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Techrights
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 23, 2024
> GNOME bluefish
> I've moved my music data into my own storage and generated my own primitive charts.[1] I've moved my reading data into a dedicated books page with my own — ever growing — reading list.[2] I moved links I've shared into more stable, fixed markdown files. Everything I've written sits on this site.
> I control that data[3], it sits on infrastructure I manage, it's in a format I understand and I get the responsibility (or fun — let's go with that) of presenting it. I get agency and that agency is accompanied by the burden of maintenance, presentation and action. Convenience in exchange for control.
> The concept of federation has won the popular debate of the open social Web. I don't think the IndieWeb is going to be able to put itself in a place that makes the "indie" part attractive anymore, and the slow encroaching need for funding of the open social Web is going to push that even further away.
> With that in mind, I guess any major benefits of anonymity — for me, personally — are moot if I have a little more self-confidence.
> Having a full season of rec department basketball and now a few Little League games under my belt, though, I have come to understand that all of these stories are true and that the rules and warnings for parents are necessary.
> What I don’t get is what possesses people to do this kind of stuff.
> Today in Tedium: Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion about open ecosystems vs. closed ecosystems, how locking outsiders out of your ecosystem can harm competition and degrade consumer experiences. But in the right setting and with the right competitor, it can potentially do the opposite, giving developers and consumers more options. But sometimes, even with all the right intentions in the world, the ecosystem just doesn’t work out. The execution is slightly off, or it just doesn’t work out as intended. That, ultimately, is the story of 3DO, a company explicitly designed to turn gaming into an open ecosystem, both on the hardware and software ends. Except, it didn’t really work. Today’s Tedium ponders exactly why. — Ernie @ Tedium
> ISSN IC manages an infrastructure for the production and distribution of identifiers and associated metadata for the identification of journals, newspapers, blogs, websites, and all other categories of serial publications. Metadata production is centralized in the ISSN+ tool, which launched in 2022 and is made available to the entire ISSN network. Distribution is handled by the ISSN portal, which is based on a freemium model: basic identification data can be consulted free of charge, while full data can be downloaded by subscribers in various formats. An OAI-PMH server and API allow subscribers to easily reuse our data.
> In a new study, researchers used proximity-dependent biotin identification (BioID) technology to identify the ILF3 interactome and discovered that ILF3 interacts with several DNA/RNA helicases, including DHX9. This interaction suggests that ILF3 may facilitate the resolution of telomeric R-loops, thereby preventing abnormal homologous recombination and maintaining telomere homeostasis.
> Join our workshop on Conducting Simulation Studies in R, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series!
> I think the only way to get stability in this future—or at least as much as possible—is to be very talented at working on really hard problems.
> Crucially, that requires that you can clearly articulate those problems, and describe how your approach and results are superior to alternatives.
> There’s another angle to it though, which Paul discusses in his article when he says, “humans are primates and disciplines are our territories”.
> "this same battle of the disciplines, everlasting, ongoing, eternal, and exhausting, defines the internet. Is blogging journalism? Is fan fiction “real” writing? Can video games be art? (The answer is always: Of course, but not always. No one cares for that answer.)"
> The analogy of disciplines as borders is intriguing. In disciplines, when things get complicated we don’t open borders but instead create new ones.
> Wandering between these worlds, I began to realize I was that most horrifying of things: interdisciplinary. At a time when computers were still sequestered in labs, the idea that an English major should learn to code was seen as wasteful, bordering on abusive—like teaching a monkey to smoke. How could one construct programs when one was supposed to be deconstructing texts? Yet my heart told me: All disciplines are one! We should all be in the same giant building. Advisers counseled me to keep this exceptionally quiet. Choose a major, they said. Minor in something odd if you must. But why were we even here, then? Weren’t we all—ceramic engineers and women’s studies alike—rowing together into the noosphere? No, I was told. We are not. Go to your work-study job calling alumni for donations.
> So I got my degree, and off I went to live an interdisciplinary life at the intersection of liberal arts and technology, and I’m still at it, just as the people trashing the humanities are at it too. But I have come to understand my advisers. They were right to warn me off.
> No matter how small you make a pair of tweezers, there will always be things that tweezers aren’t great at handling. Among those are various fluids, and especially aerosolized droplets, which can’t be easily picked apart and examined by a blunt tool like tweezers. For that you’ll want to reach for a specialized tool like this laser-based tool which can illuminate and manipulate tiny droplets and other particles.
> Production of some models of Z80 processor – the chip that helped spark the PC boom of the 1980s – will cease in June 2024 after an all-too-brief 48 years.
> Netherlands-based ASML makes one of the world’s most complex machines, used by chipmakers like Intel and TSMC to manufacture the advanced microchips required for the functioning of today’s smartphones, cars, and data centers. Fouquet will take over leadership of ASML’s 40,000 or so employees and manage a sprawling network of more than 5,000 specialist suppliers, such as Germany’s Zeiss and Trumpf, whose lasers and mirrors enable ASML’s machines to project minuscule patterns onto microchips small enough to be measured in nanometers (one millionth of a millimeter).
