"Far less examined is the expansion of the concept of the “child” itself: the extension of child-protection frameworks to fictional and artistic representations of children, and a growing willingness to criminalise imaginary depictions as if they were evidence of real crimes. A central harm of this conflation is the diversion of child-safety resources away from real abuse cases and toward the policing of imagination. In the United Kingdom, prosecutions for real child-sexual-abuse images have fallen by nearly 60% since their peak in 2016–17. Over the same period, prosecutions involving fictional content have risen by about a third and now make up roughly 40 percent of all image offences, according to statistics cited in the Drawing the Line Watchlist 2025, released on 10 December 2025 by the Center for Online Safety and Liberty. The report documents examples from ten countries revealing the global consequences of this trend. Just as children are not the beneficiaries of this conflation, its targets are not sex offenders, but more often artists, authors, LGBTQ+ communities, and even children themselves. The Watchlist describes a 17-year-old Costa Rican girl arrested over artwork she posted to her blog, with foreign entities backing both the law and its enforcement. In Australia – which does not even record the distinction between real and virtual sex crimes – the author of a fetish novel featuring adult characters faces charges identical to those applied to people who create and distribute recordings of the rape of a real child."
Drawing the line: When child safety laws lose sight of real children
Newly released data reveal how a no-compromise approach to AI-generated and other fictional sexual content depicting children has diverted resource...
 #Censorship #ChildSafety #DigitalRights #FreeSpeech
LoL. Are Big Tech companies finally realizing that writers with the ability to tell stories they're almost worthless? "Corporate America’s latest hot job is also one of the oldest in history: storyteller. Some companies want a media relations manager by a slightly flashier name. Others need people to produce blogs, podcasts, case studies and more types of branded content to attract customers, investors and potential recruits. All seem to use the word differently than in its usual application to novelists, playwrights and raconteurs. “As storytellers,” a Google job ad said last month, “we play an integral role in driving customer acquisition and long-term growth.” The listing sought a customer storytelling manager to join the company’s Google Cloud storytelling team. One article the unit published this year was titled, “Lowe’s innovation: How Vertex AI helps create interactive shopping experiences.” Microsoft’s security organization meanwhile is recruiting a senior director overseeing narrative and storytelling, described as part cybersecurity technologist, part communicator and part marketer. Compliance technology firm Vanta this month began hiring for a head of storytelling, offering a salary of up to $274,000. Productivity app Notion recently merged its communications, social media and influencer functions into one 10-person, so-called storytelling team." https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-are-desperately-seeking-storytellers-7b79f54e #Google #BigTech #Storyteling #Microsoft #Writing #TechnicalCommunication
"The independent watchdog for the country’s largest power grid operator has issued a “regulatory grenade” asking the federal government to intervene amid PJM Interconnection’s plans to power data centers it knows it doesn’t have the capacity for — despite acknowledging the heightened risk of blackouts. This comes as PJM has seen windfall profits from shouldering energy-draining data centers, at a multibillion-dollar cost to consumers. Last week, the monitor overseeing PJM filed a complaint with the nation’s top electric utility regulator, warning of unreliable service for its 65 million customers across the Midwest and mid-Atlantic. Monitoring Analytics asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to pause connecting larger artificial intelligence-powering data centers to its grid until PJM can ensure “reliable, economic, and environmentally acceptable” service and guarantee that the growing data center energy burden won’t produce unnecessary blackouts. “The logic is simple. The question is clear,” the complaint reads. “If PJM has an obligation to provide reliable service… is it just and reasonable for PJM to add new loads that it cannot serve reliably? The answer to that question is no.”"
The Lever
Data Center Boom Risks Blackouts, Energy Watchdog Warns
Data center construction should be put on hold until grid operators can ensure reliability, a regional energy monitor argues.
 #USA #DataCenters #PowerGrid #AI #PJMInterconnection #Blackouts #Energy
RT @TheHackersNews 🚨 WARNING: A “Featured” Chrome extension was silently copying everything users typed into ChatGPT and other AI tools. Prompts. Responses. Sent off-device by default after an auto-update. It even warned users about sharing sensitive info, while exporting the full chats itself. 🔗 Read:
The Hacker News
Featured Chrome Browser Extension Caught Intercepting Millions of Users' AI Chats
Urban VPN extensions collect AI prompts, responses, and browsing data from millions through hidden code.
