• 245 Posts
  • 100 Comments
Joined 1Y ago
cake
Cake day: May 10, 2022

help-circle
rss
A total of 485 children are known to have died across Ukraine and a further 1,005 have been injured since Russia launched its full-scale invasion. The youngest known victim, Serhii, was two days old when he died after Russia shelled a maternity ward in Vilniansk, in Zaporizhzia region, in November last year.
fedilink

“Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back!”


“[…] a whole new set of risks are emerging from […] the threat of western sanctions on China, either because of its support for Russia or what might unfold in Taiwan.”

“In addition, China’s newly amended law against foreign espionage exemplifies its increasing wariness when it comes to foreign investors.”

These might be the two major reasons, the second one is maybe even more crucial and has a long-lasting impact imo. For example, a few weeks ago China detained consultants over charges of “espionage” because they conducted market research for corporate clients. If even such information is considered a state secret then foreign investors have practically no choice other than leaving the country.


This is weird. I don’t know what happens here (this banner suggests you’re not logged in), but the best thing is to ask an admin at beehaw.org/c/support. Sorry, but that’s beyond my knowledge.


@ericjmorey Not sure whether I understand the question. You can simply do that the same way as you replied to this thread, just go to the post or comment you want to reply to and hit the reply icon 😊


I don’t reject crypto regulation, but the way how this is done across the world is bad for innovation and prevents competition.

To give an idea what I mean: One of the more prominent crypto scams of late has been the FTX case. Back in the fall I read FTX’s bankruptcy declaration. As far ax I remember, it said that 2 out of the 4 FTX companies never had an audited report, they never had a cashflow forecast, major decision about cash reimbursements were made via chat, budget responsibilities were unclear, assets bought were not on the books, and many other points. But none of the things had anything to do specifically with crypto. They simply had no investor reporting and the investors -with big names among them like Sequoia Capital, Tudor Investment or Robert Kraft- apparently didn’t ask questions.

With a proper reporting and by applying and enforcing the existing laws, though, the FTX case would never have happened. And this is also true for many other crypto scams imho. But, again, I’m not at all against regulation, it should just done wisely without preventing technical and social innovation.


I respectfully disagree. There has been a longer discussion here about that you may be interested in.


The website of course is through a third party and charges a fee of $2.50 per transaction.

If I understand that right you pay 2.50 for every transaction of 3. That’s 83%.

This is not completely related to school meals, but it is a good example imo which explains why big tech and banks have been lobbying for a long time to shut down and ban crypto money and other community currencies. There are many decentralized currency solutions available which parents could use at costs next to nothing, but lawmakers claim to ‘protect’ people by shutting them down or introduce regulations that trigger a similar effect.

(To also say that: There are many crypto scams and of course there should be strong consumer protections, but using complementary currency systems as a means of payment -not as a means of value storage- would be a great benefit for the society. The monetary policy and financial regulations we have in any country are increasingly causing trouble for the society imo.)


I don’t think that BTC is an appropriate solution currently for use as a means of payment given its high volatlity, but as a principle I agree that appropriately designed crypto could be a solution. What the world needed imo is a mix of different currencies for different use cases globally, regionally and locally.


Global consortium led by Credit Suisse buys Ecuadorian bonds for less than half their face value in exchange for nature conservation
In a debt-for-nature swap, Ecuador effectively bought its own debt back at a knock-down price via a fresh loan, and in return, the country pledges to spend about USD 18 million annually for two decades on the conservation of the Galapagos Islands and to capitalize an endowment for the Galapagos Life Fund (GLF).
fedilink

I can’t comment on Lula, but there is no doubt that this currency would take a very long time to gain the necessary trust even among the participants. China has been trying to push its Yuan as a new world reserve currency for some time, but this would be even harder given their economic and political regime.

What they obviously really try to do is to -understandibly- ‘escape’ the USD and in part the EUR systems, though for the currency to be successful it would require political, social and economic reforms within most BRICS+ countries before the introduction of such a new money. Unless these reforms are made, I see little chance for this project. Many articles about it across the web are highly sensationalizing imo.