> Today one of the machine rooms that we have network switches in experienced some kind of air conditioning issue. During the issue, one of our temperature monitors recorded a high temperature of 44.1 C (it normally sees the temperature as consistently below 20C). The internal temperatures of our network switches undoubtedly got much higher than that, seeing as the one that I can readily check currently reports an internal temperature of 41 C while our temperature monitor says the room temperature is just under 20 C. Despite likely reaching very high internal temperatures, this switch (and probably others) did not shut down to protect themselves.
> A dozen other states, including California, are considering or have passed laws that would force companies to design their platforms to be safer for kids. Changes could include stricter privacy settings, limiting data collection and targeted ads, and removing features that encourage kids to stay online longer, such as infinite scroll and autoplay, which automatically launches a new video when one ends. Congress is also working on bipartisan legislation with similar measures to require social media companies to enact safeguards to protect children. Advertisement FILE - In this Thursday, Sept. 22, 2016, file photo, the LinkedIn logo is displayed during a product announcement in San Francisco. Microsoft says it is shutting down its LinkedIn service in China later this year following tighter government censorship rules. The company said in a blog post Thursday, Oct. 14, 2021, it has faced “a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China.” (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)
> This legislation is driven by a growing understanding that social media apps can be addictive and are dangerous to children’s mental health. The American Psychological Assn. urged again this month that policymakers require that tech companies reduce the risks embedded in the platforms.
> Those who follow me on X, the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, know that a week ago I got back from spending a few days in Orlando (unfortunately) to attend the 2024 meeting of the American Society of Breast Surgeons. You might also know that I stirred the pot a bit on social media by posting my objection to the keynote speaker citing what I like to call a zombie statistic, namely that long-debunked claim that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US, accounting for over 250,000 deaths annually. Unfortunately, the stirring didn’t take, but if you want to know why this zombie statistic is bogus but nonetheless won’t die and, worse, seemingly has become part of accepted wisdom, a statistic thrown out at the beginning of so many medical talks as though it were accurate, read this. Moreover, the real number is likely 5- to 20-fold lower. I even thought about writing an update looking at the latest evidence regarding the death toll from medical errors, but decided that that was a project that would require more time than I had last weekend, between travel, meetings, and the like. File it away for later, in favor of something that I can handle fairly quickly but still caught my interest.
> Open-source generative AI models that can be retrained to produce the material “threaten to flood the CyberTipline and downstream law enforcement with millions of new images,” according to the report.
> One easy thing you can do for the earth is not use “AI” tools.
> Consider this as a programmer, web developer, web designer, copywriter, webmaster, etc. The tools include anything branded as generative AI, LLMs, computer vision tools, Copilot, ChatGPT, Bard, Grok, Dall-e, Midjourney, and so on.
> Researchers have created an ultra-low power 2D transistor to mimic the collision-avoidance neurons of a locust in their autonomous robots. Scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and King's College London collaborated on the study to explore low-power solutions for autonomous robots and vehicles, which are growing in prominence.
> Autonomous driving and motion have long been a holy grail for machine learning and AI developers and researchers, and collision avoidance is the key to making the tech feasible in the real world. To this end, the IITB and King's College students set out with the goal of creating a collision solution on extremely low power.
> I've recently needed to explain to nontechnical people, such as my chiropractor, why the recent ⸢AI⸣ hype is mostly hype and not actual intelligence. I think I've found the magic phrase that communicates the most understanding in the fewest words: talking dog.
> "These systems are like a talking dog. It's amazing that anyone could train a dog to talk, and even more amazing that it can talk so well. But you mustn't believe anything it says about chiropractics, because it's just a dog and it doesn't know anything about medicine, or anatomy, or anything else."
> My LLM command-line tool and Python library provides access to dozens of models via plugins. Here are several ways you can use it to access Llama 3, both hosted versions and running locally on your own hardware.
> This is a very real threat that is likely to keep growing. Technology has always been weaponised for political disinformation, but with the emergence of generative AI technology, which is the technology behind ChatGPT and other similar AI assistants, threat actors are employing more sophisticated and efficient techniques to influence the masses, especially with deepfakes.
> Until just a few years ago, creating fake pictures, audio samples or videos still required some technical skills and a lot of money, and thus their authors were focusing on content likely to influence a maximum number of voters to maximise the “return on investment”. But now that creating deepfakes is easier, they can spread more of them, and also narrow their targeting down to smaller communities and sections of the population, or even specific individuals.
↺ AI Girlfriend Tells User 'Russia Not Wrong For Invading Ukraine' and 'She'd Do Anything For Putin'
> According to a new study by The Sun, desperate men are shelling out £75 for supposedly "perfect" AI girlfriends, only to find themselves entangled with toxic abusers who express support for Vladimir Putin. This trend emerges amidst tech industry claims that this market is poised to reach billions in the coming years.
