Leftovers

• James G ☛ Advent of Technical Writing: A Day in the Life

  You may be wondering: what does the average day in the life of a technical writer look like? What do you do? What do you spend a lot of time working on? If you are entertaining a career in technical writing -- or are generally fascinated by what technical writers do -- this post will provide context on the day-to-day in the role. Of course, everyone's role is different. I will document mine.

• James G ☛ Advent of Technical Writing: Types of Documentation

  "Technical writing" is a broad umbrella. It can mean everything from scientific communication to writing instruction manuals. I wanted to take some time to document some of the types of documentation I have encountered in my work at technology startups. I will discuss the key features of each type of documentation, allowing differentiation.

• ABC ☛ Kiss say goodbye to live touring, become 1st US band to go virtual as digital avatars

  During their encore, the band’s current lineup — founders Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons as well as guitarist Tommy Thayer and drummer Eric Singer — left the stage to reveal digital avatars of themselves. After the transformation, the virtual Kiss launched into a performance of “God Gave Rock and Roll to You.”

  The cutting-edge technology was used to tease a new chapter of the rock band: after 50 years of Kiss, the band is now interested in a kind of digital immortality.

  The avatars were created by George Lucas’ special-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, in partnership with Pophouse Entertainment Group, the latter of which was co-founded by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus. The two companies recently teamed up for the “ABBA Voyage” show in London, in which fans could attend a full concert by the Swedish band — as performed by their digital avatars.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ How I Take and Publish Notes

  But I’ve yet to write about how I take and publish notes to it.

• Science

  • El País ☛ The race is on for a new [Internet] based on quantum physics

    Called the Quantum Internet Alliance, or QIA, the project brings together research institutes and companies across Europe. The initiative is receiving €24 million in EU funding over three and a half years until the end of March 2026.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-26 [Older] China demands more fever clinics amid pneumonia surge

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-24 [Older] China claims all clear on child respiratory disease

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-24 [Older] EU: Air pollution killed hundreds of thousands in 2021

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Noticing the ground beneath my feet

    One thing he points out is that mindfulness isn’t achieving a zen-like state on a mountain top, but instead being aware of the things you do on autopilot. He cites a study that we spent about half our lives performing rote actions we’re not even conciously aware of. Peversely, these habitual things can be a source of anxiety, and recognising what we’re doing in real time can be a way to break out of it.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ ICYMI: ChatGPT Authors 100 Blogs Filled With Healthcare Disinformation

    ChatGPT quickly authored 100 blogs full of healthcare disinformation, but Google Bard and Microsoft Bing had guardrails in place to thwart such prompting, according to an article on MedPage Today. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) was able to quickly churn out large amounts of health disinformation on vaccines and vaping, Australian researchers found. In just 65 minutes and with basic prompting, ChatGPT produced 102 blog articles containing more than 17,000 words of disinformation on those two topics, Ashley Hopkins, PhD, of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and colleagues reported in JAMA Internal Medicine. Hopkins and colleagues were also able to use two other generative AI tools – DALL-E 2 and HeyGen – to produce 20 realistic images and one deep-fake video in less than two minutes to accompany the disinformation blog posts.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI and Trust

    Trust is essential to society. Humans as a species are trusting. We are all sitting here, mostly strangers, confident that nobody will attack us. If we were a roomful of chimpanzees, this would be impossible. We trust many thousands of times a day. Society can’t function without it. And that we don’t even think about it is a measure of how well it all works.

    In this talk, I am going to make several arguments. One, that there are two different kinds of trust—interpersonal trust and social trust—and that we regularly confuse them. Two, that the confusion will increase with artificial intelligence. We will make a fundamental category error. We will think of AIs as friends when they’re really just services. Three, that the corporations controlling AI systems will take advantage of our confusion to take advantage of us. They will not be trustworthy. And four, that it is the role of government to create trust in society. And therefore, it is their role to create an environment for trustworthy AI. And that means regulation. Not regulating AI, but regulating the organizations that control and use AI.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Off Guardian ☛ The White House’s Secret Surveillance Program Breaks All the Laws

      For instance, it was recently revealed that the White House, relying on a set of privacy loopholes, has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

      This goes way beyond the NSA’s metadata collection program.

      Operated during the Obama, Trump and now the Biden presidencies, this secret dragnet surveillance program (formerly known as Hemisphere and now dubbed Data Analytical Services) uses its association with the White House to sidestep a vast array of privacy and transparency laws.

    • NYOB ☛ noyb sues CRIF and AZ Direct for illegal and secret data processing

      noyb has filed a lawsuit against the credit reference agency CRIF GmbH and the address trader AZ Direct. The companies secretly trade the address data of almost every adult in Austria. By doing so, CRIF obtains information that was actually collected for advertising purposes - in order to calculate credit ratings. As the Austrian data protection authority confirmed in two decisions, this violates the GDPR. noyb is now suing for injunctive relief and damages, among other things.