BRICS nations eye expansion and shared currency, challenging global financial order
The BRICS nations, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, are actively seeking to expand their alliance by inviting additional countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE to join, forming what is referred to as BRICS+. Furthermore, there have been discussions within the group about the possibility of creating a shared currency called BRICS.
fedilink

What the article does not say is that MiCA appears to also ban so-called privacy coins like Monero.

The so-called “travel rule”, already used in traditional finance, will in future cover transfers of crypto assets. Information on the source of the asset and its beneficiary will have to “travel” with the transaction and be stored on both sides of the transfer.

Crypto exchange Binance appears to have already informed its clients in Poland, Italy, Spain and France about the changes.


New regulations include that crypto exchanges and wallet providers looking to operate across the 27-nation bloc will be able to do so with a license issued under MiCA, which will likely be truly enforced in June after being published in the official EU journal. However, critics argue that excessive regulations could stifle innovation and drive crypto businesses away from the EU.
fedilink

You either:

  • raise the retirement age
  • pay out smaller retirements
  • collect more taxes

I’m afraid if we don’t change the whole system, we’ll experience all three points, and not only in France.


people not familiar with him thinking he’s a good Kennedy

I certainly belong to them :-) I’m not American and don’t follow politics too much (not even here in Europe). But the name Roger Stone is not completely new to me as this was the guy who allegedly used WikiLeaks information against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign if I’m not mistaken.


I disagree with a lot what he says (including in this interview), at least some points are legit and have barely been raised by others. But I admit this could be pure rhetoric because he thinks it supports his campaign. I don’t think he admires democracy nearly as much as he says in this interview.


He [Robert Kennedy Jr.] also criticized the inevitability of central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, which he fears the U.S. government may weaponize for financial surveillance. He drew parallels to what happened to the 2022 Ottawa truckers, who had facial recognition technology deployed against them to log their identities.

“They had people going out looking at the license plates, facial recognition, and doing data mining on these people to find out who they were, and then shutting down their bank accounts, so they couldn’t pay their mortgages, they couldn’t pay their alimonies, they couldn’t pay for food for their families and children,” he said. “If a government has that power, it can turn us all into slaves overnight.”

“If they can get you out of your home cause you can’t pay your mortgage or your rent, and if they can starve you, most people are going to comply,” he added.


Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Says He Doesn’t Want ‘Anti-Crypto’ People on the US Securities and Exchange Commission
"[The] SEC’s function now is not to protect the American people, but it’s to protect the banks – particularly the central banks and those interests," Kennedy said. The presidential candidate also spoke about the impact of inflation [...], saying that digital assets presented an "exit ramp" for those worried about traditional money being misused in the name of foreign wars or bailing out big banks.
fedilink


The financial services firm might soon use a software similar to ChatGPT that will use artificial intelligence to offer investment advice. It has filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to trademark IndexGPT. Here is the filing: http://web.archive.org/web/20230526170913/https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn97931538&docId=APP20230515101121#docIndex=1&page=1
fedilink

Another dormant crypto wallet awakens after 8 years, moving ETH worth almost USD 15 million
This has been happening quite often over the recent few months. Why? In the current case, which has been observed and reported by Lookonchain, a participant in Ethereum's ICO has moved holdings to another wallet address, also with a very short transaction history. Here is the data from the Ethereum explorer: https://web.archive.org/web/20230527172457mp_/https://etherscan.io/address/0x6ccb03acf7f53ce87aadcc21a9932de915f89804
fedilink

I’d think anyone worried about government subpoenas is already locked in offline.

I’d think anyone worried about government subpoenas has never done crypto at all :-)


… will always be opt in.

‘Always’ is a long time. No one knows what the future holds, and the statements are not exactly helpful if they want to build trust imo.

And even if you opted in, it’s somewhat strange to say that “governments only issue subpoenas in the case of a serious act like terrorism or one involving drugs.” In many countries you are obviously a ‘terrorist’ nowadays if you protest for climate change (e.g., in Germany), if you protest for democracy instead of monarchy (UK), if you protest to end the war (Russia) or if you simply criticise the government (China).

