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Techrights
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 23, 2024
> GNOME bluefish
> Back when blogging was something regular people did, there were self-anointed experts who wrote guidelines on how to write, coached as “rules”. They were often quite funny, because they’d invariably contradict the rules put down by other such experts!
> Hundreds of people and two WIRED reporters gathered at the Portal, which is open again after being closed due to “inappropriate behavior.”
> And this is where the controversy comes in at, and why I've hesitated a bit on writing this. What passed as entertainment in 1999 does not pass as easily today. I'm not here to take a political stance or make debate on what is acceptable and not, but I know a lot of folks have an issue with the way the stories, jokes, and content was presented at that time. Whether it was movies, TV shows like South Park or Jerry Springer, music like Eminem, or even Maxim, there are a lot of things that just not acceptable today. I'm not here to pass judgement, and honestly, the rest of this article is going to be me talking positively about my experience with these magazines, so there’s my little warning.
> I love reading about why bloggers write. I also find it very inspiring to read about how they do it.
> Because I know you are curious, here are a few of my favorite laundry-related things.
> Fossils of dinosaur skin are more common than you think. To date, however, only a handful of dinosaur skin fossils have been examined on a microscopic level. These studies, for example a 2018 study of four fossils with preserved skin, showed that the skin of early birds and their close dinosaur relatives (the coelurosaurs) was already very much like the skin of birds today. Bird-like skin evolved before bird-like dinosaurs came around.
> Dyson spheres were first proposed by the physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960 as a way for an advanced civilisation to harness a star’s power. Consisting of floating power collectors, factories and habitats, they’d take up more and more space until they eventually surrounded almost the entire star like a sphere.
> What Dyson realised is that these megastructures would have an observable signature. Dyson’s signature (which the team searched for in the recent study) is a significant excess of infrared radiation. That’s because megastructures would absorb visible light given off by the star, but they wouldn’t be able to harness it all. Instead, they’d have to “dump” excess energy as infrared light with a much longer wavelength.
> The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Career Development Committee is pleased to announce the 4th annual Professional Skills Survey and updated Professional Skills Map. Many thanks to all who participated!
> The 2023 survey received 235 responses and asked publishing professionals at all career levels across the industry to indicate which personal characteristics, transferable/interpersonal skills, and technical/knowledge-based skills are essential to success in their respective positions. Respondents also identified skills they would most like to develop further, highlighting opportunities for training and mentorship in those areas as they advance in their careers.
> I've been quite busy with other things, but today I decided to try and share my earliest memories with computing.
> I have lived in Portland for 19 years and always wanted to attend XOXO but the timing was never right. Portland tends to be very warm in August (nay, hot) and attending a festival that includes a lot of outdoor activity during August never sounded like a good fit for me, even if the overall event did. When I moved to SE Portland in 2012, not far from the old (or new) venue, it seemed even more important that I try to make it work to go. Then as the event announced "one last time" several times each time I thought "hmm, I should really go."
> You as a family member don’t interview at other families for more appreciation or especially not for greater challenges, or growth opportunities. But your family - hopefully - won’t let you go in a layoff if times are difficult. Even though the Grimm brothers did write a story where kids were left alone in the middle of the forest when there was not enough food… Yet, even that story teaches us that you don’t do such a horrendous thing in a family!
> On the other hand, you do change employers from time to time and your employer will dump you without hesitation if they think it’ll be better for them without you.
> So obviously the family narrative is false. I’m somewhat surprised that nobody - that I’m aware of - has come up yet with the narrative that a relationship between an employee and employer is like an early-stage relationship. There is a fair chance that you as a boyfriend or a girlfriend look into other relationships and as soon as you think it’s better without the other, you move forward. Whatever.
> I’ve worked from my home office for the past seventeen years. While it has evolved over the years, it has always been a nice place to work. These days it has the nice amenities you’d hope for in a home office: a couple windows, good monitors, a nice keyboard, a good chair, a sit-stand desk, etc.
> I had a doctor’s appointment today. The doctor didn’t show for at least an hour. He also wasn’t answering calls from his frazzled staff. I hope he’s OK and glad that my need wasn’t urgent and that I was able to rebook. I also took advantage of the enforced downtime to read Nick Simson’s 26 Days of Type, which had been on my to-read list for a while.
> Arbaugh isn’t the first person to get a BCI; one recipient, Nathan Copeland, has had one for nine years. Beyond Neuralink, several other companies are working to commercialize BCIs to help people with paralysis, mental health disorders, and even blindness. Arbaugh recently spoke with WIRED via Zoom to talk about his experience in the Neuralink study. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
> However, we should realize that these idealistic social standards for the summer are not realistic. Without club meetings or campus events, many of us live away from our college friends and in less social environments during this season. Combined with our idealism, the increase in alone time during the break can drive summertime loneliness, which can exacerbate comparison culture on social media as well as our FOMO.