    • Gizmodo ☛ Time to Change Your DNA: 23andMe Lost Data for 6.9 Million People

      23andMe, the world’s leading consumer DNA harvesting enterprise, announced Friday that hackers stole about 14,000 people’s ancestry information, as well as “a significant number of files” about other users. It turns out the word “significant” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. According to TechCrunch, 23andMe lost data about 6.9 million users, including people’s genetic information.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-25 [Older] Philippines, Australia begin patrols in South China Sea

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-24 [Older] Decoding China: Beijing, BRICS seek Middle East influence

  • Axios ☛ COP28 president says there's "no science" in fossil fuel phase-out calls

    A U.N. report last month recommended a "near total phase-out" of coal production by 2040 and a three-quarters reduction in oil and gas production and use by 2050 compared with 2020 levels.

  • Vox ☛ An oil executive is leading the UN climate summit. It’s going as well as you’d expect.

    Climate scientists have emphasized that Jaber’s statements are inaccurate, with some noting that they’re reminiscent of arguments the fossil fuel industry is known for making. According to the 2023 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, greenhouse gas emissions — which are heavily caused by the usage of fossil fuels — would need to be slashed to almost half by 2030 to keep the temperature increase below 1.5°C. Scientists have also worried that it’s too late to even limit the temperature increase to that level and that the goal is no longer tenable. As Irfan noted, for example, 2023 might be the first year the world’s average temperatures rise above the 1.5°C mark.

  • NPR ☛ U.N. climate talks head says "no science" backs ending fossil fuels. That's incorrect

    In the video, however, al-Jaber responds to Robinson's suggestion with this incorrect statement: "I respect the science, and there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5 [degrees Celsius]."

    In reality, scientists warn that the only paths to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius require phasing out fossil fuels including oil, gas and coal. Under the Paris agreement, world leaders agreed to limit global warming to well-below 2 degrees of warming, and ideally no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, compared to temperatures in the late 1800s.

  • Off Guardian ☛ COP28: The Globalist Agenda Has Never Been More Obvious

    The rest of the two weeks will doubtless be committed to lobbyists, bankers, royals and politicians deciding exactly how they are going to “act”. Or, more accurately, how they are going to sell their pre-agreed actions to their cattle-like populations.

    They are literally telling us their plans, all we have to do is listen.

  • CNBC ☛ John Kerry responds to COP28 president's claim there's 'no science' behind fossil fuel phase out

    The remarks, which were made by Al-Jaber during a live online event on Nov. 21, were described as "farcical" by climate scientists.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Russia takes control of Iraq’s biggest oil discovery for 20 years

    The approval last week by Iraq’s Oil Ministry for Inpex – the major oil company of key U.S. ally Japan – to sell its 40 percent stake in the Block 10 region that contains the huge Eridu discovery leaves the way clear for Lukoil to take total control of the entire oil-rich area.

  • Axios ☛ Behind the Curtain: U.S. not ready for era of robotic, AI world wars

    What's happening: Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, said at last week's Axios AI+ Summit in Washington that with cutting-edge tech being deployed in Ukraine, a drone is no longer just an uncrewed flying object. It's a "potent software platform" that's a big step toward more automated war.

    "It's clear that drones and other weapons based on autonomy can replace tanks, artillery and mortars," Schmidt told us in a later interview. "The success of Ukraine and also Russia on the battlefield proves this point."

  • Futurism ☛ Alarming Video Shows Guy Boxing With Robot

    The robot is being controlled by a different engineer wearing a set of VR goggles nearby, translating the movements of his VR controllers directly to Nadia's arms and legs via a tether.

  • The North Lines IN ☛ Drone Found Near IB In Punjab’s Amritsar

    During a search, a China-made quadcopter was found in a field.

  • India Times ☛ Israel investigates possible trading knowledge ahead of October 7 Hamas attack

    "Days before the attack, traders appeared to anticipate the events to come," they wrote, citing short interest in the MSCI Israel Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) that "suddenly, and significantly, spiked" on Oct. 2 based on data from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

    "And just before the attack, short selling of Israeli securities on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) increased dramatically," they wrote in their 66-page report.

  • Axios ☛ Report: Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels to hit new highs

    Why it matters: It "now looks inevitable we will overshoot" the Paris Agreement's ambitious target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial levels, said University of Exeter professor Pierre Friedlingstein, who led the research, in a statement accompanying the report involving over 90 educational institutions and published Tuesday.

    "Leaders meeting at COP28 will have to agree rapid cuts in fossil fuel emissions even to keep the 2°C target alive."

  • Science Alert ☛ It's Crucial We Phase Out Fossil Fuels, Despite Outrageous COP28 Claims

    If global emissions and fossil fuel burning continue at their current rates, this warming level will be breached by 2030.

