Links 10/03/2024: Getting Closer to Fentanylware (TikTok) Ban or Sale
Contents
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Leftovers
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Nicolas Magand ☛ On quality software
Shitty software is everywhere. And by “shitty” software, I mean software that is either not well-suited for a task, poorly implemented (meaning CPU-intensive for no reason), and/or simply not well-designed.
As someone who really enjoys quality software and spends way too much time searching for a slightly better solution for each use case, this apparent lack of taste and bon goût from the general public kinda annoys me. It’s not like software is something we only use every other day: software is ubiquitous.
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Anil Dash ☛ Make better documents. - Anil Dash
The most common, and most serious, problem people have in creating documents is that they don't consider who they're speaking to and what they're trying to accomplish. This can manifest in many ways, but most often the result is an end result that is technically not wrong (things like grammar and spelling may be correct, or the facts and figures may be accurate) but that is completely ineffective in achieving its goals. Ask yourself a few questions: [...]
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Adriaan Roselli ☛ Check-All / Expand-All Controls
Controls that can operate other controls in bulk are not new. One common example is a single checkbox that allows you to check or uncheck a group of checkboxes. Another example is a single button that lets you expand or collapse a set of disclosure widgets. When the user operates one from the set, the bulk control then reflects that.
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Futurism ☛ Doctors Say Trump Is Displaying Clear Signs of Cognitive Issues
"This is a tale of two brains," he added. "Biden's brain is aging. Trump's brain is dementing."
"In my opinion, Donald Trump is getting worse as his cognitive state continues to degrade," Gartner said. "If Trump were your relative, you’d be thinking about assisted care right now."
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Salon ☛ "He looks lost": Alarm after Trump's "mind blanks out" repeatedly during speech
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” played a supercut of Trump’s slips over the weekend and questioned what was happening with the former president.
"What happened there?” asked host Joe Scarborough. “He gets in the middle of sentences, he is reading teleprompters and his mind still blanks out — Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama for Joe Biden, and it is just so pathetic and sad. They're going, ‘he's doing it on purpose.’ No, he's not doing any of this stuff on purpose. Take the fact his mind blanks out and he looks lost."
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Ruben Schade ☛ A coffee shop Wi-Fi tethering dead zone
One of the coffee shops I love going to around here has this bizarre effect on my electronics. I’ll go to tether from my phone to my laptop, and the connection will never establish. I’m not embellishing for comedic effect (for once), it never connects. It’s like I’m drinking coffee in a Faraday cage.
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Science
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Hindustan Times ☛ Earth Sciences Minister Rijiju upset over delay in supercomputer delivery by French firm
The Earth Sciences Ministry had ordered two supercomputers worth USD 100 million from French firm Eviden, of the Atos Group, last year to better the computing capabilities of its institutions -- the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
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Science Alert ☛ Archaeologists Just Uncovered The Oldest Evidence of Humans in Europe
A spectacular time capsule of the deep past.
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Education
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Stefan Zweifel ☛ Meal Planning in Things 3
A family friend mentioned once, that they do meal planning. Each Monday they sit down and discuss and plan together what they will eat for lunch and dinner the coming week.
When I first heard the story in 2015, I thought that's just something that older folks do (the couple is in their seventies). Only years later I noticed that thinking about "what's for dinner?" occupied too much of my mind each day.
At the start of 2021 I wanted to change that.
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Rlang ☛ Pre Self: what fraction of a journal’s papers are preprinted?
Answering the question of what fraction of a journal’s papers were previously available as a preprint is quite difficult to do. The tricky part is matching preprints (from a number of different servers) with the published output from a journal. The easy matches are those that are directly linked together, the remainder though can be hard to identify since the manuscript may change (authors, title, abstract) between the preprint and the published version.
A strategy by Crossref called Marple, that aims match preprints to published outputs seems like the best effort so far. Their code and data up to Aug 2023 is available. Let’s use this to answer the question!
My code is below, let’s look at the results first.
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Hardware
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Steam Deck OLED sees burn-in after 1,500-hour stress test — reducing brightness recommended to avoid damage
YouTuber Wulff Den was able to achieve burn-in on his Steam Deck OLED after 1,500 hours in a high-brightness stress test.
