Links 07/03/2024: Google’s Tacit Admission Its Results Are Too Spammy and Microsoft Generates Plenty of Misinformation
Contents
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Leftovers
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Manuel Moreale ☛ IndieWeb Carnival: Accessibility in the Small Web
I started making websites back in 2010. That’s 14 years. I entered the web dev world back when the frontend scene was starting to become exciting thanks to CSS3 and HTML5. Shadows, rounded corners, custom typefaces! Everything was exciting. Also, new tags! I remember spending time reading about , , , and all the new things at my disposal. But I never thought about spending time learning about what all this meant in terms of accessibility.
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SANS ☛ Scanning and abusing the QUIC protocol
The QUIC protocol has slowly (pun intended) crawled into our browsers and many other protocols. Last week, at BSides Zagreb I presented some research I did about applications using (and abusing) this protocol, so it made sense to put this into one diary.
While QUIC has been around for some time, the official RFC 9000 that defines QUIC v1 was released in 2021. Of course, our browsers (namely Chrome, as Google was the main power behind QUIC) started supporting and using QUIC long time ago. Chrome, for example, added support for QUIC back in 2012, while Mozilla Firefox waited until 2021. Today, all browsers not only support QUIC but also use it – A LOT!
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Futurism ☛ Clever Thieves Using WiFi Jammers to Shut Down Those Crappy Security Cameras You Bought on Amazon
The Los Angeles Police Department is warning residents that burglars are using WiFi jammers to easily disarm "connected" surveillance cameras and alarms that are available for cheap on marketplaces like Amazon.
As LA-based news station KTLA5 reports, tech-savvy burglars have been using WiFi jammers, which are small devices that can confuse and overload wireless devices with traffic, to enter homes without setting off alarms — a worrying demonstration of just how easily affordable home security devices from the likes of Ring and Eufy can be disarmed.
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Standards/Consortia
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Manuel Moreale ☛ It’s Time to Give Up on Everything but Email
I was sitting there, minding my own damn business, surfing the web, clicking around, enjoying my time, when I stumbled on this article, by Ian Bogost on The Atlantic, that is so painfully stupid that I had to take the time and comment on it. Because, as you know, I love emails.
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Education
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Camiel Schoonens ☛ 12 Leadership reflections
A simple list with things that are very true for anyone in a leadership position.
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Hardware
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Old VCR ☛ xa (xa65) 2.4.1
A quick one: xa (xa65), André Fachat's compatible fast two-pass cross-assembler for 6502, 65C02, R65C02 and 65816 processors that André and I maintain is now at version 2.4.1. This optionally expands the syntax from 2.4.0 and fixes some bugs primarily with relocatable .o65 objects. As usual, there are even more tests in its extensive conformance test-suite, and it is tested on Linux/ppc64le, Mac OS X (PowerPC, Intel and Apple silicon), AIX (its primary development platform, just to be difficult), and NetBSD/macppc and NetBSD/mac68k. You can download it and read documentation in man(1) format (converted to HTML) from the main xa65 home page. xa is free and open-source under the GNU Public License v2.
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404 Media ☛ Oregon Passes Bill That Would Make iPhones More Repairable Everywhere
The key part of this legislation is that it forbids “parts pairing,” which is the artificial locking of repair parts to a specific device. This is something that Apple does with the iPhone: You cannot swap the screen from one iPhone 15 to another iPhone 15 without that part being paired to the new phone by proprietary Apple software. The use of parts pairing is the most critical way that Apple has managed to maintain a strong hold on the iPhone repair market. Under this legislation, Apple will have to find a way to do away with its parts pairing regime.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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The Telegraph UK ☛ Bottled vs tap: which water is best for your health?
Labelled this because they never break down, poly and perfluorinated alkyl substances – PFAS for short – have tainted our humble tap water. There are thought to be more than 4,700 types of PFAS and studies have found that some PFAS are associated with a higher risk of fertility problems, cancer and thyroid disease.
Sadly, it’s not as simple as reaching for bottled mineral or spring water instead. A new study by the University of Columbia found that a bottle of water can contain a quarter of a million pieces of plastic. Scientists have created a new category called nanoplastics to refer to the plastic pollution that happens when microplastics break down even further.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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The Verge ☛ Google’s new ranking systems are designed to stop spam, SEO, and other manipulative tactics
But for Google to continue to be Google, it has to be good at finding good stuff on the web. The company has been signaling for a while that it plans to care about and prioritize humans over machines and real content over clickbait, and it’s beginning to make moves in that direction. But it’s a long road ahead.
