI systems are trained. As noted in the current draft of the EU’s AI Act, “[t]ext and data mining techniques may be used extensively in this [training] context for the retrieval and analysis of such content, which may be protected by copyright and related rights.” The current draft of the AI Act explicitly requires compliance with the DSM to access the EU market, regardless of the country in which the copyright-relevant acts of training occur.
There are, however, many open questions about the DSM, and especially the rights reservation language in Article 4 for commercial TDM which are likely to confound rights holders and AI companies alike.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Court Slams Brakes on DMCA Subpoena Use to Expose Alleged Movie Pirates
A district court judge in Hawaii has slammed the brakes on an attempt to unmask dozens of alleged BitTorrent pirates using a DMCA subpoena. Movie companies Voltage Holdings, Millennium Funding, and Capstone Studios, served the subpoena on Cox Communications, which in turn gave those accused an opportunity to object to the disclosure of their identities. When one subscriber did just that, the court took a closer look at the DMCA subpoena disclosure 'shortcut.'
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Torrent Freak ☛ Jake Paul PPV Boxing Piracy Amnesty Misled The Public, Lawsuit Claims
In the wake of the Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren fight in 2021, Triller filed a $100m lawsuit against entities that allegedly offered the event for free. In a subsequent media release, Triller said that to avoid being sued for $150K each, up to two million PPV pirates should step forward and voluntarily pay $49.99. As part of a long-running lawsuit against the H3 Podcast, Triller now faces allegations that its amnesty program aimed to deceive the public and smear the H3 Podcast.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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