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Hackaday ☛ Rosie The Robot Runs For Real
On the recent 256th episode of the Hackaday podcast, [Kristina] mentioned her favorite fictional robot was Rosie from The Jetsons. [Robert Zollna] must agree since he built a reimagined Rosie and it even caught the notice of mainstream outlet People magazine.
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Bunnie Huang ☛ IRIS (Infra-Red, in situ) Project Updates
However, Precursor is expensive, because FPGAs are expensive. The device could be much cheaper with a dedicated security chip, but then we have no reason to trust these chips – security chip vendors don’t facilitate any form of user-side inspection, so we can’t tell if we have real or fake security chips in our device.
Kind of defeats the purpose, if you ask me.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Frank Meeuwsen ☛ Blogs for my 17-year-old daughter
“Hey dad…”, she says, as she walks in the room, “here’s the thing… I want to be less on social media. I get stressed, annoyed, it’s just too much. I want to find more on what I really like. On my own terms, not some algorithm. I want to read more blogs. On the topics that interest me.”
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The Independent UK ☛ Scientists warn ‘zombie deer disease’ could spread to humans as cases surge across US
Chronic wasting disease (CWD), which leaves animals drooling, lethargic, stumbling and with a blank stare, has been found in 800 samples of deer, elk and moose across Wyoming.
But experts warned the disease was a “slow-moving disaster” and urged governments to prepare for the possibility of it spreading to humans.
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The North Lines IN ☛ Microplastics in Your Arteries: A Warning Sign for Heart Health?
The study, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, analyzed artery samples collected from 257 patients undergoing carotid artery surgery. Surprisingly, microplastics were detected in the fatty plaques of over half the patients. Follow up over three years revealed those with microplastics had double the rate of heart issues compared to those without plastics. The study also found higher inflammation levels in affected arteries, which is known to elevate heart disease risk.
While the study faced limitations due to its small size, it serves as an alarming warning sign. As plastic pollution continues to spread through our environment and make its way into our bodies, could microplastics be silently threatening heart health? Larger and more rigorous research is still needed to confirm any direct link. However, the ubiquity of microplastics means this potential risk cannot be ignored.
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Wired ☛ This Senator Wants to Know What Meta and TikTok Are Doing About Parent-Run Girl Influencer Accounts
Now, Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan is demanding that tech companies account for the untold thousands of accounts that place girls as risk of exploitation on their platforms, through the actions of adult account-holders.
“These corporations must answer for how they are allowing young women and girls to be exploited on their platforms and what steps they will take in response,” Senator Hassan, who represents New Hampshire, told WIRED. “Young women should be able to express themselves online in safe environments that do not facilitate the monetization of potentially exploitative content.”
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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India Times ☛ WhatsApp to soon tell users when chats are end-to-end encrypted - Times of India [Ed: They NEVER are]
A new online report suggests that WhatsApp is working on a feature to indicate when chats are end-to-end encrypted. As reported by WABetaInfo, the instant messaging app is developing a feature to tell users when the chats are end-to-end encrypted.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ One runaway prison laptop caused 1,200 incarcerated students to lose their devices — jailbroken laptop spurs prison officials to issue a recall of now-unsecured notebooks
The timing of this move is regrettable because these aren't purely leisure devices by any measure. The laptops were taken immediately before the Winter Quarter Finals of community college classes, which is a pretty pivotal deadline to have your most efficient writing and research consumption tool taken from you. These laptops could run outside of a dock. Still, they could reportedly only upload or download information while connected to one, meaning a lot of existing classwork may already be permanently lost.
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The Register UK ☛ Biden's SOTU calls for a ban on AI voice impersonation
The president stated that although he'd signed more than 400 bipartisan bills, he still had more to do, including harnessing "the promise of AI and protect us from its peril. Ban AI voice impersonation and more!"
Biden offered no further detail.
It's unclear if the president was referencing an existing ban on robocalls or new legislation altogether.
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Adriaan Roselli ☛ Jakob Has Jumped the Shark
In time I expect this will happen to me. I will write some opinion piece or guidance that mostly just diminishes the audience I claim to champion, and in so doing lay bare all my own biases.
