Untitled

tech news today is that Mullvad VPN has gone mask-off about being the major funding source for the Swedish Orebro party, who are racist nationalists. unfortunately all discussion of this is occurring on fucking Mastodon instances i can barely load

if you are a mullvad customer (as i am) and want to get out, here is guidance from this guy

The sexuality of a police officer is cop.

The gender of a police officer is cop.

When you become the enforcer and protector of capital, you are making the deal to be slightly favored by the system over others like you, in exchange for being its servant. Your solidarity is with the system that you serve, even if it hates you.

A major new survey from The Trevor Project released on Wednesday (6 May) has found that transgender and nonbinary young people who wanted hormone therapy but were unable to access it were nearly twice as likely to report a suicide attempt in the past year compared to those currently receiving hormones.

According to the report – which included over 10,000 responses from trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people – 15% of trans youth denied access to hormones reported a suicide attempt, compared to 8% of those able to receive care.

"Apple has unveiled its vision for an AI-supercharged Siri, called Siri AI, which will become much more “agentic” thanks in part to an infusion from Google’s Gemini."

"Siri now takes actions across apps, both native and third-party, which includes handling stuff like email composition. This means you can give Siri topics and information and have the next-gen voice assistant do the rest for you.

To assist in its agentic capabilities, Siri is now designed to be much more personalized, using information from your Apple account and other personal data on your device, such as calendar events, emails, and notes. The upgraded Siri also has “visual intelligence,” meaning it can view and understand what’s on your screen to better take actions for you.

Visual Intelligence is best illustrated in new features like bill splitting, which uses your phone’s camera to look at a bill and then allows you to itemize it and send or receive money through Apple Cash.

Siri AI is also getting its own dedicated app, where you can resume conversations you had previously, and it will also be integrated into Spotlight in macOS, where you can now ask Siri questions and ask it to help you complete tasks and compare things. In visionOS, you can now pin a Siri orb in digital space so you can access it more easily."

"New voices abound as well, and you can now adjust the cadence and pacing of Siri if you don’t like the defaults."

C-22 would basically allow the government to force companies to keep a year of your metadata, without any cause or reason

“and grants the Minister of Public Safety power to impose these same requirements on any electronic service provider by ministerial order.

Such metadata can reveal highly sensitive information including patterns of movement, association, medical activity, religious participation, and political activity;”

“The definition of electronic service provider is broad enough to include any online service, including encrypted messaging apps, VPNs, email providers, banking apps, and cloud storage services;

Bill C-22 grants the Minister of Public Safety broad authority to compel any electronic service provider to implement interception capabilities or technical assistance measures that could weaken encrypted systems, with compliance being mandatory.

This creates cybersecurity vulnerabilities exploitable by criminals and hostile foreign actors, as demonstrated by the 2024 Salt Typhoon attack on United States telecoms;”

“The government retains broad regulatory power to redefine key terms including "encryption" and "systemic vulnerability" without returning to Parliament, rendering the bill's stated privacy protections unreliable.”

Please do sign and share this petition ( only Canadians sign it)

Tl;DR:

Google is saying that any music uploaded to YouTube is legally theirs to use in AI training.

This was to try to throw out a copyright case where the victims were trying to sue YouTube for allegedly using their music to train their AI

full discussion

“A new court filing claims that when indie artists upload music to YouTube, they grant a "broad license" that covers the AI initiatives of parent company Google.”

“Google says in a new court filing that YouTube’s terms of service grant a “broad license” for artificial intelligence models to be trained on music uploaded directly to the platform.”

“This argument came in Google’s Monday (June 8) motion to dismiss copyright infringement litigation filed earlier this year by a group of independent artists, songwriters and producers.

The lawsuit claims that Lyria 3, the AI music model launched by Google in February, was trained on songs ripped from YouTube without compensating artists.”

“The case is among dozens that have accused AI companies of illegally training their models on copyrighted sound, text and images in recent years.

In most of these lawsuits — including ones brought by the major record labels against AI music generators Suno and Udio — tech companies have argued that the so-called fair use principle of copyright law allows them to create transformative works without licensing the training data.”

Instead of making a fair use argument, Google is saying “they actually do have a license to train AI with the songs uploaded to YouTube by these indie artists.”

Google says there’s no evidence for Google using their specific works, but also that they have the right to use

the motion cites a clause in YouTube’s terms of service that states, “By providing content to the service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the service and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business.”

“if Google’s argument is accepted by the court, the company would be legally permitted to train AI models on and otherwise utilize that content for “derivative works.” However,

the situation might be different for music distributed through YouTube pursuant to licensing agreements with labels and publishers.”