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Techrights
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 03, 2024
> GNOME bluefish
> We’ve looked at plain text, which as a format clearly does not have to have a title. Let’s go one step further and implement it. What we’d need is: [...]
> Brute force attacks are one of the most elementary cyber threats out there. Technically, anyone with a keyboard and some free time could launch one of them — just try a bunch of different username and password combinations on the website of your choice until you get blocked.
> Nick Biasini and I discussed some of the ways that organizations can defend against brute force attacks since detection usually doesn’t fall into the usual bucket (ex., there’s nothing an anti-virus program could detect running). But a good place to start just seems to be implementing strong password rules, because people, unsurprisingly, are still using some of the most obvious passwords that anyone, attacker or not, would guess.
> Combining their results with those of the 2019 Canadian study, Huang and colleagues conclude that this lowly magnetic field (named the ultra-low time-averaged field intensity, or UL-TAFI) lasted for at least 26 million years, from 591 to 565 million years ago.
> Coincidentally, this interval overlaps with a surge in atmospheric and oceanic oxygen levels around 575–565 million years ago, during the late Ediacaran, when there was also an explosion in biodiversity.
> Since I was a child, I was obsessed was science and space exploration. Visiting Kennedy Space Center was absolutely a dream come true. The spectacle and the enormity of what NASA accomplished was incredible to see.
> New hope for studying neurological disorders.
> We've never seen its softer side like this.
> A tantalizing and surprising connection.
> Pieter Hintjens is a programmer, writer, and thinker who has founded many on-line communities. In 2005 he led the European fight against software patents, helping thousands of activists to organize on-line. In 2007 he founded the successful and broad-ranging ZeroMQ community.
> There are some scary people around. People who take what they want, using their charm and wits. Con artists. Professional liars. They take from friends, colleagues, family and strangers alike. They never apologize or feel remorse towards the people they hurt. They often have criminal careers. We call them by many names. Narcissist. Anti-social. Sociopath. CEO. And more and more, we call them Psychopath.
> Psychopaths raise so many questions. What is wrong with these people? Maybe they had cold and distant parents. Maybe they suffered abuse as children? Maybe they have something broken in them, a chemical imbalance, or evil demons. Or the next stage in humanity's evolution. A new race of superhumans, perhaps? Can we identify them? Can we learn to spot them in our homes and streets? What is going on in their minds? Are they aware of the damage they do? Do they sleep well at night? How do we survive them? How can such horrible people exist? Am I one of them?
> Luckily, there are good answers, which lift the dread mystery from psychopathy. This was my goal with this book: to decode the psychopathic mind and write a manual for the rest of us. The material is based on my experiences and those of many others. It has been tested in real life, and it seems to work. Having said that, please note the following section.
> As Social Architects, we participate in communities, we identify successful naturally occurring patterns or develop new patterns (which I call "tools"), and we apply these deliberately to our own projects. We apply psychology (our social instincts), economics (how we create common wealth through specialization and trade), politics (how we collect and share power), and technology (how we communicate). We continually adapt our toolkit based on new knowledge and experience. Our goal is to create on-line communities that can and do accurately solve the problems we identify, grow healthily, and survive on their own.
> Successful on-line communities tend to be based on the contract of mutual benefit, whether implicit or explicit. That is, it is possible to build a billion dollar business based on volunteer labor, with every participant contributing for selfish reasons. Often, participants do not realize or care that they are part of a community. However, every action we take is economic. "Crowd sourcing" is the exploitation for profit of volunteer labor. And it only works when the crowd really wants to solve the problems you throw at it, or the ones it discovers.
> Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
> Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.
> I have a gorgeous fountain pen: a Pilot ‘Vanishing Point’. Mine’s black and has developed a Leica-like patina such that the underlying brass shows through.
> I love it. And I never use it. Because I rediscovered pencils.
> Pencils are easier. They’re more adaptable. They smell better and I think they’re prettier. They’re cheaper; you can have a collection of pencils. I have at least 30, mostly sourced from the wonderful (Australian) site Pencilly.
> I spent a hundred-ish dollars on my ridiculous pencil collection. About the price of one fountain pen.
> Pencils are objectively better than pens. Fight me.
> Scarborough Medical Group, the woman's GP, said in a statement that it had received electronic instructions from the support service Primary Care Support England to remove her from their records — but when the news wire contacted PCSE, it said that it had nothing to do with the erroneous death declaration.
> Facebook is the best human research lab ever. There’s no need to get experiment participants to sign pesky consent forms as they’ve already agreed to the site’s data use policy. A team of Facebook data scientists are constantly coming up with new ways to study human behavior through the social network. When the team releases papers about what it's learned from us, we often learn surprising things about Facebook instead -- such as the fact that it can keep track of the status updates we never actually post. Facebook has played around with manipulating people before -- getting 60,000 to rock the vote in 2010 that theoretically wouldn't have otherwise -- but a recent study shows Facebook playing a whole new level of mind gamery with its guinea pigs users. As first noted by The New Scientist and Animal New York, Facebook's data scientists manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users, removing either all of the positive posts or all of the negative posts to see how it affected their moods. If there was a week in January 2012 where you were only seeing photos of dead dogs or incredibly cute babies, you may have been part of the study. Now that the experiment is public, people's mood about the study itself would best be described as "disturbed."
> We also observed a withdrawal effect: People who were exposed to fewer emotional posts (of either valence) in their News Feed were less expressive overall on the following days, addressing the question about how emotional expression affects social engagement online. This observation, and the fact that people were more emotionally positive in response to positive emotion updates from their friends, stands in contrast to theories that suggest viewing positive posts by friends on Facebook may somehow affect us negatively, for example, via social comparison (6, 13). In fact, this is the result when people are exposed to less positive content, rather than more. This effect also showed no negativity bias in post hoc tests (z = −0.09, P = 0.93).
> This is a big step.
It's a dayside inferno and a nightside mystery.
> It was never just us.
> Citing low recruitment rates and readiness challenges, a coalition of health groups is urging the the Defense Department to do more about obesity.
> But the output of the country’s key cash crop, oil palm, may be hit.
> Anthropomorphizing AI not only misleads, but suggests we are on equal footing with, even subservient to, this technology, and there's nothing we can do about it. You see it all the time in headlines that proclaim what AI is "coming for" next: musicians, fortune cookies, your children.
