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Techrights
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 24, 2024
> GNOME bluefish
> For any particular physical tool you see applied to computing—mercury delay line memory, “silicon” chips (nowadays the silicon wafer is mostly a substrate for other semiconductors and metals), relays, thermionic valves, brass cogs, hydraulic tubes—you can replace it with other tools or even with a person using no tools at all.
> But that's what it will mean to my children. An antiquated time before their memories. A time before digital cameras and smartphones and virtual reality and the modern ubiquity of The Internet. A time where our homes had their own phones, our computers had their own rooms, and the television played whatever the hell it wanted, whether you were watching it or not.
> Hi, my name is Jason and I use fancy website analytics like a hit counter from the 90s. I haven’t cared about website stats since about the same time. Remember when you had a “Hit Counter,” and generally, it was so bad it just counted page loads? 🤣
> The more that I work with accessibility, the more I’m enjoying solving the smaller issues. Unfortunately, I also see a lot of areas where things could be improved.
> I suspect what happened was that the scanner device scanned the code and one of the attempts got through and the backend still processed it even though the frontend had already timed out. Which would be a major bug on their backend side, they should await confirmation before committing a transaction!
> The IndieWeb in general is publishing oriented; however, the pool of people willing to publish anything is very small as a subset of the online audience. If the IndieWeb is meant to be for all, we ought to consider how our indie websites can serve people who primarily read content rather than write it — at the same time we lower the barriers to entry of posting replies and interacting with our sites. And I mean both technical and social barriers.
> 404 pages are what appear when a server cannot locate a website or resource at a specific URL. Hitting a 404 could be due to a number of reasons: a spelling error in the URL, the page may not exist anymore, or the server moved a page without having the link redirect. As a result of the error, many different entities with websites — such as state and local governments — have had a stroke of creative genius to make users aware of an issue while also having a bit of fun — which rings true for some federal agencies as well.
> The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology voted unanimously in favor of the report Tuesday following a nearly hourlong public discussion of its contents and recommendations. The delivery of PCAST’s report will fulfill a requirement in Biden’s executive order on AI, which called for an exploration of the technology’s potential role in “research aimed at tackling major societal and global challenges.”
> Previously, I took advantage of a dataset that linked preprints to their published counterparts to look at the fraction of papers in a journal that are preprinted. This linkage can be used to answer other interesting questions. Such as: when do authors preprint their papers relative to submission? And does this differ by journal?
> A US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) edict, issued Monday, modifies the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (better known as HIPAA) to increase protections for sensitive health information about reproductive care.
> The change prohibits doctors, insurers, healthcare clearinghouses, and other medical organizations from disclosing protected health information (PHI) to state officials and law enforcement officers investigating patients and providers.
> In the glacial waters of the Lofoten archipelago in Norway's far north, Angelita Eriksen uses a knife to cut a handful of seaweed that will soon end up in a fancy European eatery.
> "We have the cleanest and clearest waters in the world. We're very lucky that we have this really important resource growing right outside our doorstep," Eriksen told AFP in a cabin on the shores of the northern Atlantic Ocean where the seaweed is laid out to dry.
> The speakers stressed the need to counter the ‘plastic age’ and cited an international report indicating that microplastics and plastic chemicals are infiltrating human bodies leading to serious health issues, including brain and heart diseases, and even paralysis. Some of the speakers described plastic as a “slow poison” that threatens both humanity and the planet.
> Flaming Fowl, the studio behind the Gloomhaven video game adaptation, has announced its next game: Ironmarked, a medieval co-op RPG with turn-based combat. The only problem is the studio has failed to secure funding for the game – so in the same post as its announcement, Flaming Fowl has also confirmed Ironmarked is entering a production pause.
> As a result of a “current lack of funding in the games industry” work on the project will not go ahead, and Flaming Fowl will also be downsized with layoffs. More than 20 people will lose their jobs as part of these changes. Per Flaming Fowl, the game’s chaotic announcement is a means to help those staff that will be looking for new work, as it demonstrates their talent.
> The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an [Internet] connection.
> But all of this is coming to an end. The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences.
