"O órgão brasileiro de defesa da concorrência, o Cade, se prepara para julgar sanções à Apple e ao Google por práticas anticoncorrenciais nas suas lojas de aplicativos, no que deve se transformar no primeiro confronto com empresas americanas empoderadas sob o governo de Donald Trump. Na semana que vem, o Cade fará uma audiência pública para ouvir as big techs sobre a regulação de práticas comerciais Há seis processos em análise no Cade envolvendo as big techs. O primeiro da fila, que tem previsão para entrar na pauta de julgamentos ainda neste semestre, segundo apurou a reportagem, é um recurso da Apple contra a proibição imposta pelo órgão à cobrança de desenvolvedores de aplicativos que estão na Apple Store. A investigação constatou que a empresa cobra 30% dos desenvolvedores de apps a título de taxa de solução de pagamentos, o que a Apple nega." #Brasil #RedesSociais #BigTech #Cade

Estadão

Cade fecha cerco a big techs no que deve ser o 1º embate do Brasil com empresas dos EUA na era Trump

Na semana que vem, órgão de defesa da concorrência fará audiência pública para ouvir plataformas; Câmara Brasileira de Economia Digital, que...

"This is what his critics do not understand. They mistakenly think that he thinks that his tariffs will reduce America’s trade deficit on their own. He knows they will not. Their utility comes from their capacity to shock foreign central bankers into reducing domestic interest rates. Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs. But tariffs are only the first phase of his masterplan. With high tariffs as the new default, and with foreign money accumulating in the Treasury, Trump can bide his time as friends and foes in Europe and Asia clamour to talk. That’s when the second phase of Trump’s plan kicks in: the grand negotiation. Unlike his predecessors, from Carter to Biden, Trump disdains multilateral meetings and crowded negotiations. He is a one-on-one man."

UnHerd

Donald Trump's economic masterplan

#USA #Trump #Tariffs #TradeWar #PoliticalEconomy #Protectionism

"Another person who was allegedly targeted on WhatsApp with spyware made by Israeli company Paragon has come forward. Beppe Caccia, one of the co-founders of Mediterranea Saving Humans, an Italian non-government organization that helps immigrants, told TechCrunch that he had been targeted by the spyware campaign. Caccia disclosed he was targeted after another one of his organization’s co-founders, Luca Casarini, said publicly last week that he had also received a notification from WhatsApp alerting him to the suspected spyware attack. On Monday, during a press conference organized by Sandro Ruotolo, an Italian member of the European Parliament, Casarini said that he filed a complaint with the Prosecutor’s Office in Palermo, Italy, regarding the alleged hack. Casarini said his goal was to find out who targeted him and his organization. “We don’t have anything to hide. Those who spy have a lot to hide,” said Casarini. (...) In the same press release, the Italian government said that Meta told it there were other targets in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden."

TechCrunch

Another person targeted by Paragon spyware comes forward | TechCrunch

Four people have so far come forward as victims of the Paragon spyware campaign targeting WhatsApp users, including one journalist and three activi...

#CyberSecurity #Spyware #Paragon #WhatsApp #SocialMedia

"Vance came out swinging today, implying — exactly as the big companies might have hoped he might – that any regulation around AI was “excessive regulation” that would throttle innovation. In reality, the phrase “excessive regulation” is sophistry. Of course in any domain there can be “excessive regulation”, by definition. What Vance doesn’t have is any evidence whatsoever that the US has excessive regulation around AI; arguably, in fact, it has almost none at all. His warning about a bogeyman is a tip-off, however, for how all this is going to go. The new administration will do everything in its power to protect businesses, and nothing to protect individuals. As if all this wasn’t clear enough, the administration apparently told the AI Summit that they would not sign anything that mentioned environmental costs or “existential risks” of AI that could potentially going rogue. If AI has significant negative externalities upon the world, we the citizens are screwed."

