2024-11-23

what fantasy is for, misinformation in court, MiniTruth likes Bluesky, Northvolt bankrupt, breaking Google, auto spectrum, psychology of Trumpists, "never stood a chance". phone hacking, EU layoffs

etc

• When Writing Fantasy, Kill Your Darlings

  when you write fantasy, death is very important. When a character in a fantasy dies, it reflects two things. One: What that society sees as the greatest dangers. Two: What a society thinks is worth dying for. That's a huge topic. Right now I'm more focused on practical matters: How to kill your characters for best effect.

• How Americans Celebrate Thanksgiving

• Nippon Electric Company - by Bradford Morgan White

• Rural water utilities in North Carolina are still reeling from Helene

Horseshit

• The Unlikely Popularity of Grape-Nuts Ice Cream

• Why Is Everyone 'Sober-Ish' All of a Sudden?

• Why so many families are "drowning in toys"

• Fastest-moving stars in the galaxy may be piloted by intelligent aliens

• From millionaires to Muslims, small subgroups of the population seem much larger

celebrity gossip

• 'Vanity Fair' Faces Major Backlash over Cormac McCarthy Story

• MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s salary reportedly cut by $5M despite being ‘ratings Viagra’ – as parent company Comcast deals with ‘difficult time.’

• Self-made Indian billionaire faces biggest test after US fraud charges

Obit

• Shel Talmy, dead at 87, crafted the signature sound of the Kinks and the Who

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Misinformation expert cites non-existent sources in Minnesota deep fake case

  Professor Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, is “well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology,” according to his Stanford biography.

  At the behest of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hancock recently submitted an affidavit supporting new legislation that bans the use of so-called “deep fake” technology to influence an election. The law is being challenged in federal court by a conservative YouTuber and Republican state Rep. Mary Franson of Alexandria for violating First Amendment free speech protections. Hancock’s expert declaration in support of the deep fake law cites numerous academic works. But several of those sources do not appear to exist, and the lawyers challenging the law say they appear to have been made up by artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT. For instance, the declaration cites a study titled “The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior,” and says that it was published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics in 2023. But no study by that name appears in that journal; academic databases don’t have any record of it existing; and the specific journal pages referenced contain two entirely different articles.

  • Stanford expert on 'lying and technology' accused of lying about technology

• Google takes down fake news sites run by Chinese influence operation

Bluesky

• 'A place of joy': why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky

  In the two weeks since the US presidential election, the platform has grown from close to 14 million users to nearly 21 million. Bluesky has broad appeal in large part because it looks and feels a lot like X (formerly known as Twitter), which became hugely popular with scientists, who used it to share research findings, collaborate and network. One estimate suggests that at least half a million researchers had Twitter profiles in 2022. That was the year that billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform. He renamed it X and reduced content moderation, among other changes, prompting some researchers to leave. Since then, pornography, spam, bots and abusive content have increased on X, and community protections have decreased, say researchers. Musk has responded about some of these issues on X. In March, he posted, “Stopping crypto/porn spam bots is not easy, but we’re working on it.” Bluesky, by contrast, offers users control over the content they see and the people they engage with, through moderation and protections such as blocking and muting features, say researchers. It is also built on an open network, which gives researchers and developers access to its data; X now charges a hefty fee for this kind of access.

• Bluesky is hell on Earth - spiked

  Bluesky aims to recreate the previous iteration of Twitter, before that awful, vulgar Elon Musk got his filthy mitts on it two years ago. Those were the good old days when the people who ran Twitter colluded with the FBI and suppressed any opinion slightly to the right of Hillary Clinton’s. In this alleged golden age, an army of faceless moderators would chuck users off for having the temerity to express hateful Nazi slurs like ‘there are two sexes’. Bluesky is the new go-to site for people who like peace, brotherhood and dobbing their neighbours in to the authorities. For people whose feelgood movie is The Lives of Others. Having discovered that they are massively, disastrously out of touch – thanks to the Trump landslide – their solution has been to self-isolate, and to make themselves even more out of touch.

