Technology

Finally, Mark Zuckerberg can do whatever he wants, as opposed to the past 20 years, where it's hard to argue that he's faced an unrelenting series of punishments. Zuckerberg's net worth recently hit $213 billion, he's running a company with a market capitalization of over $1.5 trillion that he can never be fired from, he owns a 1400-acre compound in Hawaii, and while dealing with all this abject suffering, he was forced to half-heartedly apologize during a senate hearing where he was tortured (translation: made to feel slightly uncomfortable) after only having six years to recover from the last time when nothing happened to him in a senate hearing.

Sarcasm aside, few living people have had it easier than Mark Zuckerberg, a man who has been insulated from consequence, risk, and responsibility for nearly twenty years. The sudden (and warranted) hysteria around these monstrous changes has an air of surprise, framing Meta (and Zuckerberg's) moves as a "MAGA-tilt" to "please Donald Trump," which I believe is a comfortable way to frame a situation that is neither sudden nor surprising.

Mere months ago, the media was fawning over Mark Zuckerberg's new look, desperate to hear about why he's wearing gold chains, declaring that he had "the swagger of a Roman emperor" and that he had (and I quote the Washington Post) transformed himself from "a dorky, democracy-destroying CEO into a dripped-out, jacked AI accelerationist in the eyes of potential Meta recruits." Zuckerberg was, until this last week, being celebrated for the very thing people are upset about right now — flimsy, self-conscious and performative macho bullshit that only signifies strength to weak men and those credulous enough to accept it, which in this case means "almost every major media outlet." The only thing he did differently this time was come out and say it. After all, there was no punishment or judgment for his last macho media cycle, and if anything he proved that many will accept whatever he says in whatever way he does it.

Meta hasn't "made a right-wing turn." It’s been an active arm of the right wing media for nearly a decade, actively empowering noxious demagogues like Alex Jones, allowing him to evade bans and build massive private online groups on the platform to disseminate content. A report from November 2021 by Media Matters found that Facebook had tweaked its news algorithm in 2021, helping right-leaning news and politics pages to outperform other pages using "sensational and divisive content." Another Media Matters report from 2023 found that conservatives were continually earning more total interactions than left or non-aligned pages between January 1 2020 and December 31 2022, even as the company was actively deprioritizing political content.

A 2024 report from non-profit GLAAD found that Meta had continually allowed widespread anti-trans hate content across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads, with the company either claiming that the content didn't violate its community standards or ignoring reports entirely. While we can — and should — actively decry Meta's disgusting new standards, it's ahistorical to pretend that this was a company that gave a shit about any of this stuff, or took it seriously, or sought to protect marginalized people.

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Where the fridge cases were previously lined with simple glass doors, there were door-size computer screens instead. These “smart doors” obscured shoppers’ view of the fridges’ actual contents, replacing them with virtual rows of the Gatorades, Bagel Bites and other goods it promised were inside. The digital displays had a distinct advantage over regular glass, at least for the retailer: ads.

...

These internet-connected fridge panels, developed by a Chicago startup called Cooler Screens Inc., frequently flickered, crashed or showed the wrong products. Every so often, they caught fire. But store managers were stuck with them. As part of a 10-year contract with Walgreens for a split of the ad revenue, Cooler Screens had installed 10,000 smart doors at hundreds of US locations like this one. It planned to install 35,000 more.

...

On Dec. 14, Avakian’s team secretly cut the data feeds to more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area. The dozen or so smart doors affected in each of these stores either glazed over with white pixels or blacked out altogether. Customers could no longer see where the Coke and Red Bull and Hot Pockets and Heineken sat, and either assumed the fridges were out of order or found themselves rummaging through one by one. Some staffers pasted pieces of paper on the opaque screens that read, for example, “assorted sports drinks & coffee.”

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Not sure how those numbers come out over 100%. 🤔

bye bye

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[...]

