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Muslim marriage app Salams has come under fire after users highlighted that it was acquired by the Match Group, with many accusing its CEO, Spencer Rascoff, of being ‘pro-Israel’.
Dozens of people on social media sites such as X and Reddit have called for Muslims to boycott the app, after a post from Rascoff’s LinkedIn page appeared to show support for Israeli soldiers.
Rascoff, who has worked for Match Group since March 2024, wrote a post on LinkedIn stating: "Proud to support Ohana co-founders Jacob Ian Halbert and Ezra Gershanok’s campaign to help cover rent bills for Israeli soldiers fighting overseas."
creator
to
The IDF soldiers do not have to apply for Google and pass the Google application entrance exam.
Also the acquisition can happen for a far higher amount than the company’s true worth. Thus sending a lot of Google money to Israel.
It is very doubtable Wiz is worth what Google is paying.
Similar to how AIPAC works, the IDF spies goal is not to make money, but to invest other people’s money into Israel.
creator
toNot every “conspiracy” is fiction. Anyone paying attention the last two years cannot deny that the pro-Israel positions these companies hold are completely nonsensical.
The flowchart in Pauls article is pretty representative how Israeli spies use their position to redirect funds to Israeli companies, which then get acquired and given prominent roles in American companies and VC. Which then send more funds to Israel. Etc etc.
AIPAC is also an amazing example of a few hundred million in Israeli bribes to politicians is sending billions of taxpayer dollars back to Israel.
But besides politics it is extremely visible in news organizations:
And tech organizations:
Revealed: The Former Israeli Spies Working in Top Jobs at Google, Facebook and Microsoft
creator
toPaul Biggar made a great summary about how these “acquisitions” serve to get Israeli spies into American tech companies. Those spies then use their powers for Israel.
Google employees and human rights groups have raised concerns about the tech giant’s purchase of an Israeli start-up in an unprecedented $32bn deal.
Google on Tuesday announced the all-cash acquisition of Wiz, an Israeli cloud security firm which was founded by former members of Unit 8200, an elite Israeli army cyber-espionage and surveillance unit.
The deal comes with the Google already facing internal and external pressure over its controversial Project Nimbus contract, through which along with Amazon it provides cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli government and military.
A spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid, a coalition of Google and Amazon workers campaigning against the companies' involvement with Israel, said Google was "playing with fire" by buying Wiz.
Chinese electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer BYD has introduced a new charging platform that claims to reduce charging times to match the refuelling speed of petrol vehicles. The company also announced plans to build a network of fast-charging stations across China, marking a significant shift in its approach to EV infrastructure. The company’s founder, Wang Chuanfu, unveiled the ‘Super e-Platform’ at an event streamed from BYD’s headquarters in Shenzhen on Monday, as reported by Reuters.
BYD 1,000 kW charging speeds and infra plans
The new platform boasts peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW), allowing EVs to gain 400 km (249 miles) of range in just five minutes.
This is double the speed of Tesla’s latest Superchargers, which currently offer a maximum of 500 kW. The innovation aims to tackle one of the biggest barriers to EV adoption – charging time.
The company also announced its intention to build more than 4,000 ultra-fast charging stations across China to complement the new platform. However, BYD has not disclosed a specific timeline for the project or the amount it plans to invest.
The charging platform will initially be available in two upcoming BYD models – the Han L sedan and the Tang L SUV – priced from 270,000 yuan (around $37,400). These vehicles will be built on BYD’s e-Platform 3.0, which integrates multiple EV technologies, including:
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP's) national internet censor just announced that all AI-generated content will be required to have labels that are explicitly seen or heard by its audience and embedded in metadata. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) just released the transcript for the media questions and answers (akin to an FAQ) on its Measures for the Identification of Artificial Intelligence Generated and Synthetic Content [machine translated]. We saw the first signs of this policy move last September when the CAC's draft plans emerged.
