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fatehbaz · 1 year

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If you wanted to know more about the saga of protests and resistance against Canada’s open-pit copper mining in Panama:

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Screenshot and headline from: “Canadian firm blames Panama for closure of copper mine.” AP News. 16 December 2022.

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Headline from: “Panama: Canadian mining company First Quantum denied to expand copper exploitation area for alleged failure with environmental commitments.” Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. 26 January 2023.

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Headline from: Valentine Hilaire. “Panama won’t allow Canada’s First Quantum to expand its copper mine operations.” Reuters. 26 January 2023.

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Headline by: The Associated Press. “Panama reaches 20-year deal with Canadian copper mine.” As republished at ABC News. 8 March 2023.

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An excerpt and explanation:

In Panama, a dispute has emerged of a type that is common to countries in Central and South America: a huge transnational company has invested in the country’s resource wealth, resulting in a conflict over suitable payments to the government that draws in officials from the company’s nation of origin in defence of corporate profits. In this case, the company in question is First Quantum Minerals, a mining giant with lucrative investments across the Global South -- and the country of origin is Canada.

This summer [2022], Panamanians rose up in nationwide protests against the neoliberal status quo imposed on the country by the government of Laurentino Cortizo. Beginning on July 1, these protests brought together diverse groups including teachers, students, trade unionists, farmers, and Indigenous organizations [...]. The causes of the summer 2022 protests go back decades and help illustrate the dynamics of the current conflict between First Quantum (and their backers in Ottawa) and the Panamanian state.

Throughout the 1990s, Canada aggressively pushed for states in Central and South America to adopt neoliberal reforms that would permit more foreign investment and fewer regulations for transnational companies. [...]

Several protest movements emerged in Panama in the 2010s in opposition to the effects of free market reforms generally and the predominance of Canadian mining specifically. At the heart of these resistance movements is the Canadian-owned Cobre Panamá mine, which is the largest foreign investment in the country [...].

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Cobre Panamá was owned by the Toronto-headquartered Inmet Mining until 2013, at which point it was acquired by Vancouver-based First Quantum. In 2011, the Martinelli government attempted to limit the Indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé nation’s rights to autonomy and self-government in order to grant mining companies access to minerals on their land. Meanwhile, Martinelli repealed a law that prevented foreign governments from investing in the mining sector -- a gift to Canada’s Inmet Mining, which at the time was seeking financing from the sovereign wealth funds of Singapore and South Korea.

These moves sparked protests that continued into 2012. Martinelli responded to demands for the annulment of mining and hydroelectric concessions on Indigenous territory with violence by dispatching riot police. The police killed one protestor, injured thirty-two, and detained forty. The protestors did not budge; instead, they blocked the entrances to Cobre Panamá and another mine owned by the Canada’s Petaquilla Minerals. Eventually Martinelli relented and vowed not to approve mining projects on or near Ngäbe-Buglé lands.’

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During the 2011-2012 conflict, nobody in the Canadian government issued a single statement on the matter. When protestors took to the streets again in 2022, Ottawa released a statement that totally omitted the reasons behind the uprising.

Following the economic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Cortizo government declared that Panama’s recovery would rely on incentivizing foreign investment in the mining sector. Social movements have by and large rejected this new arrangement due to the history of corrupt collaboration between state officials and foreign companies and the weakness of environmental protections.

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For example, in April 2022 the Panama Worth More Without Mining Movement -- which arose in opposition to the Canadian-owned Cobre Panamá mine -- released a report that found over 200 “serious” breaches of environmental commitments by the project managers, including the breaking of reforestation promises, “the felling of 876 hectares… in an area of high biodiversity and international importance,” and “the discharge of waste from the tailings tank into natural bodies of water without official endorsement.”

Following the summer 2022 protests, the Cortizo government announced plans to reform the mining sector by instituting greater regulations on foreign companies. In the meantime, the Panamanian state and First Quantum were in the process of negotiating a renewed contract. Jason Simpson, CEO of Canada’s Orla Mining (which is hoping to begin extraction at its Cerro Quema gold project), said, “The biggest story in Panama is Cobre Panamá, so as the government works through their renewed contract law for First Quantum’s asset there, that’ll take priority… We’ll be patient for that to be resolved and then we hope to get working on construction in Panama.”

The negotiations for the renewal of the Cobre Panamá contract began in September 2021. The two parties agreed that First Quantum would provide Panama with between 12 and 16 percent of its gross profit, a new rate that would replace the previous two percent revenue royalty. [...]