> In an online survey of 676 patients with lupus – technically known as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) – roughly a third of patients reported disrupted dreams in the year before other disease symptoms emerged.
> The findings add to anecdotal reports that dreams and the brain's immune system are somehow intertwined.
> For instance, I recently uninstalled almost every time-suck app on my phone. No Mastodon client, no YouTube, etc. For a week or two it worked pretty well. When my muscle memory tried to surf to one of these places, “Oh, the app is uninstalled and maybe I just shouldn’t.”
> I know others have this same predicament be it photography or drawing etc. when it’s becoming something you stop enjoying take a break until you get that urge to do it again.
> Along with Copilot, the capability will also be available for PCs. It was introduced last year to take the place of Microsoft’s Cortana speech assistant. Recall, according to Nadella, lets users reconstruct historical occurrences using a semantic search throughout their whole history. Over 16 million people have viewed the video since it went popular on X. Additionally, Elon Musk has stated that he plans to disable Recall.
> TikTok, the widely popular video-sharing app owned by ByteDance, has announced significant layoffs affecting its operations, content, and marketing teams. The news was first reported by The Information, and impacted employees are expected to be notified by Thursday morning.
> The report claims the company plans to disband its global user operations team, which handles tasks like user support and communication.The remaining user operations staff will reportedly be reassigned to other departments within
> Yesterday, at the Council of the European Union, Member States adopted the AI Act to regulate Artificial Intelligence systems. This step marks the final adoption of this legislation under discussion since 2021, and initially presented as an instrument to protect rights and freedoms in the face of the AI steamroller. In the end, far from the initial promises and emphatic comments, this text is tailor-made for the tech industry, European police forces as well as other large bureaucracies eager to automate social control. Largely based on self-regulation, crammed with loopholes, the AI Act will prove largely incapable of standing in the way of the social, political and environmental damage linked to the proliferation of AI.
> Prompt optimization is the process of improving the quality of prompts used to generate content. Often by using few shots of context to generate a few examples of the desired output, then refining the prompt to generate more examples of the desired output.
> For some apps it may be sufficient to train a ML (machine learning) model once, and ship it with the app itself. However, most mobile apps are way more dynamic than that, constantly changing and evolving. It is therefore important to be able to quickly adapt and improve your machine learning models, without having to do a full app release, and go through the whole App Store release & review process.
> In this series, we will explore how to operate machine learning models directly on your device instead of relying on external servers via network requests. Running models on-device enables immediate decision-making, eliminates the need for an active internet connection, and can significantly lower infrastructure expenses.
> Forget AI. Google just created a version of its search engine free of all the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus. All you have to do is add "udm=14" to the search URL.
> People don't like Adobe being subscription software. It turns out that I don't care. Paying £600 per year for a suite of software that saves me countless hours, is actually a really good deal. It's a business expense that gets factored into my pricing along with every other expense from broadband to my accountant.
> People don't like the idea of being locked into proprietary formats - how will you open that file in 20 years time? If I'm no longer in business, I won't need the software. I can confidently say, that in 20 years time I will not want to open the content I created for clients today.
> “When Broadcom took over, they stopped a lot of innovation,” he said of CA at Nutanix’s NEXT conference in Barcelona on Tuesday, before predicting the same will happen at VMware and that Broadcom’s revised licensing strategy will please investors but not customers.
> Customer chatbots built on top of general purpose gen-AI engines are proliferating. They are easy to develop but hard to secure.
> Thousands of GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) instances in the United States using SAML single sign-on (SSO) authentication are at high risk of compromise from a critical vulnerability that now has a proof-of-concept exploit available on the open [Internet].
> My most distressing discovery was that Mac OS crypt(3) still supports only DES. Good grief.
> It’s a brilliant feature, Limitless should be proud of what they built, but I do hope they’re angling for a sale to someone like Apple or Google because I’m not sure what the way forward for them is once Apple adds this to macOS as well.
> I’m a techno-optimist. I believe devices and software can make many parts of our lives much better and more enjoyable. But I’m no fool and think that bringing a computer or software into everything would automatically make things better.
> The Bank of Italy warned on Wednesday against fraudulent video messages circulating online, in which artificial intelligence (AI) technology is used to reproduce fake messages from financial authorities and other institutions.
> [Portion of airport sign from May 2024 DHS media toolkit.]A year before the most recently self-imposed “deadline” on which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has threatened to start illegally denying passage through Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoints at airports to would-be travelers without ID it deems sufficiently “compliant” with the REAL-ID Act of 2004, the DHS has launched a new campaign of advertisements, press releases, and signs in airports to publicize its threat to start restricting the right to fly without ID.
