Links 07/02/2024: Taylor Swift’s Lawyers Take on 'Stalkers', GOP Pundits to Meet Putin
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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Robert Pfotenhauer ☛ I'm currently building a webring
My little blog is celebrating its six-month anniversary these days and I am very pleased that I am posting quite frequently by my standards, which was not the case with my first blog in 2004. I can't say why, a lot of water has flowed down the Tiber since then. (And by water I also mean beer and by Tiber I also mean my throat).
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Marty Day ☛ Miss the old internet? These video games do too.
First, I have to adjust my brain for having lived through an age that people have nostalgic fondness for.
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Kev Quirk ☛ Ending my Kagi Search Subscription
I figured 300 searches would be fine, since the 100 search free trial lasted me a couple weeks. Turns out that 300 searches a month isn't enough for me, as my quota just ran out, 12 days shy of my monthly renewal.
It's interesting that a search who prides itself on being privacy respecting only offers Google and Bing as alternative searches...
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Marcel Kolaja ☛ How Do You Spend Your Time?
I set myself a time budget. Five or six themes, and an explicit goal for how I should divide my time between these themes. Then, over the long-term (weeks and months), I hold myself accountable to approximately spending my time in the way that I planned. I also, twice a year or so, calibrate with my manager that they agree with this time budget, and adjust accordingly.
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Victor Kropp ☛ My private garden
This website is very own private garden on the world wide web. Here I express myself, here I can experiment and do whatever I want. I enjoy improving it when I have some free time, it’s like watering plants or removing weeds from the lawn.
Here are some enhancements I implemented in the last few months.
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Science
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Science News ☛ A rare 3-D tree fossil may be the earliest glimpse at a forest understory
With its fluffed, spiraling top and thin trunk, the Sanfordiacaulis densifolia tree looks like it came straight out of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. But this isn’t a truffula come to life. It’s a 3-D rendering of a 350 million-year-old fossil that shows something very few other fossils in the world ever have — both a trunk and the leaves of a tree species from a somewhat fuzzy time period in plant history, researchers report February 2 in Current Biology.
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Education
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Reason ☛ The Real Student Loan Crisis Isn't From Undergraduate Degrees
The real story is more complicated. It's true that yearly increases in college tuition have long outstripped inflation, rising more than 200 percent since 1980. But the conversation around student loan debt has become seriously miscalibrated: Not only do small, expensive, elite universities command the conversation about tuition costs, but there's a misplaced focus on undergraduate degree programs.
Even after decades of tuition hikes, it is still a good time to be a motivated first-time undergraduate student. The average public university tuition bill is less than $10,000 per year, and the most selective universities tend to offer extremely generous financial aid. Despite tuition increases, most undergraduates don't pay full price. In 2020, around half of students at four-year public colleges received federal grants and about half received institutional grants. At private nonprofit colleges, 84 percent received institutional grants; only about 40 percent received federal student loans. The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, a membership association of public research universities, estimates that at four-year public colleges, 78 percent of undergraduate students graduate with less than $30,000 in debt and 42 percent graduate with no debt at all.
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Quillette ☛ Concordia University 'Decolonises' Engineering
Goodleaf is quite clear about the intent of the new curriculum. It “creates a path where everyone is equal and no worldview is superior.” But as nice as this claim sounds, it simply isn’t true. Not everyone is equal. Some people are more talented musicians than others. Some are more gifted athletes. Some have better mathematical skills. Some are taller. Of course, it is important to treat everyone with equal respect, in spite of the obvious physiological and intellectual inequities that exist between individual human beings. This is a wonderful tenet that stems from the Enlightenment. (I don’t know enough about their cosmogeny to be certain, but I bet that the peoples of the Six Nations Confederacy also recognized that individuals differ in their skills and abilities and therefore probably did not consider everyone to be equal—especially people outside the Confederacy.) Indeed, the very notion Goodleaf espouses—that people should be considered equals, and their differing worldviews should all be granted equal consideration—is uniquely Western. In fact, it could be seen as one of the Western cultural norms that she is supposedly critiquing.
And some worldviews are superior to others: especially those that conform to reality, rather than myth. Some people still believe that the Earth is flat, but that view is not consistent with building and launching of satellites that help us predict the weather, guide our travel, and save many lives. A worldview that helps create knowledge, including a better understanding of the realities of being human and of the laws that govern the cosmos, will help produce structures and technologies that improve our lives. A worldview based on myth and superstition, governed by ideological strictures that discourage or punish open questioning will diminish the quality of human existence. Human history has demonstrated this time and again.
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Hardware
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The Register UK ☛ EU repair rights bill tells manufacturers to fix up or ship out
Negotiations over the bill have been ongoing for a while now - the rules were first proposed in March 2022, and the hope is that new requirements will be finalized in 2024.
The thinking is that consumers should be better informed about the lifespan and repairability of products before buying them, and there should be measures to boost repair after the legal guarantee period has expired.
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European Parliament ☛ Deal on strengthening consumers’ right to repair
On Thursday, Parliament and Council reached a political agreement on a stronger “right to repair” for consumers. The agreed rules clarify the obligations for manufacturers and encourage consumers to extend a product’s lifecycle through repair.
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European Council ☛ Circular economy: Council and Parliament strike provisional deal on the right to repair directive
The provisional agreement applies to all products with repair requirements on EU law, sets an obligation to repair on manufacturers of goods with repair requirements, establishes a European information form providing consumers with key data on the repair service, and unifies the national repair information platforms into a European online platform.
With the agreement reached today, Europe makes a clear choice for repair instead of disposal. By Facilitating the repair of defective goods, we not only give a new life to our products, but also create good quality jobs, reduce our waste, limit our dependency on foreign raw materials and protect our environment.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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El País ☛ Elon, the monkeys and you: the atrocity of giving up control of our thoughts
I’ve been ruminating on the first since Elon Musk decided to create a company to develop brain chips. I already had a shock when he killed a dozen monkeys that had been implanted with these devices. After that, he asked for human volunteers… and he got them.
Through his Twitter account (I refuse to call it “X”), Musk announced that his company had transplanted one of its devices into a human, without giving more technical details other than noting that the subject had survived. We don’t know for sure if the transplant recipient has any disease related to motor skills, but what Musk has promised everyone is that we’ll be able to go on our mobile phones using nothing but our minds.
Anyone who has observed how he’s been managing his social media site should have no doubt about what will happen to their identity, ideas and secrets if they decide to put them in the hands of a depraved oligarch.
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The Nation ☛ In the US, Mental Health Treatment Can Be a Death Sentence
Perhaps one reason to study such issues is to ensure that someone is paying attention when lawmakers of virtually every political stripe seek to answer a mental health crisis by forcing people into institutionalized treatment. Notably, such “treatment” can increase the odds of accidental death. Allow us to explain.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Tom's Hardware ☛ $10,000 for a $3,500 Fashion Company Apple Vision Pro? Scalpers mark up Apple's headset, despite the fact that it's still in stock [Ed: So "demand" for it is being faked already by scalping]
Scalpers have taken to eBay and Facebook (Farcebook) Marketplace with Fashion Company Apple Vision Pro, some asking for sky-high premiums. Most may lose money, and it's not the best way to buy.