This regulation takes effect on September 1, 2025, and will compel all service providers (i.e., AI LLMs) to “add explicit labels to generated and synthesized content.” The directive includes all types of data: text, images, videos, audio, and even virtual scenes. Aside from that, it also orders app stores to verify whether the apps they host follow the regulations.
Users will still be able to ask for unlabeled AI-generated content for “social concerns and industrial needs.” However, the generating app must reiterate this requirement to the user and also log the information to make it easier to trace. The responsibility of adding the AI-generated label and metadata falls on the shoulders of this end-user person or entity.
Google’s Gemma 3 LLMs, the new iteration in its already existing portfolio of lightweight Gemma LLMs, come in four variants: 1 billion parameters, 4 billion parameters, 12 billion parameters and 27 billion parameters. These LLMs, Google says, allow AI developers to choose the best model for their available hardware and performance when developing AI applications.
The Gemma 3 LLMs are designed to run quickly and directly on devices ranging from workstations to laptops and smartphones. For example, to run a Gemma 3 LLM on a device with a GPU or a TensorFlow processor, a larger model can be used than for a smartphone processor. The latter then uses a smaller model.
According to the tech giant, the new Gemma 3 LLMs’ performance is very high, surpassing that of OpenAI’s Llama-40B, DeepSeek-V3, and o3-mini, according to benchmarks. However, they still have to beat DeepSeek R1.
HP, along with other printer brands, is infamous for issuing firmware updates that brick already-purchased printers that have tried to use third-party ink. In a new form of frustration, HP is now being accused of issuing a firmware update that broke customers’ laser printers—even though the devices are loaded with HP-brand toner.
The firmware update in question is version 20250209, which HP issued on March 4 for its LaserJet MFP M232-M237 models. Per HP, the update includes “security updates,” a “regulatory requirement update,” “general improvements and bug fixes,” and fixes for IPP Everywhere. Looking back to older updates’ fixes and changes, which the new update includes, doesn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. The older updates mention things like “fixed print quality to ensure borders are not cropped for certain document types,” and “improved firmware update and cartridge rejection experiences.” But there’s no mention of changes to how the printers use or read toner.
However, users have been reporting sudden problems using HP-brand toner in their M232–M237 series printers since their devices updated to 20250209. Users on HP’s support forum say they see Error Code 11 and the hardware’s toner light flashing when trying to print. Some said they’ve cleaned the contacts and reinstalled their toner but still can't print.
A robotic private spacecraft designed to provide crucial data for returning humans to the moon toppled over as it landed on the lunar surface, bringing an immediate and premature end to the mission, its operators said on Friday.
Athena, a probe launched by the Texas-based company Intuitive Machines (IM) last month, touched down about 250 miles from its intended landing site near the moon’s south pole on Thursday. Initially at least, it was generating some power and sending information to Earth as engineers worked to make sense of data showing an “incorrect attitude”.
On Friday, however, IM declared Athena dead.
“With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge,” it said in a statement confirming that the 15ft (4.6 meter) spacecraft was on its side.
The joint investigation with Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call has found Unit 8200 trained the AI model to understand spoken Arabic using large volumes of telephone conversations and text messages, obtained through its extensive surveillance of the occupied territories.
According to sources familiar with the project, the unit began building the model to create a sophisticated chatbot-like tool capable of answering questions about people it is monitoring and providing insights into the massive volumes of surveillance data it collects.
“We tried to create the largest dataset possible [and] collect all the data the state of Israel has ever had in Arabic,” the former official, Chaked Roger Joseph Sayedoff, told an audience at a military AI conference in Tel Aviv last year. The model, he said, required “psychotic amounts” of data.
TikTok is to be investigated by the UK’s data protection watchdog, which is looking into whether social media algorithms are serving up inappropriate or harmful content to children.
Growing concerns over how social media platforms are using data generated by children’s online activity have prompted the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to launch an investigation into the Chinese platform, along with the forum site Reddit and the image-sharing site Imgur.