So I’m not sure who this ‘average person’ is who doesn’t get ‘subpoenaed every day.’


The firm asserted that regulators in the U.S. are “actively trying to stop companies (banks and fintechs) from supporting crypto assets – even when the companies are trying to do it correctly and by the book”. Unbanked said it recently signed a term sheet for a $5 million investment with a $20 million valuation. Though it did not state which regulations prevented it from receiving the loan, it said it ultimately had not received the funds as of yet and will resume operations.
fedilink

Recent comments by Ledger shareholder and former CEO Éric Larchevêque that governments could subpoena access to user funds held on a Ledger device that has subscribed to its new Recover service sparked consternation among Ledger users. Now Ledger's current CEO Pascal Gauthier has shrugged off concerns, arguing that governments only issue subpoenas in the case of a serious act like terrorism or one involving drugs. "It's not true that the average person gets subpoenaed every day." Aha.
fedilink

No one knows what exactly would happen as it would be the first-ever default on federal debt, but the consequences would likely be severe and it’s almost irrelevant where you live and what you do for a living. Asset managers around the globe -e.g., your pension fund, your insurance- would suffer heavy losses. Especially countries like China and Japan would suffer given as they are the two largest foreign investors in US debt (together they hold more than 20% of all US credit held by foreigners, around 2 trillion dollars).

Interest rates -for public and private debt such as your mortgage or commercial loans- would likely rise across the globe as asset managers focus on risk, and if a nation like the US defaults on its public debt, this must certainly be seen as a very strong risk event.

World trade would suffer. China’s exports, which contribute a fifth to its GDP, depend on a strong US market (China’s largest trading partner is the US) for their own growth and job creation. And so do other countries.

Some countries especially in the global South would or could no longer use the dollar as a replacement for their own weak currencies, which would further accelerate a chain reaction.

If the US government doesn’t agree on the matter soon, the Secretary of the Treasury could principally decide to continue paying bond holders and thus avoiding a technical default for a certain period (I’m not sure how long this is and can’t find it quickly). But even this would harm the US and global trade irreversibly in the long term imho.

I could continue endlessly on this, but in a nutshell: We need a lot of change in global economics and politics, including a new currency regime, but we’ll certainly never need something like a debt default, so let’s hope the change comes without such a chaos. And I’m very convinced it will. I don’t think the US will default on its debt. It’s a safe bet that everyone knows that there would be only loosers and no winners.


Broker commission in retail financials services damages household wealth by 375 million euros annually, study finds
Household wealth in countries with commission bans grows significantly more than in countries without commission bans, a research team from the University of Regensburg claims. They measured the difference in returns at 1.7 percent p.a. The researchers call lawmakers in countries like Germany, where the loss amounts to 2,400 euros per household per year, to ban commission-based sales of financial products. In the recent past, Denmark, Finland, the UK, the Netherlands, Norway as well as Australia and New Zealand have introduced such bans and established alternative payment methods, e.g., according to advisory time or assets under management. Here is the study: https://epub.uni-regensburg.de/54281/
fedilink


When citizens are voting away the democracies they claim to cherish, they are driven in part by the belief that their opponents will undermine democracy first, a new research has shown. The findings suggest that "aspiring autocrats may instigate democratic backsliding by accusing their opponents of subverting democracy". The authors claim that "we can foster democratic stability by informing partisans about the other side’s commitment to democracy." Here is the study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01594-w
fedilink

"They pay more for such work than in ‘white’ jobs”: Interview with a crypto scam investment spammer
'Krebs on Security' publishes an interview with a Russian hacker responsible for a series of aggressive crypto spam campaigns that recently prompted several large Mastodon communities to temporarily halt new registrations. According to the hacker, their spam software has been in private use until the last few weeks, when it was released as open source code.
fedilink

The cited report (as pdf here) says:

The typical rescue loan by Chinese banks requires interest rates of 5 percent. These rates are […] considerably higher than the average IMF [International Monetary Fund] rate, which has been around 2 percent for non-concessional lending operations over the past 10 years. Other multilateral institutions, including the world bank, offer even lower rates for budgetary support.