    Since the publication of our Nature paper, scientists have modelled hundreds of scenarios to explore the world's options for limiting warming to 1.5°C. Many feature in the latest report by the IPCC. Here is what they tell us about the necessary scale of a fossil fuel phase-out.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Russia shells Ukraine’s Kherson, killing at least one and damaging hospitals — Meduza

• Environment

  • Axios ☛ Study: Western U.S. wildfires undo 2 decades of air quality progress

    Black carbon concentrations have risen 55% on an annual basis, mostly due to the wildfires, researchers found.

  • Futurism ☛ Carbon Dioxide Is Becoming More Fearsome, Scientists Find

    New research has found that the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, the gas primarily responsible for making our planet hotter, becomes even more potent as as more of it is emitted.

    That grim finding comes from a new study, published in the journal Science, which took a look at CO2's effects in the stratosphere. Scientists have known that carbon dioxide actually cools this upper region of the atmosphere, but this latest work shows that stratospheric cooling ends up intensifying the greenhouse effect it causes.

    Put another way: carbon dioxide is getting pound-for-pound stronger at heating up our planet the more of it that we pump into the atmosphere.

  • India Times ☛ Why pollution from cigarettes costs $26 billion a year

    Plastic pollution from cigarette butts and packaging is costing $26 billion each year to which China contributes 20% of the global cost, SCMP reported.

    Over ten years, the cost for waste management and dealing with its impact on marine ecosystems is projected to reach $186 billion.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ Is it you or is it the system?

    The supply side (a.k.a. the drilling side, the pipelines, the cigar-smoking megarich CEOs) is one side of the problem. The demand side is another part. The supply side is maliciously and selfishly blaming the demand side—”we’re only giving the people what the people demands”. The supply side needs to stop doing what they’re doing and realize that they do bear responsibility.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • International Business Times ☛ Ryanair Passengers Asked To Pay 'Scandalous' Fee To Download Boarding Pass? Airline Offers Update

      The Irish carrier has issued a statement after several reports suggested that passengers have been asked to pay a fee between £7 and £21 to download their boarding pass or face long queues at the airport to get a physical one.

    • Democracy Now ☛ Climate Summit Host UAE Blasted by HRW for Migrant Worker Abuse, Toxic Pollution & Mass Surveillance

      The U.N. climate summit underway in Dubai marks the first time in nine years that representatives from Human Rights Watch have been allowed access to the United Arab Emirates. We speak with researcher Joey Shea about toxic pollution from UAE fossil fuels processing, and the state of political rights in the authoritarian country — especially for migrant workers who constitute 88% of the population but lack many labor protections under the kafala system. “There is no independent civil society in this country,” says Shea, adding that there is “sustained targeting of human rights defenders, activists, judges, lawyers, regular Emirati citizens” and anyone else who speaks out. Shea also warns that attendees of the COP28 conference are subject to mass surveillance from the moment they step foot in the country.

    • Democracy Now ☛ COP28: Asad Rehman on Funding a “Just Transition” Off Fossil Fuels & Limits on Protest in UAE

      As Democracy Now! broadcasts from the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, we get an update on negotiations and more from Asad Rehman, executive director of War on Want and lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition. He says developing countries must be compensated by rich countries for the impacts of the climate crisis and to allow for a “just transition” away from fossil fuels around the world, not just in the Global North. The annual United Nations conference opened Thursday with delegates agreeing to adopt a new “loss and damage” fund to help poorer nations deal with the disproportionate impact of the climate crisis, but it has raised just a fraction of what activists say is needed to address the annual cost of climate catastrophes. The United States only pledged $17 million for the fund. Meanwhile, COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber is facing a new wave of criticism after claiming there is “no science” backing the need to phase out fossil fuels. Al Jaber is also the head of the UAE’s state oil company ADNOC.

    • DeSmog ☛ Reuters, New York Times Top List of Fossil Fuel Industry’s Media Enablers

      Darren Woods, the CEO of Exxon, celebrates the potential of carbon capture to dramatically reduce global emissions. According to Saudi Aramco’s podcast, the fossil fuel industry is innovating new climate solutions, and BP’s podcast proclaims more of the same. 

      These messages sound like they’ve been pulled from the public-relations departments of the world’s largest oil companies, but they were produced and promoted by the in-house ad agencies of Bloomberg, Reuters, and The New York Times, respectively, and in the process benefited from the credibility those media brands have built with readers over the decades as trustworthy sources of news.

    • DeSmog ☛ Telegraph Sale ‘Middleman’ Nadhim Zahawi is a Guest of UAE at COP28

      Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi is attending the COP28 climate summit as a guest of the United Arab Emirates, DeSmog can reveal – prompting questions about his role as the intermediary in the host country’s prospective takeover of a major British newspaper.

      An investment fund backed by the UAE has reached an agreement to buy The Telegraph and its sister publication the Spectator and erase the £1.16 billion debt of the Barclay brothers, their current owners. 