But this post title is much simpler because it seems Jakob might also be on the fake-AI grift. While trying to stay relevant.
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Defence/Aggression
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JURIST ☛ US House Energy and Commerce Committee approves bill that would force China-based company ByteDance to sell TikTok
A bipartisan bill, titled the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” was approved unanimously by the US House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday, which would make it “unlawful for an entity to distribute, maintain, or update…a foreign adversary controlled application,” naming ByteDance, Ltd., Fentanylware (TikTok) and their subsidiaries as foreign adversaries.
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Digital Music News ☛ As Two Fentanylware (TikTok) Bills Ride a Wave of Bipartisan Support, What Does the Future Hold for the Short-Form App? [Ed: It's not an "app"; that's missing the point]
A pair of bills centering on Fentanylware (TikTok) – one of which would compel the platform’s ByteDance parent to sell or shut down the service in the US – are gaining momentum in Congress, raising significant questions about the short-form app’s future.
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Digital Music News ☛ Instagram Reels Is Paying Off—App Now Beats Fentanylware (TikTok) in New Downloads [Ed: Both very harmful to users]
Instagram has surpassed Fentanylware (TikTok) as the world’s most downloaded app—and its copycat feature Reels is what’s driving those downloads. Here’s the latest. In 2020 Instagram added Reels to its platform as a competitor to TikTok’s short-form video dominance.
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Digital Music News ☛ AIMP Issues Statement on Fentanylware (TikTok) Music Licensing for Independent Publishers [Ed: A potential cultural landgrab]
The Association of Independent Music Publishers issues a statement on the continuing issue of Fentanylware (TikTok) music licensing for independent publishers.
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Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Quietly Expands Subscription Options, Announces ‘Creator Rewards Program’ Rollout [Ed: That's giving China more controls over "influencers" abroad]
TikTok is quietly expanding subscription options for creators and taking its revamped Creator Fund out of beta with a new title. The video-sharing platform just recently revealed the expansions alongside several other announcements.
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Cloudbooklet ☛ TikTok Shutting Down in US? Everything You Need to Know
Discover the latest update Is Fentanylware (TikTok) shutting down in US. Will Congress ban the app? Get the essential insights you need now!
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NYPost ☛ Trump backs Fentanylware (TikTok) as Congress considers bill to ban Chinese-owned social control media app
“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook (Farcebook) and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” Trump, 77, claimed in a Truth Social post.
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US News And World Report ☛ 5 of Her Kids Were Abducted From a Nigerian School. All She Has Left Is Hope and Prayers
Fatigued by the 14-year Islamic insurgency in Nigeria's northeast, the military continues to conduct air raids and special military operations in the region. But the armed gangs continue to grow in numbers and often work with the extremists who are seeking to expand their operations beyond the northeast.
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Bruce Perens ☛ About Amateur Radio “Preppers”
The US has already had the January 6 insurrection. People in that event were treated with total kid gloves: only one was shot, almost every one was allowed to leave safely, and for the most part those who have been prosecuted were arrested long after the fact. They were incredibly over-optimistic, and they lost. Whatever misguided thing they thought they’d achieve on that day, they didn’t achieve, didn’t even get close. They just hurt and killed some poor cops and themselves. In the aftermath, in court, they mostly look inept and so many confess to having been severely misguided.
What protected them is the fact that since the Kent State shootings in 1970, the government has been reluctant to prepare its own forces to respond with violence to an internal situation. But we can’t expect even local governments to make that mistake a second time. A similar altercation today would be responded to with tear gas at the start, automatic weapons later, and the high “ground” would belong to the government and its aircraft.
Does anyone expect the fight will be as nice next time? Especially in a fall-of-government situation? Nobody would be pulling punches.
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Omicron Limited ☛ 'Politicians in robes': How a sharp right turn imperiled trust in the Supreme Court
But that privileged status is no more. New research led by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania finds that the court's "special status has evaporated" and that the court's dramatic shift to the right, capped by the 2022 ruling in "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health," has upended that favored relationship and polarized the public's view of the court along partisan lines for the first time in decades.