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Quartz ☛ Google targets AI spam in search changes
Google says it will begin cracking down on AI-generated content created solely for the purpose of gaming its systems and ranking high in Google Search — a change that could potentially have a ripple effect on the quality of what we see online.
The company made the announcement in a blog post on Tuesday. According to Google, this change involves algorithmic enhancements to its core ranking systems and is more complex than its usual updates. The changes will affect three types of content, or abuse, as Google calls it, the most notable being automated content. This includes content created by generative AI.
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Quartz ☛ Amazon Web Services joins Google Cloud in ending data transfer fees
Why does this matter? The tech giants’ moves promote competition by making it easier for users to leave their data ecosystems, which was the whole point of the European Data Act passed by the European Union on Jan. 11. The regulation set a framework to make it easier for consumers and businesses to “effectively switch between different providers of data-processing services” in order to “unlock the EU cloud market.”
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Canva Engineering Blog ☛ Fonts are still a Helvetica of a Problem
The attack surface of SVG and XML parsers is a well-documented problem in the web security field (see PortSwigger and OWASP). However, we were surprised to discover that the SVG format also appears in digital typography in two unique ways.
Font formats that follow the sfnt container structure, like OpenType and TrueType, contain a number of tables needed for the font to work as intended. However, there are also many auxiliary tables, some of which are poorly documented or proprietary. One such auxiliary table is the SVG table.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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India Times ☛ Digital Markets Act: Europe's Digital Markets Act is forcing tech giants to make changes. Here's what that will look like
Europeans scrolling their phones and computers this week will get new choices for default browsers and search engines, where to download iPhone apps and how their personal online data is used. They're part of changes required under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a set of European Union (EU) regulations that six tech companies classed as "gatekeepers" - Amazon, Apple, Google parent Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok owner ByteDance - will have to start following by midnight Wednesday.
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New York Times ☛ The Youths Have Spoken: Wallets Are Uncool. Go Digital.
In a survey asking just over 2,500 Americans about digital payments, some 80 percent of Gen Z respondents said they were using mobile wallets, and among them, half were eager to use their phones for much more than paying for things, according to recent data from Pymnts Intelligence, a research firm that studies commerce.
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Wired ☛ 5 Years After San Francisco Banned Face Recognition, Voters Ask for More Surveillance
San Francisco made history in 2019 when its Board of Supervisors voted to ban city agencies including the police department from using face recognition. About two dozen other US cities have since followed suit. But on Tuesday San Francisco voters appeared to turn against the idea of restricting police technology, backing a ballot proposition that will make it easier for city police to deploy drones and other surveillance tools.
Proposition E passed with 60 percent of the vote and was backed by San Francisco Mayor London Breed. It gives the San Francisco Police Department new freedom to install public security cameras and deploy drones without oversight from the city’s Police Commission or Board of Supervisors. It also loosens a requirement that SFPD get clearance from the Board of Supervisors before adopting new surveillance technology, allowing approval to be sought any time within the first year.
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Bruce Schneier ☛ Surveillance through Push Notifications
The Washington Post is reporting on the FBI’s increasing use of push notification data—”push tokens”—to identify people. The police can request this data from companies like Apple and Google without a warrant.
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The Washington Post ☛ Push alerts are latest technique FBI uses to track criminal suspects
“This is how any new surveillance method starts out: The government says we’re only going to use this in the most extreme cases, to stop terrorists and child predators, and everyone can get behind that,” said Cooper Quintin, a technologist at the advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“But these things always end up rolling downhill. Maybe a state attorney general one day decides, hey, maybe I can use this to catch people having an abortion,” Quintin added. “Even if you trust the U.S. right now to use this, you might not trust a new administration to use it in a way you deem ethical.”
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Confidentiality
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Signal ☛ Signal >> Blog >> Keep your phone number private with Signal usernames
Signal’s mission and sole focus is private communication. For years, Signal has kept your messages private, your profile information (like your name and profile photo) private, your contacts private, and your groups private – among much else. Now we’re taking that one step further, by making your phone number on Signal more private.