> “Starting May 7, 2025, you need a REAL-ID* to board domestic flights,” the TSA says, with a footnote in much smaller print, “or acceptable alternative”.
> Is this threat for real? No, no, and no.
> When the proposal was first presented on 8 May, several previously critical governments expressed their support and openness. The proposal is to be discussed again the day after tomorrow (24 May). The EU interior ministers will meet directly after the European elections and could endorse the draft legislation.
> ‘The leaked Belgian proposal means that the essence of the EU Commission’s extreme and unprecedented initial chat control proposal would be implemented unchanged,’ warns MEP and most prominent opponent of chat control Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party). ‘Using messenger services purely for texting is not an option in the 21st century. And removing excesses that aren’t being used in practice anyway is a sham.
> For me, the idea that I’m going to search through a timeline of everything so that I can see what that webpage I was looking at two Wednesdays ago just seems crazy. Like, that’s what a browser history is for and how often does this need ever really even come up? But it’s technically possible, so of course some big tech company is going to roll this shit out.
> And then this huge and ever-growing pile of data is going to be sitting there. Even on the off chance that the people designing and implementing this feature now have the very best of intentions, all it takes is a change of strategy or one down quarter, and you know some genius sitting in a conference room is going to be like “Well, we could use the Recall data to…”
> The technology uses GPS to compare a vehicle's speed with a dataset of posted speed limits. Once the car is at least 10 mph over the speed limit, the system would emit "a brief, one-time visual and audio signal to alert the driver."
> The ability to crunch AI data directly on the computer lets Copilot+ include a feature called "Recall." "Recall" tracks everything done on the computer, from Web browsing to voice chats, creating a history stored on the computer that the user can search when they need to remember something they did, even months later.
> Copilot+ PCs will be shipped with a slew of artificial intelligence features, including “Recall,” or should it be called “Total Recall?” The AI will keep track of everything people do on their PC by taking a screenshot every few seconds. What files they’ve opened, what apps they’ve used, what webpages they’ve visited, and what passwords or account details they’ve entered will all be logged and stored.
> CaliExpress by Flippy, the Pasadena, Calif., automated fast food joint that debuted in January with robot burger chefs, also offered another cutting-edge feature in their operations: Facial payment technology. This less-heralded innovation allows customers to pay for their meals with their faces.
> The remote-finding feature can be triggered by pressing a button on the front of the Onn streaming box, according to AFTVNews, which then causes the bundled remote to beep and flash a small LED light if it’s within 30 feet of the streaming box.
> This seems like a good idea, but I worry about false alarms. If I am walking with a friend, will it alert if they have a Bluetooth tracking device in their pocket?
> My story is not the first or worst doxxing on campus. According to a Title VI complaint currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, an alumnus allegedly doxxed members of Students for Justice in Palestine as “terrorist affiliated” and urged everyone to “Name them, shame them, and don’t hire them.”
> Event data recorders (EDRs) help obtain more accurate and complete data for accident research and analysis. They are already mandatory for new types of passenger cars and vans. The General Safety Regulation requires the Commission to also adopt EDR technical requirements and test procedures for new types of heavy-duty vehicles. These must become applicable as from January 2026.
> We write a lot of reports at Bishop Fox (it’s what happens when you hack all the things). This frequently results in needing to redact certain text. We have a long-standing policy that when you redact text, the only way to do it securely is to use black bars. Sometimes, people like to be clever and try some other redaction techniques like blurring, swirling, or pixelation. But this is a mistake.
> Today, we’re focusing on one such technique – pixelation – and will show you why it’s a no-good, bad, insecure, surefire way to get your sensitive data leaked. To show you why, I wrote a tool called Unredacter that takes redacted pixelized text and reverses it back into its unredacted form. There’s plenty of real-world examples of this in the wild to redact sensitive information, but I won’t name names here. Watch my video for a quick recap of the importance of NEVER using pixelation to redact text, as well as how I unredact Jumpseclabs's Challenge in real-time.
> Finnish leaders are not projecting concern about Moscow's reported plan to redraw sea borders, but experts say Russia is testing the waters to see how Finland reacts.
> Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis has called this Russia’s “hybrid operation” and “an obvious escalation”.
> "Another Russian hybrid operation is underway, this time attempting to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about their intentions in the Baltic Sea. This is an obvious escalation against NATO and the EU, and must be met with an appropriately firm response."
> El Fasher is the only city in the Darfur region that the RSF has not captured. More than 800,000 civilians are sheltering there, and a full-scale battle could unleash atrocities similar to those of the genocide carried out by Arab Janjaweed fighters against African Zaghawa, Masalit, Fur and other non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur in the early 2000s.