While the Supreme Court continues to consider the constitutionality of the TikTok ban, it is clear that TikTok presents serious and unique national security and human rights concerns. The platform’s parent company, ByteDance, is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has a record of coercing the private sector into conducting censorship and surveillance at home and abroad. The risks of TikTok being exploited by the CCP for malign purposes—for instance, to access personal data to track journalists or shape the information environment in the United States in the event of a national crisis—are very real and need to be taken seriously.

[...]

A better approach to protecting rights and security would be to adopt legislation that strengthens data privacy, platform transparency, and cybersecurity. This would force TikTok to operate more responsibly and better protect Americans’ data, while shedding light on the influence that ByteDance and the CCP have over the platform. This approach would also help address challenges raised by other social media platforms, including those with similar ties to authoritarian states.

[...]

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Beijing's Salt Typhoon cyberspies had been seen in US government networks before telcos discovered the same foreign intruders in their own systems, according to CISA boss Jen Easterly.

Speaking at a Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) event on Wednesday, the agency director said her threat hunters detected the Chinese government goons in federal networks before the far-reaching espionage campaign against people's telecommunications providers had been found and attributed to Salt Typhoon.

"We saw it as a separate campaign, called it another goofy cyber name, and we were able to, based on the visibility that we had within the federal networks, connect some dots," and tie the first set of snoops to the same crew that burrowed into AT&T, Verizon, and other telecoms firms' infrastructure, Easterly noted.

By compromising those telcos – specifically, the systems that allow the Feds to lawfully monitor criminal suspects [the U.S. Wiretap system} – Salt Typhoon had the capability to geolocate millions of subscribers, access people's internet traffic, and record phone calls at will.

This visibility into federal government networks, combined with private-industry tips coming into CISA, led to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies obtaining court-approved access to Salt-Typhoon-leased virtual private servers.

"That then led to cracking open the larger Salt Typhoon piece," Easterly said.

Still, she cautioned, "what we have found is likely just the tip of the iceberg" when it comes to Chinese intrusions into American critical infrastructure.

"China is the most persistent and serious cyber threat to the nation and to our national critical infrastructure," Easterly warned, adding that Salt Typhoon isn't her biggest worry when it comes to Middle Kingdom cyberthreats.

[...]

The public later learned that the same PRC-backed crew had compromised at least one large US city's emergency services network, been conducting reconnaissance on "multiple" American electric companies, and was still lurking inside power, water, and comms systems, preparing to "wreak havoc" on American infrastructure and "cause societal chaos" in the US.

A complex sense of touch for individuals living with spinal cord injuries is a step closer to reality. A study published in Science, paves the way for complex touch sensations through brain stimulation while using an extracorporeal bionic limb, that is attached to a chair or wheelchair. The paper is titled "Tactile edges and motion via patterned microstimulation of the human somatosensory cortex."

cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/981497

Note this post evaluates Linux systems. Microsoft presumably has a different, hopefully better, implementation.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18055357

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***This is an opinionated piece by Nick Trickett, commodities analyst with Fitch Solutions. All views expressed are his own and do not represent those of his employer. ***

[...]

The Ukrainian Association of Geologists estimates that the country has as much as 5% of the world’s critical minerals resources, including titanium, uranium, lithium, gallium, manganese, beryllium, rare earth elements, bulk ores like iron and scores of other minerals. It is hardly a stretch to imagine that Kyiv and Moscow are aware of their strategic value.

Resource wars typically bring oil to mind. However, cleantech is changing how nations conceive of energy security. Where fossil fuel crises are immediate – these fuels are produced or imported, used only once and sometimes have storage constraints – the clean energy crises of the future come from disruptions to the supplies of metals required to build essential technology. In turn, these metals are processed from ores that, in their raw form, can be stacked in warehouses indefinitely.