It will look at how TikTok uses the personal information of 13- to 17-year-olds to deliver content recommendations to them, and also examine Reddit and Imgur’s use of age assurance measures, such as how they estimate or verify a child’s age, which can then be used to tailor their experience on the platform.
BEIJING/SHANGHAI, March 4 (Reuters) - China plans to issue guidance to encourage the use of open-source RISC-V chips nationwide for the first time, two sources briefed on the matter said, as Beijing accelerates efforts to curb the country's dependence on Western-owned technology.
The policy guidance on boosting the use of RISC-V chips could be released as soon as this month, although the final date could change, the sources said.
In China, state entities and research institutes have eagerly embraced RISC-V in recent years, seeing it as geopolitically neutral. Chinese chip designers are attracted by its lower costs, but the government has yet to mention it in policy.
In 2023, Reuters reported that some U.S. lawmakers were putting pressure on the Biden administration to restrict American companies from working on the technology over concerns that Beijing was exploiting its open-source nature to advance its own semiconductor industry.
Five Microsoft employees were removed during a company town hall meeting after staging a protest against the company’s contracts supplying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud computing services to the Israeli occupation military.
The demonstration took place on Monday, following an Associated Press (AP) investigation that revealed Microsoft and OpenAI’s advanced AI models had been utilised by the Israeli occupation military to select bombing targets in recent attacks against Gaza and Lebanon.
This week at the Munich Security Conference, Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, played “I’ve got a secret.” It’s a game national security officialdom loves to play, slyly claiming authority ‘if they could only tell you what they know.’
It is in that vein that Warner spilled the beans on what he called the “real story” behind the law that could still ban TikTok.
“I want to see if you're going to tell the real story,” a grinning Warner said, addressing former congressman Mike Gallagher, and now a Palantir executive who, along with Warner, first introduced the bill that claimed that TikTok was a national security threat, a claim still relevant given the app’s uncertain future.
Gallagher described how the national security bill was dead until Hamas’ attack on Israel, which brought the legislation back to life. As Gallagher
> “So we had a bipartisan consensus. We had the executive branch, but the bill was still dead until October 7th. And people started to see a bunch of anti-Semitic content on the platform and our bill had legs again.”
Gambling companies are covertly tracking visitors to their websites and sending their data to Facebook’s parent company without consent in an apparent breach of data protection laws.
The information is then being used by Facebook’s owner, Meta, to profile people as gamblers and flood them with ads for casinos and betting sites, the Observer can reveal. A hidden tracking tool embedded in dozens of UK gambling websites has been extracting visitors’ data – including details of the webpages they view and the buttons they click – and sharing it with the social media company.
By law, data should only be used and shared for marketing purposes, with explicit permission obtained from users on the websites in which the tools are embedded. But testing by the Observer of 150 gambling sites – including virtual casinos, sports betting sites and online bingo – found widespread breaches of the rules.
The PlayStation Network (PSN) is down, depriving online gamers around the world from accessing weekend events.
The outage began in the UK at about midnight on Friday.
About 71,000 gamers reported the outage to PlayStation’s website. Many users can no longer access online gaming lobbies, the PlayStation Store or their online accounts.
The PSN runs a model that costs £13.49 a month, £39.99 for three months or £119.99 for 12 months for its premium subscription. Many gamers have pointed to these costs when complaining to Sony.
Facial recognition of criminals are among applications for AI to be deployed by the new Belgian government after Vanessa Matz was sworn in on Monday as the first federal minister to be tasked with digitalisation, AI and privacy.
The former member of the centrist party Les Engagés in the French-speaking parliament in Belgium will have a broad portfolio which also includes oversight over public companies and the civil service.
The government plan specifically mentions use of AI tools by the law enforcement authorities and police.