  • Overpopulation

    • Vox ☛ How millennials learned to dread motherhood

      I’m not alone in struggling with the prospect of motherhood. Birthrates in America have declined across racial and ethnic groups over the past 15 years, decreases driven not only by people having fewer children but also by those waiting to have any children at all, many deeply torn about the idea. The animated Fencesitter Reddit stirs daily with prospective parents stressed over what they really want. One of the most viral TikTok videos last year, with millions of views and some 800,000 likes, is known simply as “The List,” featuring hundreds of reasons to not have children. (Reasons included: urinary tract infections during and after pregnancy, back pain, nosebleeds, and #89, “could be the most miserable experience of your life.”)

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-26 [Older] Germany's Greens hold intense convention amid budget crisis

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-24 [Older] Amazon: EU workers stage strikes to 'Make Amazon Pay'

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-24 [Older] Cheap labor: Are tech giants exploiting Ugandans?

  • Reuters ☛ Twilio to cut about 5% of total workforce

    Cloud communications platform Twilio Inc (TWLO.N) said on Monday it will lay off about 5%, or 295, of its total workforce by the first quarter of 2024 to achieve profitable growth.

    The company expects to incur about $25 million to $35 million associated with the restructuring in the last three months of 2023.

  • Yahoo News ☛ Twilio to cut about 5% of total workforce

  • Game Rant ☛ EA Lays Off Developers at Codemasters

    EA has announced layoffs at Codemasters, the UK developer behind the popular F1 and Grid franchises. While not the first round of layoffs at EA, the announcement is the latest addition to a long list of staff redundancies within the gaming industry in 2023. Now, with the layoffs at Codemasters, EA may be looking to cut back on its investments in the racing genre.

  • Top headlines: Canadian banks have never had job cut 'carnage' like this, David Rosenberg says

    Canada’s main stock index moved lower, dragged down by losses in energy and base metals, while U.S. markets also ended the day in the red, led by weakness on the Nasdaq.

    The S&P/TSX composite index closed down 42.66 points at 20,410.21.

    In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 41.06 points at 36,204.44. The S&P 500 index was down 24.85 points at 4,569.78, while the Nasdaq composite was down 119.54 points at 14,185.49.

    The Canadian dollar traded for 73.85 cents U.S. compared with 74.04 cents U.S. on Friday.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-25 [Older] Hungary's Viktor Orban launches anti-EU campaign

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-25 [Older] North Korea says satellite has images of 'target regions'

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Ask The Chefs: The US Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence

    There has been significant governmental activity around AI, driven especially by the G7 Hiroshima process. In reading the Executive Order (EO), I was most interested in learning the Biden Administration’s approach on three topics: (1) copyright, (2) AI accountability, and (3) AI use in education.

    The Executive Order kicked the can on copyright. The US Copyright Office (part of the Legislative Branch) is currently in the middle of a massive AI study process, and the Executive Order directs the head of the US Patent and Trademark Office (US PTO, part of the Executive Branch) to meet with the head of the USCO within six months of the Copyright Office’s issuance of any final report (traffic is bad in DC). At such time, the US PTO is directed to “issue recommendations to the President on potential executive actions relating to copyright and AI.” On the positive side, at least the EO acknowledged that copyright is relevant.

  • The Drone Girl ☛ Red Cat management changes mean C-Suite title for one young entrepreneur

    Among the impressive lines on his resume include Peter Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 member. In 2021, Teal was acquired by Red Cat, upon which the company focused its efforts on becoming a military drone powerhouse through products like the Teal Golden Eagle. Today, the company’s flagship product is the Teal 2 drone which is a powerhouse in the darkness, largely thanks to a partnership with thermal camera maker FLIR.

  • The Verge ☛ The UK tries, once again, to age-gate pornography

    UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has laid out how porn sites could verify users’ ages under the newly passed Online Safety Act. Although the law gives sites the choice of how they keep out underage users, the regulator is publishing a list of measures they’ll be able to use to comply. These include having a bank or mobile network confirm that a user is at least 18 years old (with that user’s consent) or asking a user to supply valid details for a credit card that’s only available to people who are 18 and older. The regulator is consulting on these guidelines starting today and hopes to finalize its official guidance in roughly a year’s time.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ VA hires unnamed senior executive to clean up website benefits issues

    Rosendale said that subcommittee members received the VA response to Bost’s letter less than an hour before Monday’s hearing. “It took two hearings by this subcommittee to shake this response loose, and that is absolutely unacceptable,” he said.

  • Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 187: Jeff Elgie on What the Bill C-18 Deal With Google Means for the Future of the Canadian News Sector

    The Canadian government tried to salvage the Online News Act last week as its struck a deal with Google that will bring in $100 million to support the news sector and remove concerns about blocked news links. The government had to overhaul its own law in order to reach the agreement, tossing aside most of the core elements in favour of a fund-style single payment from Google. The reaction to the agreement from the news sector has been mixed at best with relative silence from many supporters and outright opposition from the likes of Torstar.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Spotify Lays Off 17% of Workforce Amid Profitability Push: ‘We Have to Become Relentlessly Resourceful’

    Spotify head Daniel Ek announced the layoffs in a publicly published message today, after signing off on a number of other cutbacks throughout 2022’s second half and this year’s initial 11 months. Citing “dramatically” slowed economic growth as well as a desire to “consistently drive profitability” at Spotify, the 40-year-old disclosed that the latest personnel reduction will specifically decrease “total headcount by approximately 17% across the company.”

