Tag Archives: proves

The arrest of Telegram CEO proves tech giants are not exempt from the law

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ohOn August 24, when the Russian tech tycoon’s private jet landed at Le Bourget airport northeast of Paris, officers from the French judicial police were waiting for him. He was duly arrested and taken in for questioning. Four days later, he was indicted on 12 charges, including distribution of child exploitation material and complicity in drug trafficking, banned from leaving France, placed under “judicial supervision,” and required to report to the gendarmes twice a week until further notice.

The tycoon in question, Pavel Durov, is a tech entrepreneur who collects nationalities the way he collects airline miles. His Nationality Durov is French and was generously donated by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021. Durov also appears to be a fitness fanatic with a strict daily routine: “After a recorded eight hours of sleep, Financial Times According to the report, “Without exception, he starts his days with 200 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and an ice bath. He doesn’t drink alcohol, smoke, eat sugar or meat, and takes time to meditate.” When he’s not engaged in these demanding activities, he’s also found time to be a sperm donor, father over 100 children, and rival Elon Musk as a free speech extremist.

Durov’s media profiles recall Churchill’s famous description of Russia as “an enigma wrapped in an enigma.” Durov left Russia after the Facebook clone he co-founded with his brother Nikolai in 2006 brought him into conflict with the Kremlin. He eventually emigrated to the United Arab Emirates, where he launched Telegram, a private social media platform that is as mysterious as its founder.

Telegram has around 950 million regular users. It is also a messaging system like WhatsApp, but allows groups up to 200,000 people, whereas WhatsApp has a limit of 1,024, so in that sense it is also a broadcasting system like X. One-to-one communication is only end-to-end encrypted if the user selects the “Secret Chat” option, but since many internet users do not change the default settings, in effect, According to one security expert“The vast majority of Telegram one-to-one conversations, and literally all group chats, are likely viewable on Telegram’s servers.”

Given that, it’s puzzling why there are so many bad actors on the platform. After all, rats generally hate sunlight. One critic says:“Telegram is the closest thing to a widespread dark web. Nearly a billion ordinary people are in contact with criminals, hackers, terrorists and child abusers. Despite the lack of technical security and privacy, the platform is a honeypot for people operating in the shadows.” And the reason they stay may be because Durov doesn’t believe in content moderation. In fact, he sometimes boasts about how lean he is running his operation. Like Musk, he doesn’t believe in expensive moderation teams. And it is believed that one of the reasons France prosecuted him is the way his company refused to cooperate with law enforcement agencies investigating criminal activity on the platform.

Telegram’s finances are also shrouded in mystery. Financial Times A detailed look at the company’s 2023 business plan reveals a loss of $173 million for that year. The company’s business model is vague, consisting of basic advertising, subscriptions, and (wait for it!) Toncoin cryptocurrency. There was talk of an IPO before Durov’s arrest, but that now seems like a pipe dream.

But all this is just noise obscuring the landmark importance of Durov’s arrest in a broader context. For the past 30 years, the democratic world has been gloomy about two challenges posed by technology and its corporate-controlled world. The first is the immunity given to tech tycoons by Article 230 of the Constitution. The Communications Decency Act of 1996,This absolved them from responsibility for the content displayed on their ,platform.,The second concern was the conflict between local laws and ,global technology that transcends borders.

Now, just as Durov’s plane landed in Le Bourget, a U.S. district court judge Landmark ruling This signals that the free ride given to companies by Section 230 may be coming to an end. French law officials have also signaled to tech moguls that while they may think they rule the world, France controls its own airspace. That’s why Musk might have to think twice about flying over Europe in the future. Long live France!

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Those who think think A lovely, quirky essay by Joseph Epstein. London Review of Books On the art of difficult thinking.

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read The dangers of state powerA transcript of a wonderful interview that Yasha Maunk conducted with the late, great anthropologist James C. Scott.

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Roland Allen’s entertaining essays Moleskine Mania: How the Notebook Conquered the Digital Age of Walrus His eyes turn to the strange persistence of the black notebook.

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Source: www.theguardian.com

The heat proves too much for even the hardy desert plants, leading to their demise.

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summary

  • Increasingly frequent and intense heat waves in the Southwest are damaging some of the desert plants known to thrive in harsh conditions.
  • Saguaro cacti and agaves were damaged by the extreme heat this summer and last.
  • Ecologists are working to understand how different species respond to prolonged heatwaves and pinpoint how hot is too hot for them.

LAS VEGAS — On a sun-dappled stretch of West Charleston Boulevard, Norm Schilling parked his truck on the side of the road just to check out his favorite tree.

Schilling, a local horticulturist and owner of a landscape company and garden shop called Mojave Bloom Nursery, rescued the African sumac decades ago after its branches froze and died during an unusually frosty winter. Careful pruning helped the tree survive, but this summer, it faces a new danger: Months of intense heat have dried out the branches, causing the droopy leaves to die in clumps.

This is a seemingly counterintuitive question: the Southwest is accustomed to sweltering heat, and desert plants and trees are drought- and heat-tolerant. Dry, harsh environments are exactly where desert plants and trees thrive.