• Bluesky Is Turning into a Strong X Alternative

• Jack Dorsey Explains Bluesky Exit: Repeating All the Mistakes We Made at Twitter

Musk

• Texas Opens Investigation into Conspiracy to Boycott Certain Social Platforms

  • Texas AG Declares War on Advertisers Who Snub Musk's ExTwitter

• MPs to summon Elon Musk to testify about X's role in UK summer riots

• Ask HN: What gives Elon Musk's companies their edge? | Hacker News

  • I've also asked. People say he doesn't accept excuses, or failures; and will demonstrate that things are possible whenever someone says they can't do something. All well and good; I still have questions about how the Feds stomped so many similar ventures but only recently even began impeding his projects enough that he's noticed. Paypal came together faster than X money transfer licenses have, etc, etc.

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Northvolt files for bankruptcy protection in blow to Europe's EV ambitions

  • Sweden's Northvolt files for bankruptcy, in blow to Europe's EV ambitions

  • Battery startup Northvolt files for bankruptcy protection in US

• EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

• Tesla won the plug war. Enter the age of the EV charging adapter

• Whatever Happened with Cars Parking Themselves?

• Cybertruck Values Have Cratered and Are Still Dropping

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Jaguar boss says criticism of rebrand is ‘vile hatred and intolerance.’

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• U.S. women are outpacing men in college completion in every major group (HN comments)

• Andrew Tate's online university hacked – Chat logs, data on 800k users leaked

• An Unscientific American

  I was a monthly columnist at Scientific American for nearly 18 years. On hearing this news, I emailed a number of people associated with the magazine to inquire what had transpired there—and more broadly why they think Helmuth and others allowed, or even encouraged, far-left politics to intrude into the pages of that once-storied publication. Very few people responded and those who did not only offered no comment but asked me to not even mention the fact that I had contacted them. What is going on here?

• Sports Psychologist Continues Copyright Suits over Retweets by School Officials

• 'Launchpad Jobs,' Not College, Help Some High School Grads

• Over 85k Quebec students strike for Gaza, call for intifada and final solution

• UTexas System makes undergraduate tuition free for families with less than $100K AGI

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• NSA Director Wants Industry to Disclose Details of Telecom Hacks

• Deno is filing a USPTO petition to cancel Oracle's JavaScript trademark

• Meta gains steam in its push to make Apple, Google verify users' ages

• The Rust Foundation's 2nd bad draft trademark policy

• The Intercept's case against Microsoft has just been dismissed with prejudice

• Majority of people believe their devices spy on them to serve up ads

• Hasbro's Gamer CEO to Focus on Play After Paring Film Assets

• Judge rules SiriusXM's annoying cancellation process is illegal

• Senators Call for Crackdown on VeriSign Monopoly and Predatory Pricing of .com

Google

• OpenAI Considers Taking on Google with Browser

• Mozilla Warns DOJ's Google Breakup Plan May Hurt Small Browser Makers

• DOJ's proposal require Google to divest from Anthropic investment

• Google sues ex-engineer in Texas over leaked Pixel chip secrets

  The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday, said that Harshit Roy "touted his dominion" over the secrets in social media posts, tagging competitors and making threatening statements to the company including "I need to take unethical means to get what I am entitled to" and "remember that empires fall and so will you."

• Kairos Power - which recently signed a contract to provide power to Google's datacenters - has received approval to build two test reactors in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

• The Proposal to Break Up Google Is Finally Here

• Welcome to Google's nightmare: US reveals plan to destroy search monopoly

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• TIL: Some surprising code execution sources in bash

• How the most brilliant computer scientists got password policy so wrong

• TEMPEST gets rediscovered every so often: Hackers can wirelessly watch your display by HDMI radiation

• Spelunking in Comments and Documentation for Security Footguns - Include Security Research Blog

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• The EU AI Act is a wake-up call

• OpenAI accidentally erases potential evidence in training data lawsuit

  • New York Times Says OpenAI Erased Potential Lawsuit Evidence

• Microsoft Is Trying to Fix Copilot's Oversharing Problem - Business Insider

  On Tuesday, Microsoft released new tools and a guide to help customers mitigate a Copilot security issue that inadvertently let employees access sensitive information, such as CEO emails and HR documents. These updates are designed "to identify and mitigate oversharing and ongoing governance concerns," the company explained in a new blueprint for Microsoft's 365 productivity software suite.

• Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival

• AI could pose pandemic-scale biosecurity risks

• Silicon Valley's Obsession with AI Looks a Lot Like Religion

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA Wants SpaceX and Blue Origin to Deliver Cargo to the Moon

• NASA Plans to Assign Missions for Two Future Artemis Cargo Landers

• Space station developers weigh in on NASA's continuous presence rethink

• NASA is stacking the Artemis II rocket, implying a simple heat shield fix

• India's Moon orbiter moved to dodge Korean and USA craft

Crypto con games

• Goldman Gives the Blockchain Revolution a Home

• Bitcoin jumps back above $98,000 after SEC announces Gary Gensler will step down

• Teen streamer dumped a meme coin for $30K, then things got weird

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Klarna's Planned IPO Sets the Stage for More Fintech Listings

• Companies are spritzing smells in office to make return-to-office more pleasant

• CFPB expands oversight of services like Apple Pay, Cash App, PayPal and Zelle

  • Apple will now be treated like a bank

• Is long-haul trucking facing a driver shortage?

• Americans see their savings vanish in Synapse fintech crisis

• Federal Reserve announces pricing for payment services it provides (ACH, FedNow)

• Why your local diner and grocery store aren't open 24 hours anymore

  There are several reasons fueling the move away from 24-hour operations. Businesses have been grappling with the cost of labor, rent and food supplies. Although the economy has cooled down, the annual inflation rate reached a peak of 9.1% in 2022 – the highest level in 40 years. Employers, like Norms, already tend to pay night-shift workers more in the form of premiums because of the arduous hours they work. It’s also difficult for some businesses to find enough workers willing to work graveyard shifts. At pharmacies, shrinking budgets result in understaffed locations and heavier workloads for employees. That in turn makes it harder to recruit people. Consumer habits have also changed. Nightlife activity has declined in some regions since the pandemic, according to the experts Marketplace spoke to. The downward trend has affected businesses that would have benefited from that foot traffic, while consumers who work from home can now pick up supplies during the day.

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Four tech companies just saved California from a budget crisis

• FCC passes auto safety spectrum rules

  C-V2X will use existing cellular networks to send messages from vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to infrastructure, vehicle to cyclists, or vehicle to pedestrians to warn of each other's presence for safety purposes. It could cross-alert for hazardous road conditions, including speeding cars, weather, or traffic congestion. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said the agency’s efforts will drive innovation in wireless and transportation economies and “keep us safe on our roadways when we walk, ride, and drive.” The decision on the proposed rule promotes “efficient use of 30 megahertz of spectrum” dedicated to Intelligent Transportation Systems, or ITS, in the 5.9GHz band. And it also codifies C-V2X technical parameters, including power and emission limits, technical parameters, and message priorities.

• Gary Gensler to leave role as SEC chairman

• DoD Inspector General Concealed January 6 Evidence

  After a thorough investigation, the Subcommittee uncovered evidence substantiating that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed the deployment of the D.C. National Guard to the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In addition, the DoD IG concealed the extent and cause of the delay to protect Department of Defense and Pentagon leadership. The Subcommittee found multiple instances where the DoD IG failed to disclose evidence that contradicted the DoD IG's erroneous conclusion. The DoD IG’s report reflects an alarming failure to adequately evaluate the actions of senior DoD officials, including Secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, who failed to communicate deployment orders to Major General William Walker, the Commander of the DCNG on January 6.

  • Exclusive: Pentagon Delayed Guard Deployment On Jan. 6

Trump

• Politics Trump AG pick Matt Gaetz says he's withdrawing

• Trump Picks Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary

• Trump's Truth Social is exploring a crypto payment service called TruthFi

• Microsoft urges Donald Trump to 'push harder' against Russia and China hacks

  Microsoft’s president has called on Donald Trump to “push harder” against cyber attacks from Russia, China and Iran amid a wave of state-sponsored hacks targeting US government officials and election campaigns. Brad Smith, who is also the Big Tech company’s vice chair and top legal officer, told the Financial Times that cyber security “deserves to be a more prominent issue of international relations” and appealed to the US president-elect to send a “strong message”. “I hope that the Trump administration will push harder against nation-state cyber attacks, especially from Russia and China and Iran,” Smith said. “We should not tolerate the level of attacks that we are seeing today.”