  • Quartz ☛ Spotify is ending 2023 with its third and biggest layoffs of the year

    The company has already conducted two rounds of layoffs this year. In January, when Spotify axed 6% of its global payroll, or 600 jobs, Ek took “full accountability,” saying he was “too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth.”

    Then in June, 200 employees were fired from the podcast division—a high-investment area on which the company had splurged more than $1 billion, both in production and development. That included exclusive audio rights to podcasts created by Prince Harry, Kim Kardashian, and former US president Barack Obama.

  • Gizmodo ☛ Spotify Lays Off 1,500 as Revenues Climb

    Ek admitted that this would come as a surprise to the nearly one in five staff being cut, especially since the streaming company claimed to be doing pretty damn well in its most recent quarterly earnings report from October. For most of this past year, Spotify was operating at a loss of nearly $502 million, though things seemed to have been turning around as of late.

  • ABC ☛ Spotify to cut 17% of workforce, CEO says

    The layoffs at the Stockholm-based music streaming service, which employs about 9,200 people, follow two rounds of cuts announced earlier this year.

  • NPR ☛ Spotify to cut 17% of staff in the latest round of tech layoffs

    Across the tech industry, tens of thousands of positions have been cut in the last year as a pandemic-era boon continues to fade. According to the tech job tracker layoffs.fyi, more than 250,000 tech workers have been laid off since the start of the year.

  • NBC ☛ Spotify to lay off 17% of employees — read the full memo CEO Daniel Ek sent to staff

    The latest round of cuts equates to roughly 1,500 jobs, according to a CNBC source familiar with the matter. In his memo, Ek did not specify where the job cuts would happen among its global workforce. A Spotify spokesperson wouldn’t comment on the exact number of roles affected by the measure.

  • Security Week ☛ North Korean [Crackers] Have Stolen Over $3 Billion in Cryptocurrency: Report

    North Korean threat actors are believed to have stolen more than $3 billion in cryptocurrency to date, according to a report from threat intelligence firm Recorded Future.

    Collectively tracked as the Lazarus Group, the North Korean hackers specialize in cryptocurrency-related intrusions, mainly relying on spear-phishing emails to trick victims into authorizing malicious scripts and downloading malware.

  • India Times ☛ Want India to lead protocol development in Web3, says Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal

    "I want Indian developers to be at the forefront of protocol development. If we want to attract the best and brightest of Indian talent into Web3, we need to improve education on a protocol level," Nailwal said, speaking at the Build for Web3 Summit in Bengaluru.

  • Axios ☛ Spotify to cut 1,500 jobs in latest round of layoffs

    Why it matters: The steep cuts come as a surprise, given Spotify's most recent quarterly earnings report, which marked the first time the company turned a quarterly profit since 2021.

    Spotify had previously cut 6% of its staff — roughly 600 employees — earlier this year. And it cut 200 roles after consolidating its podcast division.

  • India Times ☛ Spotify layoffs: Music streamer to lay off 17% of workforce

    Spotify has laid off 17% of its employees, or about 1,500 people, chief executive Daniel Ek said in a note about organisational changes at the music-streaming company on Monday. This is the company’s third round of layoffs this year, after sacking 6% of its workforce in January, citing a challenging economic environment. In October 2022, it laid off 38 staffers from its Gimlet Media and Parcast podcast studios.

  • India Times ☛ Generative AI a stumbling block in EU legislation talks

    EU lawmakers cannot agree on how to regulate systems like ChatGPT, in a threat to landmark legislation aimed at keeping artificial intelligence (AI) in check, six sources told Reuters.

    As negotiators meet on Friday for crucial discussions ahead of final talks scheduled for December 6, 'foundation models', or generative AI, have become the main hurdle in talks over the European Union's proposed AI Act, said the sources, who declined to be identified because the discussions are confidential.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Police Secrecy Hits A Snag After Florida Supreme Court Decision

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Futurism ☛ Facebook Accused of Pressuring Harvard to Fire a Disinformation Expert

      Best known for her work tracking COVID-19 disinformation, extremism researcher Joan Donovan is, per new court filings, accusing Harvard's Kennedy School of kowtowing to pressure from Facebook's parent company Meta after she gave a report that received significant pushback from people tied to the tech giant.

      Until now, the reasons for Donovan's exit from Harvard earlier this year and news of the school's closure of her research initiative, the Technology and Social Change Project (TASC), were unknown. But now she's filed a 248-page document with the Massachusetts attorney general's office and the US Education Department proferring an explosive explanation.