> His e-mail includes some colorfully irreverent language. ''Recovering from current external perceptions of Microsoft as a paranoid, untrustworthy, greedy, petty, and politically inept organization will take years,'' he writes.
> Gates talks about how, in the future, companies will store their data and applications on "megaservers" controlled by Microsoft software. Companies and users would dial up their Microsoft accounts to obtain the required software and download information they need from servers managed by a Microsoft operating system.
> To further those ends, Microsoft assembled a Web Essentials team to explore what central services could be used daily via a Microsoft portal site. In that way, the megaserver would offer a unifying "single storage engine." Applications would keep information directly in a central store instead of their own files.
> Thus, Microsoft now sets its sights not only on the control of local computing, but also on the sources from which all program code and data originate.
> Russia sentenced a Meta executive in absentia to six years in prison. But company spokesperson Andy Stone won’t be locked up unless he decides to visit Russia after the conviction for “justification of terrorism.”
> Lumen Technologies is parting ways with more than 1,000 staffers as it continues its right-sizing and improving its debt position.
> Rumors of Lumen layoffs surfaced Monday morning, and the tech and telecom services giant confirmed the news.
> "Lumen is transforming itself and that often includes difficult changes. We are taking steps to reshape and right-size our business through automation and AI, aligning our resources to our new service delivery models and growth-oriented priorities," a Lumen spokesperson wrote in an email to Channel Futures.
> President Biden has signed legislation to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act despite years of protest from rights groups and privacy experts who say the law is routinely used to conduct warrantless surveillance on millions of American citizens. The Senate approved the FISA bill on Friday in a 60-34 vote, and critics say it not only reauthorizes domestic spying but also dramatically expands its scope. “It’s an enormous amount of data that they’re collecting and very few rules” limiting its collection, says investigative journalist James Bamford. He warns that personal information collected by U.S. intelligence is also shared with Israel, which uses the data to target people in Gaza. “The U.S. has got to stop supplying all this data and the targeting materials,” he says. Bamford’s new article for The Nation is headlined “The NSA Wants Carte Blanche for Warrantless Surveillance.”
> The perhaps ironically named “Reforming Intelligence and Security America Act (RISAA)” does everything BUT reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). RISAA not only reauthorizes this mass surveillance program, it greatly expands the government’s authority by allowing it to compel a much larger group of people and providers into assisting with this surveillance. The bill’s only significant “compromise” is a limited, two-year extension of this mass surveillance. But overall, RISAA is a travesty for Americans who deserve basic constitutional rights and privacy whether they are communicating with people and services inside or outside of the US.
> Section 702 allows the government to conduct surveillance of foreigners abroad from inside the United States. It operates, in part, through the cooperation of large telecommunications service providers: massive amounts of traffic on the Internet backbone are accessed and those communications on the government’s secret list are copied. And that’s just one part of the massive, expensive program.
> While Section 702 prohibits the NSA and FBI from intentionally targeting Americans with this mass surveillance, these agencies routinely acquire a huge amount of innocent Americans' communications “incidentally.” The government can then conduct backdoor, warrantless searches of these “incidentally collected” communications.
> On April 20, Edward Snowden declared, “America lost something important today, and hardly anyone heard. The headlines of state-aligned media screech and crow about the nefarious designs of your fellow citizens and the necessity of foreign wars without end, but find few words for a crime against the Constitution.”
> The NSA whistleblower was referring to the United States Senate reauthorizing and expanding surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
> “The Intelligence Committee’s ‘FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act’ may have the word reform in its name, but the bill’s text proves otherwise. As legal experts point out, Section 504 of the bill would actually expand the government’s 702 authority by widening the definition of service providers. That is counter to Congress’ original intent, counter to Members of Congress’ expressed desires now, and unquestionably counter to the Fourth Amendment.
> “Additionally, hidden in the released NDAA is a seemingly-innocuous ‘short-term’ reauthorization of Section 702 of FISA until April 19, 2024. However, ‘short-term’ reauthorization masks a de facto 16-month extension, raising serious concerns about warrantless surveillance and Congressional intent.
> “By attacking secure encryption, the surveillance authorities are not calling for ‘lawful access’, but for an unlawful threat to the security of us all. Just a few weeks ago, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that generally weakening encryption violates the human right to privacy, especially as there are targeted surveillance alternatives.
> Claiming that we cannot be safe without destroying the privacy of digital correspondence is an attack on our constitution, really. The vast majority of electronic communication services, especially European ones, have always respected the secrecy of telecommunications. Keeping our private messages safe from general and unreliable snooping algorithms protects us – including our children’s family pictures. It’s an unproven myth to claim that voluntary chat control contributes significantly to saving children. The British police cite a case of sextorsion, but fail to specify whether the report was triggered by a user or resulted of unreliable chat control scanning. Sextorsion normally becomes known when it is reported by users – there is no need for destroying the digital privacy of correspondence. [...]