> Putting aside the hyperbole, it's also important to remember that AI isn't doing shit. It is not thinking, let alone plotting. It has no aspirations. It isn't even an it so much as a wide-ranging set of methods for pattern recognition and other techniques that imbue software with certain new capabilities, the extent of which we're only beginning to discover. Or, rather, we will begin to discover when we get past these personifying metaphors.
> I'm working on a new SQLite extension! It's called sqlite-vec, an extension for vector search, written purely in C. It's meant to replace sqlite-vss, another vector search SQLite extension I released in February 2023, which has a number of problems. I believe the approach I'm taking with sqlite-vec solves a number of problem it's predecessor has, will have a much nicer and performant SQL API, and is a better fit for all applications who want an embed vector search solution!
> All of which is to say: backup your stuff. Twice. And make periodic exports of anything in the cloud that you consider important, because you might one day visit to find that particular cloud has evaporated. Natch, it’d be nice if more companies would remind you to do the same, or automate backups in some way. But that would require them to admit catastrophic data loss is a possibility. And we can’t have that, can we?
> The description of the app on the Google Play store is a suspicious word soup of redundant claims, boasting that it's the "first AI friend with emotional intelligence" and the "first chatbot product that actually behaves like a real person" — easily disproven claims given the wealth of other apps just like it.
> Mysteriously, the company's copy appears to have been altered after Futurism reached out for comment.
> It’s been a particular problem in healthcare, where broken “AI” is being layered on top of already broken systems. Like in insurance, where error-prone automation, programmed from the ground up to prioritize money over health, is incorrectly denying essential insurance coverage to the elderly.
> In an article posted on Medium this week, a software engineer complained that an S3 bucket he created as part of a proof-of-concept had managed to run up charges of over $1,300 in a single day. A check of the AWS billing console showed that the cause was nearly 100 million PUT requests to add data to the bucket, he said.
> “We discovered that the threat actor had accessed data related to all users of Dropbox Sign, such as e-mails and usernames, in addition to general account settings,” Dropbox said on Wednesday in a regulatory filing. “For subsets of users, the threat actor also accessed phone numbers, hashed passwords, and certain authentication information such as API keys, OAuth tokens and multi-factor authentication.”
> In a filing with the SEC on Wednesday afternoon, the company said it discovered unauthorized access to the production environment of Dropbox Sign — a company formerly known as HelloSign that was acquired in 2019. The company allows people to sign documents digitally.
> The [cracker] accessed information related to all users of Dropbox Sign, including account settings, names and emails. For some users, phone numbers, hashed passwords and authentication information like API keys, OAuth tokens and multi-factor authentication methods were also exposed.
> Tracked as CVE-2023-7028 (CVSS score of 10/10), the flaw allows for password reset messages to be sent to email addresses that have not been verified, enabling attackers to hijack the password reset process and take over accounts.
> The Peplink Smart Reader is an internet-connected device associated with the PepXIM Time-Logging and Security System. Companies’ employees use this device to check in and out of their shifts, allowing administrators to keep track of time cards and pay. It also can control access to certain buildings, and even public transportation.
> The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) told employees Wednesday that it is blocking access to ChatGPT on agency-issued laptops to “protect our data from security threats associated with use of ChatGPT,” 404 Media has learned.
> Until now, APP enrollment has required the use of hardware security keys as a second factor, but soon, users will gain the option to enroll with any passkey in addition to using their hardware security keys. APP users will also have the choice to use their passkeys as a sole factor or along with a password. Google claims that the expanded passkey support will help reduce the barrier of entry to the APP while still providing phishing-resistant authentication.
> In a blog post on Thursday, the company announced that over 400 million Google accounts (of the at least 1.5 billion reported since 2018) have used passkeys since rolling them out, logging over a billion authentications between them. The majority of users find them easier to use than passwords, according to Google, adding that “since launching, passkeys have proven to be faster than passwords, since they only require users to simply unlock their device using a fingerprint, face scan or pin to log in.”
> There’s no hard data on how many American high school students have experienced deepfake nude abuse, but one 2021 study conducted in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia found that 14 percent of respondents ages 16 to 64 had been victimized with deepfake imagery.
> OpenAI’s ChatGPT program provided inconsistent conclusions when presented with simulated cases of patients with chest pain, researchers report.
> The AI returned different heart risk assessment levels for the exact same patient data -- not something doctors want to see when responding to a medical emergency.
> ChatGPT-4 showed a high correlation with TIMI and HEART scores (r = 0.898 and 0.928, respectively), but the distribution of individual risk assessments was broad. ChatGPT-4 gave a different risk 45–48% of the time for a fixed TIMI or HEART score. On the 44-variable model, a majority of the five ChatGPT-4 models agreed on a diagnosis category only 56% of the time, and risk scores were poorly correlated (r = 0.605).
> Peloton (PTON) appears to be in turmoil as CEO Barry McCarthy steps down from his position at the fitness equipment manufacturer. The company's stock is now spinning out Thursday morning after missing third-quarter earnings estimates amid a restructuring plan that will lay off 400 employees from Peloton's global workforce.
> It seems like Telegram just opens up a URL with your account’s token appended to it. The token gets put in a hash fragment, and quickly disappears once the web client loads up and realizes there’s a token there. Although very convenient, this feature is pretty concerning because it can be used to quickly gain access to your account even if you use 2FA and a locked-down device (eg a non-rooted/jailbroken phone).
> The “experimentation” of Algorithmic Video-Surveillance (AVS) within the framework set by the “Olympic Games” law passed last year by the French Parliament is not an experiment at all: it is nothing more than a hypocritical maneuver designed to legalize, through small steps, a police infrastructure already massively deployed in France. To counter this strategy, La Quadrature du Net is launching a campaign aimed at fueling popular opposition to AVS, a technology based on Artificial Intelligence that amounts to a constant, automated monitoring of public spaces and marks a historic turning point in state surveillance. A complaint has also been lodged with the French data protection authority, the CNIL, as a way of denouncing the hypocrisy of the AVS promoters and pointing out the negligence of the personal data protection authority.
> Specifically, the lawsuit seeks a declaration that Zuckerman's browser extension "does not violate Meta’s Terms of Service, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or California’s Computer Data Access and Fraud Act." It argues that through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, US lawmakers sought "to promote the development of filtering tools that enable users to curate their online experiences and avoid content they would rather not see."
