...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

Hopefully this move will drive people (back) to SIP and free-software clients like Linphone. Last I checked (admittedly a few years ago) you could still buy credit for by-the-minute calling from a variety of VOIP providers, and the cost was comparable to what Skype was charging.

And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":

https://mashable.com/article/c...

Crowd sourcing knowledge amplifies the most passionate voices

What are the alternatives? Privately funding knowledge amplifies the richest voices. The situation is nearly the same when using state funds for knowledge, since the output is most likely going to reflect the political opinions of those in power.

CrowdStrike wasn't hacked. Their mess was entirely their fault. What I have a problem with is blaming developers when hackers break into a system using some vulnerability. Can you sue Master Lock when thieves use bolt cutters to break into your shed?

Trademarks apply only to the specific class of products they're registered for, so as long as you're not producing a crayon, you're free to make it smell exactly like Crayola crayons. (And according to the article summary, the company demonstrated that different brands of crayons indeed have distinct smells, so even if you want to produce crayons, it's certainly at least possible to make them smell like something other than Crayola's version.)

We already had this situation back during the Cold War, where a lot of high-quality science was being published only in Russian-language journals of the Soviet Union. Western academics started up a number of journals that printed only English versions of articles from top-tier Soviet journals, translated by those few Western scholars who could read Russian. These journals were phenomenally successful and their content widely cited. (Many of these journals are still around today, though now it's almost always the original Russian authors who provide translations of their own articles. Russian universities often require doctoral candidates to publish in Russian journals, so the translation journals are a way of bringing their work to a somewhat wider audience.)

No, it won't, because the e-mail clients most commonly used by businesses (whatever Outlook variant is bundled with Office 365 or Microsoft 365 or whatever they're calling it these days) is incapable of top-posting. That is, there is no way of turning of the default bottom-posting behaviour; the best you can do is to copy and paste the original message into a text editor, manually trim it and add quote characters, and then copy and paste that back into the e-mail client. Nobody is going to do that. Unfortunately, many companies mandate the use of Outlook, to the point of configuring their servers (or whatever cloud service Microsoft sells) to not expose the standard IMAP or SMTP protocols for use by alternative clients.

So when will the millions of videos on Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok etc. be deleted, where people appear that have not consented?

Perhaps they will be. The way laws are enforced generally requires corrective action to be taken against violators one at a time, and often only at the instigation of an aggrieved party. The fact that the courts aren't able to simultaneously take action against all the other sites you mention isn't necessarily an argument against the law in question. If you agree with the law in principle, and are a resident of the Netherlands whose likeness appears in a Facebook video without your consent, then feel free to get in touch with the Dutch authorities and maybe they'll go after Facebook next.

I can think of a use case: someone has a web page open on their phone, and someone else who is with them wants to visit the same website on their own phone. Taking a picture of the QR code may be faster and less error-prone than dictating the URL, or sending the URL via e-mail or instant message.

What makes you think that CoPilot is trained so indiscriminately? The need to curate, filter, and reduce bias in training data is well known in other applications of machine learning, such as natural language processing. (Researchers figured this out as soon as they saw people prompting their language models to emit hate speech and other forms of abuse.) I rather suspect that Microsoft is aware of this issue and has taken steps to weed out, or at least assign a lower weighting to, undesirable training data. As a first step, they could probably exclude repositories that see very little community activity (in terms of cloning, forking, commits, pull requests, etc.). For many languages they could probably automatically check out and try to compile the code, or run it through a static analysis tool. Projects that don't compile, or that generate too many warnings, might also be excluded from the training set.

There's the Purism Librem 5, a Linux-based privacy-focused smartphone. It's not part of the Apple or Android ecosystems so don't expect it to run the usual proprietary apps. But it is probably worth looking into if keeping data out of the manufacturer's hands is important to you.

Airbnb has been testing the tech in Australia since October 2021 and says it's seen a 35% drop in unauthorized parties

And what's the corresponding figure for the drop in legitimate bookings because the system misidentified perfectly innocent bookings as party bookings?

I meant that the situation for tech workers in Europe and America isn't any better than it is in Russia vis-a-vis ownership of their work.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that in Russia you get to retain ownership of work for hire. If that's what you're after, then there's probably nowhere on earth you'll be satisfied.