This week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to cancel the visas of college students who protest in support of Palestine, opening the path to their deportation. A small company called Stellar Defense & Cyber Intelligence is ready to help by deploying AI technology to identify anonymous, masked pro-Palestinian protestors, through a campaign it refers to as “Operation Wrath of Zion.”
Stellar is the maker of NesherAI, a bespoke facial-recognition tool which it claims is capable of deanonymizing pro-Palestinian protestors. The name “Nesher” is Hebrew for “eagle,” the symbol for both NesherAI and the Terror Watch Agency, the brand under which it operates. Their slogan on social media is, “The Eagle listens, The Eagle watches, The Eagle knows.”
In December, The Times of Israel reported that Betar had worked with pro-Israel U.S. lawmakers including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Fetterman (D-PA) on plans to round up “suspects” in anticipation of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Ross Glick, the executive director of Betar US, told the paper the purpose of Betar’s use of facial recognition was to “give the Trump team a head start.” While Glick stressed that Betar supports free speech, he added that “if a foreign student is here on a visa, they don’t have the same rights as others to protest or promote anti-Zionist narratives.”
On Wednesday, Betar did just as Glick said. “Join us at the jihad rally as we assist @ICEgov in deportation efforts,” the U.S. branch of Betar posted on the social media platform X. Hawila’s Terror Watch Agency reposted Betar’s statement.
NEW YORK, Jan 25 (Reuters) - U.S. TikTok users who once saw the app as a haven for free speech say they see signs of censorship after the platform, which is owned by China's ByteDance, was revived by an executive order from President Donald Trump.
"Our policies and algorithms did not change over the weekend," TikTok said in a statement to Reuters. "We are working hard to restore our U.S. operations back to normal and expect some temporary instability as we restore our services, which could impact TikTok features or users' access to the app."
But some users said they now see more content moderation, like limited search results, as well as warnings about misinformation and prompts for users to check their sources.
Some claimed TikTok was striking comments that used phrases like "Free Palestine" and "Free Luigi," a reference to Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing a UnitedHealth executive, which had been previously allowed. TikTok said it does not allow content that promotes violent or hateful individuals on the platform.
FORSMARK, Sweden, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Sweden started building a final storage facility for spent nuclear fuel on Wednesday, only the second such site in the world, where highly radioactive waste will be stored for 100,000 years.
How to store deadly radioactive waste until it is safe is a question that has dogged the nuclear industry since commercial reactors began operating in the 1950s.
Finland is the only country close to completing a permanent storage site.
TikTok is reportedly planning a total shutdown of the Chinese-owned video-sharing app when the law requiring a ban or sale of the app takes effect on Sunday.
The roughly 170 million US users who try to access the app will be greeted with a pop-up message directing them to a website with details about the ban, according to the Information.
Users will also be given the option of downloading their data from the app, sources familiar with the plan told the outlet.
WASHINGTON, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Scientists have detected emanating from the nucleus of a galaxy relatively close to our Milky Way flashes of X-rays gradually increasing in frequency that seem to be coming from a white dwarf - a highly compact stellar ember - with a death wish.
The observations made using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope appear to show a white dwarf nearing the point of no return - called the event horizon - as it orbits the galaxy's supermassive black hole, according to the researchers.
"It is probably the closest object we've ever observed orbiting around a supermassive black hole. This is extremely close to the black hole's event horizon," said Megan Masterson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral student in physics and lead author of the study that was presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Maryland this week and will be published in the journal Nature.
Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, fears of a renewed ISIS insurgency have intensified. MintPress News has uncovered that, despite Meta’s previously strict policies on banning terrorism-related content, ISIS-linked accounts have been posting freely on its platforms.
Although Meta previously removed 26 million pieces of terrorism-related content—an impressive 99% of such material on its platform—MintPress News has revealed that content supporting ISIS, often referred to by its pejorative epithet ‘Daesh’ in the Arab world, is now flourishing on the platform. Many of these accounts are based in regions of Syria historically known as strongholds for the extremist group.