> Section 230 offers interactive computer services safe harbor from liability under certain conditions. It's been challenged in recent years by those who argue social media sites have been given too much latitude to avoid being accountable for distributing harmful user-generated content.
> Zuckerman hopes his yet-to-be-released browser extension will free people from the algorithmically-optimized psychological pressure to engage with the Facebook newsfeed. It automates the cumbersome process of unfollowing Facebook users, groups, and pages.
> A joint investigation by Amnesty International and Haaretz has revealed that Indonesia, which has no diplomatic ties with Israel, imported Israeli spy tech. Then Singapore found out about it
> Police and federal agencies are responding to a massive breach of personal data linked to a facial recognition scheme that was implemented in bars and clubs across Australia. The incident highlights emerging privacy concerns as AI-powered facial recognition becomes more widely used everywhere from shopping malls to sporting events.
> British tourists will not have to pay a fee to go on summer holidays in the EU next year, but will have to submit a photograph and fingerprints to a new entry system to the bloc.
> The European Travel Information and Authorisation System (Etias) is the EU’s answer to the Esta, which tourists must have to enter the United States.
> "This technology poses significant threats to our privacy and civil liberties, and Congress should prohibit TSA’s development and deployment of facial recognition tools until rigorous congressional oversight occurs," the senators wrote.
> Outabox appears to be in the business of collecting that sort of data for clubs, as it lists an entry management system called "Triagem" among its products, and describes it as "a state-of-the-art contactless sign-in kiosk that allows both members and guests to sign into the venue with ease." The kiosk can capture facial biometrics and match it to a database.
> The leak site alleges Outabox contracted development of some software to offshore developers, and that those coders were given access to data gathered by gaming venues – including facial biometrics, scans of drivers' licenses, and club membership details. The leak site also claims that the outsourced developers were told by Outabox to back up that data into public clouds and suggests that allowing offshore workers unlimited access to personal data, and storing it offshore, is not best practice.
> I posed this question to design experts and researchers, and the consensus was clear: Because new A.I. systems improve the ability for voice assistants to understand what we are saying and actually help us, we’re likely to speak to devices more often in the near future — but we’re still many years away from doing this in public.
> IP data retention is like every citizen having a visible licence plate hung around their neck and having it recorded at every corner. No one would put up with such a total recording of their daily lives. IP data retention places every internet user under general suspicion and make the internet usage of the entire population, which reflects our most intimate preferences and weaknesses, traceable. Such total recording jeopardises crime prevention through anonymous counselling and pastoral care, victim support through anonymous self-help forums and also the free press, which relies on anonymous informers. 99.99% of this data is completely useless, as it concerns citizens who are never even suspected of committing a crime.’
> The accessed information pertains to all Dropbox Sign users, encompassing account settings, names and emails. For some users, additional data such as phone numbers, hashed passwords and authentication information like API keys, OAuth tokens and multi-factor authentication were also compromised.
> The UK may be the first country, but as far as I know, California is the first jurisdiction. It banned default passwords in 2018, the law taking effect in 2020.
> A new version of the 2022 Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act (PTSI) is now in effect, covering just about everything that a consumer can buy that connects to the web. Under the guidelines, even the tiniest Wi-Fi board must either have a randomized password or else generate a password upon initialization (through a smartphone app or other means). This password can't be incremental ("password1," "password54"), and it can't be "related in an obvious way to public information," such as MAC addresses or Wi-Fi network names. A device should be sufficiently strong against brute-force access attacks, including credential stuffing, and should have a "simple mechanism" for changing the password.
> Some 58% of respondents to the two-day poll, which closed on Tuesday, agreed with a statement that the Chinese government uses TikTok, which is owned by China's ByteDance, to "influence American public opinion." Some 13% disagreed, and the rest were unsure or didn't answer the question. Republicans were more likely than Democrats to see China as using the app to affect U.S. opinions.
> Over the last month, lawmakers moved swiftly to pass legislation that would effectively ban TikTok in the United States, eventually including it in a foreign aid package that was signed by President Biden. The impact of this legislation isn’t entirely clear yet, but what is clear: whether TikTok is banned or sold to new owners, millions of people in the U.S. will no longer be able to get information [sic] and communicate [sic] with each other as they presently do.
> The news organizations impersonated in the operation include The Washington Post, The Economist and The Jerusalem Post, and Mandiant’s researchers assess that the campaign was carried out by the hacking crew known as APT42. The group also spoofed prominent Washington think tanks, including the Aspen Institute, the McCain Institute and the Washington Institute.
> According to Mandiant, the Iranian hackers spoofed these organizations in order to send phishing lures to targets meant to harvest their credentials. In other cases, the attackers masqueraded behind generic login pages, file hosting services, and legitimate services like YouTube, Gmail, Google Meet and Google Drive.
> In its operations, APT42 often uses typosquatting — or acquiring web domains that look real but might have a small error or alteration — to create malicious links that redirect recipients to fake Google login pages, according to the report. An example would be “washinqtonpost[.]press” — note the "q" in the name.
> In 2023, the threat actor reportedly pretended to be a senior fellow with the U.K. think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) while attempting to spread malware to a nuclear security expert at a U.S.-based think tank focused on foreign affairs.
> In its new report, Mandiant analyzed the social engineering techniques APT42 used to gain access to victims' networks, including cloud environments.
> Due to a recent rash of antisemitic and white supremacist Zoombombings, the suspension of Zoom access to city council meetings in favor of in-person-only meetings is once again on the agenda for the April 16 Sebastopol City Council meeting. Sadly, this is a statewide—even nationwide—problem, so we thought we'd take a broader look at the issue to discover who's doing it, what other cities have done to stop it, and the broader implications for the democratic process.
> In the months following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, conversation on college campuses has been defined by a palpable tension. Increased antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric embroiled numerous universities in free-speech debates. In late April, as the Israel-Hamas War moved into its fifth month, students at Columbia University and other institutions across the US began protesting, calling for a ceasefire. Amid all of this, one platform has served as a locus: Sidechat, a social media app that’s become both a place for dialog about the protests and a breeding ground for hate speech.
> "Threats posed by Telegram are not restricted to the dissemination of enemy propaganda," Yehor Aushev, an expert at the Institute of Cyber Warfare Research, told RFE/RL. "It is de facto a legalized darknet where one can not only buy drugs or access child pornography but also engage in cybercrime, as do multiple Russian hacker groups."