> Janjaweed fighters make up today's RSF.
> The right-wing government on Tuesday proposed the emergency measure because Finland believes Russia is responsible for orchestrating a migrant crisis on its 1,335-kilometer border in retaliation for joining NATO, which supports Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.
> Tuesday’s ruling is not the first time Impress has rapped 5Pillars for anti-LGBT discrimination. Following a standards review in 2021 Impress sanctioned the site over a video that described homosexuality as a crime, making 5Pillars the first publisher to be rebuked as part of an overall standards review by either Impress or the UK’s other press regulator IPSO.
> Mozambique, bordering the Republic of South Africa and a key littoral state east of the Cape, is suffering from domestic instability that is amenable to U.S. foreign assistance. One third of the world’s maritime shipping crosses the Mozambique Channel, and Mozambique’s Port of Nacala, the deepest harbor in East Africa, facilitate exports, primarily coal, from a number of states in Africa’s interior. Economically the nation holds one of the largest LNG reserves discovered to date, which could become an alternative source of gas for the EU in light of the Russo-Ukraine War. Mozambique is under the threat of Takfiri Islamist civil violence, and Russian influence. However, unlike recent reversals in Africa, Mozambique is amenable to increased Western intervention.
> The local influx is part of record unauthorized immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border. Border Patrol encountered more than 24,000 Chinese between ports of entry in fiscal year 2023, compared with just 330 in 2020. This spike is a tiny amount as a share of last year’s 2.5 million encounters at the border, but it reflects a growing trend in the diversification of nationalities entering illegally from the south. Experts say the increase among Chinese was triggered when China ended three years of strict pandemic lockdowns at the end of 2022.
> Retired U.S. Navy officers Donald Hornbeck, Robert Gorsuch and Jose Luis Sanchez, and U.S. Marine Corps Col. Enrico DeGuzman had all admitted to accepting bribes from defense contractor Leonard Francis, nicknamed “Fat Leonard.”
> The enigmatic figure — who was six feet, 3 inches tall and weighed 350 pounds at one time — is at the center of the Navy’s most extensive corruption cases in recent history.
> This week, an American woman named Christina Marie Chapman was arrested in Arizona. She is accused of being part of an elaborate scheme that generated almost US $7 million in funds for North Korea, potentially to fund its weapons programme.
> We speak with The New Republic's Kate Aronoff about how President Biden has unveiled steep tariff increases on various Chinese imports, including electric vehicles, which will quadruple from the current tariff rate of 25% to 100%. “What you see … is Biden really looking to lean into a really quite hawkish position on China,” says Aronoff. She explains why Biden is caught between insulating the American auto industry from competition and allowing affordable EVs to enter U.S. markets for climate goals. Aronoff says experts say Biden should work with China on this industry and “to not see this as zero-sum competition. We need to build a lot of clean technology. This is a very large pie, and there's no reason why the United States cannot also have a piece of it.”
> Former and current officials, as well as top experts, outlined what needs to be accomplished for Ukraine at the NATO Summit.
> A court in St. Petersburg has extended the pretrial detention by another two months for an 18-year-old activist who is charged with repeatedly discrediting Russian armed forces involved in Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
> Britain has accused China of preparing to or already providing ‘lethal aid’ to Russia for its ongoing full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
> Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin, who is serving an 8 1/2-year prison term for his criticism of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, has been placed in solitary confinement, just ahead of a scheduled visit by his parents.
> Ukrainian air defenses shot down all 24 drones launched by Russia at targets on Ukraine's territory early on May 22, the Air Force said in a statement.
> After a sobering trip to Kyiv, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken is urging the president to lift restrictions on how Ukraine can use American arms.
> As they evacuated from the fighting in Ukraine, the passengers already thought of what they left behind.
> As Moscow’s forces retake land from which they were ousted at the end of 2022, the Ukrainian military has adopted a strategy of fighting while slowly falling back to more heavily fortified positions.
> Sigita Roķe, Editor-in-Chief of Latvian Television (LTV), in consultation with the LTV Editorial Board, has decided to cancel the planned European Parliament (EP) pre-election debate in Russian on the public media portal Rus.LSM.lv.
> The Middle Corridor can offer an alternative to the Russian-based Northern Corridor, as long as countries can surmount these remaining challenges.
> Russia has launched a likely space weapon and deployed it in the same orbit as a US government satellite, the Pentagon said.
> Lithuania plans to install permanent fortifications on its borders with Russia and Belarus to stop the possible movement of hostile forces, Lithuanian Defence Minister Laurynas Kasčiūnas has said.
> Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo has slammed Lithuania’s response to the information that Russian authorities have allegedly decided to change the country’s maritime borders with Lithuania and Finland in the Baltic Sea.
