Links 25/04/2024: South Korean Military to Ban iPhone, Armenian Remembrance Day
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Kev Quirk ☛ Building Cool Shit
Could I go away and learn how to code? Sure. But the problem is, I'm poor on time. There just aren't enough hours in the day, so I don't think I'd ever be able to invest the time needed to learn something like that.
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Mark Dominus ☛ The Universe of Discourse: 2024/04/23 archive
The principle of explosion is that in an inconsistent system everything is provable: if you prove both !!P!! and not-!!P!! for any !!P!!, you can then conclude !!Q!! for any !!Q!!:
$$(P \land \lnot P) \to Q.$$
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[Repeat] Tedium ☛ After The Twitter Exodus: Why Post Didn’t Stick Around
It’s always telling when the dude who literally founded your social network doesn’t use it for nearly two months.
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Barry Hess ☛ What Is Good Enough?
When Shawn and I came together to do web work in 2022, we very much had in mind our deficiencies. While Shawn had been creative for all of his adult life, coding up a design was not something he’d done in forever. While I had been around coding for all of my adult life, coding up complicated back ends that are stable and efficient was also not something I had done in forever.
Yet we had many ideas. None of them seemed that technically ground breaking. We figured we could figure it out, at least to some level. We could get it done good enough.
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Andy Bell ☛ An evolution, not a revolution - Piccalilli
As part of this site’s ongoing evolution to becoming a publisher, we’ve given the overall look and feel a little refresh, along with the brand. The chilli pepper — which was a lazy job by me — has gone, the colour palette has been reduced and the link between Piccalilli and Set Studio has been brought to people’s attention.
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Antipope ☛ The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
As the Wall Street Journal said earlier this month (article is paywalled), "... In a presentation earlier this month, the venture-capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on the Nvidia chips used to train advanced AI models last year, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue."
On top of that, the industry is running at a loss on power consumption alone, never mind labour costs (which are quite high: those generative LLMs require extensive human curation of the input data they require for training).
So, we've been here before. Most recently with cryptocurrency/blockchain (which is still going on, albeit much less prominently as governments and police go after the most obvious thieves and con men like Sam Bankman Fried).
But there've been other [Internet]-related bubbles before.
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Chris Ferris ☛ Public Cloud is the most insecure form of infrastructure, except for all the others. - Chris Farris
In the quest for fortification against this common foe, the sagacious Rich Mogull and I found ourselves in accord, spirits united over a virtual ale. Thus, we set forth to pen a treatise, a WhitePaper, if you will, to distill our combined wisdom into a Universal Cloud Threat Model.
This model, a testament to our collective understanding, posits a simple yet profound truth:
"Threat Actors have Objectives against Targets using Attack Vectors which are observed by defenders as Attack Sequences."
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Science
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Science Alert ☛ Over 1,000 New Additions to Our Solar System Were Hiding in Hubble's Archives
Thanks to an international team of citizen scientists, with the help of astronomers from the European Space Agency (ESA) and some machine learning algorithms, a new sample of over one thousand asteroids has been identified in Hubble's archival data.
The methods used represent a new approach for finding objects in decades-old data that could be applied to other datasets as well.
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VOA News ☛ Japan's moon lander still going after 3 lunar nights
SLIM landed the wrong way up with its solar panels initially unable to see the sun, and had to be turned off within hours, but powered on when the sun rose eight days later.
SLIM, which was tasked with testing Japan's pinpoint landing technology and collecting geological data and images, was not designed to survive lunar nights.
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Wired ☛ How NASA Repaired Voyager 1 From 15 Billion Miles Away
There was a breakthrough last month when engineers sent up a novel command to “poke” Voyager 1's FDS to send back a readout of its memory. This readout allowed engineers to pinpoint the location of the problem in the FDS memory. The FDS is responsible for packaging engineering and scientific data for transmission to Earth.
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Education
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New Yorker ☛ A Student Journalist Explains the Protests at Yale
The editor-in-chief and president of the Yale Daily News reports on the arrest of fellow-students on campus this week.
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Daniel Miessler ☛ The Value of Elite Colleges is Relationships with Elite People
Basically it comes down to relationships. Associations. Connections.
If you go to an elite school, it’s because you’re lucky to have great parents with lots of intelligence and lots of resources.
And when you get to an elite school you’re surrounded by lots of other people like that.
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The Hill ☛ Tennessee Legislature passes bill to arm teachers despite fierce opposition
The bill, previously approved by the state Senate, will now go to Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, for his signature. Lee can veto it, sign it or wait 10 days, after which it would become law.
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Brattleboro Reformer, Vermont ☛ Tennessee lawmakers pass bill to allow armed teachers, a year after deadly Nashville shooting
The 68-28 vote in favor of the bill sent it to Republican Gov. Bill Lee for consideration. If he signs it into law, it would be the biggest expansion of gun access in the state since last year's deadly shooting at a private elementary school in Nashville.
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New York Times ☛ Tennessee Passes Bill to Allow Teachers to Carry Concealed Handguns
But many of them believed that restricting access to guns was the solution, and critics of the legislation have argued that bringing more weapons onto school campuses would not improve safety and could even amplify the danger facing students.
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Austin Kleon ☛ No such thing as waste
For years, I wanted to write a book about how much I learned from watching my kids work, but what I’m starting to realize is that what I’ve really learned is how to set up the conditions for creativity to happen. If you can do it for a four-year-old, maybe you can do it for yourself…
And one of the great lessons is: Believe that there is no such thing as waste. Creative work is the residue of time “wasted.” Of materials “wasted.”
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Hardware
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CNX Software ☛ SC730 module from Small Computer Central features the now-discontinued Zilog Z80 CPU
Small Computer Central has released a new module kit, the SC730, for the 80pin-RCBus backplane which features the widely-used 8-bit Zilog Z80 CPU and a memory management unit. The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor created to be compatible with the defective chip maker Intel 8080 microprocessor while offering more advanced features such as built-in DRAM refresh, a better interrupt system, and non-multiplexed buses. The Z80 microprocessor was widely used for various applications between the 70s and the 80s and is still quite popular among retro computing enthusiasts today. Cousins’ SC730 module kit is designed to fit into an 80-pin socket on an RCBus backplane. The module is built to be used with a memory module as part of a complete computer system.
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CNX Software ☛ Ambarella CV75S Hey Hi (AI) SoC brings Vision Language Models (VLM) and Vision Transformer Networks to cameras
Ambarella has been expanding its Hey Hi (AI) SoC portfolio, and the latest addition is the CV75S family of 5nm chips. The company claims this family introduces the most cost- and power-efficient SoC option for running the latest AI-based image processing like vision language models (VLMs) and vision transformer networks in security, robotics, conferencing, and sports cameras. The CV75S family is the first in Ambarella’s lineup to integrate the latest CVflow 3.0 Hey Hi (AI) engine, which results in 3 times the performance compared to the former generation.
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CNX Software ☛ Silicon Labs BG22E, MG22E, FG22E wireless MCUs target energy harvesting, battery-free IoT devices
Silicon Labs xG22E is a family of wireless SoCs consisting of the BG22E, MG22E, and FG22E and designed to operate within an ultra-low power envelope required for battery-free, energy harvesting applications such as electronic shelf labels, Smart Home sensors, remote controls, and so on. Like the just-announced Silicon Labs MG26, BG26, and PG26, the new xG22E family features a Cortex-M33 core clocked up to 76.8MHz.
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Hackaday ☛ Sticky Situation Leads To Legit LEGO Hack
[samsuksiri] frequently uses a laptop and has an external drive to store projects. The drive flops around on the end of its tether and gets in the way, so they repurposed their old iPod pouch and attached it to the laptop lid with double-sided tape. You can guess how that went — the weight of the drive caused the pocket to sag and eventually detach over time.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Reason ☛ New Georgia Law Allows Birthing Centers To Open Without Needing Permission From Nearby Hospitals
Certificate of need laws were supposed to ensure high-quality health care in rural places. Instead, they allowed hospitals to veto potential competitors.
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Latvia ☛ Sand, smoke and salt all find their way to Latvia via the atmosphere
A recent episode in which Saharan dust ride earth's upper atmosphere and descended upon Latvian soil in early April, is not uncommon, and it is not the only natural source of transboundary pollution that can be expected, according to Latvian Radio's 'Known unknown' science show.
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Omicron Limited ☛ Sugar in baby food: Why Nestlé needs to be held to account in Africa
The World Health Organization has called for a ban on added sugar in products for babies and young children under three years of age.
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NYPost ☛ NYC rule will slap sugar warning labels on food, drinks including Starbucks, Dunkin' specialties
The city Health Department’s first-in-the-nation edict will mean labels warning on food and drinks with more than 50 grams of added sugar, including frozen coffee drinks from places like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, fountain sodas and even hot chocolate.
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Patrick Breyer ☛ Pirates call for a halt to plans for the EU health data space
“We Pirates support the idea of an EU health data space, but not at the price of sacrificing patient control and medical confidentiality in favour of government, big pharma and big tech data access. The EU’s health data space can benefit cross-border treatments and medical progress – but these advantages could have been had by relying on patient consent and full anonymisation, which the final agreement fails to ensure. The agreed design of the regulation is against the clear will of the people. We Pirates stand up for patient rights and reject this sell-out of their health data. Information about our physical and mental health is extremely sensitive and reveals our addictions, mental disorders, abortions, sexually transmitted diseases and reproductive disorders. If we cannot rely on such information being treated confidentially by our doctors, we may no longer seek treatment, and the risk of suicide by some patients may increase.
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Brandon ☛ Maybe It Does Pay Off
Part of me wondered if philosophy was truly good for me. I actually journaled out my experiences with both philosophy and religion and came to the conclusion that I always end up a bit too deep. I contemplated swearing off any serious contemplation going forward and just trying to live a mundane, distracted life since maybe a pursuit of peace is not good for me. Maybe I just can't handle such a concept.
