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berbatrick

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-airstrikes-kurdish-groups-syria-iraq-bombing
Turkey launched deadly airstrikes over northern regions of Syria and Iraq, the Turkish defence ministry said on Sunday, targeting Kurdish groups that Ankara holds responsible for last week’s bomb attack in Istanbul.

Warplanes attacked bases belonging to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), and the Syrian People’s Protection Units, or YPG, the ministry said in a statement, which was accompanied by images of F-16 jets taking off and footage of a strike from an aerial drone.
 

berbatrick

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A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate
Make Sunsets is already attempting to earn revenue for geoengineering, a move likely to provoke widespread criticism.

https://www.technologyreview.com/20...atmosphere-in-an-effort-to-tweak-the-climate/


“The current state of science is not good enough … to either reject, or to accept, let alone implement” solar geoengineering, wrote Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, in an email. The initiative is calling for oversight of geoengineering and other climate-altering technologies, whether by governments, international accords or scientific bodies. “To go ahead with implementation at this stage is a very bad idea,” he added, comparing it to Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s decision to use CRISPR to edit the DNA of embryos while the scientific community was still debating the safety and ethics of such a step.
...
He expected they would burst under pressure at that altitude and release the particles. But it’s not clear whether that happened, where the balloons ended up, or what impact the particles had, because there was no monitoring equipment on board the balloons. Iseman also acknowledges that they did not seek any approvals from government authorities or scientific agencies, in Mexico or elsewhere, before the first two launches.

“This was firmly in science project territory,” he says, adding: “Basically, it was to confirm that I could do it.”

A 2018 white paper raised the possibility that an environmental, humanitarian, or other type of group could use this simple balloon approach to carry out a distributed, do-it-yourself geoengineering scheme.

In future work, Make Sunsets hopes to increase the sulfur payloads, add telemetry equipment and other sensors, eventually move to reusable balloons, and publish data following the launches.

The company is already attempting to earn revenue from the cooling effects of future flights. It is offering to sell $10 “cooling credits” for releasing one gram of particles in the stratosphere—enough, it asserts, to offset the warming effect of one ton of carbon for one year.
 

oates

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The British Government have now completed all stages of debate and voting to bring a new Act into being which introduces:-

Make verified ID a requirement for opening a social media account.”:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/575833


On 17 January, MPs approve the Online Safety Bill which will introduce a new regulatory framework to address illegal and harmful content online.

The Bill was introduced by the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to the House of Commons on 17 March 2022.

Read more about the measures included in the Bill in this House of Commons Library Research Briefing.

What happens next?
The Bill has now completed its stages in the House of Commons, and goes to the House of Lords. The Bill must be approved by both Houses before it can become law.

You can keep up to date with progress of this Bill on the Bill's webpage.

The Bill's publication page includes up to date links to explanatory notes and briefing papers, where you can learn more about the measures in the Bill.



Is the 'age' of Social Media coming to an end?
 

Slevs

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Felt it all the way over in Lebanon.
I thought it was a dream at first then I realized the wife was awake too and terrified.
Genuinely got the "nothing you can do" fear in me for those 30 seconds, felt like a lifetime.
 

berbatrick

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berbatrick

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not good

the archive site had put up scanned book pdfs, basically saying they are being a library. publishers sued and won.
the issue is that the archive is the only place anymore where you can find rare/old books, and even old things from the net. it's probably going to be taken down after this.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/20/...ive-hachette-lawsuit-court-copyright-fair-use

The Open Library is built around a concept called controlled digital lending, or CDL: a system where libraries digitize copies of books in their collections and then offer access to them as ebooks on a one-to-one basis (i.e., if a library has a single copy of the book, it can keep the book in storage and let one person at a time access the ebook, something known as the “own-to-loan ratio.”)

Publishers took aim not just at the National Emergency Library, however, but also at the Open Library and the theory of CDL in general. The service constitutes “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale,” the complaint alleged. “Without any license or any payment to authors or publishers, IA scans print books, uploads these illegally scanned books to its servers, and distributes verbatim digital copies of the books in whole via public-facing websites. With just a few clicks, any Internet-connected user can download complete digital copies of in-copyright books.” More generally, “CDL is an invented paradigm that is well outside copyright law ... based on the false premise that a print book and a digital book share the same qualities.”

And if the Internet Archive loses the case, it could potentially be on the hook for billions of dollars in damages. That could threaten other parts of its operation like the Wayback Machine, which preserves websites and has become a vital archival resource.


https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2023/03/17/librarians-should-stand-internet-archive-opinion

You’ve probably heard of Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which archives billions of webpages from across the globe. Fewer are familiar with its other extraordinary collections, which include 41 million digitized books and texts, with more than three million books available to borrow.
 

berbatrick

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Reading this for insight is like revering Mein Kampf if Hitler never got out of prison and the KPD took over