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Sarah Perez
11:39 AM PST · January 8, 2025

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The fake operation has a curious tendency to defend the Pakistan military

In October, a new foreign policy think tank calling itself the Beltway Grid Policy Centre quietly entered D.C.'s diplomatic fray. While there was no launch party and is no K Street office we could find, the think tank nevertheless began producing its intellectual product at a startling pace, issuing reports, press releases, and pitching journalists on news coverage—much of it focused on South Asia, and, in particular, the ongoing political crisis in Pakistan.

The unusual nature of Beltway Grid's staffing leaves open several possibilities. The organization may be so hard at work defending the policies of the Pakistan military and criticizing former Prime Minister Imran Khan, the team simply hasn't had time to lead previous lives or respond to requests for comment. They may be early alien settlers, dropped off by drones on the coast of New Jersey, who are fans of Jane Austen and have come to study "the modern dynamics of lobbying." Or, more likely, somebody with a small budget asked ChatGPT to set up a fake think tank. Using AI to make a think tank adds a deeper layer of irony, since AI proponents regularly admonish the public not to conflate the operations of an AI program with “thinking.”

Beltway Grid's work product has left a few other clues as the motivations of its creator. One recent report, "Democracy Under Siege: Economic Fallout and Diplomatic Implications of Protests in Pakistan," argues that the November 2024 protests, which lasted just a few days and were led by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party under former Prime Minister Imran Khan, resulted in higher inflation, a currency collapse, a loss of 0.8% of GDP, a cumulative cost of 3 trillion rupees. The numbers are eerily similar to a report distributed internally by the army and obtained by Drop Site News. Independent analysts have suggested the economic malaise may be more closely linked to the overall policies of the military government, but according to the author of the report Beltway Grid's "Chief Strategic Analyst, Political Influence," Alexandra Caldwell, the problems all belong at the foot of Khan. Caldwell could not be reached for further comment, but her report was convincing enough for Pakistani news to turn it into a broadcast. And its report on Imran Khan's bid for Oxford Chancellor—Beltway Grid took a dim view, believe it or not—can be found reported on PR wire services and even republished on Yahoo News.

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cross-posted from: https://leminal.space/post/14389410

“[For] people who live in the country or in remote areas or minority groups or [who have] small businesses, that is a really good way for them to communicate and reach other people,” she says.

“It’s just not possible to set up an alternative at this point in time. So, to put it bluntly, we’re in a bit of deep shit, to be honest.”

No mention of Pixelfed, but I can understand why. Will it only be seen as an alternative once a critical mass of users move there? And can that happen if they don't see it as an alternative? Chicken and egg. I'm trying out, but it's a little vapid when everyone I know is on Instagram.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24555514

With Lenovo's announcement at CES 2025 of the Lenovo Legion Go S, we are pleased to share that their "Powered by SteamOS" model is the first handheld officially licensed to ship with Valve's SteamOS. We built this operating system to provide a seamless user experience optimized for gaming, while retaining access to the power and flexibility of a PC. SteamOS is the same operating system we run on Steam Deck, and the team is making updates to ensure it fully supports the Lenovo Legion Go S and provides the same seamless experience customers expect.

In addition, the same work that we are doing to support the Lenovo Legion Go S will improve compatibility with other handhelds. Ahead of Legion Go S shipping, we will be shipping a beta of SteamOS which should improve the experience on other handhelds, and users can download and test this themselves. And of course we'll continue adding support and improving the experience with future releases.

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The goal is to show that a real go-kart for adults can be built with mail-order parts and basic tools, without cutting, welding, or nonsense.

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Meta on Tuesday announced it will eliminate its third-party fact-checking program to “restore free expression” and move to a “Community Notes” model, similar to the system that exists on Elon Musk’s platform X.

The company said Community Notes will be written and rated by contributing users to provide more context to posts across its platforms, and the feature will roll out in the U.S. over the next couple of months. The announcement marks Meta’s latest attempt to smooth over relations with Republican President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office.