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The Hill ☛ Pence urges Congress to pass bill banning TikTok in US: ‘Enough is enough’
“The era of appeasing the Chinese Communist Party is over,” Pence said in a thread on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Politicians claiming to be ‘tough on China’ while simultaneously supporting TikTok spewing CCP-sanctioned propaganda across the world are wrong. China is poisoning the minds of American children. Enough is enough.
“Congress should pass legislation forcing the sale of TikTok as soon as possible, and President Biden must immediately sign it into law,” Pence continued in the thread.
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Vox ☛ Can Congress actually ban TikTok?
Lawmakers in both parties didn’t take kindly to the impromptu lobbying frenzy. Some characterized it as confirmation of their fears that the Chinese-owned app — which is already banned on government devices — is brainwashing America. The overrun phone lines were merely “making the case” for the bill, US Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X.
Indeed, all 50 members of the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce voted Thursday to advance the legislation, which would require TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest from the app within 165 days or else it will be removed from US app stores.
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Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Ban Bills Score Bipartisan Support Ahead of House Vote
While a number of other pieces of legislation would have also set the stage for the forced sale or outright ban of TikTok, the mentioned act is especially noteworthy given the strong bipartisan support it’s garnering. A unanimous vote saw 50 Energy and Commerce Committee members, from both sides of the aisle, back the bill, which essentially amounts to a ban for ByteDance itself and has now been teed up for a wider House vote next week.
(TikTok encouraged users to contact their representatives about the bill, and Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers reportedly indicated that lawmakers had “received ‘record’ numbers of calls.” The disturbing nature of some of these calls, many seemingly attributable to young non-voters, reportedly compelled certain on-the-fence parties to green-light the act.)
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India Times ☛ TikTok: Biden says he would sign TikTok crackdown, Trump raises concerns
President Joe Biden said on Friday he would sign legislation that gives China's ByteDance about six months to divest the popular TikTok short video app as his rival Trump raised concerns about a ban of the service used by 170 million Americans.
The U.S. House of Representatives plans to vote on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week on the TikTok crackdown bill after a committee on Thursday unanimously approved the measure. The House will vote on the proposal under rules requiring two-thirds of members to vote "yes" to win approval.
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Axios ☛ Why Trump now opposes banning TikTok
Why it matters: Trump spearheaded the original U.S. threat to ban TikTok over national security concerns. Four years later, President Biden and Congress have picked up the mantle — with a bipartisan bill targeting Bytedance set to hit the House floor next week.
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Futurism ☛ Scientist Terrified by How the Climate Is Falling Apart
We're staring down the barrel of an impending climate crisis — and according to University College London geophysical and climate hazards professor Bill McGuire, we should be absolutely terrified of what's still to come.
In an opinion piece for CNN, McGuire argued that "if the fracturing of our once stable climate doesn’t terrify you, then you don’t fully understand it."
That kind of gap in our knowledge could prove fatal, allowing narratives of climate denial to flourish.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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RFERL ☛ Russian Student Gets Jail Term After Naming WiFi Network 'Glory To Ukraine'
A Russian university student received a 10-day jail term after naming his WiFi network "Slava Ukraini" (Glory to Ukraine), according to the Moscow court system website.
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RFERL ☛ Western Defense Chiefs To Hold New Ukraine Meeting In Germany
The 20th meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG) is set for March 19 at the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the U.S. Air Force said on March 9.
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RFERL ☛ German, Polish, And Czech Farmers Protest Ukrainian Imports, EU Agriculture Policy
Farmers from Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic demonstrated on March 9 at the intersection of their countries against EU agricultural policy and imports of cheap produce from Ukraine.
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RFERL ☛ Polish Foreign Minister Says NATO Troops In Ukraine 'Not Unthinkable'
Poland's foreign minister said the presence of NATO forces in Ukraine is "not unthinkable" and that he appreciated the French president for not ruling out that idea.
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RFERL ☛ Russian Military Says Dozens Of Ukrainian Drones Launched Over Russian Territory
Russia’s military said Ukraine launched dozens of drones over western and southern Russia overnight, causing minimal damage and casualties.