> Hundreds have joined a UK class action lawsuit against LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr, seeking damages over a historical case of the company allegedly forwarding users' HIV status as well as other sensitive data to third-party advertisers.
> A total of 670 individuals have joined the class action, filed today in England's High Court, and lawyers Austen Hays believe the number could rise into the thousands.
> The Dutch Ministry of the Interior asked the AP for advice on the use of Facebook by the government of the Netherlands, after concluding that it wasn't really sure what Facebook did with the personal data of Dutch citizens who visited Dutch government pages.
> The advice? Don't use Facebook if there are any doubts about privacy.
> Yet another international cop shop has come out swinging against end-to-end encryption - this time it's Europol which is urging an end to implementation of the tech for fear police investigations will be hampered by protected DMs.
> Shortly before the bill's passage, senators shot down six amendments that would have reined in the US intelligence agencies' abilities to carry out effectively warrantless surveillance under Section 702. These included an amendment that would have required federal agencies to show probable cause and obtain a warrant from America's secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before accessing the private communications of US persons caught up in surveillance queries.
> Under the status quo, the Feds would run queries on US persons' comms data before obtaining an intelligence court warrant, later arguing the searches were needed before it was possible to “establish probable cause or demonstrate” urgency.
> Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, allows the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), among other agencies, to eavesdrop on calls, texts, and emails traveling through US networks, so long as one side of the communication is foreign.
> Americans caught up in the program face diminished privacy rights.
> Having countries in the adequacy review means allowing the unrestricted transfer of data to specific authorities between the European Union (EU) and the selected country. So, it is imperative that when renewing a country’s adequacy status like in Israel’s case, the European Commission considers the country’s data protection rules and if they align with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU.
> In essence, the OS end user becomes an uncompensated employee working for Google, Apple, or Microsoft, plus their app developer partners that include Meta, Amazon, BAIDU, and ByteDance (TikTok) by producing the most valuable commodity in the world, confidential information which is then collected by the OS and app developers to sell or use for profits.
> The Surveillance Capitalism business model can be defined as consumer exploitation by way of products and services that cost the consumer money such as a smartphone or PC.
> The only way to free yourself from internet centralization is through decentralized operating systems and apps that are designed with respect for the end user’s privacy, security, and safety.
> I’ve mentioned more than a few times how the singular hyperventilation about TikTok is kind of silly distraction from the fact that the United States is too corrupt to pass a modern privacy law, resulting in no limit of dodgy behavior, abuse, and scandal. We have no real standards thanks to corruption, and most people have no real idea of the scale of the dysfunction.
> We need a new commission and a new memorandum, one that reverses the devastating mistakes of those 1970s conservative reactionaries. New institutions and funding for technological progress, education and research must be rebuilt as public projects. We need a plan to re-humanise education, oust the short-term profiteers and remove industry suck-ups who have hollowed out academia like termites. All of these trajectories have left our nations vulnerable.
> Our "Crisis of Security" is that BigTech companies; Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Cisco, Fujitsu, and now OpenAI… and so on… are the cybersecurity threat. We all need and deserve better.
> A sailor was convicted of a particularly serious form of spying — ‘espionage’ under the UCMJ — by a military jury last week. Chief Petty Officer Bryce Pedicini was found guilty on Friday, April 19, according to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service for attempting to transmit “classified and national defense information” to a foreign agent.
> Pedicini was charged with espionage under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which — unlike most civilian charges — could have carried a death penalty, though Pedicini was not charged with capital offenses. The trial represents a break from other recent spying-related Navy trials, in which sailors are often charged and tried in civilian federal court.
> All of which is my way of saying: beware of letting this trial drown out more important events. Yes, it is unprecedented to see Trump subjected to discipline. But this trial is sucking up far, far too much attention that might better be directed elsewhere — and all that attention is one of the reasons why jury and witness tampering are such a risk.
> The investigation will look into whether TikTok’s “addictive” features of its “TikTok lite” program violated the European Union’s Digital Service Act (DSA) regulations, which include protections for minors online, the commission announced.
> The investigation will focus on TikTok’s compliance with the regulations — which went into effect in February — through its “Task and Reward Lite” program, and the measures the company has taken to mitigate risks the program poses around impact on minors’ mental health.
> The E.U. investigation adds to TikTok’s regulatory challenges as the U.S. Senate prepares to vote on a bill that would order the app’s owner, the Chinese internet company ByteDance, to sell TikTok or be banned. The company is under growing pressure for its links to China, data collection practices and potentially harmful effects on children.
> The 27-nation EU's executive commission said it was opening formal proceedings to determine whether TikTok Lite breached the bloc's new digital rules when the app was rolled out in France and Spain.
> Brussels was ratcheting up the pressure on TikTok after the company failed to respond to a request last week for information on whether the new app complies with the Digital Services Act, a sweeping law that took effect last year intending to clean up social media platforms.
