Links 22/02/2024: Chatbots Failing 'Big Time' and More Condemnations Appear of Bill Gates
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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El País ☛ ‘The Bill Gates Problem’: The case against the richest man in the world
His abilities as an investigative journalist are thus overshadowed by a somewhat naive militancy against the creative capitalism that Gates promotes and an evident intention to discredit not only his work but, above all, him. The demands he makes for transparency and the accusations of obscurity are dulled by the author himself in the pages he dedicates to Gates’ relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the famous corruptor of minors at the service of the international jet set. Gates has explained his meetings and interviews with him on countless occasions, and in no case has any type of relationship, other than their commercial relations or some confusing efforts to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, been proved. Still, Schwab raises, with no evidence whatsoever, the possibility that their relationship “could have had something to do with Epstein’s principal activities in life: sexual gratification and the exercise of power.” The book is full of this kind of opinions and speculations, to the detriment of a more serious analysis of Gates’ mistakes in the management of his foundation, the problems of shielding the intellectual property of vaccines in the hands of the pharmaceutical industries and, ultimately, the objective power that big technology companies have in global society.
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Simone Silvestroni ☛ Living in a corporate bubble
Yesterday I watched a few videos from well-known professionals in the music production field, which left me stunned. Not sure if it was the language, or the way they were taking the topics so seriously, but the struggle to properly understand was real. They were waffling on about the reasons for having failed to release new videos in 2024, or what upload schedule works best, or ways to complement their income with online courses, Patreon, up to bragging about their considerable YouTube earnings in the name of transparency.
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Alex Sirac ☛ [Note] Another thing to do with your website – Alex
I’ve spent some time tinkering with the blog this week, notably reorganising the sidebar. This includes adding an activity ticker based on how many posts I made per week over the past 60 weeks and adding the « On this day » widget that I had been thinking of for years. Years!
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Science
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The Conversation ☛ Cybersecurity for satellites is a growing challenge, as threats to space-based infrastructure grow
In today’s interconnected world, space technology forms the backbone of our global communication, navigation and security systems. Satellites orbiting Earth are pivotal for everything from GPS navigation to international banking transactions, making them indispensable assets in our daily lives and in global infrastructure.
However, as our dependency on these celestial guardians escalates, so too does their allure to adversaries who may seek to compromise their functionality through cyber means. A satellite’s service could be interrupted, or at worst the spacecraft could be disabled. The expansion of the digital realm into space has opened new frontiers for cyber threats, posing unprecedented challenges.
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Education
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Lewis Dale ☛ My first ever promotion
But today, for the first time in my career, I had it confirmed that I’ve been promoted. It’s just a level-increase within the “Senior” bracket, but it’s a huge win for me. I got some good feedback out of the process too (and lots of nice things said), and a modest salary increase too.
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Talk ideas for new and experienced speakers
Are you thinking about giving a talk in your local meetup or sending proposals to conferences but you’re not quite sure what you could talk about? In this article, I share a bunch of high level categories with real talk examples to get your creativity flowing.
If you’re a beginner in the industry and want some inspiration and encouragement, Marijke has a great blog post You can be a beginner and also a speaker, blogger, or participant.
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Konstantin Tutsch ☛ I'm forced to use a notes app that can't keep notes
But for some reason, the school administration one day simply decided that we had to use a specific software. It makes sense first: every student has the same format, everything can be shared easily and younger students who aren’t that responsible can be controlled better. That’s what I thought at first.
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Hardware
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TuMFatig ☛ Using the Kensington SlimBlade Pro TrackBall with OpenBSD
I remembered my Dad brought home a Logitech TrackBall years ago and I have not bad memories of it. As part of my recent desktop changes, I decided to try a TrackBall. Internet reviews seem to acknowledge the Kensington SlimBlade Pro TrackBall is one of the best devices out there.
So I decided to try it with my OpenBSD laptop.