• Judge indefinitely postpones sentencing in Trump's hush money trial

• Trump advisers in talks to replace Biden term ‘undocumented immigrant’ with ‘illegal alien.’

• Angela Merkel expresses 'huge concern' at Elon Musk's US Government role

• Musk Unleashes Online Army on Federal Workers

Left Angst

• Another Theory of the Trump Movement - The Atlantic

  Consider the recent post-election slogan “Your body, my choice,” also engineered to upset and humiliate liberals: It’s an overt statement of sex and dominion. And Trump draws that out in people. “Disinhibition,” the New York Times writer Ezra Klein wrote recently, “is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength.” Trump is in touch with the impulses and desires that run counter to social norms, and he invites his audience to put aside the usual internal barriers to acting on or voicing them. This moment is an opportune one for a revival of Freud, whose work, with its signature focus on subterranean inner worlds, helps make sense of these tendencies and their implications for politics.

  The temptation to psychologize one’s political opponents typically wins out after defeat, the political theorist and professor Corey Robin told me recently. (An easy claim to test: Among the surge of post-election takes is a subgenre of explanatory pieces evaluating the psyches of unexpected Trump voters—suggestions that Latinos are wedded to political strongmen, or that conservative wives cast their votes for right-wingers purely out of fear or submission.)

• Why wealthy journalists didn’t understand the economy was important to voters.

• Prospect of RFK Jr. as head of HHS panics many in medical science community

• Foreign nationals propel U.S. science. Visa limits under Trump could change that

• Washington Post abruptly ousts politics editor Dan Eggen after Trump win: report

  Dan Eggen, a veteran political writer who was named senior politics editor just two years ago, said he was “crushed” after being informed he will be “removed” from his role, according to an email he sent that was obtained by Lachlan Cartwright. “I struggled with how to write this message since there is an element of begging to it that is not particularly attractive. But what the hey: I was informed Monday that I will be removed as senior politics editor at the end of the year. I will leave it to others to explain why,” the email said.

• The Greatest Cancel Culture Warrior in America Is Donald Trump - The New York Times

  If Democrats want to win again, they have to shed their ideological baggage, meet American voters where they are and stop scolding them when they’re puzzled by the ever-shifting ideological demands (and language policing) of the very online left. I agree with much of this. Cancel culture (properly defined) is toxic. White Democrats, in particular, veered to the left of Black Democrats. There has been an intense amount of intolerance in far-left spaces, and not just on campuses. There is a need for a reckoning. But let’s be very clear about the course of this election. One candidate leaned away from the extremism of her base, and she lost. The other candidate leaned into the worst excesses of his movement, and he won.

  Kamala Harris spent her short campaign running away from the excesses of the left. She abandoned her most left-wing positions. She wasn’t using left-wing buzzwords, and rather than cancel ideological opposition, she tried to create the largest possible tent, stretching from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Donald Trump’s campaign, by contrast, reveled in its most vicious language. It’s not necessary to recount every outrage, but we can’t forget that Trump and his allies spent days falsely accusing Haitian migrants of eating ducks and pets. My news colleagues accurately described Trump’s election-closing Madison Square Garden rally as a “carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.”

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Toddlers Shoot Three People Every Month in Texas

• Laken Riley's killer never stood a chance

  Riley’s murder became a political rallying cry at this summer’s Republican National Convention because Ibarra entered the country illegally in 2022. But for all the political controversy, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt. The verdict was going to be guilty. The sentence was going to be life without parole.

  the bench trial was a good call by the defense. Saving the judge from a pointless jury trial might have been Ibarra’s best chance at life with the possibility of parole. While you probably won’t see that written in any rules or law books, in my experience as a defense attorney, judges (and prosecutors) appreciate defendants who don’t waste the court’s time. Sometimes a bench trial can help avoid the “trial tax” — the harsher sentencing when a defendant opts for a three-week jury trial instead of a four-day judge-only trial.