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Omicron Limited ☛ High air pollution in Denmark may impact children's academic performance
You probably don't think about it, but in most parts of the country the air we breathe is anything but clean.
In most parts of Denmark air pollution is double the recommended WHO level, with the highest levels found in heavily trafficked cities and southern Denmark, which is affected by polluted air blowing in from the south.
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Geoff Pain vs. The Wellness Company and RFK Jr.: I do so love a good crank fight!
If there’s one thing that I enjoy immensely in this world, it’s a good crank fight. The surprising thing to most people is how seldom one crank conspiracy theorist will turn on another, given how often the conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, quackery, and misinformation peddled by different cranks is mutually contradictory or even mutually exclusive. These mutual incompatibilities seldom trouble cranks, because, according to the principle of syncretism, cranks like antivaxxers (to pick one example) don’t really have a problem with all the mutually inconsistent “theories” of how vaccines cause autism and all the other health issues for which they blame vaccines. As long as the “truth” that vaccines are bad is at the core of these “theories,” antivaxxers accept them, no matter how mutually contradictory they are. For antivaxxers, the “truth” has already been spelled out. So it is that the various antivax factions with different false ideas of how vaccines harm people exist in relative peace, at least until they do not. One example came across my feed the other day, that of Geoff Pain, who on his Substack proclaims When the Cat’s away, the Mice will play! Children’s Health Defense California Hijacked by Big Pharma.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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The Street ☛ Spotify CEO is shocked by negative impact of recent layoffs
Spotify (SPOT) CEO Daniel Ek has just revealed that he was surprised by the consequences of the company’s layoffs in December. During a recent earnings call discussing Spotify’s first-quarter earnings for 2024, Ek claimed that the decision to lay off 17% of the company’s workforce negatively affected day-to-day operations more than expected.
“Another significant challenge was the impact of our December workforce reduction,” said Ek during the call. “Although there's no question that it was the right strategic decision, it did disrupt our day-to-day operations more than we anticipate. It took us some time to find our footing, but more than four months into this transition, I think we're back on track.”
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Daily Dot ☛ ‘Let’s talk raises. Let’s talk more bonuses’: Tech company’s all-hands meeting goes great. Then 85% of staffers get laid off
A tech worker reports being part of a mass layoff at the company she worked for—after they were all told in a call that things were going great and that they could expect raises and bonuses soon.
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Gaming Industry Battles Layoffs – Content Drought Looms
From Sega to Microsoft, industry giants are reducing their workforces at an alarming rate, raising concerns about the future continuity of game content.
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Public Knowledge ☛ Public Knowledge Joins More Than 80 Groups Urging Congress To Support NIST Funding Request for Responsible Hey Hi (AI) Innovation
The joint advocacy effort calls for the establishment of an effective Hey Hi (AI) governance framework through NIST.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: “Humans in the loop” must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed
Eventually, the industry will have to uncover some mix of applications that will cover its operating costs, if only to keep the lights on in the face of investor disillusionment (this isn't optional – investor disillusionment is an inevitable part of every bubble).
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New York Times ☛ In Ukraine, New American Technology Won the Day. Until It Was Overwhelmed.
So far the results are mixed: Generals and commanders have a new way to put a full picture of Russia’s movements and communications into one big, user-friendly picture, employing algorithms to predict where troops are moving and where attacks might happen.
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Matthew J Ernisse ☛ Moving to Panix, Goodbye DigitalOcean
Broadly speaking, DigitalOcean has been good to me over the years. They seem reasonably priced compared to AWS and Azure and they are not Amazon, Microsoft, or Google so they have that going for them. If you are looking for a cloud provider as opposed to a VPS host you could do worse, but if you just need a VPS give Panix a look — I had some whacky networking issues yesterday while setting up the DNS server and their staff were extremely responsive, something I suspect I wouldn't get if I needed the help from a big provider like DO.
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Jim Nielsen ☛ The Big Sur-ification of macOS Icons
That always felt like a bit of a shame when compared to the alternative: take an opportunity to imagine a new expression of your brand/logo/icon in the context and constraints of macOS Big Sur’s new icon template (i.e. the squircle).
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Ruben Schade ☛ Joseph Weizenbaum on AI psychotherapy
Also reminds me of that IBM slide from 1979:
"A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ Six billion docker pulls
We provide an official curl container.
Why would you use curl in a container? We actually don’t ask, we just provide the image, but I can think of a few reasons…
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MIT Technology Review ☛ Almost every Chinese keyboard app has a security flaw that reveals what users type
These apps help users type Chinese characters more efficiently and are ubiquitous on devices used by Chinese people. The four most popular apps—built by major internet companies like Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek—basically account for all the typing methods that Chinese people use. Researchers also looked into the keyboard apps that come preinstalled on Android phones sold in China.
What they discovered was shocking. Almost every third-party app and every Android phone with preinstalled keyboards failed to protect users by properly encrypting the content they typed. A smartphone made by Huawei was the only device where no such security vulnerability was found.
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Wired ☛ ShotSpotter Keeps Listening for Gunfire After Contracts Expire
But ending the contract may not be enough to remove the company’s more than 2,500 sensors from neighborhoods on the city’s South and West Sides, where they’re disproportionately located. Internal emails reviewed by South Side Weekly and WIRED suggest that ShotSpotter keeps its sensors online and, in some instances, provides gunshot-detection alerts to police departments in cities where its contracts have expired or been canceled. The emails raise new questions about whether the more than 2,500 sensors in Chicago will be turned off and removed, regardless of Johnson’s decision.
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404 Media ☛ Nurses Protest 'Deeply Troubling' Use of AI in Hospitals
“It is deeply troubling to see Kaiser promote itself as a leader in AI in healthcare, when we know their use of these technologies comes at the expense of patient care, all in service of boosting profits,” Michelle Gutierrez Vo, a co-president of the California Nurses Association (CNA), said in a statement at the time. “We demand that workers and unions be involved at every step of the development of data-driven technologies and be empowered to decide whether and how AI is deployed in the workplace.”
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The Register UK ☛ Apple releases OpenELM, a slightly more accurate LLM
It's not by much – compared to OLMo, which debuted in February, OpenELM is 2.36 percent more accurate while using 2x fewer pretraining tokens. But it's perhaps enough to remind people that Apple is no longer content to be the wallflower at the industry AI rave.
Apple's claim to openness comes from its decision to release not just the model, but its training and evaluation framework.
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arXiv ☛ [2404.14619v1] OpenELM: An Efficient Language Model Family with Open-source Training and Inference Framework
The reproducibility and transparency of large language models are crucial for advancing open research, ensuring the trustworthiness of results, and enabling investigations into data and model biases, as well as potential risks. To this end, we release OpenELM, a state-of-the-art open language model. OpenELM uses a layer-wise scaling strategy to efficiently allocate parameters within each layer of the transformer model, leading to enhanced accuracy. [...]
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Silicon Angle ☛ Apple researchers open-source OpenELM language model series
Apple’s OpenELM series comprises four models with varying capabilities. The smallest model features 270 million parameters, while the most advanced packs about 1.1 billion. Apple trained the four neural networks on a dataset with about 1.8 trillion tokens, units of data that each contain a few characters.
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Hugging Face, Inc ☛ apple/OpenELM · Hugging Face
We introduce OpenELM, a family of Open-source Efficient Language Models. OpenELM uses a layer-wise scaling strategy to efficiently allocate parameters within each layer of the transformer model, leading to enhanced accuracy. We pretrained OpenELM models using the CoreNet library. We release both pretrained and instruction tuned models with 270M, 450M, 1.1B and 3B parameters.
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Hugging Face, Inc ☛ Paper page - OpenELM: An Efficient Language Model Family with Open-source Training and Inference Framework
[...] Our source code along with pre-trained model weights and training recipes is available at [...]
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Licensing / Legal
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The Register UK ☛ Euro cloud group blasts Broadcom over VMware licensing
Euro cloud trade body CISPE has hit back at concessions offered by Broadcom over VMware licensing, saying these do not address key issues that led it to lobby the European Commission into investigating.
CISPE, or Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe, claimed that Broadcom is trying to "obfuscate the main issues in this dispute" by framing its licensing changes as pro-competition and pro-innovation, and ignoring concerns about price hikes and tying products together.
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Minnesota sues Fridley used car dealership for misrepresenting vehicles, other fraudulent practices
The dealership, Midwest Car Search, and its owner, Scott Spiczka, were named in the lawsuit, which seeks to provide restitution for customers and to stop the alleged illegal business practices of the dealership.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Democratic operative behind Biden Hey Hi (AI) robocall says lawsuit won’t ‘get anywhere’
Steve Kramer tells CyberScoop he hasn’t seen the lawsuit filed against him over the New Hampshire primary robocall, but it won’t be successful.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Patrick Breyer ☛ Pirates: EU cash cap and ban on anonymous hosted crypto wallets results in financial paternalism
Instead, we need to think about ways we can bring the best attributes of cash into our digital future. We have a right to pay and donate online without our personal transactions being recorded. If the EU believes it can regulate virtual currencies at a regional level, it hasn’t understood the global nature of the Internet.”
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EDRI ☛ Modernised ePrivacy legislation must protect fundamental rights
In January 2017, the European Commission proposed an update to the 2002 ePrivacy Directive, the ePrivacy Regulation, aimed at establishing new rules governing the confidentiality of electronic communications and the use of cookies and other online tracking technologies. Seven years later, EU member states and corporations have successfully blocked this critical reform, despite the desires of civil society and individuals who openly advocate for enhanced privacy and security in online communications.
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The Register UK ☛ Google pushes third-party cookie phase-out back to 2025
Google's plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome is being postponed to 2025 amid wrangling with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).
The US ad search and cloud giant noted the challenges in "reconciling divergent feedback" over its plans and the need to ensure the CMA has time to "review all evidence."
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The Register UK ☛ Australian authorites call for Big Tech help with decryption
The two bosses yesterday appeared together at Australia’s National Press Club.