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Étienne Deparis ☛ Wireguard and after sleep time skew protection
However, there is one very specific case, when it leads to super annoying situation: if I had a wireguard connection up before the sleep, and the connection was still up during the time jump, then Wireguard just break and you lose all connectivity. This is because of the anti-replay protection of wireguard. To fix that, one must have access to the wireguard server and restart it to drop any information related to previously connected peers. That’s far from ideal (I doubt Mullvad admins would love to get dozens of email per days because we don’t know how to get our laptop to behave correctly).
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Defence/Aggression
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CBC ☛ Former Google engineer charged with stealing AI tech while secretly working with Chinese firms
A former software engineer at Google has been charged with stealing artificial intelligence technology from the company while secretly working with two companies based in China, the U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday.
Linwei Ding, a Chinese national, was arrested in Newark, Calif., on four counts of federal trade secret theft, each punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
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Variety ☛ Universal Stand Against TikTok Defends Artists' Rights (Guest Column)
The op-ed is yet another reminder that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Just as it was in the early days of Napster, music (and the artists and songwriters who create it) are the very source of the platforms’ success. Yet, rather than share the commercial success with the creators who made it possible, Napster harmed — and TikTok harms — artists and songwriters.
Today, TikTok is even larger and arguably more dominant than any other platform in history. With a corporate market cap larger than the economies of many countries and the entire music industry and a user base of 1.8 billion monthly active users, it has the size and strength that the early generations of tech elites only dreamed about.
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Pratik ☛ What's in the future of Listen to Michigan
If not, and they continue their campaign until the general election, they better hope Biden does not LOSE Michigan (even if he wins the Presidency). First, the general election ballot has no ‘uncommitted’ option. You have to vote third-party or stay home to express a similar sentiment. So why should they hope Biden not lose? Because if he does, they will be completely stranded politically and their cause will never get support. The Republicans will never support Muslims over Israelis, and the Democrats then can no longer rely on Arab-Americans' support. They’ll never get anyone to pick up their phone. Of course, they can continue to protest publicly, run campaigns, and raise money for whatever reasons, but they will never be able to influence policy or laws for their cause.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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US Navy Times ☛ Military Times survey: ‘Alarming’ percentage accept conspiracies
Researchers are already seeing instances of Russian interference in the U.S. this year, including a coordinated effort around the Texas-Mexico border crisis to amplify calls for a civil war, according to Kyle Walter, head of research at Logically, a British tech company that uses artificial intelligence to monitor disinformation around the world. Walter said Russia is likely to increase its spread of falsehoods in the run-up to the November election, likely focusing on immigration and the U.S. economy.
“The perception at times is that Russia is seeking to help one candidate win an election over another candidate,” Walter said. “What they’re really trying to do is create chaos and make people question the process and validity of the democratic process and the integrity of the election.”
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The Atlantic ☛ A Looming Disaster at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant
But residents’ hopes that the Russians wouldn’t dare attack the nuclear facility were misplaced. On March 3, there were reports that troops had started to shoot at the crowd. That night, one part of the Russian column entered the city center while the other advanced to the nuclear facility. The Ukrainian National Guard engaged Russian forces outside the plant, but soon shelling from Russian tanks started a fire, which continued to burn as Russian troops blocked firefighters from entering the plant’s perimeter. A ZNPP worker said residents scrambled to find potassium-iodide pills in case the fighting unleashed a wave of radiation.
Nuclear plants must be continuously staffed to avoid the risk of a meltdown. Another ZNPP worker recalled staying on the job for 30 straight hours, until Russian soldiers finally allowed the next shift to enter the facility. By the morning of March 4, the plant was entirely in Russian hands. About a week later, employees of Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear corporation, arrived at the ZNPP to take operational control. On March 12, the Russian forces occupying the ZNPP reportedly declared that it was “now a Rosatom station.” They had, in effect, stolen the largest power plant on the continent.