> Access to users' data and devices, including geolocation and cameras, as well as data about networks of users make Telegram "a spy in every Ukrainian's pocket" with a wide range of potential military uses, Aushev said.
> Under the Digital Services Act, TikTok has a legal obligation to mitigate any systemic risks to children’s safety and mental health. Despite launching the new gamified feature, it failed to produce a risk assessment for addictiveness—so regulators decided to open an investigation. Penalties under the DSA can be up to 6% of a companies global annual turnover for breaking the EU rules.
> Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hinted that banning TikTok in the European Union is an option, during a debate this evening in Maastricht, featuring parties' lead candidates for the bloc's 2024 election.
> "It is not excluded," von der Leyen said, after the moderator referred to the United States, where TikTok faces a national ban unless it is sold by its owner, ByteDance.
> Two new Air Force squadrons are joining the service’s growing cadre of software coders focused on rushing new electronic warfare tools to the field, along with tacticians who will advise the joint force on how best to use them.
> The 388th Electronic Warfare Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, will begin operations Thursday, one week after the 563rd EWS launched across the country at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas.
> The bill, though bipartisan, faced some opposition especially from Democrats. Still, other Democratic politicians have joined Republicans in raising concerns about protesters’ rhetoric, from yelling “We are Hamas” – considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. – to saying “We don’t want no Zionists here.” Another frequent pro-Palestinian chant is “from the river to the sea” – a reference to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which implies wiping Israel off the map.
> His lawyers argue that depriving him of his account is unlawful under the European Convention on Human Rights.
> The case turns on how vital social media has become for freedom of expression, even though the court must decide the case through laws that predate such sites.
> “Leaving Hamas in power with a cease-fire now or tomorrow is, in my view, a likely recipe for this tragedy to be repeated again and again,” he told Tarek Masoud, Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance, faculty director of the Middle East Initiative at HKS, and organizer of the series.
> “Both of us, and I hope everyone in this room, wants an outcome for the Palestinians that in three or five or 10 years looks a hell of a lot better than it did three or five or however many years ago,” said Stephens. “That outcome is not possible without the elimination of Hamas as a military and political entity” that could reconstitute itself down the road.
> Workers around the world rallied Wednesday to mark May Day, with many calling on the labor movement to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. In New York, Democracy Now! spoke to demonstrators who demanded that U.S. unions apply political pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza and to stop their government’s arms trade with Israel. “Workers do have the power to shape the world,” said Palestinian researcher Riya Al’sanah, who was among thousands gathered at a May Day rally in Manhattan.
> Student protests against Israel have entered their second week in France. A town hall event Thursday at the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris ended with the administration refusing to create a working group to investigate ties with Israeli universities, which students across France want to see cut over the war in Gaza. It is just one demand of many that are motivating students across France and beyond to keep protesting.
> Also, the U.S. accused Russia of using chemical weapons.
> Russian President Vladimir Putin sees domestic and international developments trending in his favor and likely will press aggressive tactics in Ukraine, but the war is unlikely to end anytime soon, the top U.S. intelligence official said on May 2.
> Artem Marchevskiy, a close associate of pro-Russia Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk, has left Prague for Slovakia after Czech authorities imposed sanctions on him for attempts to carry out "influence operations" for Moscow's benefit on Czech territory.
> Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called for an investigation into footage appearing to show that as many as 21 Ukrainian troops had been executed as or after they surrendered to Russian forces and urged that those responsible be punished for war crimes.
> Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he discussed a schedule for receiving weapons shipments from Kyiv's allies at a meeting of Ukraine's military commanders on May 2.
> Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has dismissed Ilya Vityuk, head of the cybersecurity department of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), amid allegations of corruption.
> The success of ballistic missile defences facing their first complex, high-stakes combat scenarios in Israel, the Red Sea and Ukraine will encourage militaries globally to invest in the pricey systems, experts say - and intensify missile arms races.
> PARIS - France and Japan agreed on Thursday to start formal talks on a reciprocal troop access deal, strengthening military cooperation in amid rising maritime tensions in the Indo-Pacific region and the war in Ukraine.
> Washington has long urged European nations to spend more on their own defense. Russia’s Ukraine invasion, and European doubts about America’s role in tomorrow’s world, have had the desired effect.
> The State Department said Russia had used chloropicrin, a poison gas widely used during World War I, against Ukrainian forces, an act that would violate a global ban signed by Moscow.
> The requirement to pass the state language (Latvian) test will be extended to a few thousand more Russian citizens, as foreseen in the amendments to the Immigration Law approved by the Saeima in the first reading on May 2.
> Last week, Congress voted to send $95 billion in additional aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The largest portion was to Ukraine – $61 billion – after the Congress had previously approved $114 billion, for a total of $175 billion. The total GDP of Ukraine in 2022 was $160.5 billion.
> Despite billions of dollars of military aid, equipment maintenance, training, intelligence, and planning from the United States and its partners in the political West, the war in Ukraine is going very badly. The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Oleksandr Syrskyi, says “the situation at the front has escalated.”
> European Commission Press release Brussels, 02 May 2024 To provide continuous support to Ukrainian research, the Commission has tripled the initial budget of the EURIZON Fellowship Programme to €4.5 million under Horizon Europe.
> Ukraine urgently needs to replenish the ranks of the country's depleted military, but the recently adopted mobilization law fails to address the key issue of demobilization, write Elena Davlikanova and Kateryna Odarchenko.
> The United States is pushing the G7 to consider a sovereign loan of $50 billion to Ukraine which would be repaid using the interest income on blocked Russian assets. Where does this $50 billion figure come from?
> Being everyone’s friend is going to be more difficult as India’s global influence grows.
> Ahead of its annual Victory Day parade on 9 May, Russia is displaying a range of military hardware captured during the conflict in Ukraine, including an armoured personnel carrier (APC) it claims is from South Africa.
> French President Emmanuel Macron reaffirmed he did not rule out sending troops to Ukraine, saying the issue would "legitimately" arise if Russia broke through Ukrainian front lines and Kyiv made such a request, in an interview with the Economist published Thursday.
> The US unveiled nearly 300 new sanctions on Wednesday, including sanctions that target entities in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Hong Kong for their support for Russia in its war with Ukraine. The sanctions were implemented following persistent warnings from US officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
> This week, the Ice Hockey World Championship IB Division takes place in Vilnius after a 10-year break. The Lithuanian men’s ice hockey team is performing exceptionally well, having already won four matches and playing for gold against Ukraine this Friday. However, the stands at the Twinsbet Arena are near-empty. The organisers admit they made a miscalculation with the pricing.
