How Russia is Waging War…on Me

(OnlySky) – Jonathan MS Pearce:

As the war in Ukraine rages on, Russia’s war efforts are not restricted to battlefields of Bakhmut. Instead, they stretch across the internet. …

I had a year of absolutely no issues with advertising until recently, when it started to become more difficult to get all of my videos accepted for advertising revenue. My suspicions were that Russian bad-faith actors had been reporting my channel en masse such that the channel became flagged to YouTube, who gave it extra special attention with their bots.

Over the last week, it has now got to the point where every single one of my videos is restricted. This means that they do not get thrown out by the algorithms to people’s feeds so fewer people watch them, and they also get no advertising revenue. When you work up to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, it gets frustrating when YouTube takes your job away from you at the flick of a switch.

From what I can gather, this is an ongoing challenge for virtually all pro-Ukrainian YouTube channels. It appears that pro-Russian channels can show all sorts of morally dubious footage and still get advertising revenue, but pro-Ukrainian channels are hammered by YouTube restrictions. This may have something to do with mass (but incorrect) reporting of pro-Ukrainian channels by Russian trolls sitting in their troll factories in St. Petersburg or Moscow. …

jpearce russia-is-waging-war-on-me

So Much for ‘Learn to Code’

(Atlantic Tech) – Kelli María Korducki:

In the age of AI, computer science is no longer the safe major. …

theatlantic computer-science ai

AI Image Can’t Be Copyrighted

(Guardian Tech) – Edward Helmore:

The use of AI in art is facing a setback after a ruling that an award-winning image could not be copyrighted because it was not made sufficiently by humans.

The decision, delivered by the US copyright office review board, found that Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial, an AI-generated image that won first place at the 2022 Colorado state fair annual art competition, was not eligible because copyright protection “excludes works produced by non-humans”. …

theguardian cant-be-copyrighted

Elon Musk and Anti-Semitism

(Popular Information) – Judd Legum, Tesnim Zekeria:

Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” is threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for billions of dollars because the group has publicly criticized his management of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. In a public meltdown over X’s declining financial condition, Musk accused the ADL, an organization founded in 1913 “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” of being “the biggest generators of anti-semitism” on X. …

The ADL, however, reported, correctly, that X was hosting anti-Semitic content and Musk had rolled back efforts to combat hate speech. And the ADL, exercising its First Amendment rights, encouraged advertisers to spend their money elsewhere unless and until Musk changed course. …

Musk, known for repeatedly associating with far-right circles, has a history of amplifying anti-Semitic speech. …

Along with making anti-Semitic remarks, Musk is also reinstating the accounts of those who make similar comments, like Kanye West. Musk also “consistently finds himself chatting it up with Twitter’s best-known antisemites.” …

popular.info elon-musk-and-anti

LibreOffice 7.6

(TDF Blog) – Italo Vignoli:

LibreOffice 7.6 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is available from www.libreoffice.org/download.

Highlights of LibreOffice 7.6 Community

GENERAL

• Support for zoom gestures when using touchpads in the main view.
• Support for document themes, and import and export of theme definitions for ODF and OOXML documents.
• Many improvements to font handling, especially for right-to-left scripts, CJK and other Asian alphabets.

WRITER

• New Page Number Wizard in the Insert menu, for easy one-step insertion of the page number in the header/footer.
• The Paragraph Style dropdown in the Formatting toolbar shows a list of styles used in the document, rather than the full list of the available styles.
• Tables of Figures can be generated more flexibly based on paragraph styles, and not only from categories or object names.
• Bibliography entries can be edited directly from a bibliography table, and bibliography marks hyperlink by default to the matching row in a bibliography table.
• Highlighting for used paragraph and character styles and direct formatting in text.
• Phrase checking: multi-word dictionary items of Hunspell and custom dictionaries are now accepted.

CALC

• Number format: “?” is now supported when exporting to ODF to represent an integer digit, replaced by blank if it is a non significant zero, and decimals for formats in seconds without truncation like [SS].00 are now accepted.
• Spreadsheets copied to another document now retain a user-defined print range.
• Solver settings are saved with documents, and page styles are exported even if they are not in use.
• Support for drawing styles for shapes and comments, including a dedicated style for comments that makes it possible to customize the default look and text formatting of new comments.
• New compact layout for pivot tables.
• Autofilter support for sorting by colour. Filter/sort by color considers colours set by number format.
• The Import Text dialog (as CSV file or as unformatted text) has a new option to not detect number in scientific notation (only if “Detect Special Numbers” is off).

IMPRESS & DRAW

• New navigation panel for switching slides while viewing a presentation (option is enabled by flagging a checkbox in Slide Show Settings).
• Objects can now be listed in front to back order in the Navigator, with the top-most object at the top of the list.
• Support for free text annotations to PDFium import, plus support for ink, free text and polygon/polyline annotations in PDFium export.
• Modified the auto-fitting text scaling algorithm to work in a way similar to MS Office. Text scaling now separates scaling for space (paragraph and line) and scaling fonts, where space scaling can be 100%, 90% and 80%, and font scaling is rounded to the nearest point size. Horizontal spacing (bullets, indents) is not scaled anymore.
• Several improvements to font management for CJK and Arabic languages.