  • MSNBC Skips, CNN Spends 2 Minutes on Laken Riley Trial in Prime Time

  • Joe Rogan Slams Insane MSNBC Headline About Laken Riley's Killer | OutKick

  • MSNBC headline saying 'Laken Riley's killer never stood a chance' sparks backlash: 'Absolutely sickening' | Fox News

  • MSNBC Edits Laken Riley Headline After Enraging Critics

• SEC Charges 3 Broker-Dealers with Filing Deficient Suspicious Activity Reports

• The FBI’s Biden-Era Murder Estimates Are Far Below the Number of Homicides Recorded on Death Certificates

  the Biden administration FBI inexplicably revised its pre-Biden murder data all the way back to 2003, elevating the counts in certain years by up to 7%. The FBI made these unprecedented alterations without so much as a footnote to inform the public. As a result of those factors and others, the gap between murders reported by the FBI and the number of homicides recorded on death certificates has grown from a low of 16 killings in 2003 to an average of 3,711 killings per year during Biden’s presidency:

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Top senator calls Salt Typhoon 'worst telecom hack in our nation's history'

  • China's Hacking Reached Deep into U.S. Telecoms

  • Salt Typhoon Exploits ISP's Achilles' Heel

  As reported by multiple sources, these PRC-backed threat actors associated with Salt Typhoon did in fact exploit an intentional backdoor in these ISP’s systems that had been put in place to comply with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). These backdoors were intended to provide law enforcement with a technical means of executing legal wiretapping per warrants and subject to legal requirements. What Salt Typhoon was able to access represents a potentially serious compromise of the privacy of US citizens and carries significant national security implications. Salt Typhoon also had access to more general internet traffic flowing through provider networks and could have potentially had access “for months” before being discovered.

  • less "heel" more "gaping hole". The analogies get impolite.

  • Chinese phone hackers 'had access to every call in the US'

  • China Wiretaps Americans in 'Worst Hack in Our Nation's History'

• DoD Adjusts Nuclear Deterrence Strategy as Nuclear Peer Adversaries Escalate

World

• Apple pledges $100M Indonesia investment to lift iPhone 16 ban

• Australia launches 'landmark' bill to ban social media for children under 16

• The Irish Government Is Unbelievably Rich. It's Largely Thanks to Uncle Sam

• Miami Financier Stephen P. Lynch Is Quietly Trying to Buy Nord Stream 2 Gas Pipeline - WSJ

• Germany: Bosch to cut 5k jobs with car industry in crisis

• Ford to cut 4000 jobs in Europe, cites disruptive shift to EVs

• Izakaya chain buys Subway Japan in challenge to McDonald's

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Senior North Korean General Wounded in Recent Ukrainian Strike, Western Officials Say.

• What do we know about Russia's 'experimental' ballistic missile?

• What we know about new hypersonic Oreshnik missile Russia used against Ukraine

• Russian ballistic missile attack on Ukraine portends new era of warfare

China

• Chinese rival to Starlink strikes deal to enter Brazil

• Huawei's Chip Advances Threaten Apple in China

• China reels from spate of suspected 'revenge against society' attacks

• China's Plan B to Save the Economy: A Crusade Against Busywork

Health / Medicine

• Gut microbiome strain-sharing within isolated village social networks

• Why Americans Are Obsessed with Poor Posture

• Long Fatigue: The Exhaustion That Lingers After an Infection

• Who should get a uterus transplant? Experts aren't sure

• Toddler's backyard snake bite bills totaled more than a quarter-million dollars

• Hypochondria Is a Real and Dangerous Illness, New Research Shows

• The Case Against Deli Meat

• I Was in Great Health. So Why Were My Arteries Clogged?

• US FDA finds widely used asthma drug impacts the brain

  the drug, sold under the brand name Singulair and generically as montelukast, attaches to multiple brain receptors critical to psychiatric functioning.

• Texas anesthesiologist sentenced to 190 years for tampering with IV bags

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Where did Covid-19 originate? Lab's genetic analysis points to animal market

• Vaccination rates for flu and Covid are low this season, CDC says.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• What 700 years of historical data can tell us about extreme weather

• NOAA finds 77% of corals exposed to bleaching-level heat

• Meltwater from Greenland and the Arctic is weakening ocean circulation

• Why is it still so hard to breathe in India and Pakistan?

• Tuvalu: The disappearing island nation recreating itself in the metaverse

• COP29 Summit Pushes for $250B Deal to Narrow Divisions

• Newly identified chemical in drinking water could be toxic: study

• Salmon return to lay eggs in historic habitat after dam removal project

• Feds release options for Colorado River as negotiations between states stall

• Staggering temperature rise predicted for the Middle East and North Africa