> To understand why, you must understand publishing. Its core task is to connect writers to an audience. Publishers work as gatekeepers, filtering candidates and then amplifying the chosen ones. Hoping to be selected, writers shape their work in various ways. This article might be written very differently in an academic publication, for example, and publishing it here entailed pitching an editor, revising multiple drafts for style and focus, and so on.
> LLMs, large language models, which have been rebranded as AI, share a lot with the Evangelical tool. AI was classically understood to be a true artificial intelligence, a thinking machine that actually processed and understood your request. It was seen as the Holy Grail of computer science, the ability to take the best of human intellect and combine it into an eternal machine that could guide and help us. This definition has leaked from the sphere of technology and now solidly lives on in Science Fiction, the talking robot who can help and assist the humans tasked with something.
> Adobe’s image and video editing tools are widely used by creative professionals, but it faces rising competition from start-ups such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Midjourney and Stability AI, all of which offer services that can generate images from text prompts.
> As Forbes reports, it's a brazen and worrying use of the tech that could easily lead to the furthering of institutional ills like racial bias in the hands of police departments. That's not to mention the propensity of AI models to "hallucinate" facts, which could easily lead to chaos and baseless accusations.
> "It’s kind of a nightmare," Electronic Frontier Foundation surveillance technologies investigations director Dave Maass told Forbes. "Police, who aren't specialists in AI, and aren’t going to be specialists in recognizing the problems with AI, are going to use these systems to generate language that could affect millions of people in their involvement with the criminal justice system."
> "What could go wrong?" he pondered.
> The "Thermonator," as it's known, was first teased by its manufacturer Throwflame last summer. And behold, it's now officially on sale. To mark the occasion, a new video shared by the company shows the robodog prowling through the woods as it spews flames left and right, set to a remix of, yes, the "Oppenheimer" score. (One wonders if this on-the-nose choice of music is evidence of any self-reflection by the flamethrower robot's creators. Probably not.)
> Nominally, it is not a weapon. Nay, this fire-wielding pup is advertised for uses like wildlife control, agricultural management, and not least of all, entertainment, folks!
> The Zscaler ThreatLabz 2024 Phishing Report does a deep dive into the world of phishing, including the latest tactics used and how to stay ahead of the threat. AI is a common theme in the report, which notes that the technology represents a “paradigm shift” in the realm of cybercrime, particularly for phishing scams.
> With generative AI now freely and frequently available, cybercriminals have been using it to rapidly construct highly convincing phishing campaigns that surpass previous benchmarks of complexity and effectiveness. Using AI algorithms, threat actors can swiftly analyze vast datasets to tailor their attacks and easily replicate legitimate communications and websites with alarming precision.
> Chinese and Russian hackers have turned their focus to edge devices — like VPN appliances, firewalls, routers and [Internet] of Things (IoT) tools — amid a startling increase in espionage attacks, according to Google security firm Mandiant.
> The company published the findings as part of its annual report on cyber investigations Mandiant was involved in last year.
> Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant, told Recorded Future News that there has been a significant shift in the tactics used by espionage hackers based in China and Russia. For years, incident responders saw the same playbook — employees would be targeted with malicious phishing emails containing malware that would give hackers a foothold into the system.
> That said: the name of the tool being “Reply Guy”? Honestly, no notes. What a perfect assessment of this [Internet] ruining tool.
> For years, people who have found Google search frustrating have been adding “Reddit” to the end of their search queries. This practice is so common that Google even acknowledged the phenomenon in a post announcing that it will be scraping Reddit posts to train its AI. And so, naturally, there are now services that will poison Reddit threads with AI-generated posts designed to promote products.
> Both probes concern the alleged use of Pegasus spyware developed by the Israeli NSO Group. The spyware silently infiltrates phones or other devices to harvest data and potentially spy on their owners. NSO asserts that it is only made available to governments for fighting terrorism and other security threats.
> A Spanish judge has reopened a probe into the suspected spying on the cellphone of Spain's prime minister after receiving a request to collaborate with a similar investigation in France.