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.6 Community is available on YouTube and PeerTube. …

documentfoundation libreoffice-7-6

“Grossly Irresponsible” Microsoft Security

(Ars Technica) – Dan Goodin:

Azure looks like a house of cards collapsing under the weight of exploits and vulnerabilities.

Microsoft has once again come under blistering criticism for the security practices of Azure and its other cloud offerings, with the CEO of security firm Tenable saying Microsoft is “grossly irresponsible” and mired in a “culture of toxic obfuscation.” …

arstechnica toxic-obfuscation

Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria” Released!

(LinuxMint Blog) – Clément Lefèbvre:

Linux Mint 21.2 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. …

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Twitter and Threads

(Guardian Media) – Andrew Anthony:

… Twitter. To sign up, you need to specify interests from a list that seems oddly weighted towards astrology and horoscopes, and you’re also given a choice of popular figures to follow. Top of the list I’m presented with is the Colombian songstress Shakira. Given that so much of what is published on Twitter is said to be of questionable veracity, I tick her box, reassured by the knowledge that her hips don’t lie. …

But that’s not to say I haven’t learned anything from the experience. For example, I read that if you quit Threads you also have to leave Instagram. Well, that should kill two birds with one stone. I think I’m going to be spending even more time back in the mundane obscurity of the real world. …

theguardian twitter-and-threads

On Mill, McLuhan, and Social Media

M L Clark:

It is important to remember that free speech has never been under threat as much as public forums: the idea of shared spaces where we can live and work together with even a modicum of good faith in our fellow civic participants.

But to understand the difference between the content of our speech and its cultural containers, we need to look at two key figures in our history of this debate. …

John Stuart Mill was my “gateway” humanist: a 19th-century philosopher who thought deeply about the importance of taking human agency seriously. He viewed vicarious redemption through Christ as an immoral concept, but also felt that there was a role for religion’s “better” features, such as aspiring to emulate good examples through collaborative exercise. He advocated for women’s full equality, robust democratic action, and human well-being as a crucial end result in policy decisions.

The key is this: Mill felt that human dignity required a clear understanding of the limits of state, and of the nature of individual transgression. The two were intertwined: to understand personal liberty, one had to understand its boundaries, too. …

A hundred years later, Marshall McLuhan published an essay that more expressly recognized that the container or context of our speech was not only critical to our understanding of its import, but also speech itself. You will know this 1964 essay by its most famous declaration: “The medium is the message.” Very few people, though, even loosely grasp the meaning of this statement. If they did, we wouldn’t still be a culture so quick to assume that “speech” ever exists outside a context. …

mlclark mill-mcluhan-and-social-media

Don’t Fear the Singularity

(OnlySky) – Adam Lee:

AI futurists assume that faster thinking automatically produces greater intelligence, leading to a Singularity of transcendent machine minds. However, thinking speed is the less important half of intelligence. We should remember the failure of past predictions and have some humility about what the future holds. …

alee our-ai-future

Reverse Turing Test

(Existential Comics) – I had ChatGPT give me an actuall “Reverse Turing Test” and you’ll be happy to note I easily passed as a computer …

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Bing Is a Trap

(Atlantic Tech) – Damon Beres:

Tech companies say AI will expand the possibilities of searching the internet. So far, the opposite seems to be true. …

theatlantic microsoft-bing consolidation

Escape Speed

(xkcd) – Randall Munroe:

Use the arrow keys, pilot. …

xkcd 2765

Marianne Williamson

(The Intercept) – Ryan Grim:

The kids may or may not be alright, but one thing is clear: They are super into Marianne Williamson. If engagement on TikTok is any indication, a Democratic presidential primary held today among people under 50 would result in a landslide for the best-selling author now making her second bid for the nomination. …

theintercept marianne-williamson

Concern Trolling

(Starts With A Bang!) – Ethan Siegel:

Concern trolling is basically when you pretend to care about an issue in order to undermine and derail any measures that would be taken to address the actual, underlying problem that’s affecting society. Instead, it’s a tactic that’s used to:

• trigger infighting among the groups/people who are actively working on the true problem,
• reframe the argument to try and take power away from an actual, effective movement,
• and to flood the public discussion with noise and distraction,

often with tremendous success.

This is a particularly fruitful tactic when the seeds of fear are already present, as it’s extremely easy to take an already fearful (sometimes, justifiably so) group and point them towards an imagined boogeyman, causing them to attack and fixate on a completely extraneous, possibly even non-existent problem instead.

When someone attempts to make you afraid of something that hasn’t happened instead of a true, present danger, suspect this nefarious ploy. …

starts-with-a-bang concern-trolling

Computer Hallucinations

(OnlySky) – Adam Lee:

Big Tech companies eager to find the next big thing have latched onto AI chatbots—but they’re racing ahead of what the tech can actually do. …

LLMs are a clever technology, capable of startlingly human conversation. But their critical flaw is that they don’t have any concept of truth.

There’s no truth-seeking algorithm in them. There’s no process of reasoning, or weighing evidence, or applying logic. All they’re doing is stringing words together according to a probabilistic model. They draw no distinction between sound arguments and glib nonsense. When they do output correct information, it’s only a coincidence, not anything fundamental to their design. …

alee ai-isnt-an-oracle-of-truth