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Environment
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Nature ☛ Projections of an ice-free Arctic Ocean
Observed Arctic sea ice losses are a sentinel of anthropogenic climate change. These reductions are projected to continue with ongoing warming, ultimately leading to an ice-free Arctic (sea ice area <1 million km2). In this Review, we synthesize understanding of the timing and regional variability of such an ice-free Arctic. In the September monthly mean, the earliest ice-free conditions (the first single occurrence of an ice-free Arctic) could occur in 2020–2030s under all emission trajectories and are likely to occur by 2050. However, daily September ice-free conditions are expected approximately 4 years earlier on average, with the possibility of preceding monthly metrics by 10 years. Consistently ice-free September conditions (frequent occurrences of an ice-free Arctic) are anticipated by mid-century (by 2035–2067), with emission trajectories determining how often and for how long the Arctic could be ice free. Specifically, there is potential for ice-free conditions in May–January and August–October by 2100 under a high-emission and low-emission scenario, respectively. In all cases, sea ice losses begin in the European Arctic, proceed to the Pacific Arctic and end in the Central Arctic, if becoming ice free at all. Future research must assess the impact of model selection and recalibration on projections, and assess the drivers of internal variability that can cause early ice-free conditions.
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Energy/Transportation
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Stephen Hackett ☛ Apple’s Car Project Was Far More Bonkers than We Ever Knew
It’s clear Apple thought it could pull off true self-driving at a level that no one on Earth has been able to do so. Even if they had, it’s also clear that there was a staggering lack of divisive decision over how such technology should be turned into a product.
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Kev Quirk ☛ My First Month With an EV
I recently bought my first electric vehicle (EV). It has been an interesting adjustment, but am I glad I switched from diesel?
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H2 View ☛ GM spearheads hydrogen-powered truck and infrastructure DOE initiative
The vehicles, built on a similar frame to the 2024 Chevrolet Silverado 5500 MD, will be powered by GM’s HYDROTEC fuel cell systems producing more than 300kW of power and an estimated range greater than 300 miles. Southern Company will use the medium duty trucks as shop vehicles at its worksites in the US.
Together with Southern Company and Nel, GM will integrate a fuel cell-based power generator, with Nel providing its advanced PEM electrolyser to generate onsite hydrogen and power GM’s fuel cells.
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Wildlife/Nature
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The Revelator ☛ Apathy Threatens the Planet. How Do We Get People to Care?
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Finance
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Thomas Rigby ☛ Unskippable ads offer no feedback loop
Skipping an advert also tells the company that their advert is in the wrong place or at the wrong time or aimed at the wrong audience.
Without feedback, everyone who sees the ad is "happy" as there's no way to indicate otherwise.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Silicon Angle ☛ Cloudflare acquires Nefeli Networks and launches multicloud networking service
The offering is based on technology that the company obtained through a recent startup acquisition. The startup, Nefeli Networks Inc., previously raised about $9 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates and other investors. Cloudflare announced the deal this morning without disclosing the financial terms.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Bipartisan bill would codify federal standards for agency AI use
According to the bill’s text, the legislation would define federal standards for AI use, acquisition, management, development and oversight. The proposed bill looks to hold agencies accountable for ensuring that they are purposeful and performance-driven when utilizing the emerging technology. The bill specifies that AI use be consistent with the use cases that the tool was trained for, and “deployers of such application promote verifiably accurate, ethical, reliable and effective use.”
The bill also requires “appropriate training to all agency personnel” that are responsible for AI use. Hiring talent for AI has been an issue raised by White House officials and experts, in addition to problems retaining talent, even as the Biden administration moves to ease education requirements and ask agencies to prioritize AI.
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Daniel Pocock ☛ Google sponsorship: failed to pay Open Labs, OSCAL, Albania
On 7 May 2017 (written below as a US date, 05/07/2017), Cat Allman from Google authorized Google sponsorship of the OSCAL conference in Tirana, Albania. Based on that authorization, the organizers put the Google logo on all their printed materials, banners and web site. $2,000 doesn't seem like a lot of money for Google but it is a lot for volunteers in Albania.
When the organizers pursued payment, it was radio silence. In August 2017, they reached out to me for help.
I tried to contact Google about this. Despite years of collaboration in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Google wouldn't respond to emails about OSCAL in Albania.
Did Google know something about the problems in Albania before other volunteers found out?
Did Google fail to inform other mentors that there were risks associated with these two men, Elio and Redon and their people trafficking culture?
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Quartz ☛ Lyft shareholders sue after earnings typo sent stock soaring
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California.