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[Repeat] Ali Reza Hayati ☛ Apple (and other) VR headsets are proprietary tyrants
Tivoized products are injustices to users. Specifically regarding to giant companies such as Apple, they can be very harmful to people. These headsets will track users and violate their privacy. As they use proprietary operating systems, they violate people’s right to operate freely. Software used in them is not libre and people won’t have any control over how they use their computers or how they do their computing.
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The Register UK ☛ Oracle partner gets multimillion top-up after Edinburgh Uni disaster
It appears as though the new system, Oracle ERP Cloud and Oracle HCM Cloud, is taking a bit of time to bed in. In May last year, the university's academic representative body issued a statement of no confidence in the institution over its disastrous enterprise software migration, which left research students and suppliers unpaid.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Meta will label AI-generated images across Facebook, Instagram and Threads
The development effort is set to focus on two open-source technologies called C2PA and IPTC. They make it possible to equip an image with metadata, or contextual information, that describes when it was created and related details. That contextual information can also be used to flag if the image was generated by an AI tool.
According to Meta, its engineers are building classifiers that can detect if an image’s C2PA or IPTC metadata indicates it was created with AI. The company says the classifiers will enable it to spot files generated by a variety of popular image generators. The goal is to “label images from Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney and Shutterstock as they implement their plans for adding metadata to images created by their tools,” Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg detailed in a blog post.
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The Verge ☛ OpenAI is adding new watermarks to DALL-E 3
OpenAI’s image generator DALL-E 3 will add watermarks to image metadata as more companies roll out support for standards from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).
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404 Media ☛ Inside the Underground Site Where ‘Neural Networks’ Churn Out Fake IDs
Rather than painstakingly crafting a fake ID by hand—a highly skilled criminal profession that can take years to master—or waiting for a purchased one to arrive in the mail with the risk of interception, OnlyFake lets essentially anyone generate fake IDs in minutes that may seem real enough to bypass various online verification systems. Or at least fool some people.
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The Hill ☛ Facebook, Instagram ramping up labels on AI-generated images ahead of election
For AI-generated or altered images, video or audio that “creates a particularly high risk of materially deceiving the public on a matter of importance,” Meta may add a “more prominent label if appropriate” to provide users with additional information and context, he said.
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404 Media ☛ AI-Generated Grandma Porn Is Flooding the Internet
All the videos follow the same format: they have an AI-generated thumbnail of a naked woman or a woman showing cleavage, a title that describes the content, and the video itself consists of an AI voice reading some kind of erotic scene. All the videos feature the exact same female, breathy, monotone voice, which an analysis by the deepfake detection firm Reality Defender found it was “99% likely manipulated” by AI. The videos are very subtly and eerily animated, with the woman in the thumbnail and the background slightly and eerily shifting across the frame.
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Zimbabwe ☛ These guys used AI to impersonate company executives (deepfake) and stole US$25.6 million
Scammers used digitally recreated versions of the company’s CFO and other employees in a convincing video conference, instructing an employee to transfer funds.
My friend, these guys had a video meeting with an employee of the unnamed company where the only real person was that employee. There were multiple deepfakes of other company employees that fooled this particular employee into thinking they were real.
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Futurism ☛ Hackers Steal $25 Million by Deepfaking Finance Boss
As the South China Morning Post reports, scammers are believed to have used publicly available footage to create deepfake representations of the staff. Some of the fake video calls apparently only had a single human on the line, with the rest being deepfakes created by the hackers.
"This time, in a multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone you see is fake," senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the SCMP.
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SCMP ☛ ‘Everyone looked real’: multinational firm’s Hong Kong office loses HK$200 million after scammers stage deepfake video meeting
A multinational company lost HK$200 million (US$25.6 million) in a scam after employees at its Hong Kong branch were fooled by deepfake technology, with one incident involving a digitally recreated version of its chief financial officer ordering money transfers in a video conference call, police said.
Everyone present on the video calls except the victim was a fake representation of real people. The scammers applied deepfake technology to turn publicly available video and other footage into convincing versions of the meeting’s participants.
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The Verge ☛ / A year after debuting in private beta, the decentralized Twitter competitor is dropping its invite system and preparing to release its underlying protocol.
The app quickly amassed over two million users while in closed beta and became a hot topic of conversation in newsrooms like The Verge’s. Now, the conversation about what comes after the platform-now-called-X has largely shifted to ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol powering Mastodon, a budding ecosystem of other services, and eventually, Meta’s Threads.
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Techdirt ☛ Bluesky Opens Up
Bluesky is now open to anyone without an invite. And a bunch of other exciting things are coming soon.
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[Old] Cloudbooklet ☛ Bluesky No-Login Mode: View Profiles and Posts Without Login
Bluesky No-Login Mode is a feature that allows you to view profiles and posts on Bluesky without logging in.
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OMG Ubuntu ☛ Open-Source Social Network Bluesky is Now Open to Everyone [Ed: omgubuntu is openwashing proprietary software and uses a hyphen/dash in "open-source"]
Bluesky, the much-hyped open-source alternative to X/Twitter, is now open for all — invites code no longer needed! Launched in the spring of last year, Bluesky is a decentralised social network modelled after early Twitter. You sign up, post, follow people, repost, and generally enjoy seeing content from people you choose in a reverse-chronological feed. And for fans of algorithms, Bluesky has an open marketplace where developers can share custom feeds that users can add, access, and even make their default experience.
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India Times ☛ Meta to start labelling AI-generated deepfake images, hopes move will pressure industry to follow suit
Global social media conglomerate Meta will soon start labelling deep fake or artificial intelligence (AI) generated images posted on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as ‘Imagined with AI’ to differentiate with from other human-generated content shared on these platforms, the company’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg told ET.
The move is likely to put pressure on Meta’s peers in the social media and internet space to come up with respective tools to fight deep fakes on their respective platforms. By labelling images or content generated with the help of AI tools, especially those offered by Meta, the company hopes to give users more information about the content they are interacting with and subsequently sharing, Clegg said at a select media roundtable.
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Modus Create LLC ☛ Evaluating Retrieval in RAGs: A Gentle Introduction
Updating the knowledge of an LLM can take two forms: fine-tuning, which we will address in a future post, and the ever-present RAG. RAG, short for Retrieval Augmented Generation, has garnered a lot of attention in the GenAI community and for good reasons. You “simply” hook the LLM up to your documents (more on that later), and it can suddenly tackle any question, as long as the answer is somewhere in the documents.
[...]
In this article, the first of a series on evaluation in LLMs, we will unpack how retrieval impacts the performance of RAG systems, why we need systematic evaluation and what the different schools and frameworks of evaluation are. If you’ve been wondering about evaluating your own RAG system and needed an introduction, look no further.