"Throughout 2025, more than 17.1 million posts circulated across multiple platforms about Mamdani, a significant share of which amplified vicious disinformation and hate speech against him. Despite this onslaught, Mamdani—a Ugandan-born, Indian American Muslim—will become the city’s first Muslim and first South Asian American mayor. Zohran Mamdani is the son of renowned academic Mahmood Mamdani and acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair, both of Indian origin. His father comes from a Gujarati Muslim background, while his mother is of Hindu descent, giving Mamdani a multicultural and interfaith heritage. His candidacy, defined by progressive policy commitments and steadfast advocacy for marginalized communities, has become a focal point for anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-South Asian animus in the United States and beyond. (...) From his primary victory in June 2025, through the end of October 2025, Equality Labs manually monitored and analyzed 500 social media posts that explicitly targeted Zohran Mamdani. This monitoring was conducted by a team of social media monitoring experts on hate speech and dis/misinformation. In parallel, we conducted a large-scale, year-long analysis across major platforms to assess the broader scope and dynamics of the hate he has been receiving. Our mixed-methods approach combined qualitative coding of harassment narratives with quantitative trend analysis to identify dominant frames, trace amplification networks, and distinguish organic discourse from coordinated disinformation and hate speech. This dual lens allowed us to map the trajectory of attacks over time, evaluate platform enforcement gaps, and surface recommendations for community safety, rapid response, and policy accountability." 📄.pdf #USA #SocialMedia #HateSpeech #Islamophobia #Mandani
Este Darko é provavelmente o meu reviewer preferido de headphones e gadgets audiófilos. Vê-se mesmo que ele não só é um audiófilo mas também um melómano, o que é coisa rara... ;) E ainda por cima os vídeos dele por vezes incluem cenas filmadas em Portugal :-D Anyway, ele prefere os Bowers & Wilkins PX8 S2 aos Sennheiser HDB 630 por achar que os primeiros transmitem um som mais vibrante e vivo e os segundos proporcionarem um som mais clínico e distanciado. Mas mesmo descontando o facto dos PX8 S2 custarem neste momento 720 euros (aposto que daqui a um ano, ambos vão estar à venda por menos de 400 euros), parece-me que os PX8 S2 são piores no que toca ao cancelamento de ruído. E em termos de pré-equalização, a app da B&W também não parece ser grande espingarda.
"A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills — and their willingness to keep their mouths shut — were fighting their way up one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas. Step by step, they trudged up the razor-toothed ridge, the wind slamming their faces, their crampons clinging precariously to the ice. One misplaced foot, one careless slip, and it was a 2,000-foot drop, straight down. Just below the peak, the Americans and their Indian comrades got everything ready: the antenna, the cables and, most crucially, the SNAP-19C, a portable generator designed in a top-secret lab and powered by radioactive fuel, similar to the ones used for deep sea and outer space exploration. The plan was to spy on China, which had just detonated an atomic bomb. Stunned, the C.I.A. dispatched the climbers to set up all this gear — including the 50-pound, beach-ball-size nuclear device — on the roof of the world to eavesdrop on Chinese mission control. But right as the climbers were about to push for the summit, the weather went haywire. The wind howled, the clouds descended, a blizzard swept in and the top of the forbidding mountain, called Nanda Devi, suddenly disappeared in a whiteout. (...) The climbers scampered down the mountain after stashing the C.I.A. gear on a ledge of ice, abandoning a nuclear device that contained nearly a third of the total amount of plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb. It hasn’t been seen since. And that was 1965. Buried beneath the rock and ice of the Himalayas, in one of the most remote places on earth, lies a sensational chapter of the Cold War, and it’s not over yet. What happened to the American nuclear device, which contains Pu-239, an isotope used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and even larger amounts of Pu-238, a highly radioactive fuel? Nobody knows."
How Did the C.I.A. Lose a Nuclear Device?
A plutonium-packed generator disappeared on one of the world’s highest mountains in a covert mission that the U.S. will not talk about.