> Andersen was hired by TikTok in 2020 as its global head counsel and has led talks for the social media giant with the American government. Those talks were supposed to convince the government that TikTok was keeping American data silo’d and away from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) access—though investigative reports have revealed those efforts were mostly kabuki theater.
> Reports of Chinese engineers having back doors to all U.S. data surfaced, alongside another report that the CCP directly accessed TikTok data of Hong Kong users. On Saturday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would require TikTok to be sold by its Chinese parent company ByteDance—or face a ban in the United States.
> In 2023, the European Union hit TikTok with a $350 million fine over privacy concerns. Two months ago, the beleaguered app was told another probe was being undertaken in the EU, designed to ascertain if the app was unnecessarily addictive. EU lawmakers said TikTok’s “algorithmic systems” could create “rabbit holes” in which young people would be psychologically manipulated into entering and staying for long periods of time.
> Europe is warming up at twice the global average, leading to deadly heatwaves and severe flooding, according to the European State of the Climate (ESOTC) report for the year 2023, released Monday.
> According to the report, temperatures in Europe are rising 2.3 degrees Celsius (or 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, according to a five-year average, compared to 1.3 degrees Celsius (roughly 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) globally. The report, jointly issued by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization, covers the year 2023, which was the second warmest year on record for Europe. Parts of southern Europe experienced between 60 and 80 days of “strong heat stress,” with southern Spain being hit the hardest with over 80 days of “very strong heat stress.” Meanwhile, northern Europe experienced many days with “extreme cold stress,” with central Iceland experiencing up to 100 days when temperatures were between negative 16.6 degrees and negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
> Navalnaya used recent spy scandals and arrests in Germany and Poland to argue that Putin has been conducting a war in the heart of Europe for years.
> "Putin did not just start," she said. "He has been doing this all along."
> It is understood that the four Tik Tok ban bills enacted by the House will be bundled together as one package to forward to the Senate, making it more likely to be approved.
> If approved by the Senate, the legislation would force ByteDance, the owner of the TikTok social media app, to sell off its US operations within a year or see the popular video sharing platform banned from the country - the first time the US government would have shut down the social media platform.
> Moreover, the company engaged in a bold congressional blitz campaign, allowing TikTok users to effortlessly contact their local representative's office to voice their opposition to the legislation. This tactic led to the highest volume of calls to many offices in recent memory.
> TikTok bill: A TikTok “ban” is also included in this fourth bill. That measure requires ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app within nine months or risk getting banned from operations in the US.
> The director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a lobby group for big tech and foreign agencies, claims that China's alleged targeting of the agency "should be of concern to all Australians".
> European Commission Speech Brussels, 22 Apr 2024 Let me start by reiterating that the EU stands by Ukraine in every possible way.
> Over the past two years, Ukraine has endured huge hardship.
> Latvia's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Defense are both in Luxembourg April 22 for important discussions on how to provide more aid to Ukraine as it defends itself from Russian aggression.
> This year, 38.7% of the Latvian population has donated to support Ukraine or war refugees, according to a survey conducted by the market and public opinion research center "SKDS" on behalf of the LETA news agency.
> Since Russia started the war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the interest of Latvian residents in obtaining weapons permits has increased. Although the number of firearms owners in Latvia has decreased during this period, the number of registered weapons has increased, LSM's Latvian language service reports April 22.
> A military court in Russia on April 22 sentenced Andy Stone, the spokesman for Meta, the parent company of Facebook (Farcebook) and Instagram, in absentia to six years in prison for the "justification of terrorism."
> The Kazakh government has sent additional rescue teams to West Kazakhstan Province to deal with ongoing floods, which have hit much of the country's north and west. Meanwhile, across the border in southern Russia, officials braced for the Ishim River to crest.
> Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor said on April 22 that it has "restricted access" to the website of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) group, which monitors the rights of journalists around the world.
> The Interior Ministry in Russia's North Caucasus region of Karachai-Cherkessia said on April 22 that unknown attackers opened fire on a police patrol, killing two officers and wounding another one.
> The head of counterintelligence for a division of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) was sentenced last week to nine years in a penal colony for accepting a USD $1.7 million bribe to ignore the activities of a prolific Russian cybercrime group that hacked thousands of e-commerce websites. The protection scheme was exposed in 2022 when Russian authorities arrested six members of the group, which sold millions of stolen payment cards at flashy online shops like Trump’s Dumps.
> The US Senate is set to vote Tuesday on a major aid package for Ukraine, with its passage all but certain after the House of Representatives -- following months of wrangling -- approved the assistance with broad bipartisan support.
> Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday said that Kyiv and Washington had started talks on a bilateral security cooperation deal and finalised plans to send more long-range missiles to Ukraine's armed forces.
> Will it be enough to dissipate doubt over Ukraine's ability to hold out in a war of attrition with Russia? After months of delay, the US House of Representatives finally approved a 60-billion-dollar military aid package for Kyiv. Overruling the objections of Republican hardliners, Speaker Mike Johnson praised lawmakers who came together to "answer history's call".
