Technology

Indeed, GNOME has been experiencing issues since a last November; as a temporary solution they had rate-limited non-logged in users from seeing merge requests and commits, which obviously also caused issues for real human guests.

Source.

TechCrunch has a new owner, again. Yahoo has sold the tech news site to the private equity firm Regent for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement on Friday.

By now, it should be pretty clear that this is no coincidence. AI scrapers are getting more and more aggressive, and - since FOSS software relies on public collaboration, whereas private companies don't have that requirement - this is putting some extra burden on Open Source communities.

On one hand I think people shouldn't use Discord anyway, but also, we need to figure out how to make the services we use sustainable.

This article is part of a bigger newsletter.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.20-132521/https://www.ft.com/content/3fd3a717-2fbf-42ef-bb08-5baecdeb1985

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.20-102147/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-03-20/are-ai-monopolies-here-to-stay-nvidia-and-the-future-of-ai-chips

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated the system was implemented "to enhance Wi-Fi connectivity on the complex," citing poor cellular service in some areas and overloaded Wi-Fi networks. ... instead the outlet writes that the White House is having its Starlink service piped from a government data center miles from the compound.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.19-154543/https://www.404media.co/facial-recognition-company-clearview-attempted-to-buy-social-security-numbers-and-mugshots-for-its-database/

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.19-050450/https://www.ft.com/content/d4616dec-c4c7-417f-8549-134710bbc5b1

Edit: Volts, apparently, not kW. Reg WTF.

The site also has information on Tesla dealerships and members of DOGE. “At DOGEQUEST, we believe in empowering creative expressions of protest that you can execute from the comfort of your own home.”

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.18-141943/https://www.ft.com/content/26ae0691-b133-42cc-b239-0da88e1b603d

The worker cooperative states:

Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD has revealed new fast-charging tech that can add 400km (249 miles) of range from a five minute charge. With the announcement, BYD has also promised to make a major investment in charging infrastructure, building over 4,000 of the new fast chargers across China.

Mark Rober just set up one of the most interesting self-driving tests of 2025, and he did it by imitating Looney Tunes. The former NASA engineer and current YouTube mad scientist recreated the classic gag where Wile E. Coyote paints a tunnel onto a wall to fool the Road Runner. Only this time, the test […]

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.17-204842/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-17/reddit-rated-sell-as-redburn-flags-risk-from-google-algorithm

Please more!!!!!!

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.17-153712/https://www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a-brute-force-attack-on-the-algorithms-that-control-reality/

Bumble is finally catching up with competitor Tinder with a new ID verification feature as dating app users urge for more safety measures. In addition to Bumble launched a new ID verification feature as dating app users urge for more safety measures.

Archive: https://archive.is/20250316144923/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-16/turkish-fortune-tellers-find-their-future-includes-tax-audits

web 1.0 hosting

Silicon Valley is bullish on AI agents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said agents will “join the workforce” this year. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that agents will replace certain knowledge work. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that Salesforce’s goal is to be “the number one provider of digital labor in the world” via the company’s various “agentic” services.

The GSM Association announced that the latest RCS standard includes E2EE based on the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, enabling interoperable encryption between different platform providers for the first time.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.13-104103/https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/citigroup-plans-slash-it-contractors-hire-staff-improve-controls-2025-03-13/

It’s not entirely surprising that YC would come out in explicit public support of the DMA. After all, the accelerator markets itself as a champion of “Little Tech” — an American venture-backed ecosystem of technology startups.

Bill sets fines of up to $38 million or 7% of turnover on companies. Aligned with EU's AI Act, it targets transparency and bans harmful practices. New AI supervisory agency AESIA to enforce most rules

In a proposal for the U.S. government’s “AI Action Plan,” the Trump Administration’s initiative to reshape American AI policy, OpenAI called for a U.S. copyright strategy that “[preserves] American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.”

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/23049942

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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.12-221956/https://www.theverge.com/news/628583/google-meta-app-store-age-verification-kids-ssafety-utah

Researchers have discovered multiple Android apps, some that were available in Google Play after passing the company’s security vetting, that surreptitiously uploaded sensitive user information to spies working for the North Korean government.

Global sales of smartwatches have fallen for the first time, new figures indicate, in large part due to a sharp decline in the popularity of market leader, Apple.

The Federal Trade Commission asked a judge in Seattle to delay the start of its trial accusing Amazon of duping consumers into signing up for its Prime program, citing resource constraints.

Today in "The US Government is looking for ways to imprison political opponents":

WikiPortraits, a group of volunteer photographers, has been covering festivals and shooting celebrities specifically to improve images in the public domain.

Google has gotten its first taste of remedies that Donald Trump’s Department of Justice plans to pursue to break up the tech giant’s monopoly in search. In the first filing since Trump allies took over the department, government lawyers backed off a key proposal submitted by the Biden DOJ. The government won't ask the court to force Google to sell off its AI investments, and the way it intends to handle Android is changing. However, the most serious penalty is intact—Google's popular Chrome browser is still on the chopping block.

Countless digital documents hold valuable info, and the AI industry is attempting to set it free.

Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/p1mI7

https://news.sky.com/story/elon-musk-says-x-hit-by-massive-cyber-attack-as-users-unable-to-log-in-13325939

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.10-032655/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/09/meta-china-censorship-facebook-mark-zuckerberg/

The Heart of Joy is an ECU that combines both driving dynamics and powertrain control into one computer. Approximately eight-inches by eight-inches, the box will serve as the control module for the upcoming Neue Klasse electrified vehicles that will start rolling out later this year.

More than 5,600 artists signed an open letter protesting the auction, saying that the works used AI models that are trained on copyrighted work.

Great. Just great.

A federal judge is allowing an AI-related copyright lawsuit against Meta to move forward, although he dismissed part of the suit.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.08-140200/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/technology/trump-google-search-antitrust.html

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.08-151651/https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2025-03-08/palantir-trumps-big-brother-dominating-the-stock-market.html

A team of Google researchers working with AMD recently discovered a major CPU exploit on Zen-based processors. The exploit allows anyone with local admin privileges to write and push custom microcode updates to affected CPUs. The same Google team has released the full deep-dive on the exploit, including how to write your own microcode. Anyone can now effectively jailbreak their own AMD CPUs.

Last November, Nguyen Thi Que’s mobile phone suddenly stopped working as telecom companies in Vietnam permanently shut down the 2G network.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.07-174511/https://www.theverge.com/news/625904/netflix-a-different-world-ai-upscaling-nightmare

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The Los Angeles Times launched a new artificial intelligence-driven “evolution” to its company this week, with billionaire owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong writing in a letter to readers that the newspaper is “beginning a new effort” to offer multiple perspectives on its opinion columns. The AI feature, known as Insights, will not only summarize data and viewpoints from a written column, but also offer online readers real-time counterpoints to that same story at the bottom of the page.

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Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip.

In late 2013, the Spike Jonze film Her imagined a future where people would form emotional connections with AI voice assistants. Nearly 12 years later, that fictional premise has veered closer to reality with the release of a new conversational voice model from AI startup Sesame that has left many users both fascinated and unnerved.

I wrote this wiki page on no-code tools for activists with a particular focus on self-hostable options.