> Lithuania plans to terminate several bilateral agreements with Russia and Belarus, replacing them with multilateral agreements.
> The Russian authorities have unilaterally decided to change the country’s maritime borders with Lithuania and Finland in the Baltic Sea, according to a draft government resolution quoted by The Moscow Times. The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry calls the move a provocation, while Russian media have denied any plans to review boundaries in the Baltic Sea.
> Two pro-Russian paramilitary organizations operating in Bulgaria should be closed because their activities violate the constitution, a Bulgarian district prosecutor’s office said on May 22.
> Russia has withdrawn without explanation a Defense Ministry draft that proposed revising Moscow's maritime border in the eastern Baltic Sea and expanding its territorial waters that raised the ire of littoral NATO members Finland, Sweden, Lithuania, and Estonia.
> A man accused of throwing two Molotov cocktails over the fence of the Russian Embassy in Chisinau on March 17, the day of Russia's presidential election, has been sentenced to 150 hours of unpaid community service.
> The Pentagon has said Russia "likely" deployed an anti-satellite weapon in space earlier this month, a claim quickly rejected by Moscow.
> Russia's Investigative Committee said on May 21 that the former deputy governor of the Kalman district in the Siberian region of Altai Krai, Vitaly Manishin, will face trial over the deaths of 11 women.
> The U.S. allegations took as reference the recent launch of a Soyuz-2.1 b vehicle on May 17.
> The situation on the Latvian-Belarusian border is stable, but migrants come in waves, says the State Border Guard. Every day, 15-70 attempts to cross the border illegally are detected, Latgale regional television reported May 21.
> Russia spent about $8.5 billion on purchasing its own shadow tankers, with most of this money coming from state funds, writes Craig Kennedy, an expert on the Russian oil industry who runs the Navigating Russia newsletter on Substack. Hundreds of companies were created worldwide to manage the tankers. Bloomberg estimates that by December of last year, shadow vessels were transporting about 45 percent of Russia’s oil.
> Describing the decision to allow oil palm in forests as “ill-advised,” he said “it is obvious that plantation and raising of exotic oil palm is a not a traditional right by any stretch of imagination since it is a commercial crop,” and that such activity, “is both ecologically and legally untenable.”
> Jammu Tawi, May 22: Jammu is seething at 42 degrees Celsius as the heat wave intensified across Jammu and Kashmir while the weatherman here has predicted more hot and dry weather conditions for the next one week.
> "It is because the heat is so strong," Mexican President and Tabasco native Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told Reuters when asked about the monkey deaths. "I've been visiting the states for a long time and I have never felt it as much as now."
> Temperatures in the region show no signs of slowing down, and are this week expected to surpass a staggering 113 degrees Fahrenheit. (The typical May temperature for Tabasco is under 100 degrees Fahrenheit.)
> In the past 18 years alone, maximum smoke cover over the state has increased by about 116,000 square miles — equivalent to about 74.4 percent of California’s entire land area, according to the study, published on Wednesday in Communications: Earth & Environment.
> The issue was initially reported in March by the FAA ... who reportedly gave Boeing until May 9 to respond -- but there's no insight into whether a response was issued. However, a Boeing spokesperson told the outlet the March notice from the FAA was over "proposed rulemaking" ... wanting Boeing to comment on the situation before the agency mandated fixes to the 777 series.
> For at least a decade, a car theft trick known as a “relay attack” has been the modern equivalent of hot-wiring: a cheap and relatively easy technique to steal hundreds of models of vehicles. A more recent upgrade to the radio protocol in cars' keyless entry systems known as ultra-wideband communications, rolled out to some high-end cars including the latest Tesla Model 3, has been heralded as the fix for that ubiquitous form of grand theft auto. But when one group of Chinese researchers actually checked whether it's still possible to perform relay attacks against the latest Tesla and a collection of other cars that support that next-gen radio protocol, they found that they're as stealable as ever.
> Kickstarter, the popular platform for crowdfunding all sorts of things including video games and board games, is expanding with some new tools.
> This is a vital principle to keep in mind, because obscenely well-resourced "financial engineers" are on a tireless, perennial search for opportunities to disguise fraud as innovation. As Riley Quinn says, "Any time you hear 'fintech,' substitute 'unlicensed bank'":
> https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism
> But there's another important lesson to learn from the 2008 disaster, a lesson that's as old as the South Seas Bubble: "leverage" (that is, debt) is a force multiplier for fraud. Easy credit for financial speculation turns local scams into regional crime waves; it turns regional crime into national crises; it turns national crises into destabilizing global meltdowns.
> On Sunday, Red Lobster announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and secured $100 million in debtor-in-possession financing commitments from existing lenders. The company was over $1 billion in debt.