> Russian energy giant Gazprom said on May 2 it suffered a record annual loss last year as the European market was practically shut off to its gas exports due to sanctions over Moscow's military operation in Ukraine.
> Relations between the US and Niger have deteriorated since a military junta took control of Niger’s government last year.
> A new complaint filed at the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee accuses the Russian government of perpetrating a deliberate and deadly bombardment of a hospital in Syria.
> The days of Europe buying its energy from Russia, outsourcing its businesses to China, and relying on the United States for its security are over.
> Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Georgia on Thursday to protest against a "foreign influence" bill likened to Russian laws silencing dissent, an AFP journalist said.
> Russia sent over 165,000 barrels of refined petroleum to North Korea in March alone, say US officials.
> Russia has been quietly shipping refined petroleum to North Korea at levels that appear to violate a cap imposed by the UN Security Council, the White House said on May 2.
> A 24-year-old man from Siberia died in hospital in St. Petersburg after staging a self-immolation action in front of a military recruitment center in Russia's second largest city, medical personnel at the Dzhanelidze hospital said on May 2.
> The largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, said on May 2 its assets in Russia may be seized following lawsuits filed in Russia and the United States
> Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Georgia on May 2 to protest against the government's push to approve a controversial "foreign agents" bill a day after a violent protest that eyewitnesses say police attempted to disperse using rubber bullets.
> SYDNEY - Russia will face consequences for a cyber attack allegedly orchestrated by a group with ties to its military intelligence, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said on Friday.
> The risks of nuclear weapons have reappeared in global headlines. Containing those risks may hinge on communication as well as a “peace through strength” tradition.
> Mass protests in the former Soviet state against a Russia-inspired bill are yet another front against Moscow’s attempt to rebuild an empire.
> President Biden also referred to Russia and China, saying they “don’t want immigrants.” A spokesman said the president was trying to make a comment about America’s immigrant “DNA,” not insult other countries.
> America’s adversaries have mounted online campaigns to amplify the social and political conflicts over Gaza flaring at universities, researchers say.
> The fact that the NYPD was able to spin out a propaganda video in less than 24 hours using body camera footage and what looks to be professional video taken by the police is notable, because the New York City government, including the NYPD, has been horrendously—and perhaps illegally—slow at producing public records they are obligated by law to provide to the taxpayers who fund them.
> Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems and one of the first whistleblowers to allege Spirit leadership had ignored manufacturing defects on the 737 MAX, died Tuesday morning after a struggle with a sudden, fast-spreading infection.
> Known as Josh, Dean lived in Wichita, Kan., where Spirit is based. He was 45, had been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle.
> 45-year-old Joshua Dean, a former employee of Spirit AeroSystems, a crucial supplier for Boeing, has passed away due to a sudden illness, as reported by US-based Seattle Times. His death comes nearly two months after another Boeing whistleblower, John Barnett, was found dead in South Carolina.
> Dean passed away after a "struggle with a sudden, fast-spreading infection," the report claimed.
> Joshua Dean was an ex-employee of Spirit AeroSystems, aircraft manufacturer that produces crucial components, such as the fuselage for Boeing. According to him, he was fired in retaliation for pointing out the company's inadequate standards at its manufacturing facility in Wichita, Kansas.
> The former auditor was said to be in good health before he got sick and began having significant trouble breathing. Soon after entering the hospital, he developed both pneumonia and the rapidly-spreading staph infection MRSA, and ultimately succumbed to the latter.
> Based in Wichita, Kansas, Dean had been fired by Spirit — which was spun out from Boeing nearly 20 years ago in an outsourcing push and shouldn't be confused with the discount flight company Spirit Airlines — in April 2023 after he repeatedly tried to sound alarm bells about the manufacturing processes for parts that went into Boeing's 737 jets, as the Seattle Times previously reported.
> This in turn brings up the issue of pollution. Astronomers were the first to notice, as Starlink streaks made a mess for ground based telescopes to peer through. But the next issue is metal polution, as re-entering satellites melt and mostly vapourize in the upper atmosphere. 45,000 Starlink 2 satellites would weigh 90,000 tonnes, and with a 10 year life (never mind the 3-5 year current lifespan) they'd be dumping nearly ten thousand tonnes of metal into the upper stratosphere every year, which is probably a Bad Thing and is rightly generating alarm among environmentalists and climate researchers.
> Four days of pounding rain have inundated many parts of a southern state, cutting off towns and leaving people trapped as they await rescue by helicopters.
> In just three days, the authorities in Moscow have detained at least three Russian journalists from Western media and news agencies considered “unfriendly” by the Kremlin. Sergey Mingazov, a reporter for the Russian edition of the U.S. magazine Forbes, has been arrested on charges of discrediting the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine for sharing third-party information about the massacre in Bucha on social media. Sergey Karelin and Konstantin Gabov — from the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters, respectively — are accused by the Kremlin of collaboration with the team of dissident Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison in February. The latest arrests of journalists follow the expulsions and imprisonment of other Western and Russian correspondents over the past year.
> This post isn’t a detailed line-by-line tutorial on how to set up each individual piece of the setup as those types of guides tend to get out of date really easily, but if you know your way around Linux and the command line, then you can definitely replicate this setup on your own.
> Over the past few years I’ve been interested in learning about how much energy my computing setup and home appliances use. I’ve used a simple digital energy meter before to get instantaneous readings, but that was not ideal for monitoring how an electrical appliance consumes power over a longer time period.
> One reason that potential EV buyers give for sticking with gasoline: Public chargers subsidized by the state and federal government are too few and too unreliable. Tesla chargers are widely considered more dependable. They were built with money brought in by the sky-high value of Tesla’s stock. Early last year, Tesla agreed to open up its charger network in return for federal subsidies to help pay for Tesla’s planned but now diminished charger expansion.
> Sellers claim they are legal because the accelerator buttons are removable and the speeds artificially limited, although these limitations can be removed on request.
> Bike “conversion kits” can also be easily bought online, many of which allow power and speeds above the legal limit for e-bikes.
> Mr Campbell added: “You see this in towns and cities all the time now. Illegal e-bikes are being used by delivery riders and they are relying on the fact that no one is going to pull them over.