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The Hill ☛ Grindr sold HIV status of “potentially thousands” of users to advertisers, lawsuit says
In the suit, which was filed in the U.K., the plaintiffs alleged Grindr disclosed user information about their health, sex lives and sexual orientation to advertisers without user knowledge — breaching data protection laws.
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Kansas Reflector ☛ Kansas school district deployed spyware. Teen journalists pushed back, but what about the others?
You know, the ones who don’t take journalism classes. What about all the students who still use devices running surveillance software from a company called Gaggle? As Smith reported, the company uses an artificial intelligence program to scan material on students’ school iPads and linked Google accounts. If the AI flags a message or image of concern, the material is then reviewed by a human — Smith found job listings for Gaggle reviewers starting at $10 an hour.
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[Repeat] New York Times ☛ How G.M. Tricked Millions of Drivers Into Being Spied On (Including Me)
Automakers have been selling data about the driving behavior of millions of people to the insurance industry. In the case of General Motors, affected drivers weren’t informed, and the tracking led insurance companies to charge some of them more for premiums. I’m the reporter who broke the story. I recently discovered that I’m among the drivers who was spied on.
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Federal Trade Commission ☛ FTC Announces Rule Banning Noncompetes | Federal Trade Commission
“Noncompete clauses keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism, including from the more than 8,500 new startups that would be created a year once noncompetes are banned,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC’s final rule to ban noncompetes will ensure Americans have the freedom to pursue a new job, start a new business, or bring a new idea to market.”
The FTC estimates that the final rule banning noncompetes will lead to new business formation growing by 2.7% per year, resulting in more than 8,500 additional new businesses created each year. The final rule is expected to result in higher earnings for workers, with estimated earnings increasing for the average worker by an additional $524 per year, and it is expected to lower health care costs by up to $194 billion over the next decade. In addition, the final rule is expected to help drive innovation, leading to an estimated average increase of 17,000 to 29,000 more patents each year for the next 10 years under the final rule.
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The Record ☛ FTC commercial surveillance rules could arrive within months, sources say
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is aiming to roll out its long-awaited proposed rules governing commercial surveillance in the next few months, with a focus on ensuring that companies properly handle the data they harvest from the apps, websites and devices that consumers use.
According to two sources familiar with the agency’s plans, the rules will emphasize data security and data minimization, or the idea that companies should only collect the data they need to conduct business with consumers and delete it when business concludes.
Other areas of concentration will include algorithmic accountability — or the concept that companies should face consequences for actions taken based on decisions by algorithms — and the related issue of how to protect consumers’ civil rights from algorithmic errors.
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India Times ☛ Australia spy boss: Australia's spy boss seeks more co-operation from big tech in hunt for extremists
Burgess, the director-general of security for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, will urge tech platforms to give the agency access to user messages, which Australian law allows in limited circumstances on the basis of a warrant.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Spain: Court reopens investigation in Pegasus spying scandal
Spain's High Court on Tuesday ordered the reopening of an investigation into the alleged hacking of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and other Spanish politicians' phones with Pegasus spyware.
The investigation was launched in 2022 when the government said software from the Israeli firm NSO Group was used to spy on ministers, triggering a political crisis in Spain. The probe was shelved last year over "the complete lack of legal cooperation" from Israel.
After receiving new information from French judicial authorities, Judge Jose Luis Calama decided to reopen Spain's investigation.
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Reason ☛ Ford Fischer: Why You Should Surveil the State
The News2Share cofounder is revolutionizing news coverage.
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Confidentiality
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Citizen Lab ☛ Chinese Keyboard App Vulnerabilities Explained - The Citizen Lab
As a result, all Chinese keyboards use some amount of prediction. By default, the prediction capabilities are limited by your phone’s hardware. To overcome this limitation, Chinese keyboards often offer “cloud-based” prediction services which transmit your keystrokes to a server that hosts more powerful prediction models. As many have previously pointed out, this is a massive privacy tradeoff, as “cloud-based” keyboards and input methods can function as vectors for surveillance and essentially behave as keyloggers.
We note that this report is not about how operators of cloud-based keyboards can read users’ keystrokes, which is a phenomenon that has already been extensively studied and documented. This report is primarily concerned with protecting this keystroke data from network eavesdroppers.
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Citizen Lab ☛ The not-so-silent type: Vulnerabilities across keyboard apps reveal keystrokes to network eavesdroppers - The Citizen Lab
We analyzed the security of cloud-based pinyin keyboard apps from nine vendors — Baidu, Honor, Huawei, iFlytek, OPPO, Samsung, Tencent, Vivo, and Xiaomi — and examined their transmission of users’ keystrokes for vulnerabilities. Our analysis revealed critical vulnerabilities in keyboard apps from eight out of the nine vendors in which we could exploit that vulnerability to completely reveal the contents of users’ keystrokes in transit. Most of the vulnerable apps can be exploited by an entirely passive network eavesdropper.
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Defence/Aggression
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Democracy Now ☛ Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister: Deliberate U.S. Policy of “Destroying Cuban Economy” Drives Migration
We speak with Carlos Fernández de Cossío, Cuba’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, about high-level U.S.-Cuban migration talks held last week in Washington. He says U.S. policies that expedite permanent residency for Cubans in the United States play a major role in the movement of people between the two countries, but adds that the main driver of migration is the decadeslong U.S. embargo. “The economic conditions of the people of Cuba push them to migrate, and an important fact in provoking those conditions are U.S. deliberate policies of destroying the Cuban economy and make it unworkable.” Fernández de Cossío also discusses the 2024 election and policy overlap between the Trump and Biden administrations, Cuba’s position on the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza, recent protests inside Cuba over living conditions and more.
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The Hill ☛ TikTok halting reward feature after pressure from EU regulators
TikTok will halt a feature that rewards its app users in France and Spain for watching videos in the wake of scrutiny from European Commission regulators.
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The Register UK ☛ Ads on .gov.uk websites raise eyebrows over privacy
At least 18 public-sector websites in the UK and US send visitor data in some form to various web advertising brokers – including an ad-tech biz in China involved in past privacy controversies, a security firm claims.
Silent Push, which identified the websites, will today argue in a report provided to The Register that this raises concerns about compliance with rules limiting ads on government websites as well as concerns about online privacy.
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The Register UK ☛ US Senate passes law requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok
The bill – formally known as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, or PFACAA as we call it – passed 79 votes to 18 in the Senate on Tuesday US time having earlier been rubber-stamped by the House. The act was bundled into HR 815 – a law that among other things authorizes military funding to support Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
The act defines just one source of foreign adversary-controlled applications – namely, anything produced by ByteDance, TikTok, or related entities – though it also gives US presidents the power to name more.
ByteDance and its TikTok unit earned the designation as it is feared the app could ultimately be used by Beijing to manipulate and snoop on Americans and spread misinformation. Chinese social media, by contrast, is largely closed to outsiders.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ How will legislation banning TikTok affect the music industry?
The Senate bill gives TikTok’s Chinese parent firm ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok, with a possible three-month extension if a sale is imminent. The bill also stops the company from controlling TikTok’s algorithm, its uncannily compelling recommendation engine for new videos. The bill, passed 79-18, was part of a $95-billion package that also provides aid to Ukraine and Israel. The House of Representatives already passed similar legislation last week, citing concerns about data security and foreign influence. President Biden said he will sign it Wednesday.
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CS Monitor ☛ Biden signed the TikTok ban bill. Here’s what comes next.
The 270-day period will end around the inauguration of the next president of the United States, on Jan. 20, 2025, likely leaving the decision on an extra three months either to Mr. Biden, a Democrat, who is seeking reelection, or Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
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New York Times ☛ Biden Signs TikTok Ban Bill Into Law. Here’s What Happens Next.
Congress passed the measure citing national security concerns because of TikTok’s Chinese ties. Both lawmakers and security experts have said there are risks that the Chinese government could lean on ByteDance for access to sensitive data belonging to its 170 million U.S. users or to spread propaganda.
The law would allow TikTok to continue to operate in the United States if ByteDance sold it within 270 days, or about nine months, a time frame that the president could extend to a year.
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Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Ban Bill Signed Into Law -- Let the Legal Battle Begin
While the House had already given the green light to the TikTok ban bill before the weekend passage, the first vote was for an initial iteration that would have afforded ByteDance six months to divest from or shut down the video-sharing app in the States.
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Digital Music News ☛ Where Will You Stand After the TikTok Ban?
The legislation springs from national security concerns regarding Chinese access to American user data and the potential for propaganda dissemination. Teenage TikTokers aren’t sold on the seriousness of the threat, though their votes only have so much impact here — literally.
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Wired ☛ TikTok’s Creator Economy Stares Into the Abyss
The version of TikTok impacted by the legislation is not the same platform that then-president Donald Trump first tried to abolish back in 2020, citing national security concerns about its links to China. TikTok, its user base, and the ecosystem of creators making a living from the platform have grown, transformed, and matured since then. And the potential consequences of the app disappearing have become more significant.
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The Atlantic ☛ Welcome to the TikTok Meltdown
The government’s case against TikTok is vague. Broadly speaking, the concern from lawmakers —offered without definitive proof of any actual malfeasance—is that the Chinese government can use TikTok, an extremely popular broadcast and consumption platform for millions of Americans, to quietly and algorithmically promote propaganda, potentially meddling in our nation’s politics. According to the U.S. State Department, the Chinese government is set on using its influence to “reshape the global information environment” and has long manipulated information, intimidated critics, and used state-run media to try to bolster the Communist Party of China’s reputation abroad. Lawmakers have also cited privacy concerns, suggesting that TikTok could turn American user data over to the CPC—again without definitive proof that this has ever occurred.
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The Verge ☛ TikTok will stop paying people to watch videos every day
TikTok Lite is designed as a lightweight alternative to the main TikTok app for easier use on slow [Internet] connections. It has been available in parts of Asia for years and became available in France and Spain earlier this month. Inside the app is a rewards hub that pays users in “coins” for doing things like logging in, watching ads, and liking videos. Coins can be redeemed for things like Amazon vouchers and PayPal gift cards. But you have to do a whole lot of engaging to make any significant amount of money — an hour of watching videos only earns about 36 euro cents (or 38 cents).