> The Federal Communications Commission is considering a proposal that would require US political ads to disclose their usage of AI technology.
> The rule was suggested by the American watchdog's boss Jessica Rosenworcel and, if enacted, would create a more transparent political environment for citizens in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential, Congressional, and gubernatorial elections.
> The Seoul Summit produced a set of Frontier AI Safety Commitments that will see signatories publish safety frameworks on how they will measure risks of their AI models. This includes outlining at what point risks become intolerable and what actions signatories will take at that point. And if mitigations do not keep risks below thresholds, the signatories have pledged not to "develop or deploy a model or system at all."
> Other signatories included Amazon, Anthropic, Cohere, G42, Inflection AI, Meta, Mistral AI, Naver, Samsung Electronics, Technology Innovation Institute, xAI and Zhipu.ai.
> All of that sounds great … but the details haven't been worked out. And they won't be, until an "AI Action Summit" to be staged in early 2025.
> That’s why we are convening world leaders and CEOs at the AI Seoul Summit on 21 and 22 May – building on the conversation we kick-started at Bletchley Park in November. We believe realising the full potential of AI requires three vital ingredients.
> The legislation prohibits AI systems from engaging in cognitive behavioral manipulation and social scoring in the EU. It also forbids the use of AI for predictive policing based on profiling and systems that utilize biometric data to classify individuals by categories like race, religion, or sexual orientation. For general AI systems, compliance with transparency requirements is mandatory unless they present systemic risks. In such cases, stricter regulations must be followed. It is important to note that the EU’s AI Act makes exceptions for systems used solely for military, defense, and research purposes, exempting them from these rules.
> An open-source focus also aligns with the desire for sovereign capabilities among emerging markets like India, which want to leverage the best technology in the world but maintain control over their own destiny, said Rob Thomas, senior vice president of IBM Software.
> The EU’s AI Act was first drafted by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, in 2021. Member states agreed on the text of the legislation this past February and the proposal received the greenlight from the European Parliament a few weeks later. The final approval that the law received today was issued by the European Council, one of the EU’s two legislative bodies.
> Both ideologies ostensibly center on improving the fate of humanity, offering anyone who adopts the label an easy way to brand themselves as a deep-thinking do-gooder. At the most surface level, both sound reasonable. Who wouldn't want to be effective in their altruism, after all? And surely it's just a simple fact that technological development would accelerate given that newer advances build off the old, right?
> But scratching the surface of both reveal their true form: a twisted morass of Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, inflated egos, and greed.
> Same as it always was.
> Donald Trump on Tuesday falsely claimed in a campaign fundraising email that President Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out” during a 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents, an extraordinary distortion of a standard FBI policy on the use of deadly force during such operations.
> AI-generated images, audio and videos have helped politicians connect directly with tens of thousands of voters. Stalwart political leaders who have died have been resurrected to cash in on their popularity. Deepfake videos of Bollywood stars criticizing Prime Minister Narendra Modi have gone viral before being taken down.
> “It’s the first time that AI has been disseminated on such a large scale,” said Divyendra Singh Jadoun, who calls himself the Indian Deepfaker and has had a packed schedule in recent months, creating synthetic content for political parties.
> The creator of a “FUCK the LAPD” shirt sold out not only his entire stock of that shirt but also sold out many of his other designs after the Los Angeles Police Department Foundation made an intellectual [sic] property [sic] threat against them that claimed they owned the letters ‘LAPD.’
> On Friday, Vox reported that employees at tech giant OpenAI who wanted to leave the company were confronted with expansive and highly restrictive exit documents. If they refused to sign in relatively short order, they were reportedly threatened with the loss of their vested equity in the company — a severe provision that's fairly uncommon in Silicon Valley. The policy had the effect of forcing ex-employees to choose between giving up what could be millions of dollars they had already earned or agreeing not to criticize the company, with no end date.
> China's [Internet] censors have deleted a video in which children at a private performing arts school in the southwestern province of Sichuan dance to British rock band Pink Floyd's 1979 hit "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" which featured a choir of schoolchildren protesting overbearing authority and "thought control" in education.
> Naik, who continues to track human rights abuses in India, received his green card in February. When he called his family to share the good news, his father revealed that, a few months earlier, he had been summoned to a military camp and interrogated about his son’s activities.
> At one point, the officer suggested to Naik’s father that his son should write nicer articles about India.
> A Tunisian court on Wednesday sentenced two journalists to one year in prison on charges of publishing false news that harms public security, a judicial official said, amid growing fears of a crackdown targeting all critical voices.
> The imprisoned journalist received a rare legal win when the UK High Court ruled he can appeal his extradition to the US. Yet the fight for Assange’s freedom — and the future of global press freedom — is far from over.