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AnandTech ☛ Arm Announces Neoverse V3 and N3 CPU Cores: Building Bigger and Moving Faster with CSS
A bit over 5 years ago, Arm announced their Neoverse initiative for server, cloud, and infrastructure CPU cores. Doubling-down on their efforts to break into the infrastructure CPU market in a big way, the company set about an ambitious multi-year plan to develop what would become a trio of CPU core lineups to address different segments of the market – ranging from the powerful V series to the petite E series core. And while things have gone a little differently than Arm initially projected, they’re hardly in a position to complain, as the Neoverse line of CPU cores has never been as successful as it is now. Custom CPU designs based on Neoverse cores are all the rage with cloud providers, and the broader infrastructure market has seen its own surge.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Futurism ☛ Too Much Protein Actually Damages Your Arteries, Scientists Find
They found that eating over 22 percent of daily dietary calories from protein can activate macrophages, a type of immune cell, to increase the process of atherosclerosis, which is the hardening of arteries due to build up of cholesterol and fat in your artery walls.
[...] While this is a soberly-written scientific study, some have interpreted it as another shot in the culture war over meat and masculinity, in which conservative trolls deride anything that would call for moderation in meat consumption, including cutting back on meat to mitigate climate change.Fitness influencer Marc Lobliner blasted the study in pungent terms on the platform X-formerly-Twitter.
"This article is stupid," he exclaims in an X video, while calling Razani "The King of Zero Gains."
A manosphere influencer, Andrew Hurst, also criticized the study on X, alleging that the authors are "desperate to promote veganism."
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Cisco COO Maria Martinez suddenly departs in wake of widespread layoffs
Cisco Systems’ executive vice president and chief operating officer, Maria Martinez, is departing the company following a companywide layoff notice and on the heels of Cisco’s pending US$28 billion acquisition of Splunk, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins announced on Tuesday afternoon US time.
“Today I shared the news that after nearly six years at Cisco … Maria Martinez, will be departing the company,” Robbins said in a LinkedIn post.
“Those of you who know [Martinez] know how she pours her heart and soul into her work with passion and enthusiasm. During her time at Cisco, she has been relentlessly focused on our success and building high-value experiences for our customers, our partners, and our people. As Cisco moves into a new chapter with the pending Splunk acquisition, Maria will take on her own next chapter where she can spend more time with her family and pursue other interests.”
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Quartz ☛ China wants more control of mass surveillance system
China’s massive surveillance state is well known. Public spaces are blanketed with CCTV cameras that record details like clothing, gender, age, and even ethnicity. Many of those cameras are powered by facial recognition technology to identify individuals on police blacklists. Citizens’ movements are monitored, dissidents are easily tracked, and protests and strikes are snuffed out before they can gain momentum.
Now Beijing wants to rein in some of the more unruly elements of its mass surveillance system.
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Amazon Inc ☛ Community | Spoiler Alert: It's All a Hallucination
But unlike the AI so many ‘80s cyberpunk novelists imagined, the generative AI of today is not all-knowing. In fact, it’s surprisingly fallible. When you ask ChatGPT, say, a question about anthropology, it may not only produce errors; it may offer quotes from scholars who never said such things at all. In our typical habit of personifying our technology, we have decided to call such errors “hallucinations” — as though Clippy finally grew up and started dropping acid. Much ado has been made about hallucinations — and rightly so. We shouldn’t blindly trust large language models. But we’re missing the bigger picture: to the LLM, it’s all a hallucination.
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Gizmodo ☛ ChatGPT Went Berserk, Giving Nonsensical Responses All Night
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
It’s unclear at this time what is causing this bug with ChatGPT, but it appears to be widespread and different from typical outages. OpenAI’s status page is typically used to report outages and heavy traffic, but the “unexpected responses” warning is unusual.
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Gizmodo ☛ Tinder Owner Signs ChatGPT Deal. Enjoy the AI Dating Tidal Wave
Match Group, the international conglomerate that owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, and almost every other popular dating app, just inked a major partnership with OpenAI. The company shared only a few hazy details, saying AI will help employees with “work-related tasks.” The dating giant says it plans to squeeze artificial intelligence into “literally everything” in its apps, and today marks the first major step forward.