Everything I warned about in Taming Silicon Valley is rapidly becoming our reality

It brings me no joy to say that

#AI #GenerativeAI #AISafety #USA #Trump #AIRegulation

"The second Trump administration may violate basic civil liberties in ways that unambiguously subvert democracy. The president, for example, could order the army to shoot protesters, as he reportedly wanted to do during his first term. He could also fulfill his campaign promise to launch the “largest deportation operation in American history,” targeting millions of people in an abuse-ridden process that would inevitably lead to the mistaken detention of thousands of U.S. citizens. But much of the coming authoritarianism will take a less visible form: the politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy. Modern states are powerful entities. The U.S. federal government employs over two million people and has an annual budget of nearly $7 trillion. Government officials serve as important arbiters of political, economic, and social life. They help determine who gets prosecuted for crimes, whose taxes are audited, when and how rules and regulations are enforced, which organizations receive tax-exempt status, which private agencies get contracts to accredit universities, and which companies obtain critical licenses, concessions, contracts, subsidies, tariff waivers, and bailouts. Even in countries such as the United States that have relatively small, laissez-faire governments, this authority creates a plethora of opportunities for leaders to reward allies and punish opponents. No democracy is entirely free of such politicization. But when governments weaponize the state by using its power to systematically disadvantage and weaken the opposition, they undermine liberal democracy. Politics becomes like a soccer match in which the referees, the groundskeepers, and the scorekeepers work for one team to sabotage its rival. This is why all established democracies have elaborate sets of laws, rules, and norms to prevent the state’s weaponization."

Foreign Affairs

The Path to American Authoritarianism

What comes after democratic breakdown.

#USA #Trump #Democracy #Authoritarianism

"EFF and a coalition of privacy defenders have filed a lawsuit today asking a federal court to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing the private information of millions of Americans that is stored by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and to delete any data that has been collected or removed from databases thus far. The lawsuit also names OPM, and asks the court to block OPM from sharing further data with DOGE. The Plaintiffs who have stepped forward to bring this lawsuit include individual federal employees as well as multiple employee unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees and the Association of Administrative Law Judges. This brazen ransacking of Americans’ sensitive data is unheard of in scale."

Electronic Frontier Foundation

EFF Sues DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management to Halt Ransacking of Federal Data

EFF and a coalition of privacy defenders have filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DO...

#USA #Trump #Musk #DOGE #DataProtection #Privacy #CyberSecurity #OPM

NeoStalinism, Maoism, or just plain Idiocracism? "The Trump administration is still prohibiting National Institutes of Health (NIH) staff from issuing virtually all grant funding, an NIH official tells Popular Information. The ongoing funding freeze is also reflected in internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information and was reiterated to staff in a meeting on Monday. The funding freeze at NIH violates two federal court injunctions, two legal experts said. The funding freeze at NIH puts all of the research the agency funds at risk. As the primary funder of biomedical research in the United States, NIH-funded research includes everything from cancer treatments to heart disease prevention to stroke interventions. On January 27, the Trump administration, through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), issued a memo requiring federal agencies to "temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance," including "grants and loans" beginning at 5 PM on January 28. The purpose of the spending freeze was to ensure compliance with President Trump's Executive Orders prohibiting funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or "DEI," and "woke gender ideology.""

Trump maintains funding freeze at NIH, defying court order

The Trump administration is still prohibiting National Institutes of Health (NIH) staff from issuing virtually all grant funding, an NIH official t...

#USA #Trump #NHS #Health #Science #Ideology

Concentration camps nearby Cuba - very, very typical of the U.S. Empire... "The Trump administration has moved more than 30 people described as Venezuelan gang members to the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, as U.S. forces and homeland security staff prepare a tent city for potentially thousands of migrants. About a dozen of the men were brought in from El Paso, Texas, on Friday, as Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, arrived at Guantánamo. She is the first senior member of the Trump administration to visit the migrant mission on the base in southeastern Cuba. Ms. Noem was taken to the rooftop of the base’s aircraft hangar and observed as U.S. security forces led the deportees down the ramp of a C-130 military cargo plane to an awaiting minibus. Maj. Gen. Philip J. Ryan, the army commander overseeing the migrant mission, stood beside her in combat uniform, and a Chinook transport chopper could be seen in the distance. “Vicious gang members will no longer have safe haven in our country,” Ms. Noem said on social media, calling the men “criminal aliens.”"