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404 Media ☛ ‘Neural Network’ Fake ID Site Goes Dark After 404 Media Investigation
OnlyFake, an underground website that lets essentially anyone generate highly convincing photos of fake IDs in minutes, has gone offline. The move comes after 404 Media used the service to create two, highly convincing photos of IDs, and used one of them to successfully step through the identity verification check of a cryptocurrency exchange.
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Vice Media Group ☛ 3 Students Reveal Secrets of 2000-Year-Old Scroll In Breakthrough Discovery
Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger created a series of machine learning algorithms to digitally unfurl and read 15 panels of a Herculaneum papyrus, revealing ancient reflections on life, food, and music. The papyrus is a part of an ancient library of scrolls in Naples, Italy that was buried when the neighboring volcano Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. The eruption carbonized the works and made them impossible to open.
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Silicon Angle ☛ AI helps scholars decipher ancient scroll buried by Vesuvius eruption
The scroll is part of the Herculaneum Papyri, which includes about 1,800 scrolls that were discovered in the 18th century in Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, Southern Italy. Most of them were badly charred after being buried by the eruption that famously destroyed the city of Pompeii.
The carbonized documents, described as looking like leftover logs in a campfire, are extremely difficult to decipher given that even the slightest touch could turn them to ash. Although some of them have been carefully unfurled, with new technology, it has been possible to unspool them virtually.
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Unmitigated Risk ☛ Challenges in Digital Content Authentication and the Persistent Battle Against Fakes
Efforts have been made for years to detect modified content by enabling content-creation devices, such as cameras, to digitally sign or watermark the content they produce. Significant efforts in this area include the Content Authenticity Initiative and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. However, these initiatives face numerous issues, including privacy concerns and fundamental flaws in their operation, as discussed here.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Scoop News Group ☛ State Department will not issue visas to individuals linked to spyware abuse
The State Department will on a case-by-case basis deny visas for individuals seeking to travel to the United States and who have been implicated in the misuse of commercial spyware, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Monday.
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Quartz ☛ Palantir's stock surged as AI demand drives revenue
Karp said that the company’s latest generative AI-driven platform, simply called “AIP” for “artificial intelligence platform,” is bringing new revenue and customers. Data integration used to take weeks and months, but the latest platform can be up and running in as little as a few hours, he boasts.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Palantir shares surge on revenue beat, revised outlook driven by AI growth
In a letter to shareholders, Palantir Chief Executive Officer Alex Karp said that the company’s expansion and growth had “never been greater” and that “after nearly two decades of investment, we have positioned ourselves as a fundamentally new software business and our results reflect this ongoing transformation.”
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[Old] El País ☛ Neurotechnology can already read minds: so how do we protect our thoughts?
On account of these and other developments, a group of 25 scientific experts – clinical engineers, psychologists, lawyers, philosophers and representatives of different brain projects from all over the world – met in 2017 at Columbia University, New York, and proposed ethical rules for the use of these neurotechnologies. We believe we are facing a problem that affects human rights, since the brain generates the mind, which defines us as a species. At the end of the day, it is about our essence – our thoughts, perceptions, memories, imagination, emotions and decisions.
To protect citizens from the misuse of these technologies, we have proposed a new set of human rights, called “neurorights.” The most urgent of these to establish is the right to the privacy of our thoughts, since the technologies for reading mental activity are more developed than the technologies for manipulating it.
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India Times ☛ Google names and shames spyware companies that are ‘dangerous’ for free speech, elections
Google has named a bunch of spyware – a type of surveillance software – and called on countries to do more to curb the sale and misuse of commercial spy tools that have been used to target high-risk users like journalists, human rights defenders, dissidents and opposition party politicians in the past.
The company’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) released a report that details how 40 Commercial Surveillance Vendors (CSVs) of varying levels of sophistication and public exposure are developed, sold and deployed spyware.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Google calls out spyware firms
In a report on Tuesday, Google researchers said that while NSO is better known, there are dozens of smaller firms helping the proliferation of spy technology for malicious uses.
The findings by Google are significant because the company has some of the best visibility into hacking campaigns globally, given the vast breadth of its online offerings.
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Security Week ☛ Millions of User Records Stolen From 65 Websites via SQL Injection Attacks
Between November and December 2023, a threat actor successfully stole more than two million email addresses and other personal information from at least 65 websites, threat intelligence firm Group-IB reports.
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Defence/Aggression
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The Register UK ☛ AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war
In a paper titled "Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making" presented at NeurIPS 2023 – an annual conference on neural information processing systems – authors Juan-Pablo Rivera, Gabriel Mukobi, Anka Reuel, Max Lamparth, Chandler Smith, and Jacquelyn Schneider describe how growing government interest in using AI agents for military and foreign-policy decisions inspired them to see how current AI models handle the challenge.
The boffins took five off-the-shelf LLMs – GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Claude 2, Llama-2 (70B) Chat, and GPT-4-Base – and used each to set up eight autonomous nation agents that interacted with one another in a turn-based conflict game. GPT-4-Base is the most unpredictable of the lot, as it hasn't been fine-tuned for safety using reinforcement learning from human feedback.
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Lusaka ZM ☛ Is China delaying Zambia Debt Restructuring Deal? An Independent Analysis
However, there are two latest stumbling blocks that the public should know about as being responsible the Debt restructuring stalemate, which need to be resolved. The first is the delay in signing the Memorandum of Understanding (Mou) agreed in October,2023 by all Official Creditors. The Zambia government has stated that 98% of them have signed. The second issue is the impasse regarding the rejection by Official Creditors of the proposal by Private Creditors. There is a need to analyse these issues critically in order to establish who is possibly responsible for the delay, and how Zambia should strategise to resolve the issue.
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Fears of Red Sea attack on internet cables
Apart from being one of the world’s busiest shipping corridors, the Red Sea is also host to some of the world’s biggest intercontinental subsea cables, including several that run along Africa’s east coast.
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The Guardian UK ☛ Houthis may sabotage western internet cables in Red Sea, Yemen telecoms firms warn
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Atlantic Council ☛ No more business as usual: The US needs a broader engagement strategy in West Africa
The Pentagon is reportedly in preliminary talks with the governments of Benin, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire about opening a drone base in one of those countries, presumably to compensate for the likely closure of the US drone base in Niger, following a coup there in July 2023. Even though there are contradictory reports about the talks, their possibility underscores an unsettling reality: US influence in the Sahel has waned, and Washington needs to rethink its engagement there and in West Africa as a whole.
If left to its own devices, US policy probably would default to a business-as-usual approach in West Africa. Unfortunately, that approach has not worked and is even less likely to work now that the French have been ousted from the region. US rhetoric about governments transitioning to civilian rule often falls on deaf ears, and many people in the region are convinced that Russia is a better partner than the United States was and is likely to be in the future. Worse, it is not clear that they are wrong.
