Technology

As X’s owner and most followed user, Elon Musk has increasingly used the social media platform as a microphone to amplify his political views and, lately, those of right-wing figures he’s aligned with. There are few modern parallels to his antics, but then again there are few modern parallels to Elon Musk himself.

Illusion — Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis (which it is facilitating), get rid of poverty (on which it is heavily relying), and unleash the full potential of human creativity (which it is undermining)?

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has officially allowed the FSFE to intervene in the litigation brought by Apple against the European Commission to avoid being designated as a ‘gatekeeper’ under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The company has put forward an aggressive policy against Software Freedom and interoperability, seeking to deter the enforcement of the DMA – a law dedicated to increase fairness and contestability in digital markets by regulating the economic behaviour of very large tech corporations. The FSFE aims to protect Free Software against monopolistic corporate control.

https://archive.is/LNbxZ

https://archive.ph/bQVGC

Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context. Since October 7, social media platforms have been challenged for the unjustified takedowns of pro-Palestinian content—sometimes at the request of the Israeli government—and a simultaneous failure to remove hate speech towards Palestinians. More specifically, social media platforms have worked with the Israeli Cyber Unit—a government office set up to issue takedown requests to platforms

Not even if they were the last SM on earth as far as I'm concerned.

What is everyone's thoughts on how that shit show is going to play out ?

https://archive.ph/W9gL6

One of Washington’s largest corporate tax breaks has grown alongside a data center boom in Central Washington, including this data center in East Wenatchee owned by the Sabey Corp. Despite forgoing more than $474 million since 2018, the state can’t say how many jobs were created by the tax break. During that same time frame, it also hasn’t evaluated whether the revenue loss was worth it.

Palantir, the company named for the dangerous seeing-stones that tended to mislead their users, has announced a partnership with Microsoft to deliver services for classified networks in US defense and intelligence agencies.

“This is a first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology that will allow critical national security missions to operationalize Microsoft’s best-in-class large language models (LLMs) via Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platforms (AIP) in Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments,” the announcement says.

Palantir is a data-analysis company that sucks down huge amounts of personal data to assist governments and companies with surveillance. It is somewhat unclear from the text of the announcement what services Palantir and Microsoft will offer. What we do know is that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services will integrate Palantir products. Previously, Azure incorporated OpenAI’s Chat-GPT4 into a “top secret” version of its software.

“We’re aware of reports that access to Signal has been blocked in some countries,” Signal says. If you are affected by the blocks, the company recommends turning on its censorship circumvention feature. (NetBlocks reports that this feature lets Signal “remain usable” in Russia.)

The Israeli army is using Amazon’s cloud service to store surveillance information on Gaza’s population, while procuring further AI tools from Google and Microsoft for military purposes, an investigation reveals.

We’re happy to announce the launch of Raspberry Pi Pico 2, our second-generation microcontroller board, built on RP2350: a new high-performance, secure microcontroller designed here at Raspberry Pi.

With a higher core clock speed, twice the memory, more powerful Arm cores, new security features, and upgraded interfacing capabilities, Pico 2 delivers a significant performance and feature uplift, while retaining hardware and software compatibility with earlier members of the Pico series.

Pico 2 is on sale now, priced at $5.

A federal judge has ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in the US. “The market reality is that Google is the only real choice” as the default search engine, Judge Amit Mehta said in his decision, and he determined it had gotten that way unfairly. It’s a ruling that could portend big changes for the company, but we yet don’t know how big, and we might not for years.

Mehta declared on Monday that Google was liable for violating antitrust laws, vindicating the Department of Justice and a coalition of states that sued the tech giant in 2020. The next step — deciding on remedies for its illegal conduct — begins next month. Both parties must submit a proposed schedule for remedy proceedings by September 4th and then appear at a status conference on September 6th.