"A wealthy bitcoin investor wants to set up his own court system within a libertarian community on a Caribbean island as part of the tech-backed “network state” movement. Olivier Janssens’ company, South Nevis Ltd, is buying up land on Nevis for his proposed “Destiny” development — the first scheme of its kind on the island, which has been enabled by a new Nevisian law. Destiny, which the island’s government has called a multibillion-dollar project, is due to involve a massive reshaping of the south coast of the island, including villas and medical clinics. Speaking via video link to a panel of islanders in late November, Janssens criticised Nevis’s court system for lacking “efficiency . . . And if we’re just going to copy that, it’s not attractive to people to come.” Instead, he said Destiny could “propose that for certain matters we have our own efficient court systems”, but would ultimately “still abide by” the national legal system. The scheme, a series of lush green terraces and pools, has been designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the architects behind 7 World Trade Center in New York and the Broadgate Tower in London. Janssens declined to comment on its cost or the price of homes within the development. Destiny is part of a trend in which wealthy figures in technology and crypto try to establish their own, more libertarian, territories, known as the “network state” movement. A few have collectively received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital from funds backed by the likes of investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong, Coinbase chief executive. Many remain theoretical at this point."

Client Challenge

#Cyberlibertarianism #NetworkState #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Nevis #Destiny

"Over the past few years, bloggers who have not secured their sites behind a paywall have seen their carefully developed and tested recipes show up, often without attribution and in a bastardized form, in ChatGPT replies. They have seen dumbed-down versions of their recipes in AI-assembled cookbooks available for digital downloads on Etsy or on AI-built websites that bear a superficial resemblance to an old-school human-written blog. Their photos and videos, meanwhile, are repurposed in Facebook posts and Pinterest pins that link back to this digital slop. Recipe writers have no legal recourse because recipes generally are not copyrightable. Although copyright protects published or recorded work, they do not cover sets of instructions (although it can apply to the particular wording of those instructions). Without this essential IP, many food bloggers earn their living by offering their work for free while using ads to make money. But now they fear that casual users who rely on search engines or social media to find a recipe for dinner will conflate their work with AI slop and stop trusting online recipe sites altogether. “There are a lot of people that are scared to even talk about what’s going on because it is their livelihood,” says Jim Delmage who, with his wife, Tara, runs the blog and YouTube channel Sip and Feast."

the Guardian

Google AI summaries are ruining the livelihoods of recipe writers: ‘It’s an extinction event’

AI Mode is mangling recipes by merging instructions from multiple creators – and causing them huge dips in ad traffic

#AI #GenerativeAI #AISearch #Google #AIOverviews #Recipes #FoodRecipes #FoodBloggers

"We are in the dynasty of bullshit, a deceptive epoch where analysts and journalists who are ostensibly burdened with telling the truth feel the need to continue pushing the Gospel According To Jensen. When all of this collapses there must be a reckoning with how little effort was made to truly investigate the things that executives are saying on the television, in press releases, in earnings filings and even on social media, all because the market consensus demanded that The Number Must Continue Going Up. The AI era is one of mythology, where billions in GPUs are bought to create supply for imaginary demand, where software is sold based on things it cannot reliably do, where companies that burn billions of dollars are rewarded with glitzy headlines and not an ounce of cynicism, and where those that have pushed back against it have been treated with more skepticism and ire than those who would benefit the most from the propagation of propaganda and outright lies. So today I'm giving you Mythbusters — AI Edition. This is the spiritual successor to How To Argue With An AI Booster, where I address the technical, financial and philosophical myths that underpin the endless sales of GPUs and ever-increasing valuation of OpenAI. This is going to be fun, because I truly believe that both the financial and tech press take this all a little too seriously, in the sense that everything is so dull. With a handful of exceptions (The Register being the best example), most publications treat financial reporting as something that must be inherently separate from any kind of analysis or criticism. And so, that’s why, if a publication calls bullshit on something insane, that call is almost always segmented away in its own little piece."

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

Premium: Mythbusters - AI Edition

I keep trying to think of a cool or interesting introduction to this newsletter, and keep coming back to how fucking weird everything is getting. ...

#AI #GenerativeAI #Nvidia #Oracle #AIBubble #AIHype #OpenAI

"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