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The Verge ☛ From ChatGPT to Gemini: how AI is rewriting the internet
How do these large language model (LLM) programs work? OpenAI’s GPT-3 told us that AI uses “a series of autocomplete-like programs to learn language” and that these programs analyze “the statistical properties of the language” to “make educated guesses based on the words you’ve typed previously.”
Or, in the words of James Vincent, a human person: “These AI tools are vast autocomplete systems, trained to predict which word follows the next in any given sentence. As such, they have no hard-coded database of ‘facts’ to draw on — just the ability to write plausible-sounding statements. This means they have a tendency to present false information as truth since whether a given sentence sounds plausible does not guarantee its factuality.”
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Mark Hansen ☛ Backing up Google Photos
I ended up with many photos only stored in Google Photos. Worryingly, these photos weren't backed up outside of Google.
I was really worried about how to set up backups; I'd heard a lot of people complain about how hard it is to get your photos out of Google Photos. I particularly heard many complaints about Takeout not exporting all the metadata; this is complicated; more on that below.
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The Verge ☛ Google Gemma: because Google doesn’t want to give away Gemini yet
Google has released Gemma 2B and 7B, a pair of open-source AI models that let developers use the research that went into its flagship Gemini more freely. While Gemini is a big closed AI model that directly competes with (and is nearly as powerful as) OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the lightweight Gemma will likely be suitable for smaller tasks like simple chatbots or summarizations.
But what these models lack in complication, they may make up for in speed and cost of use. Despite their smaller size, Google claims Gemma models “surpass significantly larger models on key benchmarks” and are “capable of running directly on a developer laptop or desktop computer.” They will be available via Kaggle, Hugging Face, Nvidia’s NeMo, and Google’s Vertex AI.
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India Times ☛ ai deepfake: 'AI godfather', others urge more deepfake regulation in open letter
Artificial intelligence experts and industry executives, including one of the technology's trailblazers Yoshua Bengio, have signed an open letter calling for more regulation around the creation of deepfakes, citing potential risks to society.
"Today, deepfakes often involve sexual imagery, fraud, or political disinformation. Since AI is progressing rapidly and making deepfakes much easier to create, safeguards are needed," the group said in the letter, which was put together by Andrew Critch, an AI researcher at UC Berkeley.
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James G ☛ Computer Vision Challenge: Validate Detections in Rows and Columns
One such application of this algorithm is in validating whether all the chocolates in a box of chocolates is in the right place. You could use the same technology to ensure books are in the right position on a bookshelf, too. Any time you have a grid and you want to validate the position of objects on said grid, the logic of validating presence by row and column is useful.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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[Repeat] JURIST ☛ Poland forms inquiry committee on Pegasus use by previous government
The Citizen Lab, a non-profit research lab at the University of Toronto, conducted investigations into the usage of Israeli Pegasus spyware by the governments of many countries, intricately targeting the opposition government officials and leaders along with journalists and independent organizations. Poland was one of the countries where there was an attack on NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware.
However, the last ruling government leader, Kaczynski, has affirmed that its government had used Pegasus but has rejected the allegation of using spyware against government officials and other factions of the society. He stated last week, “It’s all overblown…everything was in line with Polish national interest, with the needs of the security services to combat crime and espionage.”
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Zimbabwe ☛ Signal will let you share a username and keep your number private, WhatsApp should copy this
Okay, you still need a phone number to sign up for Signal but when you meet new people whilst out networking, you can give them a Signal username and they will be able to get in touch with you that way.