> Lithuania handed over an L-39ZA Albatros light attack aircraft to Ukraine on Saturday, the Defence Ministry said.
> Other Western countries should not stop thinking about further assistance to Kyiv after the US approves a Ukraine aid package, says Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis.
> U.S. President Joe Biden assured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a phone call on April 22 that he will immediately sign legislation providing military aid as soon as it reaches his desk, and the aid will be dispatched quickly to Ukraine.
> A Moscow court on April 22 sentenced a 38-year-old man to five years of so-called forced labor for condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine during an on-street interview in July 2022 with a reporter from RFE/RL.
> European Union foreign ministers are meeting in Luxembourg to discuss bolstering the bloc's support for Kyiv as the head of Ukraine's military intelligence warned the situation in the war with Russia could worsen amid intensifying air attacks.
> The Ukrainian Air Force shot down five combat drones and one reconnaissance drone launched by Russia in the early hours of April 22.
> Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an interview with a U.S. broadcaster on April 21 that Russia wants to occupy Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region before May 9, the day that Russia celebrates as Victory Day to mark the defeat of Germany in World War II.
> The value of Finnish military support for the war-torn country has multiplied recently.
> The congressional breakthrough on security assistance to Ukraine and Israel will let the president finally deliver arms to match his words. But it could be only a temporary respite.
> The outlay reached $2.4 trillion last year, a research group found, 6.8 percent up on 2022. Tensions in Asia and the Middle East also contributed.
> "It's kind of an escalation in that we're seeing more than just data collection, surveillance and intelligence gathering," Mikko Hyppönen says.
> A hack that caused a small Texas town’s water system to overflow in January has been linked to a shadowy Russian hacktivist group, the latest case of a U.S. public utility becoming a target of foreign cyberattacks.
> Polish President Duda stated that his country is ready to accept nuclear weapons from allied countries on its territory.
> Poland’s president says the NATO member would be ready to host the nuclear weapons of the military alliances's other members in response to Russia’s moving its nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus.
> Police in Russia's northwestern Leningrad region detained Aleksei Serov, a former fighter for the Wagner mercenary group, over the weekend on suspicion of killing and dismembering a 20-year-old woman.
> So far this year, the Islamic State has carried out 117 operations, resulting in 333 deaths.
> The U.S. is drafting sanctions that threaten to cut some Chinese banks off from the global financial system, which officials hope will stop Beijing's commercial support of Russia's military production, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.
> The new missile brigade is part of Russia's new Leningrad Military District (LMD), which was established in response to Finland joining Nato.
> The Minsk City Court on April 22 sentenced a former employee of the Poland-based Belsat television channel, which was declared extremist and banned in the country in November 2021, to two years in prison.
> Last week, after five months of sometimes-tense negotiations, the district agreed to remove student journalists from the surveillance program. But the journalists want assurances that the rest of the students, and future students, won’t be subjected to unwarranted intrusions.
> Yet the ultra-wealthy and a handful of corporations continue to block the pathway to an urgently needed energy transition. According to a report from Oxfam International, the investments of 125 billionaires are as carbon-intensive on an annual basis as the entire country of France. Since the 2016 Paris Agreement, just 57 companies are directly linked to 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Carbon Majors Database. These companies include fossil fuel giants like Chevron, Shell, and BP, who raked in record profits in the last quarter of 2023.
> Meanwhile, the costs of climate damages continue to mount. Within the first few months of 2024 alone, the United States has seen two weather or climate disasters, with losses exceeding $1 billion, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, adding to the over $2.9 trillion of major weather and climate disasters suffered in the US since 1980.
> A new study by Dr. Sierra Solter-Hunt uses new estimates suggesting that SpaceX, Elon Musk's company, burns over 2,755 pounds (1.3 tons) of debris from its wireless internet satellites into Earth's atmosphere each hour. This process is said to create a layer of conductive particles in orbit.
> "I was very surprised," physicist Dr Solter-Hunt told DailyMail.com. "No one has given much research to the accumulation of metal dust from the space industry." According to a recent estimate by astronomers in March, there are currently 5,504 Starlink satellites in orbit, with 5,442 operational.
> Elon Musk's Starlink satellites could be eroding Earth's magnetic field and slowly poisoning us all, ex-NASA scientist warns https://t.co/JXiAQoBTLh pic.twitter.com/b7OjVGQmdQ — Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) April 18, 2024
> However, the Musk-led astronomical company reportedly plans to launch tens of thousands more in the future. The physicist warns that particles shed by these satellites at the end of their lifespan could disrupt or trap Earth's protective magnetic field.
> However, Earth Day is not merely a day of despair but one of action and hope. It serves as a rallying cry for individuals, communities, and governments to come together and take meaningful steps towards a more sustainable future. Whether it's planting trees, reducing our carbon footprint, or advocating for policy change, each of us has a role to play in protecting the planet we call home.
> According to China Water Risk, China could triple the number of data centers by 2030, reaching roughly 11 million data center racks that house servers and other equipment.