> “This dynamic reflects an intensification of terrorism, with fewer attacks committed by fewer groups while causing a larger number of fatalities.”
> An example of this was the 7 October attack by Hamas-led militants in Israel, which killed 1 200 people, and was the largest single terrorist attack since 9/11, and one of the largest terrorist attacks in history. “The consequences of this attack have been immense and are still unfolding, with an estimated 25 000 Palestinians killed by Israel’s retaliatory military response as of February 2024,” the IEP reported.
> European commissioner Thierry Breton likened the rewards system to smoking, and the Commission swiftly called for TikTok to produce the risk assessment report that designated Very Large Online Platforms are required to conduct before launching services, as well as a document detailing measures it had adopted to "mitigate potential systemic risks" of the functionalities in TikTok Lite's reward system.
> On Tuesday the Commission revealed that TikTok had not delivered either document within the overnight deadline it imposed.
> TikTok has multiple options in the coming months, even as the Senate is poised to pass legislation tonight forcing it to be sold or face a ban.
> Why it matters: After years of threats, the U.S. is preparing to follow through on its threats to ban TikTok.
> The EU on Monday launched a probe into TikTok's spinoff Lite app and threatened to suspend an "addictive" feature on it that rewards users for watching and liking videos, amid child-safety concerns. TikTok Lite users can win rewards if they log in daily for 10 days, if they spend time watching videos (with an upper limit of 60 to 85 minutes per day) and if they undertake certain actions, such as liking videos and following content creators.
> TikTok Lite, a slimmed down version of TikTok, launched in France and Spain in March. It is optimized for slower [Internet] connections and uses less memory.
> It enables users over the age of 18 to earn points that can be redeemed for vouchers or gift cards.
> The Commission says it wants the Chinese-owned company to show how it assessed the addictiveness and mental health risks of the scheme"
> If TikTok fails to reply within the 24-hour deadline the company faces fines amounting to one percent of its annual revenue.
> And court challenges could delay the legislation from being implemented, Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London, told The Associated Press.
> "I don't think it is necessarily home and dry," he said. "We will see some attempts to block deportations legally."
> Panama reported a 2% increase in crossings through the Darién Gap in February compared to the previous month.
> Uninspected means officials cannot find a legitimate source for meat being sold to the public.
↺ 2024-04-19 [Older] Russian Missiles Destroy Grain Storage Facilities in Odesa Region, Ukraine Says
↺ 2024-04-17 [Older] Ukrainian military attacked Russian airfield in occupied Crimea, Zelenskyy says
> But the agency’s provisional approval of a few generative AI products — which include ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Claude 2, DALL-E2, and Grammarly, per a privacy impact assessment — call for closer examination in regard to federal transparency. Specifically, an amendment to OpenAI’s terms of service uploaded to the DHS website established that outputs from the model are considered federal records, along with referencing freedom of information laws.
> You may have seen a Bitcoin Teller Machine (BTM) and wondered who would use one and and why. I have, there is one in our local Safeway. Elijah Nicholson-Messmer and Ella Ceron look into BTMs in Bitcoin ATMs Flood Black, Latino Areas, Charging Fees up to 22%. The headline sums up the story well, but there is a rather interesting sting in the tail of their article.
> Follow me below the fold as I discuss the article and finally get to why the sting in the tail is interesting..
> The team's drive, which it says uses electrostatics to enable Buhler's "new force," isn't exactly a powerhouse, producing a mere 10 milliNewtons. To put that into perspective, holding a mass of about 100 grams, or a medium-sized apple, in the palm of your hand exerts 1 Newton, or 100 times more force.
> After decades of research, Buhler says he and his team had shown unequivocally that a new, fundamental force was at work and that his devices were tapping into that force to produce thrust without emitting any mass or propellant.
> “Essentially, what we’ve discovered is that systems that contain an asymmetry in either electrostatic pressure or some kind of electrostatic divergent field can give a system of a center of mass a non-zero force component,” Buhler explained. “So, what that basically means is that there’s some underlying physics that can essentially place force on an object should those two constraints be met.”