We see historical parallels [of Chinese activities] to the era when the US started its rise to a global financial power, especially in the 1930s and after World War 2, when it used the US Ex-Im Bank, the US Exchange Stabilization Fund and the Fed to provide rescue funds to countries with large liabilities to US banks and exporters […]


A report presented by US Senator Elizabeth Warren shows how Big Tech lobbyists redefine the concept of “digital trade” and use it to protect the profitability of their enterprises and make it impossible for signatory countries in trade deals to use legislative ends to protect other things, like people’s privacy or the rule of law. It largely confirms the revolving-door tech lobbyism investigated by sociologist Wendy Li. Here is Sen. Warren’s report (pdf): https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/USTR REPORT.pdf Here is tve research paper by Wendy Li: http://web.archive.org/web/20230316084447/https://academic.oup.com/ser/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ser/mwad002/7030814?utm_source=authortollfreelink&utm_campaign=ser&utm_medium=email&guestAccessKey=d5eab2cc-f0ea-4f77-a68c-97412d8b3e9d
fedilink

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) made high-risk, often-unneeded billion-dollar infrastructure loans, with no conditionality, poor risk planning, shrouded in opacity and secrecy. Cash-poor developing countries that lacked the ability to pay were particularly vulnerable, a report says. The seeds of project failure were sown from the outset by a lack of transparency, risk management, and viable controls to check corruption and incompetence.
fedilink

The cited report (as pdf here) says:

The typical rescue loan by Chinese banks requires interest rates of 5 percent. These rates are […] considerably higher than the average IMF [International Monetary Fund] rate, which has been around 2 percent for non-concessional lending operations over the past 10 years. Other multilateral institutions, including the world bank, offer even lower rates for budgetary support.

We see historical parallels [of Chinese activities] to the era when the US started its rise to a global financial power, especially in the 1930s and after World War 2, when it used the US Ex-Im Bank, the US Exchange Stabilization Fund and the Fed to provide rescue funds to countries with large liabilities to US banks and exporters […]


China has created its own subprime infrastructure crisis, and now it is trying to bail itself out
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) made high-risk, often-unneeded billion-dollar infrastructure loans, with no conditionality, poor risk planning, shrouded in opacity and secrecy. Cash-poor developing countries that lacked the ability to pay were particularly vulnerable, a report says. The seeds of project failure were sown from the outset by a lack of transparency, risk management, and viable controls to check corruption and incompetence.
fedilink

According to Unstoppable Wallet’s market overview the only PSY/ETH trading pair is at gate.io, but I’m not sure whether this is a real trade or some fake. There’s a lot of crypto scam around, but also much bullsh*t news. Would like to see this verified tbh.


At the time of this writing, 1ETH is EUR 1,676 and 1 PSYOP is EUR 0.00311.

Where did they trade this?


“Regulatory Capture”: Two new reports show how big tech lobbyists are using ‘public interest’ for their own ends
A report presented by US Senator Elizabeth Warren shows how Big Tech lobbyists redefine the concept of “digital trade” and use it to protect the profitability of their enterprises and make it impossible for signatory countries in trade deals to use legislative ends to protect other things, like people's privacy or the rule of law. It largely confirms the revolving-door tech lobbyism investigated by sociologist Wendy Li. Here is Sen. Warren's report (pdf): https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/USTR%20REPORT.pdf Here is tve research paper by Wendy Li: http://web.archive.org/web/20230316084447/https://academic.oup.com/ser/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ser/mwad002/7030814?utm_source=authortollfreelink&utm_campaign=ser&utm_medium=email&guestAccessKey=d5eab2cc-f0ea-4f77-a68c-97412d8b3e9d
fedilink

I hope that no investor will get back money because this is not “only” a scam but foremost a massive failure of investor due diligence. Theranos was supposed to be a blood testing start-up claiming to have found a new technology for this kind of research, but the first technical due diligence was made around 2015, ten or so years after the company was founded and had already raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t defend Ms. Holmes, but investors threw money at her without knowing where they exactly invest in. They couldn’t have had the faintest idea what they were doing. If and when investors acted responsibly, a criminal case like Theranos (or FTX to name another recent disaster) where they burn that much money weren’t possible.