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The Kent Stater ☛ OpenAI publishes Elon Musk’s emails. ‘We’re sad that it’s come to this’ – KentWired
In the emails, parts of which have been redacted, Musk argues that the company stood virtually no chance of building a successful generative AI platform by raising cash alone, and the company needed to find alternate sources of revenue to survive.
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Michigan News ☛ Should University of Michigan be politically neutral? Committee to explore question - mlive.com
Should the University of Michigan remain politically neutral? This is one of the considerations a campus committee will explore in a new effort to enforce diversity of thought and free expression on all three campuses.
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Harvard University ☛ Should universities be taking official stances on political, social issues of day?
The core mission of any university depends on the ability of students, faculty members, and researchers to follow questions where they lead without an institutional finger on the scale influencing how the work proceeds, experts gathered at Harvard said recently.
The assertion was a point of agreement among panelists at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on Tuesday who nonetheless disagreed over the type of policy that might be most effective. Experts from Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, and the University of Chicago, which has long had a policy of “institutional neutrality” on questions of the day, gathered to discuss the nuances of such practices.
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Vox ☛ Why US elections only give you two choices
Even if you’re not sold on the need for more parties in the US, though, scratch the surface of “only one person can win” a little and you start to see how it produces perverse results, even within the two-party system. It’s a big part of why the political parties have moved farther apart from each other, and it leaves about half of the country without any political representation at all.
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RTL ☛ "Cyber shield": EU looks to AI to battle cyber threats
The law, which needs a final sign-off from the parliament and the European Council, "will leverage state-of-the-art tools and infrastructures, such as artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics, to swiftly detect cyber threats and incidents," a European Commission statement said.
It will do that through the set-up of a European Cybersecurity Alert System designed to give real-time information to authorities.
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Wade Urry ☛ I don’t want tax cuts
If there’s money for tax cuts, then there was money available for public services.
Our services are at breaking point. My county council declared that it is bankrupt for the 2023/2024 tax year. Many other councils have been doing this, more than ever before. Their first course of action was to make severe cuts to care homes and services for the elderly and disabled.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Gunnar Wolf ☛ Constructed truths — truth and knowledge in a post-truth world
Many of us grew up used to having some news sources we could implicitly trust, such as well-positioned newspapers and radio or TV news programs. We knew they would only hire responsible journalists rather than risk diluting public trust and losing their brand’s value. However, with the advent of the Internet and social media, we are witnessing what has been termed the “post-truth” phenomenon. The undeniable freedom that horizontal communication has given us automatically brings with it the emergence of filter bubbles and echo chambers, and truth seems to become a group belief.
Contrary to my original expectations, the core topic of the book is not about how current-day media brings about post-truth mindsets. Instead it goes into a much deeper philosophical debate: What is truth? Does truth exist by itself, objectively, or is it a social construct? If activists with different political leanings debate a given subject, is it even possible for them to understand the same points for debate, or do they truly experience parallel realities?
The author wrote this book clearly prompted by the unprecedented events that took place in 2020, as the COVID-19 crisis forced humanity into isolation and online communication. Donald Trump is explicitly and repeatedly presented throughout the book as an example of an actor that took advantage of the distortions caused by post-truth.
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India Times ☛ openai misleading election images: OpenAI, Microsoft AI tools generate misleading election images: researchers
Image creation tools powered by artificial intelligence from companies including OpenAI and Microsoft can be used to produce photos that could promote election or voting-related disinformation, despite each having policies against creating misleading content, researchers said in a report on Wednesday.
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US News And World Report ☛ OpenAI, Microsoft AI Tools Generate Misleading Election Images, Researchers Say
A Stability AI spokesperson said the startup updated its policies on Friday to prohibit "fraud or the creation or promotion of disinformation."
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company was working to prevent abuse of its tools, while Microsoft did not respond to request for comment.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Meduza ☛ Russian journalist sentenced to seven years in prison asks Ukrainians for forgiveness in closing statement
In his closing statement, Ivanov got on his knees and asked the people of Ukraine to forgive him. “I want to ask for forgiveness from all the citizens of Ukraine who have been made to suffer by our country,” he said.
Ivanov was arrested in April 2023 over Telegram posts he made criticizing the war in Ukraine.