> On Monday, President Joe Biden announced the 60 organizations that, under the administration’s Solar for All program, will receive a combined $7 billion in grants to bring residential solar to low-income neighborhoods. The funding will flow into state, municipal, and tribal governments as well as nonprofits to support existing programs for low-income solar and battery storage installations and spur new ones. Such efforts are expected to bring affordable clean energy to 900,000 households.
> The city of Baltimore said the cargo ship that struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge was "clearly unseaworthy" when it left the Baltimore port last month, per court documents filed Monday.
> The big picture: Baltimore's mayor and city council accused both the owner of the container ship Dali, Grace Ocean Private, and its operator, Synergy Marine Group, of being "grossly and potentially criminally negligent."
> Each year, the Pentagon sends military officers to work for major corporations through the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows (SDEF) program. The intention is for fellows to gather insights about how these companies are organized and then present their findings to high-ranking military officials, along with recommendations for reforms that the military should consider. In practice, however, the reforms suggested to the Pentagon represent a free opportunity for the large contractors hosting fellows to push the government towards adopting corporate-friendly policies.
> Just a half-dozen leadership and oversight requirements from the 2021 executive order on improving the nation’s cybersecurity remain unfinished by the agencies charged with implementing them, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.
> Apple told Reuters on Friday that it had removed Meta Platforms' messaging apps WhatsApp and Threads from the China App Store on orders from the government due to "national security" concerns.
> The app-tracking site Apple Censorship showed that the two apps were no longer available in China, while two other encrypted messaging apps -- Telegram and Signal -- were also taken down from the store on Friday.
> Four Tibetans who had been arrested April 10 for protesting the land grab in Markham county in Chamdo, or Changdu in Chinese, in the Tibet Autonomous Region, were released, but said they had been beaten while in detention, a source told RFA Tibetan on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.
> “The four of them were released on April 16 but they were beaten and tortured during detention, and one of them even has a swollen cheek,” the source said.
> Kotrikadze spoke with RFE/RL's Georgian Service about years of fear and official retribution brought on by Russia's "foreign agent" law, especially in light of progress last week by the ruling Georgian Dream party to introduce similar legislation despite fierce public opposition and street protests.
> She called such a law "the first step on the long road to repression" and described how Russian officials tightened the noose. She argued that the same threat now hangs over Georgia, and she called the bill to combat "foreign influence" an "attempt to shift Georgia from a pro-Western course to a pro-Russian one."
> This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
> Mwiimba and Phiri, who work with the privately owned Millennium TV and KBN TV respectively, told CPJ that they were filming an altercation between police officers and two opposition party leaders on their phones when about three other officers grabbed Phiri, and forced him into an armored police vehicle.
> The Tuesday hearing was a technical appeal against an earlier decision to re-extend Gershkovich’s pre-trial detention until the end of June. To date, Russian investigators have not publicly provided any evidence to substantiate the accusations made against Gershkovich.
> The Wall Street Journal reporter, who has spent more than a year behind bars on espionage charges, has lost multiple appeals seeking to end his pretrial detention.
> The 32-year-old U.S. citizen was arrested in late March 2023 in Yekaterinburg while on a reporting trip.
> Russian authorities have not provided any evidence to support the espionage charges, which The Wall Street Journal and the U.S. government have vehemently rejected. They say Gershkovich was merely doing his job as an accredited reporter when he was arrested.
> Kurdish journalism began 126 years ago, while in exile in Cairo, and since then, has been faced with repression and pressure by successive regimes. The ‘90s were dark years in Kurdish society and Kurdish journalism became the voice of the painful truth and of what was going on in Turkey and Kurdistan. Many Kurdish journalists paid the price of telling the truth and exposing those crimes. They were murdered, jailed, harassed, wounded. We respectfully commemorate all press martyrs who have never ceased to be the voice of truth, despite their fundamental right, the right to life, being constantly violated.