(Edited for a typo.)


“If the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”

The only moral metric this person ever had.


Ecosystem Graphs: The Social Footprint of Foundation Models
Researchers develop a framework to capture the vast downstream impact and complex upstream dependencies that define the foundation model ecosystem. 'Ecosystem Graphs' project consolidates the distributed knowledge to improve the ecosystem’s transparency. Here is the graph: https://crfm.stanford.edu/ecosystem-graphs/index.html?mode=graph Here is the table: https://crfm.stanford.edu/ecosystem-graphs/index.html?mode=table
fedilink

Open Source Software - developed by the NSA
Not sure whether that's a fake site or valid, but just stumbled upon it ...
fedilink

There is a good report by Lighthouse, a Dutch media collective, about the families falsely accused by their state. There’s a high number of similar cases like the one of Prof. Torley’s, and such ‘false positives’ will always happen as they are inherent to such analyses.

The point for me here is that this guy from Microsoft likely knows that (or, in case he doesn’t, there are certainly a lot of experts at MS who know it as we can reasonably assume). What I don’t understand is that executives get often away with such statements, journalists rarely raise the issue of biases these models have. I feel that is not understood by the masses, and companies and governments exploit that use it against the people.



Ron DeSantis Explodes When Asked About His Role in Guantánamo Torture

Two former detainees have called out DeSantis specifically for his role in the unbearable situation at Guantánamo. One, Abu Sarrah Ahmed Abdel Aziz, told The Washington Post he is “100 percent” certain he spoke to DeSantis multiple times. Abdel Aziz spoke fluent English and was trying to report mistreatment claims to JAG officers.

Another former inmate, Mansoor Adayfi, said he saw a photo of DeSantis on Twitter in 2021 and recognized the governor immediately. “It was a face I could never forget. I had seen that face for the first time in Guantanamo, in 2006—one of the camp’s darkest years when the authorities started violently breaking hunger strikes and three of my brothers were found dead in their cages,” Adayfi wrote in an essay for Al Jazeera.

Adayfi said he shared a photo of DeSantis with several other former inmates, and they all recognized him from Guantánamo. Adayfi vividly remembers DeSantis watching from behind a fence as he was force-fed, “smiling and laughing with other officers as I screamed in pain.”


The number of internally displaced people -those who flee their homes but stay within their country- reached a worldwide record of 71.1 million as of the end of 2022, an increase by 20 per cent from the previous year, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre’s flagship annual report. Rapidly escalating conflict and violence in countries such as Ukraine and Congo and disasters such as flooding in Pakistan forced millions of people to flee and join the tens of millions of people already living in prolonged displacement. There is a written summary also here: https://reliefweb.int/report/world/global-report-internal-displacement-2023-grid-2023-internal-displacement-and-food-security
fedilink

UK: Majority of gig economy workers earn below minimum wage, study says
52% of those doing jobs ranging from data entry to food delivery are earning below the minimum wage, a study by University of Bristol finds. Average wages are £8.97 per hour – around 15% below the current UK minimum which rose to £10.42 in May. Three out of four workers say they are experiencing work-related insecurity and anxiety.
fedilink

AIMLab’s core activity will be developing impact assessment methods to hold those who built the algorithms accountable for harm. "Automated decisions impacting us in ways that are too often rendered invisible,” says Jacob Metcalf, one of the lab's directors. “The people for whom these systems are potentially the most harmful — those who are historically vulnerable [...] and often already subject to multiple forms of arbitrary exclusion, coercion, and surveillance — have had the least power to shape them." [Edit for a typo.]
fedilink

After FTX's collapse last year, federal prosecutors intervened within a month alleging that Bankman-Fried was stealing billions in customer funds, defrauding investors, committing bank and wire fraud, providing improper loans, misleading lenders, transmitting money without a license, making illegal campaign contributions, bribing China officials, and other crimes.
fedilink


I will, certainly, be watching out for all of the claims being made.