Proponents of the financial windfall from these minerals might rethink the scale of the markets involved. In tonnage equivalent, the world consumes over 5 billion tons of crude oil and its derived products every year. Financial markets trade oil product futures equivalent to 2.5 trillion tons, the combined markets of which generate trillions of dollars of trading activity.

Among critical minerals, copper is king with a physical trade of about 30 million tons a year, worth closer to $270 billion with a comparatively small futures market footprint. Lithium – a hot topic for Ukraine’s mineral riches – is closer to 1.5 million tons and lacks a liquid futures market for now, generating more like $30 billion a year. Critical minerals are indeed critical but do not generate the same financial muscle as oil to finance recovery or provide tax revenues.

If Russia’s war aims concern Ukraine’s mineral wealth, the obvious question is what comes next? Sanctions are unlikely to go anywhere and Europe will not turn to buying resources from Russia. China controls half or more of the processing and refining of virtually every critical mineral, often through vertically integrated companies that are profitable at lower prices than their Western peers. Either Russia intends to build a green economy – terrible for its existing growth and fiscal model – or it will sell to Chinese buyers who can drive a hard bargain on price.

[...]

For Ukraine, on the other hand, these reserves are strategically valuable because they could grant Kyiv a competitive advantage for cleantech and nuclear tech manufacturing. A post-war Ukraine could benefit from reshoring supply chains out of Germany, as Poland and other eastern European members of the EU. If Kyiv were to ensure rapid investment and development, it would likely look at primarily taxing miners’ profits rather than extraction, significantly reducing the tax base from the sector in exchange for export earnings to bolster the hryvnia.

[...]

Ukraine also has gallium, a rare metal used in semiconductors, solar PVs, LED lights, circuitry, and power converters. China recently imposed export controls on gallium in response to U.S. policy, exploiting its near-total control of refined gallium production. This could provide an opportunity for Ukraine to become indispensable to global supply chains, but the market is quite small in financial terms.

[...]

Europe has the most to gain from unlocking a new supply of minerals. Squeezed between the mercurial bellicosity of Trump and the mounting pressure of China’s cleantech prowess and economic slowdown makes Beijing even more reliant on exports, the continent’s reliance on trade for a large share of its GDP makes it an ideal partner for Kyiv. Building mines in the EU is even harder than in the U.S. Onshoring mineral value chains provides opportunities for cost-savings and vertical integration. For all its tough talk and acknowledging the growing gap between Europe’s financial support for Ukraine and that of the United States, there is not yet reason to believe European governments are willing to make even larger sacrifices to ensure Ukraine wins a fair peace.

[...]

Ukraine may seek to use its mineral wealth as a diplomatic object of negotiations for a just peace. That would be completely understandable in a war for national survival. Whoever controls these deposits faces the whims and disorder of rapidly changing markets that confound expectations and pose challenges.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18047893

Austrian digital rights organization noyb led by Max Schrems has filed GDPR complaints against TikTok, AliExpress, SHEIN, Temu, WeChat and Xiaomi for unlawful data transfers to China. While four of them openly admit to sending Europeans’ personal data to China, the other two say that they transfer data to undisclosed “third countries”.

As none of the companies responded adequately to the complainants’ access requests, we have to assume that this includes China. But EU law is clear: data transfers outside the EU are only allowed if the destination country doesn’t undermine the protection of data. Given that China is an authoritarian surveillance state, companies can’t realistically shield EU users’ data from access by the Chinese government. After issues around US government access, the rise of Chinese apps opens a new front for EU data protection law.

Starship Flight 7 UPDATE - Stage 2 (Launch Vehicle) is still LOST. Superheavy booster was successfully caught. Standby for updates.

@technology@beehaw.org @news@beehaw.org @usnews@beehaw.org @programming@beehaw.org @technology@lemmy.world @news@lemmy.world #technology

Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/

@technology@beehaw.org @news@beehaw.org @usnews@beehaw.org @programming@beehaw.org
#technology #news

European Federation of Journalists to stop posting content on X

The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has announced that it will stop publishing content on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, from January 20th, 2025, when Donald Trump will officially become the 47th president of the United States.