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Walled Culture ☛ The new Hadopi? Piracy Shield blocks innocent Web sites and makes it hard for them to appeal
That’s a future problem, but something that has already been encountered concerns one of the world’s largest and most important content delivery networks (CDN), Cloudflare. CDNs have a key function in the Internet’s ecology. They host and deliver digital material to users around the globe, using their large-scale infrastructure to provide this quickly and efficiently on behalf of Web site owners. Blocking CDN addresses is reckless: it risks affecting thousands or even millions of sites, and compromises some of the basic plumbing of the Internet. And yet according to a post on TorrentFreak, that is precisely what Piracy Shield has now done: [...]
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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VOA News ☛ Iowa Journalist Wins Five-year Fight for Press Credentials
Then, Belin said, the policy changed. Journalists now had to work for a recognized news organization with a certain size audience and finally, she says, the clerk stopped responding to her applications and appeals.
So in January, Belin filed a federal lawsuit.
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VOA News ☛ Russia Jails Journalist for Criticizing Ukraine Offensive
In social media posts published in 2022 on the Telegram and VKontake social media sites, Ivanov criticized Russia's military offensive in Ukraine and its actions in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
He was arrested last year and pleaded not guilty.
In a final statement to the court at a previous hearing he said, "Journalism no longer exists in Russia."
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Civil Rights/Policing
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RFA ☛ Tibetans underrepresented in Chinese leadership: report
In Tibet, Tibetan representation in leadership positions are limited to “token positions” at the national, provincial and sub-provincial levels, with the majority of positions held by Han Chinese, according to the report by Washington-based rights group International Campaign for Tibet, or ICT.
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Gizmodo ☛ TSA Self-Checkout Is Coming, But Will It Really Make Air Travel Suck Less?
The new TSA self-checkout lane looks a lot like the existing security you’re probably familiar with at U.S. airports. There are bins for your belongings that run along a conveyor belt and backscatter X-ray machines to scan your body. The innovation with these new self-checkout lanes appears to be the absence of large numbers of TSA agents who typically explain things.
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Buttondown ☛ We need to talk about Jakob
At this point, I have to tell you what’s about to happen. Nielsen has given everyone who sees accessibility as an unnecessary cost center a way out. Listen, they will say, the experts are telling us that AI is going to solve this, so let’s deprioritize the work now so we don’t duplicate our efforts.
I’ve been through this hype cycle before. In 2004, Jeff Veen, then at Adaptive Path, told a crowd of fawning web designers at SXSW, “I don’t care about accessibility.” It was a rhetorical flourish meant to show how far one would get by designing with web standards. I met Jeff at that session, and worked with him later on. He cared. But here’s the thing. People heard that one sentence, and they fell in love with it, because it was cheaper to do what they wanted that way. And it served to undermine a lot of the work that accessibility people were doing, even though that wasn’t his intent. What’s troubling to me in this case is not just that Nielsen gives lazy execs a big, fat get-out-of-accessibility-debt pass, he seems to actually believe what he’s saying.
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The Telegraph UK ☛ Stop being scared of Islamophobia. Start worrying about Anglophobia
But Fad thinks she is one of the lucky ones. When Fad was at school, there were girls in her class who went on “holiday” to Pakistan and were never seen again. Later, they would hear that their absent friends were married to uncles or cousins. Clever girls in Fad’s class used to deliberately fail their exams because they knew the fate that awaited them once they completed their education.
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The Register UK ☛ Apple remains tight-lipped about latest iPhone, iPad 0-days
As we've already covered this week, Apple's iOS and iPadOS 17.4 updates brought more than just security fixes.
Orders per the EU's Digital Markets Act are now in the wild. Apple was compelled by Brussels to give users a choice over their browser engine and from where they download their apps.
Apple met its March 6 deadline early, overhauling previously longstanding rules against app sideloading [sic] and browser apps using their own engines on Apple's phones and tablets. Chrome, Firefox, and the rest were all essentially reskins of Apple's Safari running on its WebKit framework.