A series of seemingly pro-ISIS accounts have emerged, concentrated in areas such as Binish, Sarmeen, Jarablous, Manbij, Palmyra and Deir Ezzor—regions historically known as strongholds for the terrorist group. New accounts appear daily, with some prominently displaying ISIS flags as their profile pictures.
These accounts frequently post speeches by ISIS leaders, which remain active on the platform and often garner hundreds of likes and comments. These include videos of the group’s fighters parading with weapons in the back of SUVs, attracting significant attention and interaction on the platform.
The folk tale that inspired Dreams on a Pillow tells of a mother who rushes into her home to retrieve her baby before fleeing, only to realise that she has escaped with a pillow instead. In the game, she spends her days trying to make her way to Lebanon after the massacre at Tantura, and the nights dreaming of the Palestine she knew as a child. Putting the pillow down lets her move through the game’s scenarios more freely, but invites nightmares and hallucinations. Abueideh estimates that it will take two years to complete; heartbreakingly, the crowdfunding page contains an assurance that “a clear plan for the completion of the game has been put in place to ensure continuity in the case of Rasheed’s disappearance, injury or demise at the hand of the continuously expanding Israeli aggression in the West Bank”.
In the city of Nablus in the West Bank, Rasheed Abueideh owns a nut roastery, where he works to provide for his family. He is also an award-winning game developer. A decade ago, as the 2014 Gaza war raged, he created a harrowing video game called Lilya and the Shadows of War, about a man trying to find safety for his daughter and himself – but as missiles fall around them, it quickly becomes clear that there is no safety. When the game was released in 2016, it was initially rejected by Apple on the grounds of inappropriate content, a decision reversed after a week of outcry.
Despite the acclaim and attention that Lilya received, however, Abueideh has not been able to raise funding for his next game through conventional means. The game he envisions, Dreams on a Pillow, is about the 1948 Nakba, told through a folk tale about a mother in the Arab-Israeli war, in which more than half the Palestinian population was displaced. He tells me that his game has been rejected almost 300 times, by publishers and providers of cultural grants, for being too controversial, too much of a risk. “Talking about the Palestinian story was always forbidden,” he says.
“Crowdfunding was our only option, but even that would not work for me because all the major crowdfunding platforms do not recognise Palestine,” says Abueideh. The team turned to LaunchGood, a Muslim-focused platform, where it met its funding goal on 7 January.
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.
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.
SMBSync2. It looks sketchy as hell but has a pretty intuitive interface to copy files to a NAS.
First create a task saying which folder to copy to where. Then either activate it manually or put it on a schedule. It makes it possible to auto create new folders based on date whenever I do a copy which I love.
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.
creator
toTikTok was already forced to host their data in the US because of “security concerns” but the level of censorship is not the same. The US wants to fully control what people are able to see to brainwash them.
American companies such as Twitter and Meta have IDF soldiers running their censorship division and systematically surpress Palestinian channels. This shadow censorship gives Americans the illusion they are experiencing free speech.
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.
An Australian computer scientist who falsely claimed to be the creator of bitcoin has been given a one-year suspended prison sentence after the high court in London ruled he was in contempt because he would not stop suing people.
Mr Justice Mellor had already found that Craig Wright, 54, repeatedly lied about his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the person or people who launched bitcoin – the cryptocurrency that was first mined in 2009 and recently soared in value to £79,000.
Wright had claimed intellectual property rights associated with bitcoin, but that was demolished when the high court found he lied about his role, deploying often clumsy forgeries “on a grand scale” and “technobabble”. The real Nakamoto is likely to be a billionaire because they are thought to own 1 million bitcoins.
Wright was then ordered to stop taking legal actions against bitcoin developers, but defied that court order in October when he brought suits against cryptocurrency developers amounting to more than £900bn in respect of his claimed intellectual property rights related to bitcoin.