    • CNN ☛ Former Harvard disinformation scholar says she was pushed out of her job after college faced pressure from Facebook

      Beginning in 2018, Donovan worked for the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and ran its Technology and Social Change Research Project, where she led studies of media manipulation campaigns. But last year Harvard informed Donovan it was shutting the project down, Donovan claims.

      In a disclosure sent last week to Harvard leaders and US Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and made public on Monday, Donovan alleges that the University began restricting her research after the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative donated $500 million to fund a new university-wide center on artificial intelligence. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is the philanthropy run by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, who both attended Harvard.

    • Chronicle Of Higher Education ☛ A Star Misinformation Scholar Says Harvard Pushed Her Out for Criticizing Meta

      Joan Donovan, a leading scholar of online-disinformation campaigns, is going public about why she believes she was recently forced out of Harvard University’s Kennedy School: because her research threatened the school’s financial ties to the social-media behemoth Meta.

    • Boston Globe ☛ Prominent disinformation specialist files whistleblower complaint against Harvard

      But Whistleblower Aid alleged that Donovan’s team began to feel pressure in October 2021, when she announced during a university meeting that she had legally obtained the so-called Facebook Files, which showed the social media giant, now known as Meta, tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms.

      Donovan said at the meeting that she planned to “create a public archive” of the documents and host workshops for researchers and journalists, according to Whistleblower Aid. But a “Facebook PR executive” at the meeting became “irate” when Donovan discussed the matter, the group alleged.

      “Following the meeting, [Kennedy School] Dean [Douglas] Elmendorf began a two-year campaign to purge Dr. Donovan, silence her voice, decrease her public profile, and stifle her team’s impactful research,” the group alleged.

    • Connor Tumbleson ☛ A Lost Friend

      So I messaged him and asked him what was going on. That was a terrible idea. There was a loud rejection for everything I asked: I'm being brainwashed, I get my news from fake sources, I'm turning into every possible bad word. Even when I broke questions down to their absolute basic form he doubled down or even tripled down to some very morally/ethically wrong points. I couldn't even have a good adult conversation about differing opinions without getting tilted.

    • Vice Media Group ☛ How Online Fights Affect Real World Battlefields

      This week, Emerson T. Brooking joins Matthew and Emily to explain how online discussion shapes the reality on the ground in conflict zones. Brooking is a resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council and the co-author of LikeWar, a book about the weaponization of social media.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Donald Trump lashes out at Robert De Niro's Gotham award speech: ‘He has become a total loser…’

    “I just wanna say one thing, the beginning of my speech was edited, cut out I didn't know about it, and wanna read it,” began the Oscar-winning actor.

    "It was, thankyou, history isn't history any more, truth is not truth, even facts are being replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness. In Florida young students are taught that slaves develop skills that could be applied for their personal benefit. Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan's arsenal. The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office, and he’s keeping up the pace with his current campaign of retribution. With all of his lies, he can’t hide his soul. He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature and shows his disrespect for example using Pocahontas as a slur. This is where I came in and I saw that they edited all that.”

  • US News And World Report ☛ Indonesia Softens Internet Law After Critics Complain of Misuse

    Indonesia's parliament on Tuesday passed a revision to its [Internet] law, softening articles that critics said have been used to stifle government opposition.

    The revision to the electronic information and transaction law (ITE) includes tighter requirements for the law's defamation article, requiring a stronger burden of proof in prosecutions. It also halves the maximum penalty for defamation from four years to two.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-26 [Older] In Georgia, 'journalism is no longer considered safe'

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-26 [Older] Iran sues newspaper for publishing morality guard documents

  • New York Times ☛ Detained in Russia for 250 Days, American Reporter Is Still Awaiting Trial

    Monday marked the 250th day that Evan Gershkovich, an American reporter for The Wall Street Journal, has been in custody in Moscow on an espionage charge that he, his newspaper and the U.S. government have vehemently denied, and a lawyer who has worked on similar cases said that Mr. Gershkovich’s time in detention will likely last much longer.

    The lawyer, Ivan Pavlov, who has worked on a number of high-profile treason and espionage cases in Russia, said that they usually take years to complete.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Is Journalism Ready?

    A second Trump White House would give important policy scoops to friendly publications such as The Federalist and The Washington Free Beacon rather than to supposedly unfair outlets like The New York Times, which would report them unfavorably. “The White House press corps could be shaken up,” the former Trump official said, explaining that the administration’s director of communications could say to the White House press corps, “I know you have your rules, but we’re not going to play by those rules. Give these people”—administration allies—“press credentials, or we’ll have briefings with only people we invite, in a different room.”