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Deutsche Welle ☛ TikTok meets EU deadline over reward-to-watch feature
TikTok Lite, a slimmed down version of TikTok, launched in France and Spain. It is optimized for slower [Internet] connections and uses less memory.
It also also rewards adult users who spend time on the app with points that can be redeemed for vouchers or gift cards.
The Commission wanted to know how the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform assessed the addictiveness and mental health risks of the rewards scheme, particularly for children, before it was launched.
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The Hill ☛ Senate poised to pass bill that could ban TikTok
The Senate voted 80-19 to limit debate on the package, which includes a provision that would force TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban from U.S. devices and networks.
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The Hill ☛ Biden signed a bill that could ban TikTok. What happens next?
ByteDance will have up to a year to find a buyer, but the process is likely to be marred by Chinese rules dictating the export of technology and a court challenge from TikTok.
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The Kent Stater ☛ Congress just passed a potential TikTok ban. Here’s what happens next
In recent years, China has implemented export controls governing algorithms, a policy that would seem to cover the incredibly successful algorithm that powers TikTok’s recommendation engine.
If the Chinese government doesn’t want to let ByteDance relinquish TikTok’s algorithm, the thinking goes, it could block the sale outright. Alternatively, it may allow TikTok to be sold but without the lucrative algorithm that forms the basis for its popularity.
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Reuters ☛ China acquired recently banned Nvidia chips in Super Micro, Dell servers, tenders show
Specifically, the servers contained some of Nvidia's most advanced chips, according to the previously unreported tenders fulfilled between Nov. 20 and Feb. 28. While the U.S. bars Nvidia and its partners from selling advanced chips to China, including via third parties, the sale and purchase of the chips are not illegal in China. The 11 sellers of the chips were little-known Chinese retailers. Reuters could not determine whether, in fulfilling the orders, they used stockpiles acquired before the U.S. tightened chip-export restrictions in November.
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The Register UK ☛ Nvidia GPUs sneak into sanction-busting Chinese servers
According to the report, 10 groups purchased the Nvidia-powered servers, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Heilongjiang local government's tech investment company, and an aviation research center. There were 11 sellers involved, though none of them are big names in the hardware retail industry.
It's not clear if these servers were already available for sale in China before any relevant export rules came into effect, or if they somehow dodged customs and made their way to the Middle Kingdom after the bans were put in place. Nvidia said that the GPUs in question were available before regulations were put in place, and that their sale wasn't proof that any export laws were broken by it or its partners.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Germany sees spike in Chinese and Russian espionage
The press office of Germany's Federal Prosecutor is a hive of activity these days: "Arrest for suspected secret service agent activity" — read the headline of a press release from April 23, 2024. A press release from the day before had exactly the same headline.
All four suspects — three men and one woman — are alleged to have spied for China.
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VOA News ☛ China’s global lending lures countries into a debt trap
“No country has fallen into debt difficulties because of cooperation with China,” Lin Ming, the agency’s spokesperson said on April 18.
This is false.
At least two countries, Zambia and Sri Lanka have gone into default and declared bankruptcy, mainly due to their inability to pay high interest rates on their debts to China. About a dozen developing countries now owe more than 10% of their GDP to China’s state creditors.
In a dozen countries most indebted to China, paying back the debt is “consuming an ever-greater amount of the tax revenue needed to keep schools open, provide electricity and pay for food and fuel,” The Associated Press reports.
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Associated Press ☛ China's loans pushing world’s poorest countries to brink of collapse
An Associated Press analysis of a dozen countries most indebted to China — including Pakistan, Kenya, Zambia, Laos and Mongolia — found paying back that debt is consuming an ever-greater amount of the tax revenue needed to keep schools open, provide electricity and pay for food and fuel. And it’s draining foreign currency reserves these countries use to pay interest on those loans, leaving some with just months before that money is gone.
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Axios ☛ Trump again tempts his fate on New York gag order
Trump also quoted Fox News host Jesse Watters in a post: "They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump Jury."
• There's no evidence for that claim.
What they're saying: Some legal analysts think Merchan will treat such antics as if Trump had delivered the criticisms himself.
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Kansas Reflector ☛ NY judge spars with Trump lawyers over gag order in criminal trial
Trump has routinely posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, to complain about the case, despite a gag order that prohibits him from making public statements about potential witnesses.
Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for reimbursing his attorney and personal fixer at the time, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. It is the first criminal trial against a former U.S. president.
Trump has posted on social media to criticize Cohen and Daniels, as well as reposting articles and video clips that disparage the case entirely.
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Sightline Media Group ☛ Jury deliberating in Abu Ghraib case; contractor casts blame on Army
The suit alleges that civilian interrogators supplied by CACI to Abu Ghraib contributed to the torture the plaintiffs by conspiring with military police to “soften up” detainees for interrogations.
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Atlantic Council ☛ American Hit Squad in Yemen
Host and Nonresident Senior Fellow Alia Brahimi speaks with BillBC investigative journalist Nawal Al-Maghafi about her film on American mercenaries in Yemen.
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France24 ☛ ‘Ugly speech’ but not a surprise: Modi accused of anti-Muslim rhetoric on campaign trail
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign speech over the weekend calling the country’s Muslims “infiltrators” has sparked an outcry ahead of the second phase of the multiphase vote. But while Irfan Nooruddin from Georgetown University concedes it was incendiary, he notes that it comes as no surprise.
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New York Times ☛ Congress Passed a Bill That Could Ban TikTok. Now Comes the Hard Part.
After President Biden signs the bill to force a sale of the video app or ban it, the legislation will face court challenges, a shortage of qualified buyers and Beijing’s hostility.
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The Straits Times ☛ Modi accused of hate speech by his opponents, analysts say possible shift in polls strategy
Over 17,400 citizens have written to the Election Commission seeking action against Mr Modi.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Alleged Hong Kong bomb plot during 2019 protests could have caused heavy casualties, prosecution says
An alleged bomb plot to murder police officers during the 2019 protests and unrest in Hong Kong could have caused heavy casualties, the prosecution has said in the city’s first trial under an anti-terrorism act.
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JURIST ☛ India’s largest opposition party urges election commission action against Modi’s alleged hate speech
The Indian National Congress (INC), the primary opposition party in India, formally lodged complaints with the Election Commission of India on Monday, denouncing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarks delivered during a recent campaign address.
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The Strategist ☛ Tech industry is the new defence industrial base
Developments in nascent technology areas such as quantum computing, biotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI), are predominately happening in the private sector, where there is a higher concentration of talent, capital and competition.
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ADF ☛ Ethiopia Teeters Amid Ethnic Conflicts
Gunfire echoed between sleek glass buildings in Addis Ababa on April 12. The city’s relative peace was shattered by a shootout between security forces and three members of an Amhara militant group. One of Ethiopia’s many ethnic and regional conflicts had spilled into the capital city, exposing ongoing nationwide security concerns.
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Defence Web ☛ Global terrorism deaths on the increase
Global deaths from terrorism have risen to their highest level since 2017, with 8 352 deaths recorded in 2023, a new report has found.
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The Straits Times ☛ North Korea leader Kim's sister: We will build overwhelming military power
She said a series of US military drills are driving the regional security environment into a dangerous turmoil.
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JURIST ☛ Vietnam public security ministry arrests assistant of National Assembly chairman
Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security on Monday arrested Pham Thai Ha, assistant to the country’s National Assembly chairman.
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RFA ☛ North Korea sends officials to Iran amid suspected military cooperation
The delegation is led by Yun Jong Ho, who has been active in the country’s increasing exchanges with Russia.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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RFERL ☛ Russia Vetoes UN Resolution Calling For Prevention Of Nuclear Arms Race In Space
Russia on April 24 vetoed a UN resolution sponsored by the United States and Japan calling on all nations to prevent a dangerous nuclear arms race in outer space.
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RFERL ☛ Russian Court Orders Seizure Of JPMorgan Chase Funds In VTB Lawsuit
A Russian court has ordered the seizure of funds in JPMorgan Chase bank accounts in Russia, court filings showed on April 24, in a lawsuit filed by state-owned bank VTB as it seeks to regain funds blocked abroad.
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teleSUR ☛ NATO Drills Near Russian Border Increase Risks of Conflict
Russia is keeping a close watch on the Collective West's aggressive actions, Zakharova warned.
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RFERL ☛ Another Former Wagner Fighter Imprisoned For Crime In Russia
A court in Russia's Kirov region sentenced a former fighter with the Wagner mercenary group on April 24 for murdering and raping a woman.
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Latvia ☛ Rīga to host Crimea platform in Fall
Speaker of the Saeima, Daiga Mieriņa, has invited the speakers of the other EU member states to attend the third parliamentary summit of the international Crimea platform, which will take place in Rīga in October.
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Meduza ☛ Russia’s FSB jailed Konstantin Kochanov and promised him treason charges. Then investigators made a crucial paperwork error. — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ ‘Deceptively close’: Fearing mobilization, some Ukrainians are risking a treacherous swim to Romania. Scammers are cashing in. — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russian Orthodox Church head suspends priest who led memorial service for Alexey Navalny — Meduza
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ US Chief Sec. Antony Blinken in China to manage tensions and press Beijing on Russia
By Shaun Tandon US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was due in China on Wednesday as the United States ramps up pressure on its main rival over its support for Russia, while seeking to manage tensions between the two powers.
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LRT ☛ Tighter controls stop Russian grain imports into Lithuania, but transit soars
After tightening controls a month ago, Lithuania has seen grain imports from Russia and Belarus coming almost to a halt, while transit shipments to other EU markets have surged, according to the State Food and Veterinary Service (VMVT).