More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism.
The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi.
The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.
The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege.
NSO competitor Paragon, creator of Graphite spyware used by Israel and U.S., sold to American defense contractor, marking a shift in ties of cyber arms between Jerusalem and D.C.
Police and intelligence services in Serbia are using advanced mobile forensics products and previously unknown spyware to illegally surveil journalists, environmental campaigners and civil rights activists, according to a report.
The report shows how mobile forensic products from the Israeli firm Cellebrite are used to unlock and extract data from individuals’ mobile devices, which are being infected with a new Android spyware system, NoviSpy.
High speed rail can be cost effective. High speed planes however cannot.
The amount of air resistance at higher speeds is insane. Instead of relying on wing lift for efficiency the entire aircraft has to remove all wings and it literally becomes a missile.
Efficient planes have long wings to create lift and cruise at lower speeds. This is the opposite where all lift is generated from the fuel.
NEW YORK, Dec 7 (Reuters) - U.S. TikTok users spent heavily to buy merchandise from a range of vendors on the e-commerce platform TikTok Shop so far this holiday shopping season, according to TikTok estimates and a Reuters analysis of spending patterns measured by data from Facteus.
When questioned about its controversial cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, Google has repeatedly claimed the so-called Project Nimbus deal is bound by the company’s general cloud computing terms of service policy.
While that policy would prohibit uses that lead to deprivation of rights, injury, or death, or other harms, contract documents and an internal company email reviewed by The Intercept show the deal forged between Google and Israel doesn’t operate under the tech company’s general terms of service. Rather, Nimbus is subject to an “adjusted” policy drafted between Google and the Israeli government. It is unclear how this “Adjusted Terms of Service” policy differs from Google’s typical terms.
“The tenderer [Israel] has adjusted the winning suppliers’ [Google and Amazon] service agreement for each of the services supplied within the framework of this contract,” according to a 63-page overview of the Nimbus contract published to the Israeli government’s public contracting portal. “The Adjusted Terms of Service are the only terms that shall apply to the cloud services consumed upon the winning bidders’ cloud infrastructure.”
The language about “Adjusted Terms of Service” appears to contradict not only Google’s public claims about the contract, but also how it has represented Nimbus to its own staff. During an October 30 employee Q&A session, Google president of global affairs Kent Walker was asked how the company is ensuring its Nimbus work is consistent with its “AI Principles” document, which forbids uses “that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” including surveillance, weapons, or anything “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
creator
to"As a Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations policy manager, Byrne’s entire job was to help form policies that would most effectively thwart groups like Azov. Then one day, this was no longer the case. “They’re no longer neo-Nazis,” Byrne recalls a policy manager explaining to her somewhat shocked team, a line that is now the official position of the White House.
Shortly after the delisting, The Intercept reported that Meta rules had been quickly altered to “allow praise of the Azov Battalion when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine OR their role as part of the Ukraine’s National Guard.” Suddenly, billions of people were permitted to call the historically neo-Nazi Azov movement “real heroes,” according to policy language obtained by The Intercept at the time.
Byrne and other concerned colleagues were given an opportunity to dissent and muster evidence that Azov fighters had not in fact reformed. Byrne said that even after gathering photographic evidence to the contrary, Meta responded that while Azov may have harbored Nazi sympathies in recent years, posts violating the company’s rules had sufficiently tapered off.'"
Byrne joined Meta in September 2021.
She and her team helped draft the rulebook that applies to the world’s most diabolical people and groups: the Ku Klux Klan, cartels, and of course, terrorists. Meta bans these so-called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, or DOI, from using its platforms, but further prohibits its billions of users from engaging in “glorification,” “support,” or “representation” of anyone on the list.
Byrne’s job was not only to keep dangerous organizations off Meta properties, but also to prevent their message from spreading across the internet and spilling into the real world. The ambiguity and subjectivity inherent to these terms has made the “DOI” policy a perennial source of over-enforcement and controversy.