    It’s not hard to imagine Trump breaking laws to go after journalists, seeking embarrassing personal information on his most effective pursuers. At the start of his term, he floated to James Comey, the FBI director, the possibility of jailing journalists who published classified information. Comey laughed off the idea; with fanatic loyalists in the bureau, a second-term Trump could carry it out. In a 900-page manual on how to bring the administrative state under the president’s complete control, Heritage advises that “the Department of Justice should use all of the tools at its disposal to investigate leaks,” including seizing reporters’ email and phone records, a practice that Attorney General Merrick Garland ruled out in 2021. The conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court might be less likely to defend press freedom during a second Trump term than the Court has been in the past. Joel Simon, the founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, has urged colleagues to prepare, practically and psychologically, for legal assaults, economic pressure, “a toxic online environment,” and dangerous streets with violence from both police and demonstrators.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2023-11-25 [Older] Germany: Last Generation activists blockade Berlin streets

  • Site36 ☛ Last investigations closed: Hamburg G20 police violence in 2017 remains completely unpunished

    All criminal prosecution of police officers who violently assaulted people at the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg came to nothing and no charges were brought. The last investigation was closed despite compelling evidence.

  • RFERL ☛ Regional Iranian Officials Order Strict Dress Code For Female Public Workers

    The deputy governor of Qom, Abolghasem Moghimi Araghi, emphasized in the directive the need for female employees to comply with the "laws of modesty and hijab." The requirement underscores the regime's renewed emphasis on conservative dress standards, particularly in Qom, a city known for its religious significance and as a hub for Shi'ite religious education.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Comic Book ☛ Sony Is Deleting a Ton of Content PlayStation Fans Paid For

    "As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library," reads the alert from PlayStation. "We sincerely thank you for your continued support."

  • The Register UK ☛ Steam client drops support on macOS, but adds it on Linux

    It is not an instant 100 percent cutoff. The client, and the games, will keep working for now – but there will be no more updates, and if it or the games installed using it, break, well, that means gamers will be on their own. The underlying reason for dropping these releases is that Google's Chrome no longer supports these macOS releases, and Steam uses Chrome internally.

  • The Register UK ☛ HP exec says quiet part out aloud when it comes to locking in print customers

    Instant Ink is a subscription in which ink or toner cartridges are dispatched when needed, with customers paying for plans that start at $0.99 and run to $25.99 per month. As of May last year, HP had more than 11 million subscribers to the service. Since then it has banked double-digit percentage figures on the revenues front.

  • Kyle E Mitchell ☛ Support the Blue Oak License List

    If you’ve benefited from this blog and other licensing material I’ve published, please consider donating to Blue Oak Council’s license list this year!

• Monopolies

  • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok and Ticketmaster Expand Partnership to Over 20 Countries: ‘We Hope to Deliver Further Value to All Artists’

    While Ticketmaster event links’ ability to turn TikTok users into ticket customers is unclear, the businesses did disclose that there’ve “been more than 2.5 billion views of videos utilizing the in-app features by artists, sports teams and event organizers” to date.

    (Of course, that TikTok reportedly uses a secret “heating button” to drive viral trends – or deliver viewers to particular videos and individuals, that is – means Ticketmaster links may prove doubly beneficial for artists who higher-ups wish to see succeed.)

  • BW Businessworld Media Pvt Ltd ☛ Meta To Face €550 Mn Lawsuit By Spanish Media Outlets Over Unfair Competition

    A coalition representing 83 prominent Spanish media outlets has launched a legal offensive against Meta, parent company of social media giant Facebook. The AMI newspaper publishing association spearheaded the initiative, filing a substantial EUR 550 million (USD 598 million) lawsuit on Friday in a commercial court, alleging Meta's engagement in unfair competition within the advertising market.

  • India Times ☛ Spanish media association files $598 million lawsuit against Facebook owner Meta

    A group representing 83 Spanish media outlets on Monday said it has filed a 550 million euro ($598 million) lawsuit against Facebook owner Meta Platforms, citing unfair competition in the advertising market.

    The lawsuit was filed by the AMI newspaper publishing association in a commercial court on Friday, the association said.

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ KISS Announces the ‘End of Its Physical Existence’ with Full Avatar Replacements

      After a career spanning over 50 years, KISS is marking the official end of its “physical existence” as a band by crossing into the digital world for future performances. At the conclusion of the last show of the band’s final live tour, The End of the Road, on December 2 at Madison Square Garden, KISS announced the surprise onstage handover of the band to the members’ new digital avatars with an encore performance of “God Gave Rock and Roll To You.”

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Kiss to live on as avatars as band prepares to retire

      In this vein, lead singer Paul Stanley and bandmates Gene Simmons, Eric Singer and Tommy Thayer have something in common with Swedish pop group Abba. The group is in discussions to let their avatars continue to tour in a deal with Pophouse Entertainment Group, the company behind Abba Voyage. Details are yet to be ironed out.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Cloudflare Applauds Court for Rejecting DNS Piracy Blocking Order

      Cloudflare applauds a recent decision from a Higher Court in Germany, which ruled that DNS resolvers are not liable for online piracy. The ruling is a key victory in an ongoing legal fight over the responsibilities of online intermediaries. According to Cloudflare, broad DNS blocking orders are not just ineffective but also disproportionate.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Record Labels Urge Court to Uphold $47 Million Piracy Liability Verdict