A Tent City Is Rising at Guantánamo Bay (Published 2025)

These are the first independent images to emerge from the migrant operation that the Trump administration has begun at the Navy base.

#USA #Trump #Imperialism #Cuba #Guantanamo #ConcentrationCamps #Migrants

"On President Donald Trump’s authority alone, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been unleashed on federal agencies. Employees from Musk’s companies and those of his allies, as well as young staffers he’s recruited, are wresting authority from career workers and commandeering computer systems. While some have been public about their involvement, others have attempted to keep their roles secret, scrubbing LinkedIn pages and other sources of data. With little information from the White House, ProPublica is attempting to document who is involved and what they are doing. Musk’s team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, has already thrown entire swaths of the federal government and its programs into disarray — programs that serve millions of Americans. Musk himself has made no secret of his intentions, saying that DOGE is a “wood chipper for bureaucracy” and that he is “deleting” agencies. A White House spokesperson wrote, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.” None of the people identified responded to requests for comment."

ProPublica

Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been unleashed on federal agencies. ProPublica is attempting to document who is working with him and what...

#USA #Musk #DOGE #Trump #Plutocracy

"It’s not that social media is fundamentally evil or bereft of any good qualities. Some of my best post-Twitter moments have been spent goofing around with mutuals on Bluesky, or waxing romantic about the joys of human creativity and art-making in an increasingly AI-infested world. But when it comes to addressing the problems we face, no amount of posting or passive info consumption is going to substitute the hard, unsexy work of organizing. It’s a lesson the Extremely Online Left still hasn’t fully learned, failing where its political enemies succeed. Reactionary right-wing groups like the homophobic and transphobic Moms for Liberty—which seeks to ban books from LGBTQ and BIPOC authors under the guise of “parental rights”—have claimed political victories by seizing power one public school board and small town at a time. Other reactionaries have similarly managed to take their pet grievances about diversity and wokeness to the national level by moving from online outrage to on-the-ground community organizing. You can d­iscourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information. As the internet continues to enshittify, maybe what we really need is to start trusting each other and our own collective sense of what is true and good. We don’t need any more irony-poisoned hot takes or cathartic, irreverent snark. We need to collectively decide what kind of world we actually do want, and what we’re willing to do to achieve it."

404 Media

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism

Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose wri...

#SocialMedia #Activism #Protest #BigTech

"TikTok is back in the US after a brief shutdown, reportedly because Trump pledged to suspend the Biden administration’s ban. A Gaza ceasefire has also finally emerged due to pressure from Trump after Biden stalled for 15 months, and NBC News is reporting that the Trump administration plans on pressuring the Israeli government throughout negotiations to establish a permanent peace beyond the 42 days scheduled for the first phase of the agreement. Remember this: it’s not that Trump is good, it’s that Democrats are just that bad. Biden’s completely unconditional facilitation of Israeli atrocities has actually been the exception rather than the norm among US presidents, as Trita Parsi explained in Foreign Policy last April. From what we are seeing so far, Trump is just returning things to their horrible standard baseline. Trump will go on to do many evil things as president, just as he did during his first term, but none of this will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and authoritarianism. The Democratic Party plays just as crucial a role in promoting the tyranny and abuse of the US empire as the Republican Party does, and it is nonsensical to think of either of them as a lesser evil. The empire itself must end."

It's Not That Trump Is Good, It's That Biden Was Just That Bad

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

#USA #Trump #Biden #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #TikTok

RT @manovich The final version of our book 'Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, Art and Visual Media' is now available as a free PDF download #GenerativeAI #DigitalCulture #Aesthetics #AIArt

Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich: photos, bio, complete CV.

"On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company’s e-commerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack. He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site. “We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page,” Tomchuk told TechCrunch. “Each page has at least three photos.” OpenAI was sending “tens of thousands” of server requests trying to download all of it, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with their detailed descriptions. “OpenAI used 600 IPs to scrape data, and we are still analyzing logs from last week, perhaps it’s way more,” he said of the IP addresses the bot used to attempt to consume his site. “Their crawlers were crushing our site,” he said “It was basically a DDoS attack.” Triplegangers’ website is its business. The seven-employee company has spent over a decade assembling what it calls the largest database of “human digital doubles” on the web, meaning 3D image files scanned from actual human models. It sells the 3D object files, as well as photos — everything from hands to hair, skin, and full bodies — to 3D artists, video game makers, anyone who needs to digitally recreate authentic human characteristics."