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Gizmodo ☛ TikTok's Newest Trend: Cross The Southern Border With Me
TikTok is allegedly being used by Chinese migrants to cross the United States’ southern border, first reported by 60 Minutes on Sunday. In interviews at the border of the U.S. and Mexico, Chinese migrants said they were able to discover weak points in America’s border wall through TikTok.
Videos on TikTok written in Mandarin provided step-by-step instructions for crossing the border and even hiring a smuggler, according to the report. Chinese migrants are the fastest-growing group crossing illegally into the United States from Mexico.
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Vox ☛ Welcome to the “neomedieval era”
The result is that the US now finds itself operating in two strategic eras at the same time. In one, heavily armed industrial militaries fight a catastrophic war over a chunk of Europe (with a potentially even more catastrophic invasion scenario lurking in Asia). And in another, a Yemeni rebel group using rudimentary drone and missile technology shows itself capable of causing a disruption to global supply chains on par with Covid-19.
To comprehend this chaotic era — one in which nation-states boast historically destructive firepower but in many ways appear weaker than ever, unable to mobilize their populations around a common call or control their international environment — we need to go beyond the well-worn 20th-century analogies. We need to get medieval.
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The Hindu ☛ India to fence entire border with Myanmar
The 1,643-km-long India-Myanmar border, which passes through Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, currently has FMR. It was implemented in 2018 as part of India's Act East policy.
Fencing along the border has been a persistent demand of the Imphal Valley-based Meitei groups which have been alleging that tribal militants often enter into India through the porous border.
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ANF News ☛ 85 ISIS members arrested in Hol Camp
According to the statement, YPJ rescued a Yazidi woman named Kovan Ido Xorto, who had been kidnapped by ISIS gangs 10 years ago.
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ADF ☛ Dismantling al-Shabaab Finances a Tough Task For Somalia
More than a dozen bombings in and around Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, in November and December 2023 revealed a clear pattern — telecommunications company Hormuud Telecom was being targeted. Bombs killed at least three employees and destroyed offices, communications towers and vehicles.
Analysts believe al-Shabaab has targeted the country’s largest telecommunications provider for refusing to pay “taxes” to the terrorist group.
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The Strategist ☛ China’s recognition of the Taliban sets a dangerous precedent
Prior to the Taliban’s resurgence, China maintained a cooperative relationship with the Afghan government, which included security collaboration against Uyghur militants. Following the Taliban’s takeover, China initiated engagement with the new regime, aiming to prevent terrorism from affecting its regional interests and to secure its investments, including those related to the Belt and Road Initiative.
The ethical dimensions of China’s interactions with the Taliban are seemingly complex, even on the surface. On one hand, China’s engagement is driven by security concerns and economic interests, particularly in mining and infrastructure. On the other hand, the Taliban’s lack of international recognition and domestic legitimacy raises questions about the long-term viability of these agreements.
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The Dissenter ☛ 'Terrorism Enhancement' Applied Against Ex-CIA Programmer For Leaking Represents A Stark Development
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FAIR ☛ ACTION ALERT: Friedman’s Vermin Analogies Echo Ugly Pro-Genocide Propaganda
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a piece in the Point (2/2/24), an online Times feature the paper describes as “conversations and insights about the moment,” that compared the targets of US bombs to vermin. It’s the sort of metaphor that propagandists have historically used to justify genocide.
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Common Dreams ☛ Let Us Pray: God's Gullible, Ugly, Sad Army Limps to the Border
As GOP House leaders trash as "a stinking pile of crap" a border deal that (unconscionably) gives them most of what they've demanded to "solve" a crisis they in fact have no interest in solving, several dozen witless MAGA nativists - a tad shy of their avowed 700,000 - joined a bedraggled "Take Our Border Back" convoy to the southern border to wave flags, preach hate, hawk merch, get baptized, hear Sarah Palin babble, and decry a migrant "invasion" that, once there, failed to materialize. SAD!
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teleSUR ☛ UN Security Council Convenes to Address Middle East Tensions
The U.S. actions in the region were just the latest in a litany of unlawful and irresponsible attacks, Russian diplomat Nebenzia pointed out.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ Russian court arrests exiled writer Boris Akunin in absentia — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Mobilized Russian soldier given six years in prison for desertion, 400 servicemen present at sentencing — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russia’s Health Ministry approves two popular emergency contraceptives for over-the-counter sale — Meduza
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Latvia ☛ Latvia-Belarus border point Silene to remain closed
Taking into account the need to prevent possible threats to Latvia's internal security, on Tuesday, February 6, the government decided not to reinstate the operation of the Silene border post on the Latvian-Belarusian border.
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LRT ☛ Lithuania looks to close 2 more checkpoints on Belarus border quoting national security
Lithuania’s National Security Commission has proposed closing down two more checkpoints on the Belarusian border and taking steps to reduce travel between the two neighbouring countries.
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Meduza ☛ Russia arrests former Zelensky adviser Oleksiy Arestovych in absentia — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russian anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin asks authorities for three more days to review claims of paperwork errors, Russia’s election commission gives him one more day — Meduza
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France24 ☛ France sells Riviera chateau seized from late Putin foe
A French Riviera chateau seized from late Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky has been sold to an undisclosed buyer, according to France's agency for handling confiscated assets.
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Atlantic Council ☛ Ukraine opens new front with drone strikes on Russia’s energy sector
Ukraine is seeking to bring the war home to Russia in 2024 with a new long-range drone strike campaign against Putin's oil and gas industry, writes Mykola Bielieskov.
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Atlantic Council ☛ Russia’s Bashkortostan protests: Separatism isn’t the real threat facing Putin
The main risk to the Putin regime is unity and solidarity across regions between Russians protesting shared forms of mistreatment at the hands of the state, write Dylan Myles-Primakoff and Lillian Posner.
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Meduza ☛ Putin reportedly to address Russia’s Federal Assembly in late February or early March — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announces interview with Putin in Moscow — Meduza
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New York Times ☛ Tucker Carlson Says He Will Soon Interview Putin
The Kremlin did not immediately confirm an interview with Mr. Carlson. It would be Mr. Putin’s first formal interview with Western media since the start of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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The Straits Times ☛ 'Very good' deals worked on for Putin's visit to N. Korea -Russian envoy
February 07, 2024 8:49 AM
Russia and North Korea are working on a \"very good\" package of agreements to be signed when President Vladimir Putin visits Pyongyang, Russia's envoy to North Korea told the Russian TASS state news agency in remarks published on Wednesday.
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RFERL ☛ Wagner Group Defector Reportedly Granted Temporary Residence In Norway
A Russian man who reportedly defected from a high-ranking position in the Wagner Group has been given permission to stay in Norway but was refused permanent asylum, a Norwegian newspaper reported.