 #USA #India #China #ColdWar #CIA #Spying
"Los 10 pensadores que han conseguido más votos de nuestro jurado no solo reflexionan sobre estos temas y otros relacionados, y no solo describen y en ocasiones dan nombre a lo que está ocurriendo para que podamos identificarlo y analizarlo. (...) Casi todas las novedades de las empresas de plataformas han venido acompañadas de un discurso que las presentaba casi como naturales, como el fruto de un supuesto e imparable progreso. Esto será así, nos decían, hay que adaptarse o desaparecer. Mark Zuckerberg, fundador de Facebook, asegura que la privacidad es cosa del pasado. Empresas como Amazon y Uber disfrazan de libertad lo que no es más que trabajo precario a las órdenes de un algoritmo. Sam Altman, consejero delegado de OpenAI, promete que la inteligencia artificial ayudará en el futuro —quizás, no lo sabemos— a solucionar el problema del cambio climático y por eso se le ha de permitir agravarlo hoy en día mediante el uso de las cantidades ingentes de agua que necesitan los grandes centros de datos. En sus libros y artículos, estos pensadores nos muestran que no tiene por qué ser así, que, como escribe la filósofa estadounidense Shoshana Zuboff, nada de esto es inevitable. Podemos defender unas redes sociales que respeten nuestra privacidad, como plantean la investigadora en IA Meredith Whittaker y la filósofa Carissa Véliz, o exigir una inteligencia artificial que esté subordinada a nuestras prioridades sociales, políticas y medioambientales, como proponen el filósofo Éric Sadin y la ingeniera Timnit Gebru. Y podemos imaginar un modelo de negocio para estas empresas que no suponga una amenaza para la democracia, como defienden Daron Acemoglu y la misma Zuboff. En definitiva, nos alertan de los peligros de obedecer ciegamente a personas que tienen en cuenta sus intereses y no los nuestros, y nos animan a moldear el futuro a través de acciones individuales y colectivas. Con su ayuda, podemos imaginar una tecnología diferente..."
El País
Los 10 pensadores tecnológicos más influyentes del mundo
Vivimos una época en la que el futuro tiene más de amenaza que de promesa y más de imposición que de esperanza. Necesitamos leer y escuchar a p...
"A cryptocurrency firm run by the billionaire Winklevoss twins was facing a punishing federal lawsuit. After Donald J. Trump returned to the White House, the Securities and Exchange Commission moved to freeze the case. The S.E.C. had also sued Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, but then dropped the case altogether under the new administration. And after a yearslong legal fight with Ripple Labs, the new S.E.C. tried to reduce a court-ordered penalty against the crypto firm, seeking to soften the blow of the punishment. The agency’s pullback from these cases illustrated a wide-ranging transformation in the federal government’s treatment of the crypto industry during President Trump’s second term, a New York Times investigation has found. It is unheard-of for the agency to retreat from a swath of lawsuits against a single industry. And yet, The Times found that the S.E.C. had eased up on more than 60 percent of the crypto cases that were ongoing when Mr. Trump returned to the White House, moving to pause litigation, lessen penalties or outright dismiss the cases. The dismissals were particularly unusual, The Times found. Under Mr. Trump, S.E.C. dismissals came at a far higher rate for crypto firms than other cases. And although the particulars of the crypto lawsuits differed, many of these firms had something in common: financial ties to Mr. Trump, the self-described crypto president."
The S.E.C. Was Tough on Crypto. It Pulled Back After Trump Returned to Office.
An investigation by The Times found the administration’s change in enforcement benefited the industry, including companies that had ties to the p...
 #USA #Trump #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Kleptocracy #Plutocracy #SEC #Binance #Winklevoss #RippleLabs
"Billionaires control the cable channels, social media platforms, newspapers, movie studios and essentially everything else that we consume, but for their own information sources they are in some cases more likely to trust their own kind. Semafor documented one ultraexclusive group chat that included Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Srinivasan, among others, in which the self-reinforcing discourse is reported to have pushed many Silicon Valley tycoons toward right-wing politics. “If you weren’t in the business at all,” the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams said of a similar group chat he was a member of, “you’d think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently.” Such disconnection goes a long way to explaining why billionaires can’t grasp how the real world is convulsing outside their well-secured gates. And convulsing it is. According to the most recent edition of an annual Harris Poll, for the first time, a majority of Americans believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. A remarkable 71 percent believe there should be a wealth tax. A majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate. A realignment may be underway. The recent push for the Epstein files, a previously unimaginable collaboration between conspiracy-addled MAGA true believers and anti-corporatist Democrats, was just the latest sign. At a moment when income inequality, the looming threat of A.I. and the rise of authoritarianism seem to be straining American societal cohesion, a revolt against self-dealing elites may be the only cause compelling enough to bring us together. The favor of billionaires is already in some cases proving to be more of a liability than a blessing. In Seattle last month, a democratic socialist was elected mayor over a Democratic incumbent backed by wealthy interests."
Opinion | The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV
The first rule of dark money is to quit blabbing about it. Did they think people would thank them for it?
 #USA #Capitalism #Billionaires #Kleptocracy #Plutocracy #Ideology #Democracy #Inequality