These people will not be able to see your phone number. All they will have is your username. So, it’s kind of like giving someone your Twitter (X) handle and having them direct message you there. They don’t get to know your phone number.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Mint Press News ☛ Unraveling Bill Gates’ Global Web of Influence, with Tim Schwab
And yet, for all of his power and prestige, Gates is rarely scrutinized in our media. The Seattle native has been careful to cultivate an image of a well-meaning nerd who uses his wealth for good. Our guest today on the “MintCast” is an exception to that rule, being one of the few investigative journalists to critically examine Gates’ power and influence. Tim Schwab is an award-winning investigative journalist based in Washington, D.C. His reporting has been published in outlets such as The Nation, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Baffler and Jacobin magazine. His latest book, “The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire,” was published in November.
Today, Schwab joins “MintCast” co-host Alan MacLeod to discuss Gates’ origin story, how he uses his enormous wealth to negatively influence public health and education policy, his connections to disgraced child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and to ponder whether there is ever such a thing as a good billionaire.
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Environment
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DeSmog ☛ Greenwashing Through Sport
The fossil fuel giant is happy to co-opt F1’s association with speed, progress, and innovation to mislead, confuse, and greenwash. But for Aramco, it’s less “drive to survive” and more “misguide to survive”.
Despite recently announcing a halt to its expansion plans, which the Saudi energy minister said was due to the energy transition, Aramco is still deeply dependent on oil. The company produces roughly 10 percent of the oil that the world consumes every single day.
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Omicron Limited ☛ Mercury levels in tuna remain nearly unchanged since 1971, study says
Tuna is one of the most popular seafoods worldwide. But this protein-rich fish can build up high levels of methylmercury from feeding on contaminated prey, like smaller fish or crustaceans. Despite efforts to reduce mercury emissions into the environment, researchers report in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology Letters that levels in tuna appear to be unchanged since 1971. They warn that more aggressive emission reduction targets are needed to start nudging down tuna mercury levels.
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Energy/Transportation
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The North Lines IN ☛ Kashmir to be soon linked with Kanyakumari by rail, says PM
The commissioning of the Banihal-Khari-Sumber-Sangaldan section is significant as it features the usage of Ballast Less Track (BLT) all along the route, providing a better riding experience to passengers. Also, India's longest transportation tunnel T-50 (12.77 km) lies on this portion between Khari and Sumber.
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Finance
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Layoffs: Maria Martinez, CISCO’s chief operating officer departs
Maria Martinez, who led Cisco, an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation, as chief operating officer, has stepped down from her position. Her departure comes on the heels of an impending $28 billion acquisition of Splunk, a software company.
Martinez stated, “Today we announced that I will be departing Cisco after 6 years. As Cisco moves into its new chapter with the Splunk acquisition, it’s the perfect time for me to do the same. Cisco will always be special for its unmatched culture. I am incredibly proud and grateful for the accomplishments and character of my team.”
Martinez started off at AT&T Bell Labs and went on to work across Motorola, Embrace Networks, Microsoft, Declara, Plantronics and Salesforce. Last week, Cisco System announced that it would cut five percent of its global workforce, or more than 4,000 jobs.
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More layoffs expected at Kreysler plant in Vallejo
Solano County and the city have been notified that another 25 employees at the Kreysler & Associates Inc. plant on Mare Island are expected to be laid off by April 19.
The notice comes about three weeks after the company reported that 59 employees would lose their jobs by the end of March.
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2024 Another Year Of Layoffs : Bracing For The Winds of Change🌪️ [Ed: Perpetuating the lie that this isn't about debt, bubbles etc. but about automation or so-called "Hey Hi" (chatbots)]
The year kicked off with notable companies announcing significant layoffs. Cisco revealed plans to lay off 4,250 employees, around 5% of its global workforce, as part of a restructuring plan aimed at investing in key priority areas.
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Variety ☛ Process of Elimination: Why Layoffs Are Hitting Media, Tech and Gaming – Despite Their Steep Costs
When Paramount Global announced it was pink-slipping 800 employees, roughly 3% of its workforce, on Feb. 13, CEO Bob Bakish praised those sent packing for a job well done. “Your talents have helped us advance our mission of unleashing the power of content around the world,” he wrote in a companywide memo. “We are a better company because of you.”