I will, too :-)

Thanks for sharing this, I wasn’t aware if this company.


This is very impressive. I would have tons of questions, though, as I don’t understand :-)

How did the device know that he accepts the call? He didn’t do something as far as I am aware.

And how did the device know that he wants the translation into French, or that he wants a translation at all?

He says that it’s private. But how? Doesn’t have the device sync with other data, e.g., some health data base (regarding the chocolate example)? Where does the data sit, in the cloud or on the device? Meaning, does the device also work offline or do you need a cloud (or a network)?

And how does the device learn and store new data (e.g., that he ate a chocolate)? And when he eats the chocolate, does this go into some database? If so, who controls this data?


I am wondering whether this technology could enable communication with non-human species. There’s a fair evidence from research that animals have someform of intelligence, e.g., the paper posted yesterday. I mean, if this decoder can be trained on an individual human being’s brain activity, why not on any non-human being’s?


A lot of research has been going on for some time around “intelligence” with some books published in the last 10 or so years. There is an interesting long read reviewing some of these books.

From AI to cephalopods, a new strain of “nature writing” explores the frontiers of non-human sentience […] Octopuses are having a moment. So are slime moulds and honeybees. Mushrooms are in vogue. After 250 years of humanity (well, some of humanity…) confidently atop the great pyramid of being, we in the west are becoming more aware that we might, perhaps, have company.


There are a fair few examples in the animal kingdom of species that have mathematical abilities, some fish can count, bees can tell apart odd and even numbers, and now giraffes can make decisions based on statistical information, a new study has found. This reaches new heights in terms of animal intelligence. Here is the study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32615-3
fedilink

A paper published by security researchers at the Technical University of Berlin reveals that AMD's firmware-based Trusted Platform Module (fTPM / TPM) can be fully compromised, thus allowing full access to the cryptographic data held inside the fTPM in an attack called 'faulTPM.' The attacker needs physical access to the device to exploit the vulnerability. The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14717 The researcher also shared the code used: https://github.com/PSPReverse/ftpm_attack
fedilink

Russia’s dominion over Eastern Europe — first as the Russian Empire, later as the Soviet Union — ushered in many of the same colonial practices as Western empires: the suppression of local languages, the persecution of the local intelligentsia, and education reforms that prioritized the metropol’s view of culture and history. Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian art was simply labeled as 'Russian'. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, however, artists across Eastern Europe are increasingly reclaiming their identities and carving their own paths.
fedilink

Finland’s decision to seek NATO membership and the removal of the last remaining Lenin statues in the country in 2022 highlighted a change in how perceptions of Russia have shifted in Finland post-February 24, 2022. And some argue that the Finns’ previous reticence regarding America is also on the decline.
fedilink

It’s all written in the linked article and this thread already imo, but as I just stumbled about this:

If you post any content to the Bluesky Web Services, you hereby grant Bluesky and its licensees a worldwide, perpetual […] licence to use, reproduce, publicly display, publicly perform, modify, sublicense …

That’s from BS’s Terms of Service.


And this is somewhat at the other end of the spectrum: Texas governor decried for ‘disgusting’ rhetoric in wake of mass shooting

Republican Greg Abbott condemned for calling […] victims of Friday night shooting in rural Cleveland ‘illegal immigrants’.

The victims, which included a young boy and two women who were shielding children from gunfire, were all from Honduras.


Since Euromaidan and the first Russian invasion in 2014, Ukrainian filmmakers have been prolifically recording the impact of war on society. The result is an immensely powerful and varied body of work across genres and styles. [The article contains links to the films/documentaries.]
fedilink

After reading this site (btw, they appear to be using Cloudflare for their decentralized service) it doesn’t change anything. They indeed “may soon be able to migrate”, may “federate soon”, and all that, but it simply isn’t. It is a centralized service, and they promise once again that this time everything will really be better.


After the terrifying early months of 2022, and a brutal winter of drone attacks and blackouts, a crop of new independent bookshops is hardly what one would expect to find in the Ukrainian capital. But, in defiance of Russia’s ongoing invasion, they are springing up all around Kyiv.
fedilink

ActivityPub has a over 20k different independent instances, mostly federating with one another. BlueSky has one, and if you try to set up an independent one, it won’t federate.