> Sam Altman-led OpenAI has signed a deal that will give it access to content from some of the biggest news publications owned by media conglomerate News Corp, the companies said on Wednesday.
> The deal comes weeks after the Microsoft-backed AI giant clinched an agreement to license content from the Financial Times for the development of AI models.
> On the right to plead the First Amendment, plainly no sufficient assurance had been given. The US government had simply assured that Julian’s defence in the US would be entitled to seek to make a First Amendment defence.
> It is important to understand that the High Court has not asked for an assurance that the First Amendment argument would ultimately prevail against other factors, e.g. so-called national security. They had merely asked that the line of defence not be barred on nationality alone. The US assurances had sought to avoid the question completely by ignoring it and seeking to conflate the other arguments that might prevail against the First Amendment.
> This was so blatant, I did not see how the court could rule that the US assurances were sufficient, and still retain any intellectual self-respect. My observation of judges Johnson and Sharp at the last hearing was that they very much possessed intellectual self-respect. So my optimism of winning the right to a new appeal was very high.
> Israel’s Communications Ministry confiscated camera equipment from The Associated Press on Tuesday afternoon, claiming the agency had violated a new broadcasting law by providing images of northern Gaza to Al Jazeera.
> But hours later, Israel’s communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, reversed the decision and ordered the equipment be returned to The A.P. It was not clear when the equipment would be given back to the news agency.
> For over thirty years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation presented awards to key leaders and organizations in the fight for freedom and innovation online. The EFF Awards celebrate the longtime stalwarts working on behalf of technology users, both in the public eye and behind the scenes. Past Honorees include visionary activist Aaron Swartz, human rights and security researchers The Citizen Lab, media activist Malkia Devich-Cyril, cyberpunk author William Gibson, and whistle-blower Chelsea Manning.
> The internet is not simply a frontier to conquer. It’s a necessity in modern life and a continually evolving tool for communication, creativity, and human potential. Together we carry—and must always steward—the movement to protect civil liberties and human rights online. Will you help us spotlight some of the latest and most impactful work towards a better digital future?
> Remember, nominations close on May 31st at 2:00 PM Pacific time!
> Winnick has learned that the corporate world is not entirely up to speed when treating pregnant women fairly. She stated: "I was incredibly naive to think that in 2024, it was finally possible to become a mom without taking a hit to your career. I know no woman whose trajectory hasn't been affected, temporarily or permanently."
> The direct way Winnick's pregnancy threatened her career prospects reflects the "motherhood penalty" which many pregnant women can experience. Victims of this trend often struggle with landing jobs and receiving promotions and pay raises.
> Three Amazon shareholder proposals designed to improve working conditions at Amazon were killed at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday.
> The proposals, outlined in brief in Amazon’s 2024 proxy statement, included requests for additional reporting on how Amazon had undermined workers’ right to unionize, a report on warehouse conditions, and an additional board to oversee the implementation of AI in warehouses. The first of these, the proponent said, has been proposed for three years in a row and has continued to fail.
> Although Incognito Market did not sell narcotics directly, it provided a dark web platform connecting customers with vendors. The site earned 5% of every narcotic sold for its services.
> Stay with me here. That connection came nestled in an opinion concerning a police detective who allegedly cost an innocent man almost two years of his life by using a nearly-incomprehensible statement from someone in jail, who was reportedly under the influence of meth, and then guiding that same person to pick her chosen defendant, Desmond Green, out of a photo line-up—after her witness explicitly picked someone else. As a result, Green was arrested for capital murder and spent 22 months in the Hinds County Detention Center, which he claims was infested with rodents and where his cellmate was stabbed.
> In the letter, the resident said, “neighborhood children were in the side yards playing and my family was within close perimeter” when the weapon was fired. The resident said their 17-year-old daughter witnessed the dog get shot by the officer.
> Regina Adams-Miller, a Sturgeon resident, said she was concerned that the officer discharged his firearm at all but especially without warning in a resident’s backyard.
> AI projects like OpenAI’s ChatGPT get part of their savvy from some of the lowest-paid workers in the tech industry—contractors often in poor countries paid small sums to correct chatbots and label images. On Wednesday, 97 African workers who do AI training work or online content moderation for companies like Meta and OpenAI published an open letter to President Biden, demanding that US tech companies stop “systemically abusing and exploiting African workers.”
> As you can imagine, it was an incredibly emotional experience. Led by the great Craig Kirchhoff, this music making experience has informed my music listening experience ever since.
> Overall, Huston believes Starlink has "a very high jitter rate, a packet drop rate of around one percent to two percent that is unrelated to network congestion, and a latency profile that jumps regularly every 15 seconds."