The organisation stated that it can “no longer ethically participate in a social network that its owner has transformed into a machine of disinformation and propaganda”.

It joins The Guardian and other European media outlets including Dagens Nyheter, La Vanguardia, Ouest-France and Sud-Ouest in coming off the platform, due to the impact of Musk on the organisation.

The EFJ is the largest organisation of journalists in Europe, representing over 295,000 journalists in 44 countries has announced that it will stop posting content on X.

The company’s general secretary Ricardo Gutiérrez stated:

“After the US elections, EFJ pointed out the threat to democracy and freedom of expression posed by the cooperation between the president of the most powerful country in the world, Donald J. Trump, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who is also the owner of social network X and has been appointed to lead a “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) when Donald J. Trump takes office as president on January 20, 2025.

“We cannot continue to participate in the social network feed of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists”, said the president of EFJ, Maja Sever.

“The social media site X has become the preferred vector for conspiracy theories, racism, far-right ideas and misogynistic rhetoric. X is a platform that no longer serves the public interest at all, but the special ideological and financial interests of its owner and his political allies”, he writes further.

“The editorial evolution of X, since its acquisition by Elon Musk, is simply contrary to our humanist values, our commitment to press freedom and media pluralism, and our fight against all forms of hatred and discrimination. The decision to suspend our @EFJEUROPE account seemed clear to us and we invite all our members and all organizations defending freedom of expression to migrate to other platforms.”

@technology@beehaw.org @news@beehaw.org @usnews@beehaw.org @programming@beehaw.org @technology@lemmy.world @news@lemmy.world #technology

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/52638736

Archived link

Chinese game 'Marvel' has been accused of censorship after players of its new video game were unable to chat about topics that are banned in China.

Marvel Rivals is a new release featuring battles between heroic characters such as Captain America and Iron Man and the villains Loki and Venom. The plot revolves around Doctor Doom and his future counterpart Doom 2099.

The game was developed by Marvel in conjunction with the Chinese developer NetEase and released in December. However, players have been blocked from typing in words such as “Tiananmen Square” and “Wuhan virus” in the chat function. They are met with the warning: “text contains inappropriate content”.

Marvel Rivals game artwork featuring Iron Man, Spider-Man, and other characters.

Other restricted phrases include “free Taiwan”, “free Hong Kong”, “free Tibet”, “Taiwan is a country”, “Taiwan No 1” and even “1989”, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Chatting about Mao Zedong or the Dalai Lama is also banned.

Winnie-the-Pooh, a name associated with President Xi, is blocked. Xi was compared to the character after appearing in a photograph with Barack Obama in 2017.

Popular gamers have posted videos of themselves trying to type in the words. Asmongold, the YouTuber, is allowed to type in the words “Taiwan sucks” and “Taiwan is bad” only to be blocked when trying “free Taiwan”. At the end of the video he added sarcastically: “Marvel Rivals is a very interesting game that has no censorship at all and lets people think whatever they want and that’s just the way it is guys.”

[...]

China has a long history of censoring the content of video games and films for the domestic market. The Second World War strategy game Hearts of Iron was banned for depicting Tibet, Manchuria and Xinjiang as independent nations. Command & Conquer: Generals, a game depicting a hypothetical Third World War, was said to “smear the image of China and the Chinese army”.

Marvel has also been accused of altering films so they would be accepted in the Chinese market. In the 2016 film Doctor Strange the main character is trained by a Celtic woman played by Tilda Swinton rather than a Tibetan monk who appeared in the original comics. A screenwriter claimed it was to appease the Chinese authorities and Marvel later admitted the move was a mistake.

[...]

I honestly did not realize this was not already the case but it is a good move to make right now. Hopefully folks will start to recognize the Fediverse for what it is and can be and explore coming to the Activity Pub side over using Bluesky.