TechCrunch

How OpenAI's bot crushed this seven-person company's website ‘like a DDoS attack’ | TechCrunch

OpenAI was sending “tens of thousands” of server requests trying to download Triplegangers' entire site which hosts hundreds of thousands ...

#CyberSecurity #AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #WebScraping #DDoS #AITraining

"In newly unredacted documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday, plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta, who include bestselling authors Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, recount Meta’s testimony from late last year, during which it was revealed that Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of a dataset called LibGen for Llama-related training. LibGen, which describes itself as a “links aggregator,” provides access to copyrighted works from publishers including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. LibGen has been sued a number of times, ordered to shut down, and fined tens of millions of dollars for copyright infringement. According to Meta’s testimony, as relayed by plaintiffs’ counsel, Zuckerberg cleared the use of LibGen to train at least one of Meta’s Llama models despite concerns within Meta’s AI exec team and others at the company. The filing quotes Meta employees as referring to LibGen as a “data set we know to be pirated,” and flagging that its use “may undermine [Meta’s] negotiating position with regulators.”"

TechCrunch

Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta's Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims | TechCrunch

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta's Llama team approval to train on copyrighted documents, according to a new court filing.

#AI #GenerativeAI #Meta #AITraining #LibGen #Copyright #IP #Piracy

"Google is forming a new team to work on AI models that can simulate the physical world. Tim Brooks — one of the co-leads on OpenAI’s video generator, Sora, who left for Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind, in October — will lead the new team, he announced in a post on X. It’ll be a part of Google DeepMind. “DeepMind has ambitious plans to make massive generative models that simulate the world,” Brooks wrote Monday morning. “I’m hiring for a new team with this mission.” According to job listings Brooks linked to in his post, the new modeling team will collaborate with and build on work from Google’s Gemini, Veo, and Genie teams to tackle “critical new problems” and scale models “to the highest levels of compute.” Gemini is Google’s flagship series of AI models for tasks like analyzing images and generating text, while Veo is Google’s own video generation model."

TechCrunch

Google is forming a new team to build AI that can simulate the physical world | TechCrunch

Google is establishing a team to build AI that can simulate the physical world, led by one of the former co-leads on OpenAI's Sora model.

#AI #AGI #Google #DeepMind

"Capitalist and technology-enabled surveillance has moved beyond targeting users with ads to targeting their lives. This is why privacy online today means freedom tomorrow. Protecting our privacy secures our fundamental rights for the future. I will be honest, it can be overwhelming; however, in times like this, I like to focus on what can be done instead of worrying about what hasn't happened yet. The most important thing is to act, no matter how difficult it can be during times of fear and stress. Pushing for incremental change and improvements requires small actions every day. We have to engage the folks that are willing to join our fight, pave the way for those actions, and build the communities we want collectively. There is a lesson to be learned from merging with Tails in 2024 and our growth in the last several years: together we are stronger. And in 2025, I want to use this lesson as a guiding principle, that solidarity and collaboration are our greatest strengths."

Meeting the demands of tomorrow's Internet | Tor Project

Reflecting on 2024 and looking forward to 2025.

#Tor #Anonymity #Privacy #Surveillance

"One reason people think Bluesky will be different is that the app has a decentralized ownership model, which means it’s controlled by a four-person board rather than any single person or company. Bluesky is a public benefit corporation, a for-profit company that aims to have a positive impact on society rather than focusing on maximizing shareholder value. There are currently no ads, which means Taco Bell and Tide aren’t trying to get your attention with meme-speak. The platform is still small, with roughly 25 million users, a fraction of the population of its peers, and it runs on an open-source protocol, which means that anyone can build their own subcommunities on top of it with their own moderators and guidelines. Already there are a few attempts, including Blacksky, a community dedicated to Black users that hopes to recreate the best of Black Twitter. (So far, it’s still a nascent aggregation of scattered photos and messages.) Yet all other indicators point to a service organized suspiciously like its predecessor: The company hopes to start generating revenue with subscriptions, and has raised close to $23 million in venture funding from private investors. Even Dorsey has lost his early faith: In May, he announced that he had stepped away from the Bluesky board, and later gave an interview in which he lamented that the team was “repeating all the mistakes we made as a company,” referring to the early years of Twitter. Bluesky, he said, was turning into just “another app.”"