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European Commission ☛ Speech by President von der Leyen at the European Parliament Plenary on the need for unwavering EU support for Ukraine, after two years of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine
European Commission Speech Strasbourg, 06 Feb 2024 The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, delivered a speech at the European Parliament Plenary on the need for unwavering EU support for Ukraine, after two years of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.
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Latvia ☛ Osokin Freedom Festival for Ukraine to return April, May
From April 5 to May 12, the fifth Osokin Freedom Festival will be held in Rīga and elsewhere in Latvia. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it has been dedicated to supporting the Ukrainian army, civilians, and especially Ukrainian children.
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The Strategist ☛ The anniversary of war in Ukraine—10 years, not two years
In the coming weeks, a flood of analysis can be expected marking the end of the second year of war in Ukraine.
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JURIST ☛ Russia accuses Ukraine of attack on bakery in Lysychansk
Russian officials accused Ukraine on Saturday of attacking a bakery in a Russian-occupied town, Lysychansk, in eastern Ukraine, killing civilians and several representatives of the Russian occupation authorities. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also called the attack a terrorist act against civilian infrastructure.
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JURIST ☛ Moscow court orders arrest of exiled novelist Boris Akunin over Ukraine support
A Moscow court issued an arrest warrant in absentia on Tuesday for exiled novelist Grigori Chkhartishvili (under pen name Boris Akunin) over his critique of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
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RFERL ☛ Ukraine's Parliament Extends Martial Law, Military Mobilization By 90 Days
Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, on February 6 passed laws to extend martial law and military mobilization for another 90 days as Russia's full-scale invasion nears the two-year mark.
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RFERL ☛ Moscow Court Issues Arrest Warrant For Former Adviser To Ukraine's Presidential Office
A court in Moscow issued an arrest warrant for the former adviser to Ukraine's presidential office, Oleksiy Arestovych, on February 6, on charges of calling for terrorism and distributing false information about Russian armed forces involved in Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
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RFERL ☛ Three Belarusians On Trial Over Online Chat Supporting Ukraine
Three men went on trial on February 6 in the Belarusian city of Homel over an online chat in which they supported Ukraine's efforts to stand against Russia's ongoing invasion.
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RFERL ☛ Romanian Defense Minister Rules Out Reintroducing Mandatory Military Service
Romanian Defense Minister Angel Tilvar has ruled out reintroducing a mandatory military service in Romania amid discussions about measures to better prepare the NATO member country in case Russia's war against Ukraine spreads.
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RFERL ☛ UN Nuclear Chief Says Security Still Fragile At Ukraine's Russian-Occupied Power Plant
Security at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant remains fragile amid worrying recent staff cuts enacted by Russian authorities occupying the facility, which is one of the 10 biggest atomic power plants in the world, the United Nations nuclear watchdog chief said on February 6.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Issues Arrest Warrant In Absentia For Writer, War Critic Akunin
A Moscow court has issued an arrest warrant in absentia for prominent Russian writer Boris Akunin (aka Grigory Chkhartishvili), who has been accused of calling for "terrorism" and disseminating "fake information" about the Russian Army.
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New Yorker ☛ Was an Antiwar Russian Tricked Into Carrying Out an Assassination Plot?
Darya Trepova admits that a network of handlers in Ukraine recruited her to hand an explosive device to a far-right propagandist in St. Petersburg—but, she says, they never told her it was a bomb.
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New York Times ☛ Dysfunction Reigns in Congress as G.O.P. Defeats Multiply
In a day of chaos in the Capitol, Republicans failed to impeach the homeland security secretary, lost a vote to speed aid to Israel and cheered the demise of a border deal they had demanded.
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New York Times ☛ U.S. Ambassadors in the Pacific Urge Action on Ukraine, Israel and Border Bill
With the package teetering on the brink of collapse, diplomats said the nation’s credibility was on the line.
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LRT ☛ Russian reconnaissance sonar discovered on Curonian Spit in Lithuania
A Russian hydroacoustic sonar designed to detect and locate submarines was found in the Curonian Spit in Lithuania on Saturday, the military has reported.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Summons Israeli Ambassador Amid Anger At Criticisms Of Lavrov, Middle East Policy
The Russian Foreign Ministry said on February 6 that it had informed Israeli Ambassador Simona Halperin of its "negative reaction" to her comments about Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian policy in the Middle East.
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RFERL ☛ Russia Labels Japanese Association Seeking Return Of Islands 'Undesirable'
The Russian Justice Ministry on February 6 declared as "undesirable" Japan's Northern Territories Issue Association, which seeks the return to Japan of four islands incorporated to Russia by the then-Soviet Union after World War II.
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RFERL ☛ Inmate With Central Asian Roots Who Was Tortured In Russian Prison Found Hanged
Tahirjon Bakiev, an inmate with Central Asian roots who was tortured in a Siberian penitentiary, has been found dead at the correctional colony No. 6 in the Irkutsk region.
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RFERL ☛ Anti-War Presidential Hopeful Nadezhdin Says Russia Needs To Stick To Its Constitution
Anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin, whose official registration as a candidate for the March 15-17 presidential election in Russia is under question by authorities, says Russia should stick to its constitution and act like a real federation by giving more freedom to its regions and ethnic republics.
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RFERL ☛ Kremlin Critic Navalny Placed In Solitary Confinement For 26th Time
The press secretary of imprisoned Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny said on February 6 that the outspoken Kremlin critic had been placed in solitary confinement five days earlier for unspecified reasons.
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Marcy Wheeler ☛ John Durham Feigns Totally Dumb about Russian “Collusion”
During John Durham's testimony to Congress, he played dumb about how willingly Trump pursued Russian help.
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RFERL ☛ EU's Borrell, IAEA's Grossi In Kyiv As Russian Strike On Kharkiv Kills 2-Month-Old Baby
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and UN nuclear chief Rafael Grossi have arrived on separate visits to Kyiv on February 6 as Russian missile strikes continued to claim victims among Ukrainian civilians, killing a 2-month old baby boy on February 6 in the Kharkiv region.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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JURIST ☛ Canada Supreme Court rules disclosure of Premier Doug Ford’s mandate letters are not required
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s mandate letters to his cabinet fell under an exemption of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) on Friday. The request for the mandate letters by a journalist from the Canadian news outlet Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) was denied...
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Bruce Schneier ☛ Documents about the NSA’s Banning of Furby Toys in the 1990s
Via a FOIA request, we have documents from the NSA about their banning of Furby toys.
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Rolling Stone ☛ Taylor Swift’s Lawyers Threaten Private Jet Flight Tracker Over ‘Stalking and Harassing Behavior’
As The Washington Post reports, the letter was sent to Jack Sweeney, the same programmer and University of Central Florida student briefly suspended from X in Dec. 2022 after his jet tracking account rankled Elon Musk. At the time, Musk characterized the tracking of aircraft as a form of “doxxing,” and compared sharing this flight info — which, again, is culled from publicly available Federal Aviation Administration data — to dropping his “assassination coordinates.”