A full copy of the secret list obtained by The Intercept in 2021 showed it was disproportionately comprised of Muslim, Arab, and southeast Asian entities, hewing closely to the foreign policy crosshairs of the United States. Much of the list is copied directly from federal blacklists like the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Global Terrorist roster.
Byrne tried to focus on initiatives and targets that she could feel good about, like efforts to block violent white supremacists from using the company’s VR platform or running Facebook ads. At first she was pleased to see that Meta’s in-house list went further than the federal roster in designating white supremacist organizations like the Klan — or the Azov Battalion.
She was also unsure of whether Meta was up to the task of maintaining a privatized terror roster. “We had this huge problem where we had all of these groups and we didn’t really have … any sort of ongoing check or list of evidence of whether or not these groups were terrorists,” she said, a characterization the company rejected.
Byrne quickly found that the blacklist was flexible. "Meta’s censorship systems are “basically an extension of the government...”
Dec 2 (Reuters) - Intel (INTC.O) Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger has stepped down less than four years after taking the helm of the company, handing control to two lieutenants as the faltering American chipmaking icon searches for a permanent replacement.
Gelsinger, who resigned on Dec. 1, left the company before the completion of an ambitious and costly four-year plan to restore the company's lead in making the fastest and smallest computer chips, a crown it lost to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (2330.TW) which makes chips for Intel rivals such as Nvidia (NVDA.O)
While Gelsinger has assured both investors and U.S. officials, who are subsidizing Intel's turnaround, that his manufacturing plans remain on track, the full results will not be known until next year, when the company aims to bring a flagship laptop chip back into its own factories.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired after over four decades at the company and stepped down from the board of directors effective December 1st, 2024. Gelsinger rejoined Intel as CEO in February 2021, taking over from Bob Swan to turn around the already struggling chipmaker — an effort that hasn’t gone as planned. It’s largely missed out on the AI chip boom that fueled Nvidia’s rise, failed to launch new technology on schedule, and struggled with recent CPU instability issues.
While recent rumors had suggested that Qualcomm was considering an acquisition of Intel, that prospect appears to have cooled. When asked about the potential deal on November 20th, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said the company has “not identified any large acquisition that is necessary.”
Ahead of the launch of Intel’s new Arc GPUs this week, the company’s Core Ultra 9 200S-series processors were met with a lukewarm reception, as Robert Hallock, Intel’s VP and GM of AI and technical marketing admitted that the launch “didn’t go as planned.”
Meta is actively helping self-harm content to flourish on Instagram by failing to remove explicit images and encouraging those engaging with such content to befriend one another, according to a damning new study that found its moderation “extremely inadequate”.
Danish researchers created a private self-harm network on the social media platform, including fake profiles of people as young as 13 years old, in which they shared 85 pieces of self-harm-related content gradually increasing in severity, including blood, razor blades and encouragement of self-harm.
The aim of the study was to test Meta’s claim that it had significantly improved its processes for removing harmful content, which it says now uses artificial intelligence (AI). The tech company claims to remove about 99% of harmful content before it is reported.
But Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), an organisation that promotes responsible digital development, found that in the month-long experiment not a single image was removed.
When it created its own simple AI tool to analyse the content, it was able to automatically identify 38% of the self-harm images and 88% of the most severe. This, the company said, showed that Instagram had access to technology able to address the issue but “has chosen not to implement it effectively”.
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to“This only hurts your cause” - person who doesn’t care about cause.
For more info https://mastodon.cloud/@[email protected]/113559307152573904
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toYes stating you like visiting an Apartheid state while it is in the middle of a genocide is the same as saying ‘kill all the Palestinians’
How else would you interpret someone saying “good to be back in Nazi Germany” at the height of the Holocaust.