> Democracy Now! speaks with the great labor organizer and writer Jane McAlevey about the historic victory for Volkswagen employees at a Chattanooga, Tennessee, factory who voted overwhelmingly to join the United Auto Workers union. The plant will become the first foreign-owned car factory in the South to unionize. “This win wasn’t just a win — it was what we would call a beatdown,” says McAlevey, who says the UAW’s recent success is a result of direct democracy and smart, strategic organizing that could lead to the unionizing of Mercedes workers in Alabama. “It’ll be a massive change in the U.S. South.” We also speak with McAlevey about her terminal cancer diagnosis and why she’s “going to fight until the last dying minute, because that’s what American workers deserve.”
> Narrowing the damage done by its 2015 ruling in the Identity Project case of Mocek v. Albuquerque, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that it is clearly established law that, even in a state such as New Mexico that requires individuals suspected of crimes to identify themselves to police on demand, a valid demand for ID must be predicated on “reasonable suspicion” that an individual has committed some other predicate crime.
> The plaintiff in the latest 10th Circuit case, Albert Bustillos, is an independent journalist and YouTuber. He was wrongly arrested for video and audio recording from a public street outside an oil refinery in Artesia, NM, on September 11, 2018.
> Like Mr. Mocek, who was falsely arrested for recording TSA checkpoint staff at the Albuquerque airport, Mr. Bustillos was wrongly charged under a New Mexico law that makes it a crime to “conceal” your identity if you are lawfully stopped by police.
> After winning a nationwide strike against the Big Three automakers last year, the UAW said, “We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own so that together we can begin to flex our collective muscles.” That contract expiration date is May 1, 2028. It was a call to prepare for a May Day general strike, a perpetual dream of many labor radicals. But coming from the UAW—a major union, with major resources, with a crusading new president, which had just won a strike and plunged into a big national organizing drive and which appears to be very serious about everything it says—it instantly became a uniquely plausible dream.
> The European Union already requires companies to offer a two-year minimum warranty on products, but these new rules take things a step further. Even after the warranty period ends, companies are “still required to repair common household products,” including smartphones, TVs, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other items. If a product breaks while under warranty, consumers can choose between a replacement or a repair. If they choose to repair, the warranty will be extended for a year.
> In a ruling, the FTC said the ban covers the vast majority of existing noncompete clauses. “In the final rule, the Commission has determined that it is an unfair method of competition and therefore a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, for employers to enter into noncompetes with workers and to enforce certain noncompetes,” the commissio said in a statement.
> Noncompete clauses are typically used by companies in the U.S. to prevent their employees from leaving their role to take up a position with a competitor. They also prevent workers from starting competing businesses, but they have become a highly contentious issue in many industries, especially in the technology sector.
> The US Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday issued a final rule that bans most noncompetes nationwide. The agency estimated that by allowing people more freedom, the change would lead to the creation of 8,500 new businesses annually, an average annual pay increase of $524 for workers, lower health care costs, and as many as 29,000 more patents each year for the next decade.
> The FTC says about one in five US workers are bound by contract clauses that prevent them from taking new jobs from a competitor, or starting their own competing businesses, for some period of time. The agreements can trap workers and slow career advancement and wage increases—two things workers often achieve by hopping jobs.
> But the operators also find themselves in a catch-22 situation when it comes to deprecating legacy networks, with the potential savings from next-generation technologies at odds with losses in revenue collected from the millions of users who rely on 2G and 3G services, especially those living in remote and rural areas.
> The good news is that the shift from fossil fuels to renewables has started to feed through to opex savings, as have the phased retirements of legacy 2G Network opex SG&A + cost goods Capex Free cash margin and 3G networks that are less energy efficient than LTE or 5G NR standards. Looking ahead, however, as LTE and 5G progressively account for larger shares of the overall global user base, data traffic rises are inevitable – and with this comes the pressure on energy consumption. There is no one method of increasing energy efficiency or reducing power usage. Instead a mixed approach is generally being used, comprising renewables, AI-driven network sleep states, more efficient batteries and decentralised site deployments with compute power pushed towards the edge. The results will feed through over a period of years.
> Breaking up the tech monopolies is one of the best things we can do for cybersecurity.
> In March 2024, the DOJ filed a lawsuit against Apple, alleging its smartphone market monopoly. However, this isn't the first time Apple has seen legal action.
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