> “Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what laws are in place if there’s no enforcement.”
> We first visited the Rhododendron Species Botanical Garden in June 2021, mostly missing the rhodies — but today we caught them! Even a week earlier, there would have been more — but there were still plenty to see, and cool foliage too. There was a super high pollen count today so I masked up but still got a headache 😕 I’m out of the habit of excursions so I was wiped by the time we got home 😄 But I’m glad we went anyway.
> (Data warning: lots of photos! Also, lots of squeeing about plants! It’s my blog, not Instagram, so I’m not limited to ten photos, bwahaha)
> A long-awaited policy update from the city of Chicago is supposed to help prevent such injuries and deaths, which occur by the thousands each year when migrating birds crash into local buildings.
> But Chicago bird safety advocates say they are disappointed that the city's policy update, now in draft form, does not make bird safety measures mandatory.
> Instead, anti-collision measures, which can include installing glass with tiny markings, are included in a menu of sustainable design options from which developers working on affected projects can pick and choose.
> Their results suggest that the clever birds, who often suffer from loneliness in captivity, may be able to tell the difference between live and pre-recorded content on digital devices, and strongly prefer interacting with other birds in real time.
> The paper, titled "Call of the Wild Web: Parrot Engagement in Live vs. Pre-recorded Video Calls," will be presented at the Association of Computing Machinery's CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024) held in Honolulu May 11–16.
> The Colorado River's future may be a little brighter than expected, according to a new modeling study from CIRES researchers. Warming temperatures, which deplete water in the river, have raised doubts the Colorado River could recover from a multi-decade drought. The new study fully accounts for both rising temperatures and precipitation in the Colorado's headwaters, and finds precipitation, not temperature, will likely continue to dictate the flow of the river for the next 25 years.
> Securities regulators concluded their investigation into significant investments Barry Diller, Alexander von Furstenberg, and David Geffen made in Activision Blizzard shortly before Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) acquired the company in 2022.
> The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Justice Department investigated these options purchases for potential insider trading but found no grounds for charges, the Wall Street Journal reports.
> The IRS has launched a campaign to examine whether wealthy taxpayers are violating the law when using their ownership of sports teams to save large amounts in taxes.
> The effort will focus on sports industry entities that are reporting “significant tax losses” to “determine if the income and deductions driving the losses” are lawful, according to the IRS announcement earlier this year. That announcement, which consisted of one sentence on a webpage devoted to compliance campaigns by the IRS division that focuses on large businesses, did not specify what kinds of abuses the agency will be looking for.
> Whirlpool constructs a five-input, five-output transaction between an unknown number of people. Five units of similar-sized bitcoin go in and five come out to new addresses. This obfuscates the individual coins' history, and anybody observing flows on the publicly available blockchain can no longer know which of the five outputs belonged to which input.
> In the DOJ's enlightened view, that now constitutes money laundering and a failure to register as a money transmitter, even though Samourai is a noncustodial wallet, where the "operators do not take custody of user funds and therefore are technically incapable to 'accept' deposits or 'execute' the transmission of funds," according to Bitcoin Magazine.
> Last wednesday, Samourai Wallet founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill were arrested and charged with conspiracy to money laundering and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money service business in the Southern District Court of New York. The indictment alleges that Samourai Wallet “facilitated more than $100 Million in money laundering transactions from illegal dark web markets”.
> The definition of a non-custodial wallet as a money service business and the consequent indictment of the wallet’s maintainers can set dangerous precedents for the wider Bitcoin space and may go as far as affecting the freedom of the internet, essentially endangering all individuals, organizations and technologies involved in the transfer of financial transactions without exercising control over funds.
> Google is laying off at least 200 employees from its "Core" organization, which includes key teams and engineering talent, CNBC has learned. As part of the unit's reorganization, the company will hire corresponding roles in Mexico and India.
> Tasked with building out the foundations of the company's products and helping keep users safe, the core unit umbrella oversees teams related to information technology, code development, infrastructure, and security.
> The buyback was announced alongside Q2 2024 results that saw the iGiant win $90.8 billion of revenue – down four percent year over year. Net income dipped two percent to $23.636 billion. Earnings per share hit a record $1.53 and dividends per share rose four percent to 25 cents.
> “Standards are just going to have to evolve,” he said. He dismissed the notion that ChatGPT could be used for writing in the sciences, where the emphasis is on the findings, but not in the humanities, where the expression of ideas is central.
> “Writing a paper the old-fashioned way is not going to be the thing,” he said. “Using the tool to best discover and express, to communicate ideas, I think that’s where things are going to go in the future.”
> In comparison, when Debian Developers were asked to vote on the amateur-hour Code of Conduct, very few actually consented to that. Only 25% consented to CoC while 100% consented to DSC.
> We frequently see bullies insisting they have to "enforce" the CoC. What about enforcing the Debian Social Contract?
> Pichai was selected in 2015 by co-founder Larry Page to be Google’s CEO, while Page became CEO of newly formed holding company Alphabet. Pichai took over that role as well in 2019 when Page and co-founder Sergey Brin — two of the 10 richest people in the world — stepped back from day-to-day management.
> Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. announced early in 2023 that it planned to eliminate about 12,000 jobs, or roughly 6% of its workforce, in the wake of a downturn in the online advertising market that hurt its revenue. Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai (pictured) reiterated the plan to continue cutting jobs in January, and even though ad market has rebounded, the company has followed through with a series of layoffs this year.
> Google's Core unit is tasked with building the technical base for its flagship products and ensure safety of its users online. It also maintains the company's global IT infrastructure and provides users with internal tools and developer solutions.
> In the lead up to European Parliament 2024 elections, the current parliament has conducted a series of investigations into the risks of foreign interference and fake news. The bad news is, these things are already happening and they are visible to the naked eye.
> Such misleading information is relatively easy to see. But spotting other kinds of misleading information is more like identifying planets in other star systems. It’s difficult to find such a planet by just taking a direct image; the radiation from the star the planet orbits can obscure it. Instead, you might look for the shadow in front of the star or the “wobble” of a star caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet. You find it by looking around it.
> Over time, with this kind of misleading information, you learn to spot the wobble, the tells that something might not be right. This is what happened for me when I began to listen to Huberman Lab last fall.
> A photo of Donald Trump has been shared repeatedly in Chinese-language social media posts that claim it shows the Republican presidential nominee watching a China state-run broadcaster’s news program on his tablet at an April banquet.