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Business Insider ☛ AI isn't driving tech layoffs — but it does make a good scapegoat
However, there's little evidence to show that AI is driving mass cuts in the industry.
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Layoffs 2024: EV Maker Rivian Announces To Lay Off 10% of Its Workforce To Cut Costs
Electric vehicle (EV) maker Rivian has announced to lay off approximately 10 per cent of its salaried workforce in a bid to cut costs. The company announced the latest job cuts in its 2023 fourth-quarter (Q4) earnings call.
The Q4 financial report has shown that despite producing and delivering twice as many EVs in 2023 as compared to 2022, the company still incurred a loss of $5.4 billion for the year. Moreover, for the year 2024, Rivian anticipates producing approximately the same number of vehicles, i.e., around 57,000, as it did in 2023.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Common Dreams ☛ Never Surrender the Gold Lamé
Fresh off his latest legal triumph - payment due of $355 million - and his yuge win in historians' annual presidential ranking - dead last as Worst. President. Ever. - the "greatest con artist in world history" has unveiled his latest trashy, loutish grift: $400, ugly-ass, gold-spray-painted "Never Surrender" high-top sneakers, "Bold, gold and tough, just like President (sic) Trump." And just like his steak, water, vodka, airline, deodorant, board game, casinos and mugshot mugs, he says, "I think it’s gonna be a big success."
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Gizmodo ☛ Winklevoss Twins Donate $4.9 Million to Crypto Group Trying to Influence 2024 Election
The new donation from the Winklevoss twins, first reported by Crypto Telegraph Wednesday, comes after huge players in the crypto industry made large donations to Fairshake starting in late 2023. Ripple Labs and Coinbase donated $20 million and $20.5 million, respectively, according to the latest figures from OpenSecrets. Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the firm a16z have each donated $9.5 million since October 2023, according to OpenSecrets.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Biden to sign executive order to give Coast Guard added authority over maritime cyber threats
The executive order will give the Coast Guard the authority to respond to cybersecurity incidents, while requiring the maritime sector to beef up digital defenses and to report cyber incidents to the Coast Guard. The administration will also invest over $20 billion in port infrastructure over five years.
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Cyble Inc ☛ NSA Veteran Rob Joyce Retires, David Luber Appointed Director
NSA veteran Rob Joyce retires from the post of director, scheduled for the end of March, marking the culmination of a distinguished 34-year career within the agency. Joyce, who served as the director of cybersecurity, will be succeeded by David Luber, the current Deputy Director of the Cybersecurity Directorate.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Rob Joyce leaving NSA at the end of March
Rob Joyce, the veteran National Security Agency official, is retiring at the end of March after 34 years at the spy agency, leaving the federal government without one of its most experienced cybersecurity experts going into a critical election year and amid warnings that China is carrying out unprecedented cyber operations against U.S. critical infrastructure.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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CBC ☛ TikTok is becoming a popular source [sic] for news [sic]. Can it help fill the gaps left by local TV news cuts?
The audience for news on TikTok is small but growing. It accounted for just five per cent of news consumption in the Reuters Institute survey of 2,150 Canadians, conducted in early 2023, and the demographics, not surprisingly, tend to skew younger.
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VOA News ☛ Two Scientists Called Nobel Laureates by Russia’s Education Minister Didn’t Win the Prize
Nevertheless, the Sveriges Riksbank prize is the subject of controversy since, unlike the Nobel Prizes for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace, it was not established by Alfred Nobel in his last will and testament in 1895.
Four members of Alfred Nobel’s family formally distanced themselves from the Swedish central bank-sponsored award. Peter Nobel, the great-grandnephew of the founder and a Swedish human rights lawyer, called the Prize in Economic Sciences "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation ... most often awarded to stock market speculators.”