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Meduza ☛ ‘Nobody would have arrested him for corruption’ Russian deputy defense minister reportedly charged with bribery as cover story for treason investigation — Meduza
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European Commission ☛ Daily News 24 / 04 / 2024
European Commission Daily news Brussels, 24 Apr 2024 Commission disburses additional €1.5 billion in bridge financing to Ukraine
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AntiWar ☛ The North American Peace Movement at an Inflection Point
The North American peace movement is contesting ongoing US wars in Ukraine and Palestine and preparations for war with China. Out of the fog of these wars, a clear anti-imperialist focus is emerging.
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Reason ☛ Building on the Success of Uniting for Ukraine
A new CBS article details the successes of a program enabling Americans to sponsor Ukrainian migrants fleeing the Russian invasion to live and work in the US.
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Atlantic Council ☛ A decentralized power grid can help Ukraine survive Russian bombardment
Russia is attempting to depopulate large parts of Ukraine by bombing the country's power grid. Ukraine's best chance of survival may lie in a more decentralized energy sector, writes Yuri Kubrushko.
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France24 ☛ Biden signs Ukraine military aid bill into law, $1 billion arms shipment imminent
US President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed legislation authorizing $61 billion in military aid for Ukraine, with the Pentagon quickly announcing a new $1 billion package headed for Kyiv, featuring desperately needed air defense and artillery munitions.
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France24 ☛ Russia, Ukraine to exchange displaced children in Qatar-brokered deal
Russia and Ukraine have agreed in a Qatari-brokered deal to exchange almost 50 children displaced by Moscow's invasion, the Kremlin's children's rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova announced in Doha Wednesday.
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France24 ☛ US Senate passes $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan
The Senate has passed $95 billion in war aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, sending the legislation to President Joe Biden after months of delays and contentious debate over how involved the United States should be in foreign wars.
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University of Michigan ☛ U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine gives lecture on war with Russia at 6th annual Vandenberg lecture
About 50 University of Michigan community members gathered in Annenberg Auditorium Tuesday afternoon to hear Bridget Brink, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, speak on the current status of the Russia-Ukraine war. Brink served as the Ambassador to the Slovak Republic from August 2019 until she became the Ambassador of Ukraine in May 2022.
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RFERL ☛ U.S. Confirms It Sent Missiles With 300-Kilometer Range To Ukraine
The U.S. State Department confirmed on April 24 that the United States sent long-range missile systems known as ATACMS to Ukraine for use inside its territory, and the weapons arrived in the country this month.
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RFERL ☛ Kazakh Foreign Minister, U.K. Foreign Secretary Hold Talks In Astana
Kazakh Foreign Minister Murat Nurtileu and visiting British Foreign Secretary David Cameron held talks on April 24 in Astana, focusing on bilateral ties, regional security, cooperation, and ongoing war in Ukraine, Kazakh Foreign Ministry said.
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RFERL ☛ With Conflicts Raging In Ukraine, Middle East, Amnesty Warns Rights Under Threat
Rights watchdog Amnesty International has warned that world order is under threat amid a wave of international rule breaking, deepening global inequality, superpower rivalries, and accelerating climate change.
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RFERL ☛ Biden Signs Ukraine Aid Package, Says Weapons Shipments To Start In Coming Hours
U.S. President Joe Biden has signed a long-delayed military aid package hours after it was passed by the Senate, saying U.S. military aid will begin flowing again to Ukraine in the next few hours.
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RFERL ☛ Russian Anti-War Activist Loses Appeal Against Conviction
A Russian court on April 24 rejected an appeal filed by anti-war activist Svetlana Marina against a "forced labor" sentence she was handed last month on a charge of discrediting the Russian armed forces.
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RFERL ☛ UK's Sunak To Discuss European Security, Ukraine With Scholz In Berlin
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will talk defense and security with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on April 24 when the British leader makes his first trip to Berlin since becoming prime minister 18 months ago.
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RFERL ☛ Ukraine's SBU Hit Oil Facilities in Russia's Smolensk, Says Source
Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) carried out drone strikes early on April 24 that set fire to oil-storage facilities in Russia's Smolensk region, a source familiar with the issue has told RFE/RL.
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YLE ☛ Kremlin spokeswoman: Nato drills in Finland "increase risk of military incidents"
Finland applied to join the Nato alliance in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
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YLE ☛ Wednesday's papers: Ukrainian conscription, Stubbs in Sweden, and wolves in Turku
Ilta-Sanomat went to meet Ukrainians at an assistance depot run by the Ukrainian Association in Finland, hoping to find military age men affected by the country's new conscription law.
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CS Monitor ☛ Russia tried to stay on good terms with Iran and Israel. Then they started fighting.
Iran creates a unique link between the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, where it supplies Russia with arms. That puts the Kremlin in a difficult position in the Middle East.
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New York Times ☛ Biden Signs a $95.3 Billion Aid Package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan
The $95.3 billion measure comes after months of gridlock in Congress that put the centerpiece of President Biden’s foreign policy in jeopardy.
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New York Times ☛ Justices Seemed Split on Emergency Abortion Access
Also, U.S. weapons are headed to Ukraine. Here’s the latest at the end of Wednesday.
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New York Times ☛ Enduring Mayhem: Images From Year 3 of the War in Ukraine
A photographic chronicle of the third year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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New York Times ☛ ‘Kharkiv Is Unbreakable’: A Battered Ukrainian City Carries On
For residents of Ukraine’s second-largest city, daily Russian attacks have escalated fears but have not brought life to a standstill.
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New York Times ☛ Here’s How U.S. Aid to Ukraine Might Help on the Battlefield
Weapons from the support package, considered “a lifeline” for Ukraine’s military, could be arriving on the battlefield within days.
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New York Times ☛ Thursday Briefing: Israel Seems Poised to Invade Rafah
Also, details of the U.S. aid package to Ukraine and Taylor Swift’s new album.
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Environment
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Hakai Magazine ☛ The Waning Reign of the Wetland Architect We Barely Know (Hint: Not a Beaver)
Another possibility is that muskrat habitats are changing in fundamental ways. Not only have many wetlands been lost to or degraded by human activity, but those that remain may be isolated, making it difficult for muskrats to travel between them and establish new homes. The importance of dispersal, as such movements are technically known, is neatly illustrated by research from northern Alberta’s vast Peace-Athabasca Delta, where the density of muskrat houses—the rodents often build mud-and-grass huts, counts of which are used as population proxies—has plummeted by 90 percent since the early 1970s.
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Harvard University ☛ Early warning sign of extinction?
For hundreds of millions of years, the oceans have teemed with single-celled organisms called foraminifera, hard-shelled, microscopic creatures at the bottom of the food chain. The fossil record of these primordial specks offers clues into future changes in global biodiversity, related to our warming climate.
Using a high-resolution global dataset of planktonic foraminifera fossils that’s among the richest biological archives available to science, researchers have found that environmental events leading to mass extinctions are reliably preceded by subtle changes in how a biological community is composed, acting as an early warning signal.
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NPR ☛ South Koreans sue government over climate change, saying it's violating human rights
The plaintiffs argue that by not effectively tackling climate change, their government is violating its citizens' human rights.
While there are other cases in progress elsewhere, this is the first in Asia to have a public hearing and plaintiffs say that the court's verdict, when it comes, is also likely to be the first in Asia.
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Restaurants slow to adopt eco-friendly alternatives as Hong Kong’s ban on single-use plastics takes effect
Hong Kong restaurants have been slow to switch to eco-friendly alternatives following the single-use plastics ban enacted on Monday, with many still using disposables. Single-use plastics including straws and utensils are forbidden under the ban.
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Atlantic Council ☛ The flaws in project-based carbon credit trading and the need for jurisdictional alternatives
This issue brief highlights several significant, and at times unresolvable, problems with the project-based approach to carbon credit trading, the purpose of which is to reduce deforestation and sequester carbon.
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Energy/Transportation
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DeSmog ☛ Big Oil’s Dangerous Radioactive Secret
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DeSmog ☛ UK Accused of ‘Helping Russia’ as Refined Oil Imports From ‘Laundering’ Countries Remain at Record High
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Hakai Magazine ☛ In the Rush to Decarbonize, the Shipping Industry Is Exploring Alternative Fuels
In mid-2023, for example, a new container ship, the US $160-million Laura Maersk, began operating in the Baltic Sea. “It looks like any other container ship,” says Christiansen. But the Laura Maersk has never run on oil. Instead, it’s powered by methanol. There are lots of different ways of producing methanol, and not all are environmentally friendly. However, when sustainably sourced, such as by capturing gas produced at landfill sites or through various processes powered by renewable energy, methanol can be significantly less polluting than fossil fuels. The Laura Maersk is already plying the waters off northern Europe, and more than 200 other ships capable of running on methanol are currently on the order books of shipyards around the world.
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Lewis Dale ☛ New bike(s) day
It’s actually really fun to ride, the gearing is pretty much perfect for my cadence so I’m actually just as quick on it as I was on a road bike.
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MIT Technology Review ☛ What tech learned from Daedalus
The problem with the Daedalus project, and human-powered aircraft of any kind, is the grueling effort to remain aloft, the risk of crashing, and the expense—none of which was lost on Langford. “In itself, our Daedalus project could never answer the question ‘So what?’” he admits.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ High-speed rail to Las Vegas is coming as soon as 2028
The project, whose construction launched on Earth Day, is expected to cut 800 million pounds of carbon pollution a year once completed, Buttigieg said.
Brightline, a private company that operates an intercity rail line connecting Miami and Orlando, Fla., hopes to be the first to run a private high-speed service in the U.S.
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Futurism ☛ California Now Has So Much Solar Power That Electricity Prices Are Going Negative During the Day
The real game changer would be if, in the future, the widespread use of batteries and other forms of storage could save any excess solar power generated during the day — meaning the power from sunny days will be able to last well into the nighttime, instead of forcing fossil fuel power plants to spin back up.