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Much like Ottawa jumped to the defence of Centerra Gold following Kyrgyzstan’s nationalization of the Kumtor gold mine last year, the Trudeau government has taken a keen interest in Cobre Panamá and, according to the unnamed Reuters source, is actively backing the mining company’s position. Given Canada’s long history of support for neoliberal reforms and transnational investment in Central and South America, Ottawa’s support for First Quantum in these negotiations should come as no surprise.

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Headline and text by: Owen Schalk. “Ottawa backs Canadian mining giant in dispute with Panama.” Canadian Dimension. 26 December 2022. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph contractions added by me.]

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qqueenofhades · 11 months

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i know you've talked about this before but i just saw someone say obama had 59 senate seats and a 78 house seat majority and he "could've done anything" and i can't. when did peoples' collective memory get so shit? i was in middle school for most of his presidency and even i knew back then how hostile the republicans were to him. what is this revisionist history people are insistent on engaging in like i just don't get it. it's so easy to look back from where we are now and act like people back then didn't try hard enough and it's infuriating

"Obama could have done anything." Sure, when he came into office in the middle of a global economic meltdown and somewhat understandably, put that first, even when the Republicans had already declared their firm intention, in the middle of said financial emergency, not to work with him ever on anything and to make him a one-term president. And yet, still got the $787 billion stimulus through (which at the time was just an Absurd level of Government Spending Oh Noes!!!) and in fact managed to stop things from getting even worse.

"Obama could have done anything." Sure, for the first half of his first term where he had full control of Congress (4 months with 60 seats) and aside from said minor economic problem, was also trying to get the Affordable Care Act done. After 2010 he lost the House; after 2014 he lost the Senate. There are plenty of critiques to be made with the benefit of hindsight about how the Democrats did or did not push to change the procedural rules (something they still can't do now with a much smaller majority and Joe Fucking Manchin reliably on hand to torpedo it), or how they did or did not campaign on the ACA, or how they got punished for it, or how Obama's political inexperience and knowledge that the Republicans were going to crucify him but he still tried to work with them did or did not play into it. The point is, to act like he had those whopping majorities for his entire two terms (and that they automatically just did whatever he said, thanks to his magic mind-control powers) is nonsense.

"Obama could have done anything." As the first African-American president who faced ungodly levels of hate, racism, paranoia, personal attacks, personal attacks on his family, attempts to prove he "wasn't American," Tea Party conspiracies, and Christ knows what else, all while he had to not put a single foot wrong in any scandal, no matter how minor, for eight years. (Which he did!) If only Obama had KNOWN that he could have just done anything and this would totally happen and be fine and never be subject to legal challenges or anything! The Republicans haven't spent a decade since trying to destroy the ACA or anything like that, not ever. Why didn't he use his psychic powers to peer into the future and realize that Roe, universally regarded as settled law, was going to be overturned thanks to an orange maniac and a dark-money federalist judiciary effort! Why didn't he predict that American white fragility was going to backlash in the form of Trump and just never run for president at all? HIS FAULT! THANKS, OBAMA!

"Obama could have done anything." Because he was a wizard, because the Democratic Party and the country was exactly the same 15 years ago, because 2008 was completely identical to 2023 in its social priorities, political issues, cultural beliefs, and other material, and because we can happily act as if Trump never existed, his effect on the American social, political, and racial zeitgeist never existed, because everything is Obama/the Democrats' fault somehow for Not Doing Enough, and nothing to do with anything else, ever. Clearly nothing to do with these fuckwits and their chucklefuck revisionist purity ideology and deliberate refusal to learn or accept anything that contradicts that, i.e. basic reality and history. Nosirreebob.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

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houseofpurplestars · 5 months

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⚫️ Palestinian Islamic Jihad:

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In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Regarding the latest developments in the aggression against our people

In light of the dangerous developments of the zionist aggression on Gaza, and the ongoing series of zionist crimes against our people in the occupied West Bank, it is important for us, in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement, to emphasize the following:

First: The decision issued by the Security Council yesterday does not rise to the level of putting an end to the crimes committed by the criminal entity against our people, nor does it meet the minimum requirements needed by our people in the Gaza Strip. Instead, it records a resounding failure of the Security Council to put an end to the American genocide carried out with zionist hands. This miserable decision grants the entity the opportunity to control the needs of Gaza and its people, blatantly disregarding the international laws and norms that the Council claims to protect.

Second: We warn the entire world of the enemy committing bloody massacres and field executions against civilians in the Gaza Strip, some of which we have begun to witness, in retaliation for the terrible defeat experienced by the entity's army and its forced withdrawal of its soldiers in the face of the valor of Gaza's fighters and the steadfastness of its people.