But as climate change makes heat waves more frequent, intense, and long-lasting, experts say increasingly harsh conditions are testing some iconic desert plants known for their resilience, including saguaro cacti and agaves.

“This summer we’ve seen damage to plants that previously didn’t show heat stress,” Schilling said.

Sun-bleached mock-orange shrub leaves, photographed Aug. 23. Brown spots indicate areas of damaged tissue.
Dennis Chou/NBC

As we drove through Las Vegas, he pointed out the results.

A magnolia shrub in a quiet residential neighborhood was sunburned, its shiny leaf tissue bleached and damaged in places by the sun. On another street, two mulberry trees were dying, likely because they weren’t getting enough water to survive the heat. Around the corner, a large juniper tree was showing signs of “severe decline,” Schilling said, with brown, dead leaves still hanging from its dead branches, evidence that the heat damage was recent.

“That juniper is probably close to 40 or 50 years old. It’s a magnificent tree, but it will soon die,” he said, patting and kissing its rough trunk.

Norm Schilling surveys the deaths of juniper trees in Las Vegas on August 23.
Dennis Chou/NBC

Then, a few blocks away, there was a row of succulents known as gopher spurge, parts of which looked burnt, branches yellowed with dried sap splayed out in all directions.

“This species is very dependable and very common throughout the valley,” Schilling said, “and some of the plants here are getting to the point where they’re not likely to recover.”

Las Vegas has already broken several heat records this summer, including the hottest day on record when temperatures reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit on July 7. Then, seven consecutive days of temperatures above 115 degrees Fahrenheit were recorded. For most of June, July, and August, temperatures remained in the triple digits with little cooling at night.

“The heat we’re seeing right now is a new paradigm. It’s like the ground is shifting beneath our feet,” Schilling said.

Ecologists across the Southwest are studying how different species respond to the annual heatwaves, trying to understand how hot is too hot for desert plants and trees.

Kevin Hultin, director of research at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, studies the effects of heat stress on ecosystems in the Sonoran Desert. He and his colleagues have been tracking an uptick in saguaro cactus mortality that began in 2020 when the state was in the midst of its worst years-long drought and hasn’t slowed down.

“The summer of 2020 was the hottest on record until last year, and we saw a lot of deaths,” Hultin said. “We’ve been seeing deaths ever since, and we’ve seen an accelerated pace of deaths in 2023.”

Source: www.nbcnews.com

“Miss AI: A supposed advancement that proves to be a major setback” – Arwa Mahdawi

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M
I eat Madame Potato. Although she doesn’t actually exist, she will hopefully become the world’s first “Miss AI”. I recently created an image of her on her website that generates AI faces and entered it into a beauty pageant. Now I’m sitting in hopes of winning $20,000 in prize money.

What kind of fresh hell is this? Well, unfortunately, AI beauty pageants are now trendy. A company called Fanvue, a subscription-based content creator platform similar to OnlyFans, recently partnered with the World AI Creator Awards (WAICA) to create the world’s first Miss AI” contest. A team of judges consisting of two humans and two virtual models will classify the AI-generated photos of women and select one woman to be crowned “Miss AI.” Winners will receive cash prizes and the chance to monetize their work on Fanvue.



How will the winner be chosen? Apparently so. However, the judges will also consider the size of a character’s fan base and their “personality.” This application contains questions such as: “If your AI models could talk, what would be their one dream to make the world a better place?” The technical skill behind the character’s creation will also be considered by the judges.

A WAICA press release said the contest “represents a monumental leap forward, nearly 200 years after the world’s first actual beauty pageant was held in the 1880s.”

But it feels more like a monumental setback than a “step forward.” Rather than destroying traditional beauty standards, AI models exaggerate them. They take all the toxic gendered beauty norms and package them up in a completely unrealistic package.

For example, let’s take a look at two AI models that are judging a contest. Aitana Lopez and Emily Pellegrini. Pellegrini was designed by an anonymous creator who told Chat GPT that he asked the average man what his dream was in a woman and designed the model along those lines. That means long hair, big breasts, perfect skin, and a sculpted body. Pelligrini is still a completely digital work, but she reportedly earns thousands of dollars from fan views and famous soccer players use her Instagram because they think she’s a real person. It seems like he’s going to slide into Gram’s DMs.

Another judge, López, who is touted as “Spain’s first AI model” and can apparently “earn up to €10,000 a month” with modeling work for brands, is also on the same page. The creators of Lopez AI modeling office A group called “The Clueless” rejected criticism of her sexual appearance, claiming they were merely reacting to market forces. “If we don’t follow this aesthetic, brands won’t be interested.” one of the creators he told reporters. “To change this system, we need to change our brand vision. The entire world is sexualized.”

So is this the future? Will human models be completely replaced by AI? The folks at The Clueless certainly seem to hope so. “[Brands] We want to have an image that represents the values of the brand, not a real person, so that if we have to lay someone off or we can no longer rely on them, there will be continuity issues,” says founder Ruben Cruz. he told Euronews. And it all makes sense. Why wouldn’t brands want to use a model that never ages and has full control?