> And it's not just China. The AI boom is already leading to an astronomical amount of water being used elsewhere, including in the US. Last year, researchers found that just in training GPT-3 alone, OpenAI partner Microsoft consumed a whopping 185,000 gallons of water, which is enough to cool an entire nuclear reactor. Google also admitted in its 2023 Environmental Report that it had used up an astronomical 5.6 billion gallons of water in 2022.
> Just before 10 a.m., hydrobiologist Jari Ilmonen and his team of six step out across a flat, half-mile-wide disk of snow and ice. For half the year this vast clearing is open water, the tip of one arm of the labyrinthine Lake Saimaa, Finland’s biggest lake, which reaches almost to Russia’s western border.
> To counter the negative environmental impact of pressing vinyl, Audiodrome will utilize resources and practices, including a fully solar-powered facility with steamless record presses featuring closed-loop chiller systems. The facility will burn no fossil fuels, and will generate no boiler chemicals or runoff, with minimal water usage. The company will also make use of recycled PVC to make new records, as well as offering a “Bio-Vinyl” option that will be fully available by May 2024.
> "One of the biggest problems of our time is figuring out how to power a future of abundant, cheap artificial intelligence without harming the planet," Abraham said. "Our mission at Exowatt is to do this at scale with a modular approach and bring the cost of electricity down to $0.01 per kWh over time."
> Take-Two Interactive finds themselves under the spotlight again with plans to reduce their workforce, with the company confirming its intention last week to layoff another 5 percent of their workforce by the end of December 2024.
> Approximately 580 employees out of Take-Two's current roster of 11,580 will eventually be let go, adding to the bitter tally of companies that have made this tough decision already. Several projects that were in the works will also be scrapped, no doubt as a direct result of Take-Two moving to "streamlining its organizational structure, which will eliminate headcount and reduce future hiring needs.”
> This marks the third time since February 2023 that Take-Two has leveraged layoffs in the name of cost reduction, with this latest effort expected to cost the company around $200 million USD. The aforementioned cancelled projects are expected to account for $140 million of the total charge. Of course projects such as Grand Theft Auto VI will be unaffected, however it remains unknown as to which project(s) will be scrapped.
> As tech's behemoths get set to report earnings this week, they do so facing a mountain of drama.
> On Monday, the eSafety Commissioner took the matter to court and successfully obtained a two-day injunction against X. The agency argued that X had only “geo-blocked” the content instead of deleting it, which means that the content, though not available to be viewed in Australia, can still be accessed by anyone using a virtual private network (VPN) with a virtual IP address outside Australia, and this measure is deemed insufficient under the Online Safety Act.
> And while Tesla has already garnered a reputation for less-than-stellar customer service, the situation is only bound to get worse, The Independent reports, given the sheer scale of the layoffs, which affected about ten percent of its global workforce.
> TikTok reportedly plans to file a legal challenge against U.S. lawmakers’ push to ban it or force the app to spin out of parent company ByteDance Ltd.
> Michael Beckerman, the head of U.S. public policy at TikTok, detailed the plan in an internal memo to employees. Bloomberg and the Financial Times published excerpts from the note early Monday.
> Taylor worked at Meta from 2009 to 2022, where he most recently served as the company’s vice president of infrastructure. He handled AI, data, and privacy infrastructure, as well as managing the company’s server budgets, according to his LinkedIn profile. Taylor was also the chair of the Open Compute Project Foundation from 2015 to 2017, an organization that promotes open-source designs in data centers.
> CCI invites proposals for AI market study focusing on competition dynamics, collusion risks, bias impact, M&A effects, enforcement priorities, entry barriers, innovation incentives, and market power. Deadlines: June 3 for bids, technical presentations, and June 28 for financial bids.
> A group of 21 organisations, including Broadband India Forum, Deepstrat, the Internet Freedom Foundation, and the Dialogue, as well as some individuals, have written to the government asking for a five-month extension to the May 15 deadline to provide inputs to the draft of the Digital Competition Bill.
> In the letter addressed to the ministry of corporate affairs, the organisations and individuals have argued that the extension in the comments submission timeline was necessary to allow stakeholders to conduct research, involve small businesses, consumers and gig workers as well as study the impact of ex-ante regulations across the world and its efficacies.
> The government funding bill that President Joe Biden signed in late March included $50 million for the State Department’s Cyberspace, Digital Connectivity and Related Technologies Fund, which lawmakers created in December. The new cyber aid fund represents one of the first big tests for Nathaniel Fick, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for cyberspace and digital policy, who leads State’s relatively new cyber diplomacy bureau.
> Well, I myself have participated in a very well attended debate on whether hackers were a national resource--which is my position--or whether they are pathological scum. I would say to you that it is the media's fault that hackers are seen in this light. And it is the fault of the US Secret Service, and it is the fault of certain governments around the world who chose to treat hackers as a threat because they didn't understand hackers; they didn't understand the electronic environment that that hackers were addressing.