You are not expected to participate in every boycott. If you cannot avoid using something you can keep using it. But if you do not care much about a certain brand and it is on the boycott list, consider using alternatives
Over the past few years, the UEFI threat landscape, particularly that of UEFI bootkits, has evolved significantly. It all started with the first UEFI bootkit proof of concept (PoC) described by Andrea Allievi in 2012, which served as a demonstration of deploying bootkits on modern UEFI-based Windows systems, and was followed with many other PoCs (EfiGuard, Boot Backdoor, UEFI-bootkit). It took several years until the first two real UEFI bootkits were discovered in the wild (ESPecter, 2021 ESET; FinSpy bootkit, 2021 Kaspersky), and it took two more years until the infamous BlackLotus – the first UEFI bootkit capable of bypassing UEFI Secure Boot on up-to-date systems – appeared (2023, ESET).
A common thread among these publicly known bootkits was their exclusive targeting of Windows systems. Today, we unveil our latest discovery: the first UEFI bootkit designed for Linux systems, named Bootkitty by its creators. We believe this bootkit is merely an initial proof of concept, and based on our telemetry, it has not been deployed in the wild. That said, its existence underscores an important message: UEFI bootkits are no longer confined to Windows systems alone.
The bootkit’s main goal is to disable the kernel’s signature verification feature and to preload two as yet unknown ELF binaries via the Linux init process (which is the first process executed by the Linux kernel during system startup). During our analysis, we discovered a possibly related unsigned kernel module – with signs suggesting that it could have been developed by the same author(s) as the bootkit – that deploys an ELF binary responsible for loading yet another kernel module unknown during our analysis.
Supporters of Palestine have called to boycott the payment platform Stripe after its CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison - an Irish-American billionaire who has advocated for Palestinians in the past - posted on social media on Wednesday about his run on the beach in Tel Aviv and how it was "great" to be back.
Many responded to his post on X by pointing out that he was only thirty minutes away from the Gaza Strip. Conservative estimates say nearly 44,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's war on Gaza and two million have been under constant Israeli aggression as they fight what UN experts have called "'deliberate starvation".
Some drew comparisons to the Academy Award-winning film, Zone of Interest, which depicts the everyday lives of Germans who lived next to the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War Two.
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It did, the updated version had a mission called Al Aqsa flood
An updated version of the game called Operation al-Aqsa Flood, the name Hamas uses for its October 7, 2023 attack, was released on Steam earlier this month.
It is similar to American military games in the middle east. Except instead of stealing oil you defend your homeland.
Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, released in 2022, lets gamers play as the fictional character “Ahmad al-Falastini,” a young Palestinian student, as he takes revenge on Israeli soldiers who tortured him and killed his family. An updated version of the game called Operation al-Aqsa Flood, the name Hamas uses for its October 7, 2023 attack, was released on Steam earlier this month.
Nijm, who identifies as a Muslim Brazilian, said that his game was intended to be a political protest and was not affiliated with any specific Palestinian group.
“I tried to show that we Palestinians have rights to resist against Israeli occupation and the genocide we clearly see [on] a daily basis on the news. But I also like to always stay ‘under the thin red line’ between freedom of speech and ‘terrorist propaganda,’” Nijm told Al Jazeera.
Operation al-Aqsa Flood’s cut scene was intended to be provocative and “to ‘trigger’ Zionists”, Nim said, but the gameplay itself is more toned down, with players immediately failing if they shoot unarmed civilians.
“I do not blame Valve nor Steam; the blame is on the UK government and authorities that are pissed off by a video game. On their flawed logic, the most recent Call of Duty Black Ops 6 should be banned, as well,” he said.
“As you play as an American soldier and go to Iraq to kill Iraqi people. What I can say is that we see clearly the double standards.”
For my job I get to recommend an LLM supplier and I want to pick the least pro-Israel one. Though Deepseek probably is not going to get a pass because China.
It is looking like they all at least have partial ties but does anyone know which would be the least bad option?