Yes, and the current owners have no economic incentive to change that. It’s a project backed by financial investors, which means they’ll want to get back as much money as possible as soon as possible.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not some “venture capital bashing”. It’s their full right to earn their money back and do with their companies whatever they want. If I were a financial investor, I did the same (what is ignored in many discussions on this is the fact that the vast majority of VC investments fail due to their high-risk nature, but that’s a different story). I just argue that if you want a distributed and/or decentralised system, you likely need a different kind of funding and a more decentralized form of decision making.


it decentralizes the cost to the central authority by pushing data load onto volunteers

the sad reality is that people will buy the hype

I have been discussing BlueSky some time ago with a friend of mine, and we soon agreed exactly on these two things. This is an excellent article, thanks for sharing this.



Khrystyna Mykhailichenko, 17, has been awarded a full bursary for four years to study piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her 12-year-old sister, Sasha, a violinist, has a scholarship to become a weekly boarder at the Yehudi Menuhin School. Both feel that classical music helped them to face the trauma of abandoning their home with their mother.
fedilink

Many Public Salesforce Sites are Leaking Private Data
A high number of organizations — including banks and healthcare providers — are leaking private and sensitive information from their public Salesforce Community websites, says KrebsOnSecurity. The data exposures all stem from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an unauthenticated user to access records that should only be available after logging in.
fedilink


A little experiment to demonstrate how a large language model like ChatGPT can not only write, but can read and judge. That, in turn, could lead to an enormous scaling up of the number of communications that are meaningfully monitored, warns ACLU, a human rights group.
fedilink

Companies like Google, for instance, could obtain access to the details of a patient's cancer treatment or the results of a psychotherapy session to train its new AI for some well-being app. The outcome of that might feed into the company’s advertising business. The European Health Data Space (EHDS) does not foresee patients being asked for their permission; it does not even include a right to object to this kind of excessive data sharing.
fedilink

Affected smart phones are Sony Xperia XA2 and likely the Fairphone and many more Android phones which use popular Qualcomm chips. The data is sent without user consent, unencrypted, and even when using a Google-free Android distribution. This is possible because the Qualcomm chipset itself sends the data, circumventing any potential Android operating system setting and protection mechanisms.
fedilink


"We are in an age which, to an extent, embraces feminism, anti-racism and anti-ableism. Perhaps it is also time to include “speciesism” in our discussions about ethics – since valuing some species over others is a form of prejudice."
fedilink

In the supposedly first report of its kind, researchers have shown that ChatGPT generates racist and other harmful dialogue in response to user questions. By asking the model to respond to questions as a good or a bad person, a man or woman, or as individuals of varying racial or ethnic backgrounds, it produced "biased and hurtful commentary" showing varying degrees of toxicity. The report (12 pages, not very technical) can be downloaded here: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2304.05335
fedilink

Onsite @ NYU in New York City or via live stream
fedilink


A financial model investigating the issuance of digital money as central bank digital currency (CBDC) or as stablecoins found that a fully-integrated digital currency would lead to higher and less volatile asset prices, and household welfare gains are potentially large which could lead to an increase in consumption by up to 2%. However, a fully-integrated digital currency would depress bank deposit spreads, particularly during times of crises, which limits the banks’ abilities to recapitalize losses after a bank crises. These investment losses, not specifically bank runs, create instability, the paper argues. Another research paper found that bank runs are not as big as initially feared. This paper can be found here: https://www.financialresearch.gov/working-papers/2022/07/11/central-bank-digital-currency/ Both papers focus on the issuance of CBCD and stablecoins and do not include privately issued money like LETS/Time Dollars and similar privately issued complementary currency systems. (Edited to correct a typo.)
fedilink

Russian forces detained and tortured residents of the city of Kherson and its vicinity during their occupation of the area between March and November 2022, Human Rights Watch. Victims and their family members reported about torture and other ill-treatment at several detention centers in the city.
fedilink