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Politico LLC ☛ Airport security line cutters are target of first-in-the-nation California bill
“The least you can expect when you have to go through the security line at the airport is that you don’t suffer the indignity of somebody pushing you out of the way to let the rich person pass you,” Josh Newman, the Democratic lawmaker who authored the bill, told POLITICO.
His Republican colleague, Janet Nguyen, expressed similar sentiments about the bill.
“I do understand the frustration stated in Senator Newman’s bill,” Nguyen, who sits on the transportation committee, said in an email to POLITICO. “It becomes a haves vs. have nots where those who can afford it jump in front of the rest of us. They even cut in front of TSA Pre-boarding pass travelers who have been screened by the TSA.”
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Arduino ☛ Creating a low-cost EV charging station with Arduino
The high cost of EV (electric vehicle) chargers may lead you to believe that they’re complex systems. But with the exception of Tesla’s Supercharger, that isn’t true. They’re actually quite simple — basically just glorified switches. All of the nitty gritty charging details are the responsibility of the car’s onboard circuitry. With that in mind, EV owners may want to follow Pedro Neves’ guide on building an affordable Arduino-based charging station.
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Democracy Now ☛ Climate Activists Blockade Citigroup HQ in NYC to Demand Banking Giant Stop Funding Fossil Fuels
Hundreds of climate activists gathered at the global headquarters of Citigroup in New York on Wednesday to demand the banking giant stop financing fossil fuel companies. The protests come on the heels of a first-of-its-kind Earth Day hearing where environmental activists from around the world gathered in New York this week to condemn what they call Citigroup’s environmental racism. Citibank is the world’s second-largest funder of coal, oil and gas. “They always say, 'We care about the planet.' … But actions speak louder than words,” says Alice Hu, climate campaigner for New York Communities for Change. “Citibank has poured over $332 billion into fossil fuels since the Paris Agreements were signed in 2015.” We also speak with Roishetta Ozane, a Black environmental leader from Sulphur, Louisiana, who has been leading the fight against the expansion of Citigroup-funded liquified natural gas projects in her community. She says she has seen the health impacts of such projects on her own family. “I’m fighting not only for myself and my community, but for my children. And by fighting for my children, I’m fighting for everyone’s children,” says Ozane.
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Atlantic Council ☛ Navigating dominant narratives and data accuracy: Implications for energy security
Energy market shocks and uncertainties highlight the importance of understanding the interplay between data-driven narratives and market expectations within the energy sector. These narrative wield significant influence over market dynamics, impacting commodity pricing and investment trends.
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Hackaday ☛ Amazon Ends California Drone Deliveries While Expanding To Arizona
When Amazon started its Prime Air drone delivery service in 2022, it had picked College Station (Texas) and Lockeford (California) as its the first areas where the service would be offered. Two years later, Amazon has now announced that it will be expanding to the West Valley of the Phoenix Metro area in Arizona from a new Tolleson center, while casually mentioning buried in the press release that the Lockeford area will no longer be serviced. No reason for this closure was provided, but as a quite experimental service drastic shifts can be expected as Amazon figures out what does and does not work.
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Tesla Lays Off 3300 California Employees Bay Area Hit Hard
Tesla’s massive layoff is about to shake California’s employment structure. As per the warning filing made with California’s employment department, around 3,300 employees are set to be laid off in June.
At the beginning of April, Elon Mask announced a 10% reduction in Tesla’s workforce.
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Wildlife/Nature
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The Revelator ☛ Rock and Roll Botany: An Endangered Plant Named After Legendary Guitarist Jimi Hendrix
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The Conversation ☛ Our laser technique can tell apart elephant and mammoth ivory – here’s how it may disrupt the ivory trade
This is a process that is both time-consuming and requires destroying the ivory.
Now our new study, published in PLOS ONE, presents a major breakthrough – using a well known laser technique to tell mammoth and elephant ivory apart.
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US News And World Report ☛ The First Glow-In-The-Dark Animals May Have Been Ancient Corals Deep in the Ocean
In a new study, scientists report that deep-sea corals that lived 540 million years ago may have been the first animals to glow, far earlier than previously thought.
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WWF ☛ WWF WILDLIVE – Baltic ringed seal
WWF brings you a live cam starring the close relatives of the Saimaa ringed seal. These ringed seals live in the Finnish archipelago in the Baltic Sea, and they are even fewer in numbers than their endangered cousins in lake Saimaa.
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Finance
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WhichUK ☛ Revolut fraud complaints to Ombudsman outstrip all banks
Huge numbers of customers are going to the Financial Ombudsman Service
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Over 1,000 UPMC Employees Have Been Laid Off Due To Layoffs
UPMC, a Pittsburgh-based health care giant, announced Wednesday afternoon layoffs of at least 1,000 employees due to post-pandemic challenges.
Paul Wood, vice president and chief communications officer at UPMC, said the reductions would affect just over 1% of the organization’s more than 100,000 employees.
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WhichUK ☛ Online banking security put to the test – how safe is your bank's website?
Which? investigation tests the resilience of the biggest current account providers' apps and websites
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New York Times ☛ In Silicon Valley, You Can Be Worth Billions and It’s Not Enough
Andreas Bechtolsheim, the first investor in Google, has an estimated $16 billion fortune. He recently settled charges that he engaged in insider trading for a profit of $415,726.
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ServiceNow earnings, Whirlpool job cuts: After-Hours Movers
Appliance maker Whirlpool Corporation's (WHR) stock ticks up on news it will be cutting 1,000 jobs to cut costs and offset weakening demand. Whirpool is set to report earnings on Thursday, April 25.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The American Prospect ☛ My Dinner With Andreessen
And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
I’m taking the liberty of putting it in quotation marks, though I can’t be sure those were his exact words. Marc, if you’re reading, feel free to get in touch and refresh my memory. Maybe he said “quiescent,” or “docile,” or maybe “powerless.” Something, certainly, along those lines.
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Futurism ☛ Three Top Tesla Execs Have Resigned Over the Past Few Weeks
As insiders who spoke to Fortune magazine confirm, Tesla vice president of investor relations, Martin Viecha, announced that he was leaving the company at the end of this week's quarterly earnings call, which came after mass layoffs, a dip in sales, and the recall of the Cybertruck.
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The Atlantic ☛ Tesla Is Not the Next Ford. It’s the Next Con Ed.
Whether Musk can sustain his EV empire is now in doubt. He told investors that Tesla’s primary focus is now on AI and self-driving cars. But even if that pivot fails, the company has positioned itself to be on the edge of another, perhaps more crucial part of the green transition: delivering and storing America’s power. Tesla’s EV chargers are ascendant, if not dominant, as are its huge batteries that store renewable energy for homes and even entire neighborhoods. Profits from Tesla’s energy business were up 140 percent compared with the same period last year, and Musk asserted yesterday that the division will continue to grow “significantly faster than the car business.” The company’s future may not lie in following the footsteps of Ford, then, so much as those of Duke Energy and Con Edison. Tesla, in other words, is transforming into a utility.
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Scoop News Group ☛ GSA taps TTS deputy director to take top Login.gov role next month
Kim has served as the website’s first deputy director since January following a five-year stint at Amazon, where she developed “cutting-edge AI-based technology to scale policy enforcement,” per a GSA email. Kim previously worked across the federal government, serving with the departments of State, Treasury and Defense.
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APNIC ☛ Internet sanctions as a response — diverging actions and mixed effects
In a collaborative effort between researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago, SIDN Labs, Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), the University of Twente, and the University of Amsterdam, we carried out a longitudinal traffic analysis to understand how ISPs in different EU member states implement these sanctions. We found that the degree of blocking varies widely, both between and within individual EU member states. This raises questions about the effectiveness of the EU sanctions. This blog post is a summary of the paper we published last month.
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The Hill ☛ Former DHS disinformation office chief joins nonprofit, calls out GOP lawmakers
Jankowicz joined the American Sunlight Project and sent a letter to congressional leaders who have “done little to improve the health of our information environment” in the years since Russia interfered with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
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Ed Zitron ☛ The Man Who Killed Google Search
This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it.
The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.
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Manuel Moreale ☛ Re: Growth is a mind cancer
Yesterday I stumbled on an interesting article by Ed Zitron titled "The Man Who Killed Google Search" that is closely related to my recent post about the growth mentality.
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Marty Day ☛ blast-o-rama.
A blistering read from Ed Zitron breaking down the managerial changes and overall focus on profits before people which has – perhaps irreparably – ruined Google search. [...] I feel like the term “enshittification” has become an overused shorthand for “thing I don’t like”, but this is the term at its purist. A focus on Fuck Yours, Got Mine on a massive level, which trickles down across the web as a whole.
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American Oversight ☛ American Oversight Settles Lawsuit Over Records from Secret Wisconsin Impeachment Panel
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The Straits Times ☛ Solomon Islands' Sogavare says he runs security amid tense wait for new government
Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manesseh Sogavare said he narrowly won his seat and still exercises power over security in the Pacific Islands nation, as he vies with opposition parties to form government after an election delivered no clear winner.
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The Straits Times ☛ South Korean military set to ban iPhones over ‘security’ concerns
The decision to ban iPhones in the military came from joint meetings held by the headquarters of the Army, Navy and Air Force.
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RFERL ☛ British Foreign Secretary Holds Talks With Uzbek Counterpart In Tashkent
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron held talks with his Uzbek counterpart Baxtiyor Saidov in Tashkent on April 23, focusing on regional security, education, climate change, bilateral trade, and the development of business relations.
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Marcy Wheeler ☛ Trump’s White House Didn’t Archive Ex-Twitter DMs
Documents from Trump's motion to compel in Florida remind of newly significant details of his White House's failure to preserve tweets covered by the Presidential Records Act.
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JURIST ☛ Brazil supreme court justice sets deadline for social control media platform X to explain alleged non-compliance with previous rulings
Alexandre de Moraes, a justice of the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF), issued a five-day deadline for the social control media platform X (formerly Twitter) to explain its purported failure to fully comply with earlier court orders on Monday.