(Sweeney was eventually able to relaunch his flight tracker account on X, though all data is shared with a 24-hour delay to abide by the site’s real-time location tracking rules.)
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TMZ ☛ Taylor Swift Sends Cease & Desist to Jet Tracker ... You're Inviting Stalkers!!!
Sweeney had one page that was completely dedicated to tracking Taylor's private jet -- as well as a general celebrity jet page, where her jet would at times be tracked too -- and he was using publicly available data from the FAA and amateurs who'd throw out data for fun.
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The Verge ☛ Taylor Swift joins Elon Musk in trying to silence student who tracks celebrity jets
Along with data on private jets landing and taking off, Sweeney also posts estimates of the associated fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions of the flights. “Flight shame” really took off in 2018 after an environmental campaign in Sweden urged people to find less polluting ways to travel. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg then made waves for taking a two-week by sea journey to attend a climate conference in New York the following year.
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Environment
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The Hill ☛ Record rain dumped on parts of Los Angeles
On Sunday, the NWS said an atmospheric river event would continue bringing “heavy rain, strong wind, high surf and heavy snows” over a sizable part of Central and Southern California for the next few days. More than 200,000 people had lost power in California Sunday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us.
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Omicron Limited ☛ Researchers find that dust in the atmosphere is feeding algae in mountain lakes
Researchers are trying to understand what is driving recent and troubling changes to mountain headwaters across the globe, which support roughly half the world's population with freshwater for drinking, irrigation, hydropower, industry and use in homes. The latest from the team is a publication in Global Change Biology showing how algae growth is connected to atmospheric dust, with lead author Juan Manuel González-Olalla and James Powell.
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Energy/Transportation
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The Sun ☛ Real identity of Bitcoin founder ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ could FINALLY be revealed in court…and may unlock £36billion fortune
The real identity of Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto could finally be revealed, unlocking the key to his £36billion fortune.
A UK court will now decide if Craig Wright, 54, is the mysterious, anonymous crypto-king who disappeared from the internet over a decade ago.
Wright, an Australian computer scientist who lives in London, has been arguing since 2016 that he is the real Nakamoto – a claim largely dismissed by the cryptocurrency world.
Whoever did invent Bitcoin is sitting on an enormous stash of cryptocurrency now worth £36billion ($46b) – which would make them one of the world’s richest people.
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India Times ☛ Apple wants 'speculative' consumer lawsuit over [cryptocurrency] tech dismissed
Apple asks U.S. judge to dismiss consumer lawsuit accusing it of unlawfully barring cryptocurrency transaction apps. The lawsuit claims Apple's restrictions on cryptocurrency tech harm competition and increase fees on Venmo and Cash App. Apple argues there are no unlawful app rules or business agreements.
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The Verge ☛ Fossil fuels are losing ground to renewable energy in Europe
Fossil fuels dropped to their lowest point since reliable record-keeping started in 1990, making up less than a third of EU’s electricity generation in 2023. Carbon-pollution-free power generation — which includes renewables and nuclear energy — made up more than two-thirds of the electricity mix, and twice as much as fossil fuels.
“What’s encouraging is it’s just continuing that structural decline in fossil fuels,” says Sarah Brown, Ember’s Europe program director. And while records started in 1990, she says, “We think it’s the lowest point ever, because before that fossil fuels were making up the majority and there wasn’t anything else to replace it.”
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DeSmog ☛ New Liz Truss Faction ‘Pops’ With Climate Science Denial and Fossil Fuel Ties
Liz Truss’s new ‘Popular Conservatism’ faction of the Conservative Party launched today with attacks on net zero targets and environmental bodies, using the playbook established by libertarian lobby groups.
The self-styled PopCons included politicians critical of climate policies and science, including Lord Frost, who is a director of the climate science denial Global Warming Policy Foundation, as well as Conservative MP Lee Anderson and Reform party president Nigel Farage.
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DeSmog ☛ How the Oil Industry Indefinitely Delays Cleaning up Oil and Gas Wells in California
A new report from the Sierra Club has found that more than 40,000 unplugged oil and gas wells are sitting idle across California — potentially leaking planet-warming gas and unsafe chemicals, but no longer actively extracting fossil fuels.
In theory, it shouldn’t be possible to leave so many wells in that neglected state. Companies that operate in California are required to safely “abandon” wells that are no longer in use, removing pumpjacks and sealing off openings forever with concrete. And yet, the report found that more than 40 percent of unplugged wells in California haven’t produced oil or gas in at least two years, which is the state’s formal criteria for an “idle” well. According to Sierra Club’s review of California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM) data, only three companies are responsible for most of these wells: Chevron, Aera Energy, and California Resources Corporation. And while operators do pay modest fees for letting their wells stay idle so long, aggressive industry lobbying has helped to keep those penalties as low as possible.
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Overpopulation
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Overpopulation ☛ Birth rates have been falling in Nigeria, though slowly. What factors cause declining fertility, according to educated people in Nigeria?
Since 1970, birth rates have been falling in most developing countries. An earlier study by TOP researchers found that Swedes generally think that improved living conditions, including economic and educational progress, are the cause for declining fertility. What do Nigerians, living in a developing country, think about declining fertility in their country?
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[Old] Sierra Club ☛ What Does “Dead Pool” Mean for the American West?
If Powell hit dead pool, the delta would advance toward the dam at a faster rate, filling the reservoir with sediment. Power generation would get stuck in a loop of diminishing returns until the water level fell below what's called “power pool,” at 3,470 feet.
"The Bureau of Reclamation would have to re-engineer those tubes to make sure they can withstand the abrasiveness of the sediment," Schmidt told Sierra. "They're going to do everything possible to prevent that condition."
Dead pool into perpetuity could lead to so-called water wars—lawsuits between the federal government, states, municipal leaders, and agricultural business owners—and even mass exodus.
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CBS ☛ Northern Colorado communities partner to build $150 million water pump station and pipeline for pending population boom
Northern Colorado's population is expected to double in the coming 25 years.
With that in mind, the previously mentioned communities and water districts are forming the Cobb Lake Regional Water Treatment Authority.
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Finance
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Techdirt ☛ I Remain Confused By The Ruling On Elon Musk’s Compensation Package
There are a number of people, both those who agree with me and those who disagree with me, who seem to think I have some sort of personal dislike of Elon Musk. That’s not true. I find it amazing that he gets away with some of the stuff he gets away with, and I am perplexed at why anyone thinks he “supports free speech,” when he clearly does not. I also have pointed out the many times he seems to make counterproductive decisions at ExTwitter.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Pro Publica ☛ Nevada Republicans’ Caucus Adds Chaos and Confusion to the State’s Presidential Primary
When Sarah Lee Hooper’s mail-in ballot for Nevada’s presidential primary arrived last month, the Las Vegas Republican was utterly confused.