Meta said it will simplify its content policies by removing restrictions on subjects like immigration and gender and implement a new approach to policy enforcement that will focus on illegal and high-severity violations. The company is moving its trust and safety and content moderation teams from California, a historically Democratic state, to Texas, a historically Republican state.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24503345

A team from China’s top government research academy pledged to produce this year a processor based on the open-source chip-design architecture RISC-V, as Beijing advances its semiconductor self-reliance drive amid escalating US restrictions.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) will be able to deliver its XiangShan open-source central processing unit in 2025, wrote Bao Yungang, deputy director at the academy’s Institute of Computing Technology, in a Weibo post on Sunday.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24419041

RISC-V laptops offer customizable and affordable personal computing with their open-source instruction set architecture. Early versions have demonstrated their potential, but lagged in performance. But in 2025, Framework and DeepComputing are partnering to make the best RISC-V laptop yet, promising an alternative to laptops powered by x86 and Arm.

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cross-posted from: https://endlesstalk.org/post/81122398

due to the new rules of European Union, whatsapp has/had one year - iirc - to open the app to talk with other apps. iirc, this started on February/March of 2024 and we are in 2025. Anyone knows more details or news about it? This is ONLY applicable to European Union countrys, iirc.

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Disgraced crypto tycoon Do Kwon, a key figure related to the 2022 collapse of TerraUSD and Luna coins, has been extradited to the United States, where he will face federal fraud charges.

The government of Montenegro announced on Tuesday (local time) that the extradition procedure of Kwon to the U.S. FBI was completed at Podgorica International Airport.

This marks one year and nine months since the 33-year-old Korean national was arrested at the same airport on March 23, 2023.

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In this year's two-part finale, Ed Zitron enumerates the damage being done to billions of people by the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy - and why you need to have solidarity with your fellow user.

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Never Forgive Them (www.wheresyoured.at)
submitted 1 week ago by krash@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml
 
 

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17602033

You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.

It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.

These people want everything from you — to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesn’t involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.

Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and it’s because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.

This year has, on some level, radicalized me, and today I’m going to explain why. It’s going to be a long one, because I need you to fully grasp the seriousness and widespread nature of the problem.

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This post is a follow up to Breaking "DRM" in Polish trains [video] – 37c3 presentation

Description

You've probably already heard the story: we got contracted to analyze a bunch of trains breaking down after being serviced by independent workshops. We reverse engineered them and found code which simulated failures when they detected servicing attempts. We presented our findings at 37C3… and then shit hit the fan.

This talk will be an update about what happened since our 37C3 presentation. We’ll talk about:

  • Three parliamentary workgroup sessions with dirty bathroom photos on Newag’s offtopic slides, train operators revealing that they paid Newag more than 20k EUR for unlocking a single train, which Newag was able to unlock in 10 minutes, and at the same time saying that they don’t know anything about the locks.
  • 140-page lawsuits, accusing us of copyright violation and unfair competition (sic!) with a lot of logical gymnastics.
  • How it’s like to repeatedly explain reverse engineering concepts to journalists.
  • 6 official investigations, two of them criminal.
  • New cases revealed since then (from different train operators).
  • and much more!

Original media.ccc link (could be audio issues) or https://streaming.media.ccc.de/38c3/relive/336

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In a Tuesday episode of the This Past Weekend podcast, Von dismissed any national security concerns being floated about the China-owned TikTok platform, arguing the prevalence of content related to Israel’s bombing of Gaza — where thousands of civilians have been killed — is the real reason the government is uncomfortable.

“I believe that they don’t want people sharing the truth about the genocide in Palestine and that’s why they’re doing it. I believe that that’s what it is and TikTok is one of those places where people can still do that. And they want to own it. They want to own it, dude,” the podcaster and comedian said.

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