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New York Times ☛ ‘It’s a Way of Life’: Women Make Their Mark in the Ukrainian Army
As Ukraine struggles against Russian assaults and its losses mount, there has been a surge of women enlisting, and they are increasingly volunteering for combat roles.
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New York Times ☛ Biden’s Armageddon Moment: When Nuclear Detonation Seemed Possible in Ukraine
For a few weeks in October 2022, the White House was consumed in a crisis whose depths were not publicly acknowledged at the time. It was a glimpse of what seemed like a terrifying new era.
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New York Times ☛ Pope Says Ukraine Should Have the ‘Courage of the White Flag’
His words have raised questions about whether Francis was suggesting that Ukraine surrender, but a Vatican spokesman said the pope meant “cease-fire and negotiation.”
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New York Times ☛ Macron and Scholz Spar Over Policy on Ukraine and Russia
A fraught relationship has recently turned bitter, with insults and barbs threatening European unity at a critical moment.
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New York Times ☛ Russia’s Advance Around Avdiivka Loses Momentum After Quick Gains
Ukraine has committed significant forces to defending the area, and Russian troops are now attacking across open fields with little cover.
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RFERL ☛ Kazakhstan Confirms Two Citizens Killed In Russia In What FSB Calls Antiterror Operation
Kazakhstan on March 9 confirmed that two of its citizens were shot dead in Russia in what the Kremlin said was an antiterrorism operation that prevented an attack against a synagogue in the Moscow area.
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RFERL ☛ Armenia Considering EU Membership, Foreign Minister Says
Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said his nation is considering applying for EU membership, a further sign of Yerevan's attempts to distance itself from traditional ally Russia.
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YLE ☛ Finnish Foreign Ministry warns against public gatherings in Moscow as terror threat looms
Russia says it foiled a possible terror plot in Moscow, but Western embassies have still issued travel warnings over heightened security concerns.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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DJ Bernstein ☛ 2022.08.05: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum cryptography
I asked for the full NISTPQC records, and for "all records of NIST/NSA meetings mentioning the word 'quantum', whether or not NIST views those meetings as part of this project".
NIST has produced zero records in response to this FOIA request. Civil-rights firm Loevy & Loevy has now filed suit on my behalf in federal court, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, to force NIST to comply with the law. Keep checking https://nist.pqcrypto.org/foia/index.html for records produced as a result of this lawsuit.
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Environment
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Chris O'Donnnell ☛ The Last Tourist
[...] As it stands today, only about 15% of the tourism dollars stay in the underdeveloped places westerners are visiting.
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Energy/Transportation
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WhichUK ☛ Rail fares rise by 4.9% in England and Wales – how to save on transport in 2024
Plus, how Londoners can get cheap travel on Fridays
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Lusaka ZM ☛ Zambia : Zambia Wake -Up Party urges Government to import electricity
Zambia Wake-Up Party (ZAWAPA) President Howard Kunda has urged the Government to import electricity in order to mitigate the impact of the power deficit amid the planned prolonged hours of load shedding.
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New Yorker ☛ The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I.
“There’s a fundamental mismatch between this technology and environmental sustainability,” de Vries said. Recently, the world’s most prominent A.I. cheerleader, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, voiced similar concerns, albeit with a different spin. “I think we still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,” Altman said at a public appearance in Davos. He didn’t see how these needs could be met, he went on, “without a breakthrough.” He added, “We need fusion or we need, like, radically cheaper solar plus storage, or something, at massive scale—like, a scale that no one is really planning for.”
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The Register UK ☛ An engine that can magic propellant from thin air – how?
A.T.: Air goes inside an engine and there's an electron gun that emits high energy electrons. Those high energy electrons interact with the air and ionize the particles; it's a chain reaction called ionization. Then they will be excited and emit light that glows. Plasma is created from the charges, the positive ions and negative electrons. Now you have electromagnetic fields, and you have a perpendicular magnetic field. The charged particles get accelerated by the Lorentz force to generate thrust.
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DeSmog ☛ The Uncertain Future of Gas Exports on Louisiana’s Vanishing Coastline
This story originally was published on Gas Outlook and is the second of a two-part long read on LNG expansion in Louisiana and its impacts on the local community. Read the first part here.