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Censorship/Free Speech
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uni Emory ☛ Proposed pornography ban threatens American right to degeneracy
The fear of degeneracy and deviance ripples through American conservatism, marrying Christian ideals of sin with the long tradition of authoritarian oppression. This can be seen in the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) case Stanley v. Georgia, in which state police arrested Robert Stanley for the possession of pornography tapes during a house search that was unrelated to these items. Stanley was convicted of violating Georgia’s obscenity statute. His conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court of Georgia, but SCOTUS overturned it, ruling that the possession of “obscene” material is protected under First Amendment rights.
Deevers’ law flagrantly violates the First Amendment and advocates for dangerous, regressive ideas that restrict individuals’ freedoms. Though Deever’s law will most likely not pass due to this violation, I am nonetheless appalled at his attempt to manifest his personal religious beliefs into law. I see this bill as a proclamation that Deevers, and by extension, Christian conservatives, will stop at nothing to regulate social behaviors. Christian conservative lawmakers are attempting to reshape society in their subjective image of righteousness.
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Meduza ☛ Russian war blogger reportedly dies by suicide after saying 16,000 Russian troops lost in battle for Avdiivka
Morozov wrote that on February 20, his superiors forced him to delete a post from his channel. According to BBC Russian, this likely refers to a post in which Morozov said that the Russian army lost 16,000 soldiers and 300 armored vehicles during the battle for control of the village of Avdiivka. The BBC noted that the post drew fierce criticism from Russian propagandists, who accused the blogger of “slandering the Russian Defense Ministry.” According to Morozov’s final messages, the order from his superiors was issued under pressure from the “political prostitutes led by [propagandist] Vladimir Solovyov.”
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Nat. security trial for Tiananmen crackdown vigil group members to begin November at earliest | Hong Kong Free Press HKFP
The three democrats, along with the Alliance itself, were charged in September 2021 under the Beijing-imposed national security law for allegedly inciting other people “to organise, plan, commit or participate in acts by unlawful means with a view to subverting the State power”.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Scheerpost ☛ Chris Hedges: Julian Assange’s Day in Court
Julian’s nearly 15-year legal battle began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists in Baghdad. He took refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, before being arrested by the Metropolitan Police in 2019 who were permitted by the Ecuadorian embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh.
Julian did not commit a crime. He is not a spy. He did not purloin classified documents. He did what we all do, although he did it in a far more important way. He published voluminous material, leaked to him by Chelsea Manning, which exposed U.S. war crimes, lies, corruption, torture and assassinations. He ripped back the veil to expose the murderous machinery of the U.S. empire.
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ US Media Is Collapsing. Here’s How to Save It.
Social media is full of predictable “thoughts and prayers” for American journalism in crisis, but not enough calls for action. Few people have any clue what to call for. What we need now are three major shifts. First, we need to pursue a program of fresh near-term media policy reform. Second, we need a new paradigm for media — an ambitious longer-term transformation in funding and ownership. And third, we need an immediate harm-reduction response for reporters and smaller media entities at grave risk.
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Craig Murray ☛ Assange Final Appeal - Your Man in the Public Gallery - Craig Murray
That left three tiers for media and public, about thirty people. There was however a wooden gallery above which housed perhaps twenty more. With little fuss and with genuine helpfulness and politeness, the court staff – who from the Clerk of Court down were magnificent – had sorted out the hundreds of those trying to get in, and we had the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, we had 16 Members of the European Parliament, we had MPs from several states, we had NGOs including Reporter Without Borders, we had the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, and we had, (checks notes) me, all inside the Court.
I should say this was achieved despite the extreme of official unhelpfulness from the Ministry of Justice, who had refused official admission and recognition to all of the above, including the United Nations. It was pulled together by the police, court staff and the magnificent Assange volunteers led by Jamie. I should also acknowledge Jim, who with others spared me the queue all night in the street I had undertaken at the International Court of Justice, by volunteering to do it for me.