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Marcy Wheeler ☛ David Weiss Treats IRS Agents Who Accused Him of Misconduct as “Whistleblowers”
In a bid to dismiss Hunter Biden's Ninth Circuit appeal of Judge Scarsi's denial of his motions to dismiss, David Weiss called the IRS agent media campaign "whistleblower disclosures."
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Meduza ☛ ‘A distortion of history’: Russian political actors and historians on Team Navalny’s new film about Yeltsin’s role in Putin’s rise to power — Meduza
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The Hill ☛ NPR chief knocks ‘bad faith distortion’ of social media posts
Conservatives used Uri Berliner’s essay to highlight, in some cases, years old social media posts from Maher showing her praising Democrats and promoting progressive ideas.
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VOA News ☛ Kremlin deploys propaganda outlets to whitewash Wagner’s footprints in the Sahel
To expand its influence in the African region, Russia has launched a complex of diplomatic, economic, and military initiatives, from hosting annual African forums under President Vladimir Putin’s patronage to funding a massive propaganda campaign to whitewash Russia’s image from the stain of violence and corruption left by Wagner troops.
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Breach Media ☛ Pierre Poilievre is parroting ‘crooked Big Pharma’ talking points
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre appears to have a new speech writer: the pharmaceutical lobby.
As the corporate lobby mounts an attack on the NDP and Liberal government’s new pharmacare program, Poilievre has been cribbing from their deceitful talking points.
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New York Times ☛ Nina Jankowicz Forms New Group to Defend Disinformation Research
Now she has re-entered the fray with a new nonprofit organization intended to fight what she and others have described as a coordinated campaign by conservatives and others to undermine researchers, like her, who study the sources of disinformation.
Already a lightning rod for critics of her work on the subject, Ms. Jankowicz inaugurated the organization with a letter accusing three Republican committee chairmen in the House of Representatives of abusing their subpoena powers to silence think tanks and universities that expose the sources of disinformation.
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The Record ☛ France seeks new EU sanctions to target Russian disinformation
The draft of the proposal, as seen by journalists at Bloomberg, would allow the European Union to impose tougher restrictions on individuals and entities involved in Russia-backed influence operations worldwide.
“Destabilizing activities executed by Russia-related actors have increased everywhere in Europe as well – as the Russian regime has taken actions to undermine democracy, stability and the rule of law through a variety of hybrid instruments,” the draft of the proposal said.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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RFA ☛ Hong Kong schools ban books, warn teachers not to get 'political'
The ruling Chinese Communist Party is moving to step up its "patriotic education" program in schools, universities and religious institutions across the country, including in Hong Kong, where the program is generally termed "national security education."
Since the start of the current academic year, teachers in more than 1,000 Hong Kong schools have been required to report "potential violations" of the city's security laws to the authorities.
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RFERL ☛ Sister Of Iranian Teen Killed In Anti-Government Protests Released From Prison
The sister of a 16-year-old killed in 2022 in anti-government protests has been freed from an Iranian jail. [...]
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RFA ☛ Activists interrupt Chinese ambassador's Harvard speech
‘It's shocking how many professors kowtow to the Chinese Communist Party and sing its praises,’ said one protester.
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CS Monitor ☛ As graduation approaches, colleges struggle to balance free speech and safety
Protests over the Israel-Hamas war are shadowing U.S. colleges’ and universities’ preparations for graduation ceremonies. The institutions face the responsibility to keep students safe while still honoring their free speech rights.
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New York Times ☛ Student Editorial Boards Rebuke College Officials for Protest Decisions
Around the nation, editorial boards at college newspapers have defended free speech and pro-Palestinian protesters in recent weeks.
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New York Times ☛ Myanmar’s Young Rebels Find the Bright Sides to an Internet Blackout
Even through the Myanmar army’s communications blackout, residents of a conflict zone find moments of grace, and occasional connectivity, away from the battlefield.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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FAIR ☛ Right-Wing Critiques Miscast NPR, NYT as Lefty Bastions
“I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” reads the headline of a recent essay in the Free Press (4/9/24), a Substack-hosted outlet published by former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss. The author, senior NPR business editor Uri Berliner, argued that the broadcaster’s “progressive worldview” was compromising its journalism and alienating conservatives, including Berliner himself—who subsequently resigned.
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New York Times ☛ Inside the Crisis at NPR
“We are slipping in our ability to impact America, not just in broadcast, but also in the growing world of on-demand audio,” Daphne Kwon, NPR’s chief financial officer, told the group, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.
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New York Times ☛ Australian Journalist Says She Had No Choice But to Leave India
Avani Dias, the South Asia correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, said on social media that Indian officials told her last month that her application for a resident journalist visa extension would not be approved because a television segment she had produced on accusations that India was responsible for the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada had “crossed the line.”
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CPJ ☛ Australian journalist Avani Dias leaves India over visa delay, censorship
After receiving a demand from India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, YouTube blocked access in India to Dias’ report, as well as an ABC news segment about Australian national security agents meeting with Sikh activists in Australia regarding Nijjar’s death, ABC said.
“The case of ABC journalist Avani Dias is not an isolated incident. Foreign correspondents in India have faced increasing pressure and harassment from authorities, particularly when reporting on topics deemed unfavorable to the administration. Such actions not only infringe upon the rights of journalists but also deprive the public of access to important information and diverse perspectives,” said Kunāl Majumder, CPJ’s India representative.
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USMC ☛ The man who made Belleau Wood — and the Marine Corps — immortal
The news censor, however, incorrectly believing Gibbons to be dead, “concluded that it would be a crime to cut the last dispatch of Gibbons’s life, so he decided to let it go through as written,” according to an account in the Washington Post.
When he sent his final dispatch, Gibbons had expected the word “Marines” to be omitted. Up until that point no correspondent was permitted to name which troops were on which fronts due to wartime censorship.
“Because the censor let Gibbons’s dispatch go through, all correspondents were given the same privilege,” the Post continued.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Scoop News Group ☛ DOJ seeks public input on AI use in criminal justice system
In a document posted for public inspection on the Federal Register Wednesday, the research, development and evaluation arm of the department said it’s seeking feedback to “inform a report that addresses the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the criminal justice system.” Those comments are due 30 days after the document is published.
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USA ☛ [OJP (NIJ) Docket No. 1824] Request for Input from the Public on Section 7.1(b) of Executive Order 14110, “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” [PDF]
SUMMARY: The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) seeks written input from the public relevant to section 7.1(b) of Executive Order 14110, “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” NIJ is seeking information that could inform a report that addresses the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the criminal justice system.
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USA ☛ Statement by President Joe Biden on Armenian Remembrance Day
The campaign of cruelty began on April 24, 1915, when Ottoman authorities arrested Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. In the days, months, and years that followed, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths—leaving families forever broken, and generations forever changed.
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US Senate ☛ Chair Cardin Statement on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day
“Every April, we remember the one and a half million Armenian lives taken by the Ottoman Empire’s targeted campaign of extermination against Armenians, which began in Constantinople on April 24, 1915. I commend President Biden for becoming the first U.S. President to recognize this as a genocide, and strongly encourage him and my fellow lawmakers to continue rejecting the ongoing persecution of Armenians. [...]“
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Canada ☛ Statement by the Prime Minister on Armenian Genocide Memorial Day
“In Canada, April marks Genocide, Remembrance, Condemnation and Prevention Month, which reminds us of the consequences of indifference. We must remember and honour the memories of the victims lost to the Armenian Genocide. We must stand up against hate and stand for diversity, inclusion, and human rights – it is our shared, collective responsibility.
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Armenian Weekly ☛ April 24, 2024, a day of remembrance and resolve
During World War I (1914-1918), the Ottoman Empire, ruled by the Young Turks (Ittihad Ve Teraki), suffered great territorial losses. Defeated on every front, Turkey was forced to surrender to the victors. On the Armenian front, Catholicos of All Armenians Kevork V (1911-1929) appointed an Armenian National Delegation under the leadership of Boghos Noubar Pasha to appear before the European governments and see that Armenian reforms in Turkey were enacted. The Turks were infuriated that the Armenian Question was being brought up again.
World War I provided the best pretext for Turkey to “solve” the Armenian Question, eradicating international opposition or any interference in its internal affairs. As it was, the Turks had been considering ridding themselves of the Armenian Question for many years and had secretly prepared a special plan to eliminate the Armenian people. In April 1915, they reviewed that plan once more, during which they listed the reasons why the Armenians had to be eliminated. Among others, they listed the following: [...]
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RTL ☛ Historic step: Starbucks set for talks with unionized US stores
The goal is to establish a "foundational framework" on key issues such as wages, scheduling policy and access to health care, the union said.
The talks "mark a major step forward towards establishing strong contracts for more than 10,000 and growing Starbucks Workers United partners who have won their union, and with it, a seat at the table to build a stronger Starbucks," the union said.
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NPR ☛ U.S. bans noncompete agreements for nearly all jobs
The ban, which will take effect later this year, carves out an exception for existing noncompetes that companies have given their senior executives, on the grounds that these agreements are more likely to have been negotiated. The FTC says employers should not enforce other existing noncompete agreements.
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Axios ☛ The FTC votes to ban employment noncompetes
The Federal Trade Commission voted 3-2 on Tuesday to ban noncompete agreements, which prevent workers from taking positions with competitors for a period of time after they leave a job.
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Techdirt ☛ Top Lawyer In Texas Doesn’t Understand Court Rulings, Celebrates Obvious SCOTUS Loss As A Win
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is an utter asshat. Not only is he the chosen defender of litigation over unconstitutional laws passed by an equally idiotic legislature, but he’s also the man behind plenty of Texas government action meant to make things worse for plenty of Texas residents.
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The Straits Times ☛ Musk targets Australian senator, gun laws in deepening dispute over X stabbing content
SYDNEY - Elon Musk said an Australian senator should be jailed and suggested the country's gun laws were meant to stop resistance against its "fascist government", escalating his battle over a court order to remove video posts of a bishop being stabbed.