(Cameron, Louisiana) — John Allaire spreads an old map across his table, which shows what his property in Cameron, Louisiana looked like in 1982.
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Hackaday ☛ A Vanadium Redux Flow Battery You Can Build
Vanadium flow batteries are an interesting project, with the materials easily obtainable by the DIY hacker. To that effect [Cayrex2] over on YouTube presents their take on a small, self-contained flow battery created with off the shelf parts and a few 3D prints. The video (embedded below) is part 5 of the series, detailing the final construction, charging and discharging processes. The first four parts of the series are part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
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Overpopulation
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Science Alert ☛ Scientists Reveal How to Replenish Earth's Vital Groundwater
It's crucial that we do this.
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Wired ☛ Solar-Powered Farming Is Quickly Depleting the World's Groundwater Supply
The desert state of Rajasthan is the Indian pioneer and has more solar pumps than any other. Over the past decade, the government has given subsidized solar pumps to almost 100,000 farmers. Those pumps now water more than a million acres and have enabled agricultural water use to increase by more than a quarter. But as a result, water tables are falling rapidly. There is little rain to replace the water being pumped to the surface. In places, the underground rocks are now dry down to 400 feet below ground.
That is the effective extraction limit of the pumps, many of which now lie abandoned. To keep up, in what amounts to a race to the bottom of the diminishing reserves, richer farmers have been buying more powerful solar pumps, leaving the others high and dry or forcing them to buy water from their rich neighbors.
Water wipeout looms. And not just in Rajasthan.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong can learn a lot from watching how mainland China’s central and local authorities interact
Two recently published books shed light on the relations between central and local authorities in mainland China, and provide valuable lessons for Hong Kong.
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US Navy Times ☛ Joint VA/DOD medical site launches new health records system today
Several lawmakers have openly questioned whether VA’s $16 billion contract with Oracle Cerner will ever produce a workable system for the department. But McDonough and Oracle officials have insisted the problems can be fixed, given time and focus on the issue.
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Federal News Network ☛ VA, DoD launch new EHR at joint site — a major milestone for each agency’s rollout
The Lovell Federal Health Care Center is DoD’s final go-live site for the new Oracle-Cerner EHR, which it calls MHS Genesis. DoD has now deployed the new EHR at all its sites across the U.S. and internationally.
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Wired ☛ Sam Altman Back on OpenAI's Board After He Is Cleared by Investigation
Altman and three veteran business executives, all women, were named to OpenAI’s board on Friday, OpenAI announced in a blog post. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, a former Sony general counsel; and Fidji Simo, the CEO and chair of grocery delivery company Instacart and a former Facebook executive, are the others joining the board.
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The Atlantic ☛ Why the National Guard Won’t Make the Subways Safer
The subways need more police officers, Bratton said, and Adams had already announced a deployment of an additional 1,000 last month. But an influx of National Guard troops won’t be as effective, he argued. They can’t arrest people, and the items they are looking for in bags—explosive devices and guns, mainly—aren’t the source of most subway crime. The highest-profile incidents have involved small knives or assailants who pushed people onto the subway tracks. “What are the bag checks actually going to accomplish?” he asked. “The deterrence really is not there.”
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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US News And World Report ☛ Who Are the Russian Dissidents Still Serving Time After Alexei Navalny Died Behind Bars?
Putin has gone from tolerating dissent to suppressing anyone who dared challenge him during his 24-year rule. Over the past decade, his government has restricted freedom of speech and assembly, targeted people considered threats to the Kremlin, and restricted access to many independent news outlets.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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RFERL ☛ Iranian Government 'Bears Responsibility' For Amini's Death, Brutal Crackdown, UN Mission Says
The Iranian government "bears responsibility" for the physical violence that led to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in police custody in 2022, and for the brutal crackdown on largely peaceful street protests that followed, a report by a United Nations fact-finding mission says.
The report, issued on March 8 by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, said the mission “has established the existence of evidence of trauma to Ms. Amini’s body, inflicted while in the custody of the morality police."