> But the photo has been digitally doctored. The original photo, which began to circulate online as early as November 2023, shows Trump looking at a playlist on digital music service Spotify.
> Parliament condemns the dangerous phenomenon of disinformation-for-hire, whereby providers offer disinformation services to government and non-government actors, for example over the dark web, to attack electoral processes. To counter prohibited financial transactions from non-EU countries entering the EU’s political system, MEPs urge the Commission to facilitate the tracking of donations and call on the member states to urgently address the issue of donations from third countries to national political parties.
> The 167-year-old magazine brand is owned by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, who took a majority stake through the Emerson Collective in 2017, and chairman emeritus David Bradley.
> To the world’s journalists and Pakistan’s voters, the message is clear: America has your back. American actions, however, send a message at odds with Biden’s and Lu’s rhetorical flourishes: Don’t mess with Uncle Sam. Those who do will end up like Julian Assange in London’s Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison and Imran Khan in Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail.
> Adiala and Belmarsh are modern, state-of-the-art holding pens for murderers, drug lords, and terrorists. Yet Assange and Khan have killed no one, sold no drugs, planted no bombs. They outraged Washington in different ways, but they are both paying for it in the same way. Assange exposed America’s dark secrets. Khan defended his country’s sovereignty against American tutelage. Both have been disabled: Assange no longer publishes documents exposing US war crimes, and Khan ceased to serve as the prime minister who asserted his country’s neutrality in the US-Russia standoff. Theirs are textbook lessons in how to eliminate troublesome critics and discourage others from following their example.
> While that contraction will most affect marginalized voices, she says it will eventually impact all creators, leaving only those wealthy enough to do it — undermining the purpose, and benefit, of documentaries.
> "It becomes something for those who can afford it or a part-time gig that you can't sustain," she said. "This is not healthy. It's not a healthy space for people to be operating out of."
> It's a trend that's been observed by more than just filmmakers themselves.
> Finland ranked in fifth place in the World Press Freedom Index for the third year in a row, but the report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) once more highlighted a deterioration in the safety of journalists.
> "State secrecy lawsuits and a court ruling undermining the legal protection of journalists have created a climate of uncertainty in the profession," the report said.
> President of the Finnish chapter of Reporters Without Borders, Kaius Niemi — a former editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat and current lobbyist for PR firm Miltton — noted that although journalists in Finland operate within a generally stable environment, they do face coming under increasing pressure.
> Canada boasts one of the world’s highest assisted-death rates, supposedly enabling the terminally ill to die with dignity. However, this suicide program increasingly resembles a dystopian replacement for care services, exchanging social welfare for euthanasia.
> Because he broke labor laws, Jassy and the company are facing … pretty much nothing. Gee recommends that Amazon be forced to cease and desist from making labor-act violating statements – which critics would say is akin to throwing another bucket of water on a forest fire – and wants Amazon to notify all employees of their rights under US labor law. No fine was leveled, nor was any other form of penalty imposed.
> A new report released by NELP and over a dozen other workers’ rights groups, based on recently released data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), finds that Amazon workers experience a disproportionate share of injuries in the warehousing industry and that injuries at Amazon warehouses were more likely to be serious enough to require time off work. Amazon accounts for 79 percent of employment among warehouses with at least 1,000 workers, but 86 percent of all injuries. Last year, Amazon’s injury rate was more than one and a half times that of TJX (which owns T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and other large retailers) and almost triple that of Walmart, the two comparable US warehouse employers.
> Just days ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to France, the democratically elected head of the Tibetan government-in-exile met with French President Emmanuel Macron during an award ceremony in Paris.
> The visit marked the first meeting of a Tibetan elected leader with the head of a state of a major Western democratic nation.
> But as far as I am aware, the machine-tool distinction hasn’t been addressed in this literature, at least not explicitly. For bosses, a central feature of the machine, exemplified by the Taylorist time-and-motion expert, is the capacity for detailed control over the work of those employed to tend it. With a skilled worker using their own tools, such detailed control isn’t possible. In simple forms of production, where output can be measured easily, control over work can be replaced with production quotas or piecework payments. But in with collective products and where quality is hard to measure, such straightforward methods of control are no longer feasible. Workers can demand, and receive, more autonomy and require more motivation than simple monetary rewards and penalties.
> In the case of computers, bosses have done their best to fight back with various forms of spyware and remote control. But this has turned out to be costly and counterproductive. As far as I can tell, most of these attempt have been abandoned. Similarly, despite repeated ‘back to the office’ announcements, backed up by dire threats, working arrangement seem to have reached an equilibrium of 2-3 days a week as the median, with the weekend increasingly starting early on Friday afternoon, rather than at the traditional 5pm.
> David Gilkey once asked a pair of police officers a profound question: “What do you do with all the money you seize in drug busts?”
> One officer said, “we put in back into law enforcement training.” The other officer nodded.
> Gilkey, a Wichita youth advocate, then asked, “Why don’t you put that money back into the community?”
> The officer who answered said, “That’s not a bad idea.” The other officer stayed quiet.
> For the reasons set forth above, Plaintiffs’ motion to proceed anonymously is DENIED without prejudice. On or before May 20, 2024, Plaintiffs shall file an Amended Complaint properly suing in the names of the individual Plaintiffs. The Clerk of Court is respectfully requested to terminate docket entry 4.
> The Pabón family is among the nearly 8 million Venezuelans who have left their country in the last decade, fleeing an authoritarian regime and a collapsed economy — one of the largest population displacements in the world.
> Starlink sent a message to African users last month telling them that they had until April 30 to get their receivers to an approved location or risk service being cut off. As that date has now passed, Bloomberg went looking to see if illicit Starlink access is still working, and found it is.
> In an online poll, 73 percent of roaming Starlink customers in South Africa reported their service is still working. Many users in other countries similarly say their transceivers can still make a connection.
> Since 1992, the RIPE NCC has been the only Regional Internet Registry to offer a secondary DNS server to its members, called ns.ripe.net. LIRs with a /16-sized IPv4 allocation or a /32-sized IPv6 allocation have been able to use this service to ensure the stability of the DNS service for these large allocations, as they were considered essential to Internet operations. However, this service is challenging to support for many reasons, and we believe it is now time to retire it.