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Quartz ☛ Apple blocks Epic Games from the App Store CEO Tim Sweeney's tweet
“Apple is retaliating against Epic for speaking out against Apple’s unfair and illegal practices, just as they’ve done to other developers time and time again,” Epic Games said in a blog post on Wednesday. Apple cited a tweet from Sweeney as one of the main reasons for blocking the Epic Games Store.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly (05 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
It's pretty clear to me what's going on here. Keyme has hired some SEO creeps and/or paid off Google, flooding the zone with listings for its machines. Meanwhile, Golden State, being merely good at locksmithing, has lost the SEO wars. Perhaps Golden State could shift some of its emphasis from being good at locksmithing in order to get better at SEO, but this is a race that will always be won by the firm that puts the most into SEO, which will always be the firm that puts the least into quality.
Whenever I write about this stuff, people inevitably ask me which search engine they should use, if not Google?
And there's the rub.
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Trademarks
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Idiomdrottning ☛ “Clearly pirated” vs counterfeit
Even though I wanna abolish copyright and am in favor of commons culture and shared-world story-telling and open games, I have an appreciation for when pirated things are “clearly pirated”, when they aren’t being presented as the official thing. Like a shoddily xeroxed version of a game text, or a clearly home-burnt CD or mixtape, or a scanlation/fansub community clearly marking their stuff as “fan made”.
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Copyrights
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India Times ☛ x copyright: Elon Musk's X escapes most of lawsuit over copyrighted songs
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, on Tuesday won the dismissal of most of a lawsuit by 17 music publishers that accused it of infringing copyrights on nearly 1,700 songs by letting people post music online without permission.
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Torrent Freak ☛ X Partially Defeats Music Piracy Liability Claims in Nashville Federal Court
The federal court in Nashville has handed an early and partial win to Elon Musk's X as it fights back against a copyright complaint filed by several record labels. Judge Trauger dismissed the labels' direct and vicarious copyright infringement claims but left the contributory infringement claims intact. This means that X can still be held liable for failing to act properly against repeat copyright infringers.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV Co. & Seven Workers Fined After Massive Raids Eight Years Ago
A company in Spain and seven of its workers have been fined between 540 and 673,000 euros for their role in an international IPTV piracy operation shut down by the authorities almost eight years ago. The sentences are described as 'historic' since they target corporate actors rather than private individuals. However, background to the case makes this case historic for entirely different reasons.
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Idiomdrottning ☛ My current stance on copyright
Let me just briefly get these out of the way in the beginning of this essay. They are distinct from copyright and should not be lumped in. Trademark is a monopoly on a name, patent is a monopoly on an idea, and copyright is a monopoly on a particular implementation, a particular text or image for example.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Stargazing: Leo: Fairbanks, AK, USA: 2024-03-01 (publ. 2024-03-06)
I enjoyed a brief stargazing session last Friday morning, around 5am. I only did naked-eye stargazing, mostly studying Leo.
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Technology and Free Software
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“Clearly pirated” vs counterfeit
Even though I wanna abolish copyright and am in favor of commons culture and shared-world story-telling and open games, I have an appreciation for when pirated things are “clearly pirated”, when they aren’t being presented as the official thing. Like a shoddily xeroxed version of a game text, or a clearly home-burnt CD or mixtape, or a scanlation/fansub community clearly marking their stuff as “fan made”.
I think pirated stuff is good, but it still rubs me the wrong way when pirated DVDs are presented as if they were official released ones, or when people spread myths about “abandonware” or “No Copyright Intended”.
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Internet/Gemini
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Prepping AuraGem Search for Major Updates
I have been prepping AuraGem Search for some major updates recently. In order to expand the search engine into other protocols, I have added fields to the database and have started refactoring and rewritting parts of the crawler to be able to distinguish URL/protocol schemes.
For at least 2 years now my search engine has had a way of detecting which pages can be used as gemsub feeds and which cannot. So, I have also changed the crawler so that it can go into certain "modes" where it will only follow internal links (non-cross-host links). This will allow me to set a thread to periodically crawl feeds so that I can create an aggregator page. There are about 7822 gemsub feed pages in the index right now.
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My Website now supports Webmentions
My website is just a proxy for my gemini content, because I thought it was the easiest way to bring my gemini content to the web. So *all* content on the website is available on the gemini site. In fact, I consider my site mainly as a gemini/gopher site. But bacardi55's article inspired me to do the same he did although he doesn't publish his webmentions and looks at them from a different angle.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.