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The Verge ☛ Activision QA workers form the largest US video game union yet
Around 600 workers in Activision Publishing’s quality assurance department have formed a union. Assisted by the Communications Workers of America, the employees completed their vote with the results certified on Friday, March 8th. With that, Activision Quality Assurance United – CWA becomes the latest union to arise out of Microsoft’s gaming division and the largest video game union in the United States.
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[Repeat] Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama marks 65 years in exile
The Dalai Lama was just 23 when he fled the Tibetan capital Lhasa in fear for his life after Chinese troops crushed an uprising that began on March 10, 1959 — 65 years ago this Sunday.
It took him 13 days to trek across the Himalayas to the Indian border. He has never returned.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Iran's women vow resistance against 'misogynistic' regime
Women from Iran have sent many stories like this about the oppression they face every day under the Islamic Republic's regime, which are published anonymously on Harasswatch website.
Ghawami, who herself has more than once been in the clutches of the Iranian justice system, stays in touch with many Iranian women, despite all the difficulties and dangers.
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Hamilton Nolan ☛ Unionize College Sports And Watch the World Bow Down
There are several factors that make college sports teams an incredibly attractive organizing target. They sit on campuses, which are, as previously mentioned, already hotbeds of union organizing; they are relatively small groups, meaning that they can organize faster; they could wield outsized power if they organized, because they have a huge amount of natural leverage with the schools; and, oh yeah, they are a group of workers who have been getting exploited for generations, because schools and the NCAA make piles of money off of their labor while paying them nothing. Tons of reasons to organize. Athletes could become the ultimate craft unions: Small groups of highly skilled workers who are hard to replace and who can use their irreplaceability to cut themselves into the profits they produce in a major way.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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MacRumors ☛ Here Are All the M3 Macs Still Expected This Year
Earlier this week, Apple announced new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models, the first Mac updates of the year featuring M3 series chips. But there are other Macs in Apple's lineup still to be updated to the latest M3 processors.
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Manuel Moreale ☛ Digital walled gardens
It’s interesting how we’re using the same metaphor—the garden—to describe two completely different things. One is the embodiment of the capitalist mindset applied to the digital ecosystem driven by greed. The other is the digital manifestation of personal expression. Digital gardens are—or at least should be—a welcoming place.
But they should not be a destination. The point of a garden is to walk through it, to enjoy what it has to offer, and to then keep moving while carrying its beauty with you. Ideally, you should come out of that walk enriched, and not enraged.
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Patents
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Trademarks
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EuroNews ☛ Exclusive: Fraud office handling complaints over jobs at European trade mark agency
Two complaints made over past year cover several appointments, alleging irregularities in pre-selection, bias, nepotism and graft.
European anti-fraud office OLAF has received two complaints alleging fraud surrounding recruitment at the EU’s Alicante-based intellectual property office (EUIPO), Euronews can reveal, according to two sources familiar with the complaints and sight of related documents.
The two complaints were made within the last year and relate to several recruitment and selection processes. They allege frequent irregularities in the work of pre-selection committees, with a view to present sole candidates for selection, or to favour specific candidates.
In two of the recruitment processes subject to the complaints, graft involving municipal authorities local to EUIPO’s Alicante premises is alleged. Two allegations of nepotism in relation to recruitment are made.
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Copyrights
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Digital Music News ☛ D4vd Started Making Music to Avoid Copyright Strikes on His Fortnite Videos — He Just Hit 1 Billion Spotify Streams with ‘Romantic Homicide’
An avid Fortnite player started making his own music to avoid copyright monopoly strikes on his gameplay videos. Now one of his songs has reached 1 billion Spotify streams.
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YLE ☛ HSL apologises to teen for using YouTube still in marketing campaign without permission
The capital's transport authority said "human error" was behind the copyright monopoly infringement.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Movie & TV Giants Say French Pirate Site Audiences Are Continuously Shrinking
French anti-piracy group ALPA represents some the world's largest movie and TV show companies and through various organizations, the recording industry and authors' groups. A new ALPA, Mediametria, and NetRatings study suggests positive news for the French entertainment industry. Minus an anomaly during the pandemic, local pirate site audiences continue to fall year-on-year and are currently just half of those reported five years ago.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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