The candidate she wanted to vote for, Vivek Ramaswamy, wasn’t included. Neither were Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and, most notably, former President Donald Trump. The only name she recognized was former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
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Silicon Angle ☛ DocuSign cuts 400 jobs in third round of layoffs since 2022
DocuSign Inc. today announced plans to let go about 400 employees, or 6% of its workforce, in a bid to cut costs and redirect more resources to growth initiatives.
The electronic signature provider detailed in a regulatory filing that the layoffs will mainly affect its sales and marketing teams. According to DocuSign, those employees in the U.S. will receive at least 12 weeks of severance pay. The company also plans to provide healthcare benefits, accelerated stock vesting and outplacement support.
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US News And World Report ☛ EU Proposes Stronger Rules Against Child Abuse and Pornography
The new rules would adapt those implemented in 2011, and expand the definition of criminal offences related to child abuse to include livestreaming and AI content.
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Pete Brown ☛ Never trust a simple solution.
So, two things:
1. This is not something that a US president has the power to do.
2. If the President did try to do something like this, every company CEO and all of the usual right-wing suspects would immediately start screaming about authoritarian overreach.
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CBC ☛ Meta says users must label AI-generated audio and video — or they could be penalized
Meta Platforms could penalize users who fail to label AI-generated audio and visual content posted on its platforms, its top policy executive said on Tuesday.
The comments were made by Nick Clegg, the company's president of global affairs, during an interview with Reuters.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Silicon Angle ☛ Oversight Board calls for changes to Meta’s manipulated-content policy
Meta Platforms Inc.’s Oversight Board, an expert panel that advises the company on moderation decisions, today called for changes to its manipulated-content policy. Meta formed the Oversight Board in 2020 to field appeals that users submit over moderation decisions across Facebook (Farcebook) and Instagram. Additionally, the panel can recommend ways to improve the company’s content policies.
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Reason ☛ "Times Less Than"
A Facebook (Farcebook) comment reminded me again of this debate — some people argue that "A times less than B" is "mathematically incorrect," "simply wrong," and so on.
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AI and the election: a voters guide
The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recently raised concerns about the threat of AI to free and fair elections
So what is AI in this context? How does it impact you? Can you defend against it, making yourself less prone to its influence?
NPD
Think of all the people you dislike because they are manipulative. Do you know a person who always seems to know which of your buttons to press? Is there someone who always seems to know what you're thinking, or mirrors back your own fears and desires in a way that strangely seems to suit them?
Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is what psychologists call a trait of habitual lying and manipulation from otherwise intelligent people who seem to lack a part of their mind that cares about others. Someone lacking empathy or acting very selfishlu is sometimes labelled a "psychopath" or "sociopath".
The narcissistic psychopath (NP) watches very carefully and learns from things you do and say, with one goal, to manipulate and use you.
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Futurism ☛ Embattled Sheriff Caught Posting AI-Generated Headlines About How She’s Awesome
As it turns out, the 31 Bilal-boosting headlines were made up by AI, and either nobody caught it ahead of time, or nobody cared to change it.
"After review," the unattributed statement from Bilal's campaign provided to the Inquirer reads, "it has been determined that an outside consultant for the reelection campaign utilized ChatGPT."
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The Philadelphia Inquirer ☛ The Philly sheriff’s good news headlines? AI generated them.
The campaign broke its silence, releasing a statement in response to an Inquirer article published Monday morning that raised questions about the veracity of 31 favorable headlines attributed to local news organizations including NBC10, CBS3, WHYY, and The Inquirer, each with supposed dates of publication.
Representatives for those organizations were not able to find any of the articles.
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ADF ☛ AI-Generated ‘Fake News’ Fuels Misinformation, Puts Peacekeepers at Risk
Recent research shows a dramatic rise over the past year in misinformation generated by artificial intelligence and presented as authentic news that, experts say, puts at risk international peacekeeping operations in Africa.
At last count, more than 675 websites publish what one group of experts describes as “unreliable” news articles generated by artificial intelligence (AI) — articles that frequently present falsehoods and misinformation as the truth.
NewsGuard, a group that monitors misinformation efforts, identified the sites. Researchers found AI-generated content published in 15 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French and Portuguese, on sites whose names make them seem like legitimate sources of information.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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RFERL ☛ 'Revenge For My Activism': Extremism Cases Skyrocket In Russia
Yet very few of these “extremists” are prosecuted for something they did, according to Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with the legal-aid organization First Department. Instead, he said, the statistics “indicate a tendency toward the mass persecution of people for speech.”
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RFA ☛ China jails feminist labor activist Li Qiaochu for ‘subversion’
But rights activists have said Li’s detention came after she publicly shared details of her husband’s torture by state security police while in detention.
“Li has been ruthlessly targeted for expressing views the Chinese authorities would prefer to suppress – on the premise that her speech could somehow topple the government,” Amnesty International China director Sarah Brooks said in a statement on Monday.
“It is shameful that the Chinese authorities have jailed Li for speaking out against torture and ill-treatment rather than properly investigating the allegations she made,” Brooks said, calling for Li’s immediate and unconditional release.
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Techdirt ☛ Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well, Child Safety Edition
Last week, as you likely heard, the Senate had a big hearing on “child safety” where they grandstanded in front of a semi-random collection of tech CEOs, with zero interest in actually learning about the actual challenges of child safety online, or what the companies had done that worked, or where they might need help. The companies, of course, insisted they were working hard on the problem, and the Senators could just keep shouting “not enough,” without getting into any of the details.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai told Apple Daily to play up business sector concerns on extradition law, court hears
The founder of pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily Jimmy Lai asked senior staff to play up the business sector’s concerns over a since-axed extradition law, a former publisher at the paper has said as she testified against her former employer in his national security trial.
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Kansas Reflector ☛ Former Marion police chief had ‘pizza party’ after raid, turned off body cam, new lawsuit says
The lawsuit describes the chief rummaging through Gruver’s desk drawer and rifling through her files on him. Captured audio depicts Cody stating that he is hungry and that the officers should “just take them all” in reference to the Record’s computers and equipment, so they could “get the f*** out of here.”
Other footage includes Cody using the bathroom at Casey’s General Store between raiding homes.
“While Chief Cody did not turn off his body camera while relieving himself, he apparently chose to turn it off while he reviewed Gruver’s file on him, for the Marion Police Department did not produce any body camera footage from Cody of him looking through Gruver’s file on him,” the lawsuit reads.
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US News And World Report ☛ A Reporter Is Suing a Kansas Town and Various Officials Over a Police Raid on Her Newspaper
Marion County Record reporter Phyllis Zorn is seeking $950,000 in damages from the city of Marion, its former mayor, its former police chief, its current interim police chief, the Marion County Commission, the county sheriff and a former sheriff's deputy. The lawsuit calls them “co-conspirators” who deprived her of press and speech freedoms and the protection from unreasonable police searches guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Officers raided the newspaper's offices on Aug. 11, 2023, as well as the home of Publisher Eric Meyer, seizing equipment and personal cellphones. Then-Marion Chief Gideon Cody said he was investigating whether the newspaper committed identity theft or other crimes in accessing a local restaurant owner's state driving record.