Another New Twitter? Good Luck With That. (Published 2024)

Users are now flocking to Bluesky. But every social media platform becomes a wasteland in the end.

#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #Twitter #Musk #Bluesky #VCs #SiliconValley

"I actually agree with the idea that socialism and democracy have an intrinsic relationship. Or better still, given the disastrous fact that the idea of “socialism” — including things like planning, redistribution, development, and mass education — has been associated with the more or less complete abolition of democracy, in the end leading to the collapse of socialism itself, it’s clear that we must work towards an “organic” combination of socialism and democracy. This certainly influences our very understanding of what “socialism” means, but it should also affect our understanding of what “democracy” means. I have argued that there are historically three main forms of democratic institutions: those based on representation, direct participation, and social conflict. In Marx’s “communist” program, especially after the Paris Commune, the accent is heavily on “direct” democracy or participation against “representation,” which Marx — or better still, his followers — tended to reduce to “parliamentary” democracy. Perhaps this was too hasty a reduction, and where social conflictuality is concerned, it can actually be dangerous. In fact, the direct form of democracy was conceived on the model of small communities. With social and political problems becoming increasingly global — one need only think of the consequences of climate change, which have become the central problem for humankind — we need various degrees of socialism and various combinations of democratic institutions at different levels, from the local to the global."

Étienne Balibar: Socialism and Democracy Are Intrinsically Related Ideas

Marxist philosopher Étienne Balibar sits down with Jacobin to discuss freedom and democracy — and why socialists need to reclaim those words fro...

#Marx #Balibar #Socialism #Democracy

"You can ask me questions later, but this is what makes me sad: the most probable outcome is what I call “soft fascism.” By soft, I don’t mean Nazi-style fascism or outright extermination campaigns. Rather, what I mean is this: the best definition of fascism for me is a conservative revolution. That means participating in the dynamic of capitalist development, while recognising that unrestrained capitalism and liberalism can lead to social disintegration. Intelligent fascists understood this. So, they envisioned an economy based on capitalism, but controlled by a strong state that legitimises itself by appealing to invented traditions—often religious, but not necessarily so. Now, I may upset some of you, but do you know who serves as an example of this? China. I’ve been closely following what happens there. Two months ago, their leader gave a speech. He began with: “Our youth is not educated enough; we must train them ideologically.” I expected the usual rhetoric about reading more Marx or Mao. But no. He emphasised Confucian traditions, saying they were essential for holding society together. Modi is doing something similar in India—brutal capitalism coupled with a narrative of tradition. This, I think, is the most probable direction for much of the world. History, I’m afraid, is not on our side."

Žižek on Soft Fascism, AI, and the Collapse of Shame

Editor

#SoftFascism #Capitalism #AI #History

"Now that the seal is broken on scraping Bluesky posts into datasets for machine learning, people are trolling users and one-upping each other by making increasingly massive datasets of non-anonymized, full-text Bluesky posts taken directly from the social media platform’s public firehose—including one that contains almost 300 million posts. Last week, Daniel van Strien, a machine learning librarian at open-source machine learning library platform Hugging Face, released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, including when they were posted and who posted them. Within hours of his first post—shortly after our story about this being the first known, public, non-anonymous dataset of Bluesky posts, and following hundreds of replies from people outraged that their posts were scraped without their permission—van Strein took it down and apologized."

404 Media

Your Bluesky Posts Are Probably In A Bunch of Datasets Now

After a machine learning librarian released and then deleted a dataset of one million Bluesky posts, several other, even bigger datasets have appea...

#SocialMedia #Bluesky #AI #ML #GenerativeAI #AITraining #WebScraping