Technology

Technology is playing a central role in enabling the relentless mass slaughter and destruction unleashed in Gaza. From supplying the dystopian AI systems used to automate the killing and bombing, to facilitating the spread of state-sponsored disinformation and online incitement to violence and war crimes, Big Tech is deeply embroiled in this brutal war. However, the impunity with which Israeli authorities have been allowed to wage this war has also served to shield technology companies from scrutiny. Not only have companies failed to uphold their human rights commitments in times of war, they have also dismissed, ignored, and even punished dissenting voices among their own ranks, civil society, and the public flagging their possible complicity in what the UN’s top independent expert on Palestine describes as an unfolding genocide.

This post interrogates how technology companies can be potentially facilitating or contributing to an endless list of egregious violations of international law, including the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, currently under investigation by the ICJ and the International Criminal Court (ICC). We also provide companies with recommendations to avoid potential complicity in such violations.

BRUSSELS, Oct 10 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's X will not be designated as a gatekeeper under landmark EU tech rules known as the Digital Markets Act which would have subjected it to an onerous list of obligations, people with direct knowledge of the matter said on Thursday.

The European Commission, which opened an investigation into online social media platform X in May, will announce its decision next week, the people said.

The EU competition enforcer declined to comment. X, formerly known as Twitter, had previously told the Commission that even though it met the criterion regarding the number of users to be classified as a gatekeeper, it does not qualify for the other criterion as an important gateway between businesses and consumers.

Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok owner ByteDance and Booking.com, have been designated as gatekeepers, among others.

At Apple’s secretive Global Police Summit at its Cupertino headquarters, cops from seven countries learned how to use a host of Apple products like the iPhone, Vision Pro and CarPlay for surveillance and policing work.

{Solved Thanks}

Would there be any interest? header tags are used to make table of contents, anchor tags create Index entries, all the formatting tags (tables, un-numbered and numbered lists etc) do basic print formatting. All the bold/underline/italic also render to paper. Sort of like a poor man's TeX.

Has anyone done this?

ISTANBUL, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Turkey has blocked access to instant messaging platform Discord in line with a court decision after the platform refused to share information demanded by Ankara, Turkish authorities said on Wednesday.

The San Francisco-based company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Turkey's Information Technologies and Communication Authority published the access ban decision on its website. Justice minister Yilmaz Tunc said an Ankara court decided to block access to Discord from Turkey due to sufficient suspicion that crimes of "child sexual abuse and obscenity" had been committed by some using the platform.

"WordPad users who want to keep using it after updating to Windows 11 24H2 can do so by simply saving Wordpad.exe, wordpadfilter.dll, and write.exe. The first two are located in the C:\Program Files\Windows NT\Accessories folder, while the last can be found in C:\Windows."

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/14041182

OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after this news broke, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati resigned, followed by Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and VP of Research, Post Training Barret Zoph, leaving OpenAI with exactly three of its eleven cofounders remaining.

This coincides suspiciously with OpenAI's increasingly-absurd fundraising efforts, where (as I predicted in late July) OpenAI has raised the largest venture-backed fundraise of all time $6.6 billion— at a valuation of $157 billion.

Over the weekend, Google removed Kaspersky's Android security apps from the Google Play store and disabled the Russian company's developer accounts.

Users have been reporting over the last week that Kaspersky's products (including Kaspersky Endpoint Security and VPN & Antivirus by Kaspersky) are no longer available on Google Play in the United States and other world regions.

Kaspersky confirmed the issue on the company's official forums on Sunday and said that it's currently investigating why its software is no longer available on Google's app store.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-removes-kasperskys-antivirus-software-from-play-store-disables-developer-accounts/

Dozens of neo-Nazis are fleeing Telegram and moving to a relatively unknown secret chat app that has received funding from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

In a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published on Friday morning, researchers found that in the wake of the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov and charges against leaders of the so-called Terrorgram Collective, dozens of extremist groups have moved to the app SimpleX Chat in recent weeks over fears that Telegram’s privacy policies expose them to being arrested. The Terrorgram Collective is a neo-Nazi propaganda network that calls for acolytes to target government officials, attack power stations, and murder people of color.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/neo-nazis-head-to-encrypted-simplex-chat-app-bail-on-telegram/