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ANF News ☛ Journalist detained in Hewlêr
"This kind of mistreatment is part of the pressure exerted by the KRI authorities on freedom of expression, which leads to the number of charges against Kurdish officials increasing day by day and the country losing its friends in the international community," said Standard Kurd officials. They see Husen's safety under threat and call for his immediate release.
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Joan Westenberg ☛ The creator economy can't rely on Patreon.
She felt like she had no creative freedom or joy in her creations. And the only answer had been a pivot to direct financial support. But despite racking up tens of thousands of views per video, she struggled to convert more than a tiny fraction into paid subscribers.
Finally, we were grabbing coffee, and she just broke down. She asked me, "At what point am I selling out? And is it even worth it?"
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Hamilton Nolan ☛ Public Funding of Journalism Is the Only Way
So next time that you wonder, “What happened to all the nice newspapers and magazines and perhaps even websites that I remember reading from my halcyon youth?” just imagine Google and Facebook and Amazon as three vampires, sticking a straw into the media business and sucking it dry. The tech platforms figured out how to insert themselves between the news producers and the news audience. The ad money that used to fund news now goes to the tech companies. They took it and now the news companies don’t have it to hire journalists with. That’s why your local paper sucks and your favorite website is dying. When you pull back, it’s pretty simple.
This is not a case of publications dying because they weren’t good enough and consumers made the independent choice of moving their dollars to new and better publications, which flourished anew. No. This is the attack of the middlemen. I must admit that I kind of admire the cleverness of the big tech companies in figuring out how to extract all of the revenue from journalism without actually making any journalism. Smooth move. Also a problem. Did you see the problem? That’s right: the places that make the journalism are not getting the money and therefore they stop making journalism and the places that are getting the money instead do not make journalism. So where does that leave journalism? Nowhere. Which is to say, the place we are rapidly approaching now.
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CPJ ☛ Iranian journalist Nasrin Hassani begins 7-month prison sentence
On Sunday, Hassani, a reporter for the state-run local newspaper Etefaghyeh, and editor-in-chief of the social media-based outlet East Adventure Press, responded to a summons to appear before Branch 2 of the Bojnourd Revolutionary Court in the northeastern city of Bojnourd. She was arrested and taken to the city’s central prison to serve a seven-month sentence for “false news” that was issued in November 2023, according to multiple news reports.
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The Atlantic ☛ You’ll Miss Sports Journalism When It’s Gone
The new sports-media reality is troubling—and paradoxical. Sports fans are awash in more “content” than ever before. The sports-talk-podcast industry is booming; many professional athletes host their own shows. Netflix cranks out one gauzy, player-approved documentary series after another, and every armchair quarterback or would-be pundit has an opinion to share on social media. Yet despite all of this entertainment, all of these shows, and all of these hot takes, true sports-accountability journalism is disappearing.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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ANF News ☛ Over 17 thousand girls at risk of genital mutilation in Germany, says human rights organization
With global migration, the brutal tradition of female genital mutilation of girls and women is becoming increasingly common in Europe. According to the women's rights organization Terre des Femmes, there are currently more than 100,000 girls and women who have suffered genital mutilation in Germany, and more than 17,000 girls in Germany are potentially at risk.
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The Kent Stater ☛ FGM in Sierra Leone: Girls continue to bleed to death but an alternative ritual could save lives and preserve tradition
FGM involves the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia. There are differing numbers from various UN agencies (due to inconsistent data collection in-country) about prevalence rates but the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that at least 200 million girls and women in 31 countries have undergone one of four types of FGM. The practice is said to be happening on every continent, though it is most prevalent in the Arab states and in Africa.
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PHR ☛ ICE Used Solitary Confinement More Than 14,000 Times Since 2018: Report
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used solitary confinement at least 14,264 times from 2018 to 2023, according to a new report issued by experts at Physicians for Human Rights, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Medical School.
The report, “Endless Nightmare”: Torture and Inhuman Treatment in Solitary Confinement in U.S. Immigration Detention, documents that people placed in ICE solitary confinement spent a staggering 27 days in isolation on average, exceeding the 15-day period that constitutes torture as currently defined by United Nations experts.
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RFA ☛ Tibetan monk arrested for publishing books on Tibet from exiles
“The primary charge that was leveled against him was that he had published and disseminated books that had origins in the Tibetan exiled community while he was in charge of the library at Kirti monastery and he communicated with people outside Tibet,” another source said.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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India Times ☛ Alphabet is seeking outside investment for its GFiber internet business
Alphabet plans to seek external investment for GFiber, its business selling Wi-Fi and internet connectivity in parts of the United States, the company told Reuters on Monday, as it looks to ramp up its expansion to more cities.
GFiber, owned by Google's parent company, competes with larger internet service providers including Comcast, Verizon Communications and AT&T.
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Troy Patterson ☛ Enshittification and Owning Your Own Land
I saw this somewhere today (lost exactly where, so I can’t link to it). The basic premise is don’t create all your stuff somewhere that someone else owns. We’ve seen this play out with Facebook and Twitter. Now more than ever, it is possible to own your own website and post to it. Not only that, but with the Fediverse, you can also automatically have those posts show up on a social media site. This was incredibly hard in the past. Thus, we were forced to choose between having your own website and the network effect of other sites.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Digital Music News ☛ Indies Speak Out Against Fashion Company Apple Music’s Heightened Spatial Audio Royalties, Target Policy-Change Talks
Indie labels are reportedly criticizing – and signaling their openness to pursuing legal action against – Fashion Company Apple Music’s royalty bump for works made available in spatial audio. The newest twist in the Apple-developed streaming platform’s own royalties pivot (Spotify, Deezer, and others have likewise retooled their models) just recently entered the media spotlight.
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Quartz ☛ Spotify raised prices and still hit a record for new subscribers
The music streaming giant now boasts 236 million paid subscribers, according to its news released fourth quarter earnings report. That growth came even as the company raised prices to $10.99 a month in 2023. It was Spotify’s first price increase in 12 years. A monthly subscription to Spotify had previously cost $9.99.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ AirVPN Stops Serving Italians due to “Piracy Shield” Blocking Requirements
Starting later this month, VPN provider AirVPN will no longer accept Italian customers. This drastic decision is a direct response to the Government's piracy-blocking requirements, enforced through the "Piracy Shield" system. AirVPN says that the requirements are too burdensome, while opening the door to potential overblocking and violations of users' fundamental rights.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Piracy Shield's First Targets Blocked, Pirate Boxes Discovered in Italian Prison
The much anticipated Piracy Shield blocking system is now fully operational according to Italian authorities. The system's first three official targets appear in legal documents and are web-based, not traditional IPTV providers as some expected. Meanwhile, an operation carried out by over 100 officers to seize contraband from an Italian prison has turned up pirate set-top boxes in prisoners' cells.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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