      In 2022, a group of major recording labels won $47 million in damages from Internet provider Grande Communications. The ISP appealed the verdict, challenging the evidence and the liability claims. However, according to the music companies, Grande can't escape responsibility for infringement since it willingly profited from pirating subscribers.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Movie Companies Sue Lawyer in Dispute Over Piracy Settlement Cash

      Movie companies behind The Expendables, Olympus Has Fallen, and The Hitman's Bodyguard, have built a reputation for tracking down thousands of BitTorrent users in pursuit of cash settlements. In a rare case that could provide an even rarer glimpse behind the scenes of an industrial-scale settlement operation, the movie companies are now suing a lawyer who acted for them in a large number of settlement cases.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BEHNOUY Wordo: USING

  • Notes on an overheard conversation at 4:15 am

    “Hey! I heard the screen door slam! Could you check the front porch?”

    “Who would be here at … 4:00 am‽”

    “Probably an Amazon delivery. I ordered a white noise machine last night.”

    “Seriously?”

    “Just go look!”

• Technology and Free Software

  • Survey (cause i'm curious)

    Seeing the recent spike in users and reading some interesting posts, I felt really curious as to the ways people came across this bit of the internet. So to put it clearly...

  • The End of "Good Enough"

    With the exception of gaming equipment, all of my computers run some flavor of Linux. Linux is much more powerful than Windows, but it's also geared toward IT professionals and other power users, which means I need to configure large parts of the OS myself. I have the freedom to easily build scripts or even standalone programs for custom data processing--on the other hand, because it's easy to do so, I'm often expected to do it on my own. The result of this effort is a fleet of systems that are by no means perfect, but certainly work well enough for my purposes.

    I write these notes about Linux over Gemini, a protocol with a similar do-it-yourself attitude among its users. Gemini isn't a perfect protocol, as the endless debates about its features and weaknesses show. But, like Gopher and the early days of HTML before it, it serves well enough to allow an ecosystem of capsules to grow and thrive within its own niche.

  • I'm just sitting here watching the posts go 'round and 'round

    Time files when you're not having self.

    For example, self worries this transmission won't make some other self's grade, therein finding this self to be less than this self would want to be found.

    Time practically comes to a grind agonizing thusly.

    But remove the self-related concerns and holy fucking shit is watching text I was just thinking about appear in a vim session whilst fingers be a flappin' fun!

  • Random Rhythm Generation

    First up, some notation. The "x" in the following indicate when noise is made, and the "." indicate silence (or, sometimes, that there is an onset, but it is much quieter than those marked with an "x"). What makes the noise or how long that sustains for are not indicated.

  • The squelching effect of modern online fundamentalism

    Given "me" and "the system" are arguably nothing more than mental constructs, it seems "it is" whatever gives mere mental constructs more value than they're arguably worth.

  • It's beginning to look a lot like BBS->Antenna-mas

    Do I really want to create yet another account somewhere now that tilde.club seems permanently dead?

    No. Eff no.

    Looks like I could still upload to places that supported a Geminaut incarnation prior to oldernow, but nah.. confusion.

  • File/directory entropy warrior

    It's time, once again, to wade through files/directories created/downloaded during other life battles with sufficient haste to have made painfully disordered waste just crawling with Fear Of Losing Out via deleting a file that *might* come in handy to rectify someone *else's* eff up.

    We're talkin' filenames now devoid of meaning, filenames suggesting "attempt iterations" without clarity as to which was actually used in whatever circumstance/situation.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I've been blogging for 757,382,400 seconds

      Wow! It's been a full 365 days since my blog went under the lock [1]! And it's been a full 8,766 days since I started blogging [2]. Here's to another 8,766 days!

    • The Gopher Situation

      Over the past few days, I've been battling a pernicious bug in my gopher server [1] wherein it becomes CPU (Central Processing Unit) bound and cause other issues on the server. I then have to go in and kill the gopher process (and the one time I couldn't even do that—I had to have the virtual server restarted). I initially attributed this to an over-aggressive bot crawling my site and blocked it with `iptables` but even that didn't solve the issue.

  • Programming

    • Aya v0.4.0 Coming Soon, Doom Mapping, and Other Updates

      Aya is now written in Common Lisp and uses the CL-RemiGemini library. This provides better conformance, as well as support for client certificate handling. * You can now specify what the index files are with the new `index-files` option in the config. The default is to look for (in this order): `index.gmi` or `index.gemini`.

    • Shell scripting with completing-read

      Here’s a li’l completing-read that asks you to select one line from all the lines piped into it, and pipes that one line out. So you can use it in the middle of pipes, it doesn’t have to be at the end.

      The smart thing is that if you’re in Emacs, like in shell-mode for example, it uses Emacs’ completing-read (which you hopefully have souped up with vertico or the like), and if you’re outside of Emacs in another terminal, it just passes it on to gum choose.