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FTC puts stop to non-compete clauses | PC Games Insider
The United States' Federal Trade Commission is banning non-compete clauses.
In its ruling, the organisation pointed out that these do nothing by stymy people's creativity. The FTC also argued that trade secret laws and non-disclosure agreements did enough to protect companies worried about knowledge leaving the building with workers after they left.
The organisation's research shows that more than 95 per cent of workers under non-compete clauses were also subject to NDAs.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Internet Society ☛ The Importance of Strong Technical Communities and Partnerships in Africa
The recent outage in West Africa caused by submarine cable damage could have been a lot worse. A strong community ensured it wasn't.
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Scoop News Group ☛ FCC wants rules for ‘most important part of the internet you’ve probably never heard of’
“The Commission could consider requiring service providers to deploy solutions to address BGP vulnerabilities, such as BGP hijacks,” the FCC wrote in the proposed April rule. “The agency could also consider establishing cybersecurity requirements for BGP, including ‘security features to ensure trust in the information that it is used to exchange,’ which could prevent bad actors from ‘deliberately falsify[ing] BGP reachability information to redirect traffic to itself or through a specific third-party network, and prevent that traffic from reaching its intended recipient.’”
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APNIC ☛ IPv6 prefix lengths
This leads to the question: What lengths are commonly used by network operators to assign site prefixes to each customer?
Unless you are located within the network and can observe the length of the IPv6 address prefix that your provider has assigned to you, this is not an easy question to answer. But suppose we can assemble a collection of IPv6 addresses used in the public Internet. In that case, we can examine the address to make a reasonable estimate of the site prefix length being used.
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The Verge ☛ The FCC is set to bring back net neutrality
The commission is expected to reclassify [Internet] service providers (ISPs) — e.g., broadband companies like AT&T and Comcast — as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. That classification would open ISPs up to greater oversight by the FCC. The vote is widely expected to go in favor of reinstating net neutrality since FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, controls the agency’s agenda. Rosenworcel moved forward with the measure after a fifth commissioner was sworn in, restoring a Democratic majority on the panel. (Disclosure: Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.)
Net neutrality proponents say that oversight can help ensure fair access to an open [Internet] by upholding principles like no blocking or throttling of [Internet] traffic. Opponents, including industry players, fear it could halt innovation and subject ISPs to onerous price regulations.
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SANS ☛ It appears that the number of industrial devices accessible from the [Internet] has risen by 30 thousand over the past three years
It has been nearly three years since we last looked at the number of industrial devices (or, rather, devices that communicate with common OT protocols, such as Modbus/TCP, BACnet, etc.) that are accessible from the [Internet] [1]. Back in May of 2021, I wrote a slightly optimistic diary mentioning that there were probably somewhere between 74.2 thousand (according to Censys) and 80.8 thousand (according to Shodan) such systems, and that based on long-term data from Shodan, it appeared as though there was a downward trend in the number of these systems.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Los Angeles Times ☛ Why Netflix wants us to stop obsessing over subscriber numbers
You could look at this as a real spiking-the-football moment for Netflix. According to Wedbush Securities analysts Alicia Reese and Michael Pachter, this signals the arrival of Netflix’s long-awaited pivot “from a high-growth, low-profit business to a slow-growth, high-profit business,” even if that transformation is not yet complete.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The specific process by which Google enshittified its search
I think it's something else. I think the main job of a CEO is to show up for work every morning and yank on the enshittification lever as hard as you can, in hopes that you can eke out some incremental gains in your company's cost-basis and/or income by shifting value away from your suppliers and customers to yourself.
We get good digital services when the enshittification lever doesn't budge – when it is constrained: by competition, by regulation, by interoperable mods and hacks that undo enshittification (like alternative clients and ad-blockers) and by workers who have bargaining power thanks to a tight labor market or a powerful union: [...]
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Kevin Wammer ☛ Why I am stuck with IOS
I‘ve been in the Apple ecosystem for over half my life.
But lately, I find myself increasingly frustrated by Apple's behavior. There are many reasons, but it boils down to their arrogance. While I don‘t agree with everything the EU decided, Apple's public reactions irritate me.
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Digital Music News ☛ Drake Used AI for Tupac's Voice—Tupac's Family Responds
It’s worth noting that a release like this would be illegal under Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, which bans the use of AI-generated voices without express permission. A separate provision of that act, if it becomes a model for a national law, would hold AI platforms liable and open to lawsuit against any person who “makes available an algorithm, software, tool, or technology, service, or device” that creates unauthorized recording’s of a person’s voice.
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TMZ ☛ Tupac Shakur’s Estate Threatens to Sue Drake Over AI Vocals in Diss Track
TMZ has obtained the cease-and-desist letter fired off by the attorney for Tupac's estate, Howard King, and it calls out Drake for the AI verse on "Taylor Made Freestyle" ... saying, "Not only is the record a flagrant violation of Tupac's publicity and the estate's legal rights, it is also a blatant abuse of the legacy of one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time."
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The Verge ☛ Tupac’s estate may sue Drake over ‘Taylor Made’ AI-generated diss track
While Drake’s fans have been having a ball with the Canadian rapper’s recently released track dissing fellow rapper Kendrick Lamar, the legal team representing Tupac Shakur is threatening to take legal action if the song isn’t pulled off the [Internet].
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Penske Media Corporation ☛ Tupac's Estate Threatens To Sue Drake Over AI-Generated Fake Vocals
Tupac Shakur’s estate is threatening to sue Drake over a recent diss track against Kendrick Lamar that featured an AI-generated version of the late rapper’s voice, calling it a “a flagrant violation” of the law and a “blatant abuse” of his legacy.
In a Wednesday cease-and-desist letter obtained exclusively by Billboard, litigator Howard King told Drake (Aubrey Drake Graham) that he must confirm that he will pull down his “Taylor Made Freestyle” in less than 24 hours or the estate would “pursue all of its legal remedies” against him.
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Quartz ☛ Microsoft and Amazon's AI deals are getting antitrust scrutiny in the U.K.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said Wednesday it is inviting third parties to comment on whether the partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI, as well as Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic, fall under the UK’s merger regulations and can threaten competition. The CMA is also asking for comment on Microsoft’s hiring of former Inflection AI employees, including its co-founder, amid its $650 million deal with the startup to license its AI software.
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Patents
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Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ What is Next for Enablement and Written Description of Antibody Claims?
I had been following the case of Teva v. Lilly for a few years. Teva has traditionally been a generic manufacturer, but in this case sued Eli Lilly for infringing its patents covering methods of treating headache disorders like migraine using humanized antibodies that bind to and antagonize calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), a protein associated with migraine pain. U.S. Patent Nos. 8,586,045, 9,884,907 and 9,884,908.
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Kangaroo Courts
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Kluwer Patent Blog ☛ T 1006/21: you say admissible, I say inadmissible – let’s call the whole thing off?
It is well known that the EPO Boards of Appeal take a strict line on admissibility of new elements of the appeal case under Articles 12 and 13 RPBA. But if the request to hold new elements inadmissible is itself filed late, the admissibility of the inadmissibility request may be questioned, see e.g. T 500/16...
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Trademarks
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TTAB Blog ☛ J. Michael Keyes: "Will Bad Spaniels' New 'Disclaimer' Keep VIP Products Out Of The Doghouse?"
Here is the latest literary effort from Mike Keyes, a consumer survey expert and IP litigator at Dorsey & Whitney LLP (you may subscribe to his newsletter here). "Will Bad Spaniels' New 'Disclaimer' Keep VIP Products Out Of The Doghouse? - A Consumer Survey Provides a Cautionary Tale for Would-Be Parodists," appears in Vol. 64, No. 2 (March 2024) of IDEA The Law Review of the Franklin Pierce Center for IP at the University of New Hampshire School of Law.
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Copyrights
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Techdirt ☛ Universal Music’s Copyright Claim: 99 Problems And Fair Use Ain’t One
Fair use is supposed to be the valve by which the copyright system doesn’t violate the First Amendment. But when we see copyright wielded as a censorial weapon like this, with no real recourse for the artist, it should raise serious questions about why we allow copyright to act this way in the first place.
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Creative Commons ☛ CC at WIPO: Slow progress on copyright exceptions for cultural heritage institutions
Last week, Creative Commons (CC) participated in the 45th session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR). In this post, we briefly report on the session discussions on exceptions and limitations for cultural heritage institutions (CHIs), a topic of utmost relevance to our Open Culture Program.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Vietnam Admits Manga Piracy Problem as New BestBuyIPTV Details Emerge
In a joint press release on Monday, the Premier League and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment revealed the first-ever online piracy conviction in Vietnam. The news came as a surprise, as did comment published in local media attributed to a government official. It may seem like a small step, but admitting that Vietnam has a manga piracy problem, one that causes "hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to copyright owners," is a big step forward.
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Torrent Freak ☛ 'Expensive' Streaming Services Are a Key Reason for Americans to 'Pirate'
A new survey confirms that the high cost of online streaming services keeps piracy relevant. The findings suggest that one in three Americans have pirated a movie or TV series over the past year. Costs are a key motivator for these self-proclaimed pirates, with the number of legal subscription services and their price tags a key trigger.
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Bryan Lunduke ☛ The Internet Archive's last-ditch effort to save itself
A lost lawsuit, a flimsy appeal, and misleading public statements... things aren't looking good for the Internet's archivist.
On April 19th, The Internet Archive filed the final brief in their appeal of the "Hachette v. Internet Archive" lawsuit (for which, judgment was handed down, against Internet Archive, last year).
What is curious, is that this final brief fails -- almost completely -- to reasonably address the core issues of the lawsuit. What's more, the public statements that followed, by The Internet Archive, appeared to be crafted to drum up public sympathy by misrepresenting the core of the case itself.
Which suggests that The Internet Archive is very much aware that they are likely to lose this appeal.
After a careful reading of the existing public documents relating to this case... it truly is difficult to come to any other conclusion.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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