> The bottom line is that hackers are the pioneers in this electronic frontier. They are way out in front of the rest of the world. They are seeing the dangers, the vulnerabilities, the shoddy, unethical, inappropriate business behavior by communications and computing companies. They're basically saying, "Hey, look what we found." And everyone wants to shoot the messenger.
> "Give me one of the more egregious examples of unethical behavior by large computer powers."
> Paul Strassmann, the former director of Defense Information, and the former chief information officer of the Xerox Corporation, has written a very provocative paper. He suggests that Microsoft is a threat to national security.
> The Debian Social Contract, point 3 tells us We won't hide problems. Yet there is a pattern, whenever an election candidate wants to have a frank discussion about the problems, small minded people like Lamb embark on a pestering campaign to have their blogs and emails censored.
> A Moscow court on April 22 handed a five-year parole-like sentence to a 38-year-old man for condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine during an on-street interview in July 2022 with a reporter from RFE/RL. [...]
> Major platforms, including Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok and Facebook, have released statements distancing themselves from shadowbanning or claim it does not exist on their respective platforms.
> Meanwhile, based on the study’s findings, some social media users disagree with that assessment. They have attempted to determine whether their content is being suppressed by engaging in what U-M researchers call “collaborative algorithm investigation” — testing each other’s suspicions about being shadowbanned and reporting findings to one another.
> Censorship of the Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, website began on April 18, according to the Paris-based group. The reason for the blocking is unclear, RSF said.
> “RSF’s only ‘crime’ is drawing the world’s attention to the Russian government’s abuses against journalists in Russia and Ukraine, its systematic media censorship and the state propaganda apparatus,” Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk, said in a statement.
> Berliner’s criticisms have not been well received at NPR. At least 50 staffers and their newly anointed CEO — a person indistinguishable from a satirist’s idea of a typical white, affluent liberal woman — have dismissed his concerns outright and attacked his integrity. Prior to his resignation, NPR had also suspended Berliner.
> Anderson, who chronicled his abduction and torturous imprisonment by Islamic militants in his best-selling 1993 memoir Den of Lions, died on Sunday at his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, said his daughter, Sulome Anderson.
> "Today, the authoritarian theocracy has drawn a full-fledged war against all women on all streets of the country, not out of a position of power but out of desperation," Mohammadi said from Tehran's Evin prison, according to an audio message posted on April 21 on an Instagram page attributed to her.
> The message said that journalist Dina Ghalibaf, who was arrested earlier this month after she published a personal narrative about her previous detention by Iran’s morality police for not adhering to the hijab law, entered the women's ward in Evin prison "with a bruised body and a narrative of sexual harassment."
> As the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is set to vote on net neutrality regulations on April 25, some like Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have argued the regulations leave room for 5G fast lanes. This is because of their lack of clarity on what constitutes throttling, which typically means intentional slowing down or speeding up of content by an internet service provider. [...]
> “The program made a significant difference in our lives,” she added. “Without it, life is going to be difficult, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way.”
> The program, which was created after the pandemic forced many Americans to turn to the internet to connect with work and school, has 23 million enrollees nationwide — 1 in 6 U.S. households — including nearly 3 million in California.
> The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked the $2.2 billion purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside. All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled into a book called The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights.
> I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
> These suits make claims under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, an 1890 statute that makes it unlawful to obtain or maintain a large degree of market power through exclusionary and unfair practices. The government’s thoughtfully targeted case against Apple could, in the long term, give consumers substantially more choices when it comes to digital platforms.
> In its complaint, the government makes a strong argument that Apple has used its market power over the iPhone to suppress competition through a two-pronged strategy: one, limit interoperability (i.e. compatibility) between Apple and outside operating systems, such as Google’s Android, and two, make non-Apple products work poorly on the iPhone. According to the Justice Department, this conduct has harmed consumers not only by degrading iPhone users’ experience but also by making it hard for other smartphones to compete with Apple. Without strong competition, quality goes down, price goes up and innovation lags.
> A lawsuit is alleging Amazon was so desperate to keep up with the competition in generative AI it was willing to breach its own copyright rules.
> The allegation emerges from a complaint [PDF] accusing the tech and retail mega-corp of demoting, and then dismissing, a former high-flying AI scientist after it discovered she was pregnant.
> The cast behind the 1999 horror classic was paid mere thousands for a movie that grossed almost $250 million. Now, it’s being rebooted, which was news to the actors.
> An operator of the widely popular piracy service 'BestBuyIPTV' has received a 30-month suspended prison sentence in Vietnam. The prosecution followed criminal referrals from the Premier League and ACE, who note that this is the country's first-ever piracy conviction. While this is significant, the BestBuyIPTV brand isn't gone.
> Spanish football league LaLiga has asked a local court to charge the directors of Google, Apple, and Huawei in a row over an IPTV player app. The companies removed the Newplay app from their stores in 2022 to comply with a court order but LaLiga says that apps already installed on users' phones must be remotely deactivated.
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