> That makes it "an unusually hostile link environment" for transport control protocol (TCP), and means "older variants of TCP, such as Reno TCP, that react quickly to packet loss and recover slowly, can perform very poorly when used across Starlink connections."
> The PRS-, STIM-, and GEMA-founded company reached out today with word of that milestone, which arrived specifically between May of 2023 and April of 2024. As recapped by ICE (the International Copyright Enterprise), nearly three and a half years passed before it topped €1 billion in cumulative distributions, compared to about two years for the second billion.
> Apple Inc. has filed a suit at the European Union’s General Court in Luxembourg, challenging the €1.8 billion ($1.95 billion) fine issued by the EU in March for curbing fair competition from its rivals in the digital music streaming sector. The EU’s antitrust arm, the European Commission, says it stands ready to defend its decisions in court.
> The EU’s fine levied against Apple also included an order to no longer prevent music streaming apps such as Spotify from informing users of cheaper deals outside of the App Store. Undoubtedly, this was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, leading to Apple challenging the decision.
> Could Google down-rank publishers who decline to use its new Privacy Sandbox online advertising system, which is scheduled to come online in early 2025?
> So far the search giant has not offered any assurance that declining to use Sandbox, the Google-controlled system which will replace publisher cookies on Chrome, won’t impact search rankings.
> The government plans to argue in a lawsuit that Live Nation shored up its power through Ticketmaster’s exclusive ticketing contracts with concert venues, as well as the company’s dominance over concert tours and other businesses like venue management, said two of the people, who declined to be named because the lawsuit was still private. That helped the company maintain a monopoly, raising prices and fees for consumers, limiting innovation in the ticket industry and hurting competition, the people said.
> Why it matters: There's widespread agreement that pharmaceutical companies have gamed the system through tactics like "product hopping," where a drug company makes small changes to a drug in a bid to keep cheaper generics from reaching the market sooner.
> The USPTO is seeking nominations for several open positions on its Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC) and Trademark Public Advisory Committee (TPAC). [Fed Reg Notice] These prestigious committees advise the Director of the USPTO on policy matters relating to patents and trademarks respectively. Serving on the PPAC or TPAC is an incredible opportunity to help shape the future of intellectual property rights in the United States. As a member, you would review policies, goals, performance metrics, budgets and user fees at the USPTO. You would also prepare an annual report for the President and Congress on these key issues. Members must be U.S. citizens with substantial expertise in areas like finance, management, labor relations, science, technology or automation. At least 25% of the PPAC must represent small entity patent monopoly applicants.
> Thank you, Ted Davis, for permitting me to post a link (here) to your article, "Recent Developments in United States Trademark and Unfair Competition Law." This article is a companion to the Ted's presentation at the 2024 Annual Meeting of INTA Atlanta."
> It’s unclear if Johansson plans to take additional legal action against OpenAI. Her counsel on the dispute with OpenAI is John Berlinski, a partner at Los Angeles law firm Bird Marella, who represented her in a lawsuit against Disney claiming breach of contract, settled in 2021. (OpenAI’s outside counsel working on this matter is Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati partner David Kramer, who is based in Silicon Valley and has defended Google and YouTube on copyright infringement cases.) If Johansson does pursue a claim against OpenAI, some intellectual property experts suspect it could focus on “right of publicity” laws, which protect people from having their name or likeness used without authorization.
> The Market Court in Finland has just thrown out an attempt by a law firm to obtain the personal details of suspected BitTorrent users, without actually being a rightsholder of the works in question. After years spent representing movie rightsholders, the law firm felt copyright law should be interpreted as granting it rightsholder-like powers to obtain names, addresses, and similar information, without the rightsholders themselves having to be part of the action.
> Sony Music Entertainment (SME) is suing Marriott International for copyright monopoly infringement over the alleged unauthorized use of protected music in social control media promo videos. The major label and several of its subsidiaries recently submitted the complaint against Bethesda-headquartered Marriott to a Delaware federal court.
↺ The UK Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) Says Mechanicals Topped $260 Million in 2023
> The UK-based Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) has announced it has paid out £204.3 million ($260 million) to music publishers, songwriters, and composers for UK-based plays. This payout represents an 8.5% uplift (£15.9M/$20.2M) on 2022 and a 43% increase in annual distributions over the last five years.
> Most people agree that cheating is an unfair way to win at online video games, but do cheating tools actually break the law? This question is at the center of a landmark trial currently underway between cheat maker AimJunkies and Destiny 2 creator Bungie. Among other things, the jury must decide whether the cheat maker infringed the game's copyrights.
> A New Orleans group is suing Beyoncé over her smash hit “Break My Soul” — accusing her of copyright infringement stemming from her use of a sample from Big Freedia, who they claim illegally used lyrics from their 2002 song “Release a Wiggle.”
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