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The Dissenter ☛ Assange Appeal Hearing Plagued By Media Access Issues
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The Dissenter ☛ Assange Is No 'Ordinary Journalist': US Opposes Request For Appeal
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Democracy Now ☛ “Political Prosecution”: WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Faces Final U.K. Appeal to Avoid U.S. Extradition
The final day of a critical appeal for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is underway today at the British High Court of Justice, in what could be Assange’s last chance to stop his extradition to the United States. Assange faces a 175-year prison sentence for publishing classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the WikiLeaks founder’s health is reportedly deteriorating rapidly, his lawyers are arguing the case is politically motivated to target Assange for exposing “state-level crimes.” Meanwhile, U.S. lawyers are attempting to portray Assange as a hacker rather than a journalist. “It’s clear to everyone that Assange is a journalist. He revealed more criminality by the world’s most powerful country than anyone’s ever done in history,” says Matt Kennard, head of investigations at Declassified UK, who lays out the proceedings so far, what to expect from the British justice system and the precedent an Assange extradition would set for global journalism. “It will be a huge nail in the coffin for investigative journalism, for any kind of publishing of information that state powers don’t like, and it will be used by repressive regimes all around the world.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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YLE ☛ Wolt wins landmark case — couriers declared entrepreneurs, not employees
The court's verdict therefore overturned a previous decision, made in November 2021 by the Regional State Administrative Agency of Southern Finland (Avi), which decreed that couriers for the app-based service should be considered employees of the company, and not entrepreneurs.
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StreetInsider ☛ Form 10-K DoorDash, Inc. For: Dec 31
With the breadth of our geographic scope, the classification of Dashers that utilize our platform as independent contractors may be subject to challenge in other jurisdictions. In particular, through Wolt, we are subject to local regulations and challenges in Europe and Asia to the classification of Wolt courier partners as independent contractors. For example, on November 1, 2021, the Finnish Occupational Safety and Health Administration (through the Division at the Regional State Administrative Agency for Southern Finland) issued a decision which deemed that Wolt courier partners in Finland are in an employment relationship with Wolt, and that Wolt should be mandated to keep statutory records of Wolt courier partners' working hours. We have appealed the decision to the Administrative Court of Hämeenlinna. In addition, other jurisdictions are considering changing the standards used to determine worker classification, which may impact the classification of Dashers using our platform. For example, the EU is considering a new mechanism for determining worker classification, which would be applied by member states if adopted, and may involve differing implementation by the various member states. Any potential EU-wide legislative reform may adversely affect our ability to operate our current independent contractor model within the EU.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Intel lands foundry deal for custom Microsoft processor — 18A process tech to be used for 'very exciting platform shift'
Intel Foundry announced Wednesday at IFS Direct that Microsoft has chosen Intel's 18A (1.8nm-class) process technology for its next-generation custom processor.
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Copyrights
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US News And World Report ☛ Meta Says Not Required to Pay for Indonesia News Content Posted Voluntarily
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc on Thursday said it understood it was not required to pay for content by news publishers posted voluntarily by users in Indonesia, after its government issued a regulation requiring digital platforms to "split profits" with media firms.
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Walled Culture ☛ Texts of laws must be freely available, not locked away by copyright; in Germany, many still aren’t
This Leistungsschutzrecht is also known as an “ancillary copyright”, and is a good demonstration of how fans of copyright try to spread its monopoly beyond the usual domains. Whether to create a new Leistungsschutzrecht was one of the important battles that took place during the passage of the EU’s Copyright Directive, discussed at length in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). In that instance, it resulted in a new ancillary copyright for newspaper publishers that is another example of yet more money being channelled to the copyright world simply because they were able to lobby for it effectively. As usual, there is no corresponding benefit for the public flowing from this extension of copyright. In the case of the Leistungsschutzrecht claimed by the publisher of the German law gazettes, it results in a ridiculous situation:
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Torrent Freak ☛ Appeals Court Vacates $1 Billion Piracy Damages Award Against Cox, Orders New Trial
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated the $1 billion piracy damages award against Internet provider Cox Communications. While the ISP remains contributorily liable for pirating subscribers, a finding of vicarious copyright infringement was reversed. A new trial will determine the appropriate damages amount given these new conclusions.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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