> The new line named T4 will replace the South Africa-Far East (Safe) cable that’s coming to end of life in 2027, a quarter of a century after commissioning. T4 will have a thousand times more capacity than the Safe, according to Kapil Reesaul, CEO of the Port Louis-based Mauritius Telecom.
> “With so many cable breakdowns we are having, we want to secure the Far East with a cable that will run from Mauritius to India and Singapore,” he said in an interview on Monday.
> 10+ years ago I created an annual list of websites that FORBADE you from linking to them, DEMANDED you write to ask for permission or LIMITED links to only their home page. Royal Mail even promised to post me a paper licence.
> Now a decade has passed, let’s see who’s still doing it … And yes I’ve linked to your websites to prove this. Uh oh.
> However dynamic or sociable they become, Web-site home pages will continue to reckon with the structural problems of the social Internet. Facebook still works to track its users around the Internet, and uses the data to target them with advertising. Readers often log on to publications like the Times with their Gmail accounts, further entrenching Google as a Internet gatekeeper. Consumers’ attention is still largely dictated by algorithmic feeds, and TikTok continues to provide the best opportunity to draw new eyeballs, at least until it gets banned by the United States government. Individual sites trying to replicate the dynamism of social platforms must reckon with the fact that they are doing so at a far smaller scale. Loyal audiences are pointedly not everyone; there is a limit to how much revenue can be juiced from them. Moving away from the traffic firehose of the wider Internet seems counterintuitive, in that sense, but it may be the only viable option left.
> Google is certainly paying companies lots of money to keep its search engine number one. During the trial last year, the ad biz disclosed it had spent $26.3 billion in 2021 on deals that kept Google as the default search engine for a variety of internet browsers. Apple alone received between $18 billion and $20 billion just to keep Google as the default search engine for Safari, something that Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai insists is to preempt competition from the iPhone and Macmaker.
> Though all those billions were enough for Apple not to make its own search engine or use Bing, apparently they weren't enough to stop the company talking smack about its rival behind closed doors. At trial, the Department of Justice revealed internal documents and presentations that showed Apple had (and has) significant privacy concerns about Google Search, and called Android "a massive tracking device."
> The case is the first to go to trial out of a handful of lawsuits the government has brought against the biggest tech companies since stepping up antitrust scrutiny of the industry in 2019 under then-President Donald Trump. The Biden administration hasn’t let off the gas.
> Central to the government’s case against Google is the over $20 billion it says that Google pays Apple annually to be the default search engine on iPhones and the Safari browser across much of the world. Google pays an additional more than $1.5 billion a year to wireless carriers and device makers, and more than $150 million to browsers, for similar defaults in the US, according to the government. Google can afford to pay those sums and still enjoy enormous profits because it has the US market for search and search ads cornered, the government alleges.
> Beyond just the apps and their capabilities, another reason I stick with iOS is the ecosystem around it.
> The biggest U.S. challenge so far to the vast power of today’s tech giants is nearing its conclusion.
> On Thursday and Friday, lawyers for the Justice Department, state attorneys general and Google will deliver their final arguments in a yearslong case — U.S. et al. v. Google — over whether the tech giant broke federal antitrust laws to maintain its online search dominance.
> The government claims that Google competed unfairly when it paid Apple and other companies billions of dollars to automatically handle searches on smartphones and web browsers. Google insists that consumers use its search engine because it is the best product.
> In this appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed a Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) decision sustaining an opposition proceeding and refusing registration of the standard character mark #TODECACHO for hair combs. Procedural and Substantive: the Federal Circuit held that the TTAB properly allowed Framboise to extend its trial period; and that substantial evidence supported the TTAB’s finding that Framboise established prior use. Opinion by Judge Lourie, joined by Judges Linn and Stoll.
> The Trademark Reporter has published its "Annual Review of European Trademark Law," with contributions from an impressive roster of authors from across Europe. The volume may be downloaded here. Willard Knox, Editor-in-Chief, comments as follows: [...]
> Is it simply the music flowing out of your earphones? According to the law, the answer is a bit more complicated.
> After Nintendo filed a full-blown lawsuit against the developers of the Yuzu emulator in February, a rapid settlement effectively ended that phase of the project a little over a week later. In March, Nintendo targeted various related tools, taking down dozens of repos at a time. This week, a single DMCA notice filed at GitHub effortlessly took out 8,535 Yuzu repos; elsewhere, new target Mig Switch also receives attention.
> Acting on a notice from Sky, Google has removed the websites of several pirate IPTV services from its UK search results. The domain names in question were previously blocked by local Internet providers in response to a High Court order. The recent action shows that Google's cooperation with rightsholders goes beyond targeting traditional pirate sites that host or link to pirated content directly.
> As the lawsuit details, the plaintiffs discovered that their work was part of Google's Imagen image generator's initial training data after Google released a paper about it in 2022 that noted it had used the publicly-available LAION-400M dataset. This "Large-Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network," as the name suggests, contains some 400 million images and captions to help train image generators — including, as the artists note in their suit, their copyrighted work.
> The latest obsession in the world of copyright is trying to get generative AI companies to pay for using creative material for training purposes. As various posts have noted, this makes no sense, because training is just a matter of analysis, which requires no permission. What the copyright world wants to do is to erect further barriers to accessing knowledge and art. But even without the legal threats being thrown around by publishers and other intermediaries, there’s another problem that generative AI companies face when it comes to using training materials: there simply aren’t enough of them. In particular, there aren’t enough of the really good textual materials that are need to push forward the generative AI field.
> Notably, the deal will address concerns that UMG and its artists have with generative AI. “TikTok and UMG will work together to ensure AI development across the music industry will protect human artistry and the economics that flow to those artists and songwriters,” reads a press release announcing the deal. “TikTok is also committed to working with UMG to remove unauthorized AI-generated music from the platform, as well as tools to improve artist and songwriter attribution.”
> Concerns about AI are growing in the creative community. In April, a non-profit group called the Artist Rights Alliance published an open letter urging the responsible use of the technology. The group of more than 200 musicians and songwriters called on technology companies and digital music services to pledge not to deploy AI in a way that would "undermine or replace the human artistry of songwriters and artists or deny us fair compensation for our work."
> The deal comes amid questions over TikTok's long-term future in the United States. President Joe Biden signed legislation last week that gives TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, 270 days to sell its U.S. assets. TikTok has vowed to file suit to challenge the legislation, which it calls a ban.
Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
-- Response ended
-- Page fetched on Sat May 18 07:44:51 2024