Third: As we condemn the global silence, especially the official Arab silence, regarding the arrests and campaigns of killing and liquidation in the streets carried out by the entity's army against our people in the occupied West Bank, we bet on the courage and valor of our fighters and the sons of the West Bank in confronting these frenzied campaigns.

Fourth: We salute the courage of the brotherly Yemeni people and their leadership for their bold and firm positions in supporting Palestine and its people, and for the Yemeni leadership's stand alongside our people at a time when many normalizing regimes, and those eagerly pursuing normalization, have abandoned their dignity and opened the doors of Arab national security wide to the enemy. We also commend the position of the Malaysian government in stopping dealings with ships associated with the Nazi entity and call on all Arab and Islamic countries to sever all relations with the usurping entity.

Fifth: We strongly condemn the continued targeting of journalists and media professionals, including the destruction of the offices of Palestine Today channel in Gaza, and the ongoing targeting of journalists and their families across the Strip. We also condemn the silence of the relevant international institutions in the face of ongoing, proven, and documented war crimes.

Sixth: We call on the sons of our Arab and Islamic nation everywhere to fulfill their religious, ethical, and national duty in supporting the oppressed Palestinian people in all forms of support against the genocide supported by arms, mercenaries, weapons, and American and Western political cover. We urge those who remain silent to reconsider their positions.

It is indeed a jihad of victory or martyrdom.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement

Saturday, December 23, 2023 - 10 Jumada Al-Akhir 1445 AH.

#free palestine #free gaza #pij #islamic jihad #i stand with palestine

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beardedmrbean · 2 months

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A government agency created five decades ago to boost the fortunes of minority-owned businesses discriminated against whites and must now serve all business owners, regardless of race, a federal judge in Texas ruled Tuesday.

Siding with white business owners who sued the Minority Business Development Agency for discrimination, Judge Mark T. Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas said the agency’s mission to help disadvantaged businesses owned by Blacks, Hispanics and other racial and ethnic groups gain access to capital and contracts violates the rights of all Americans to receive equal protection under the constitution.

“If courts mean what they say when they ascribe supreme importance to constitutional rights, the federal government may not flagrantly violate such rights with impunity. The MBDA has done so for years. Time’s up,” Pittman, who was named to the federal bench by President Trump, wrote in a 93-page decision.

Pittman directed the Nixon-era agency to overhaul its programs in a potential blow to other government efforts that cater to historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups.

The ruling marks a major development in the broader legal skirmish over diversity, equity and inclusion that is likely to fuel a re-energized conservative movement intent on abolishing affirmative action in the public and private sectors.

Last summer’s Supreme Court decision on race-conscious college admissions has increased scrutiny of government programs that operate based on a presumption of social or economic disadvantage.

Conservative activists have peppered organizations with lawsuits claiming that programs to help Black Americans and other marginalized groups discriminate against white people.

In a statement proclaiming “DEI’s days are numbered,” Dan Lennington, an attorney with Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, the public interest law firm that sued MBDA, hailed the decision as a “historic victory for equality in America.”

“No longer can a federal agency cater only to certain races and not others,” Lennington said. “The MBDA is now open to all Americans.”

The MBDA, which is part of the Commerce Department, could not be immediately reached for comment.

Justice Department lawyers who represented the agency declined to comment. They argued in court filings that the agency’s services are available to any socially or economically disadvantaged business owner. They also pointed to decades of evidence showing that certain groups suffered – and continue to suffer – social and economic disadvantages that stunt “their ability to participate in America’s free enterprise system.”

Alphonso David, president and CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum, said the court’s decision acknowledged this disadvantage.

"Despite this recognition, the court somehow argues that a program created to remedy this discrimination must be dismantled. That makes no sense,” David said in a statement.

What’s more, David said the ruling is limited to one federal agency.

“We can expect right-wing activists to conflate the issue and confuse people into thinking it applies to any public or private program that fights discrimination, but that is not the case," he said.

Established in 1969 by President Richard Nixon to address discrimination in the business world, the MBDA runs centers across the country to help minority owned businesses secure funding and government contracts. The Biden administration made the agency permanent in 2021.

Three small business owners sued MBDA in March, alleging they were turned away because of their race. “The American dream should be afforded to all Americans regardless of skin color or cultural background. But what we have is a federal government picking winners and losers based on wokeism – enough is enough,” one of the plaintiffs, Matthew Piper, said at the time.

National Urban League president Marc Morial urged the federal government to appeal the decision.

"The work of the MBDA to concentrate on the growth of businesses that remain substantially locked out of the mainstream of the American economy is needed and necessary," Morial said.

#nunyas news #sigh

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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This day in history

Tomorrow (November 29), I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

#15yrsago Peak Population: when will population growth stop, why, and how? https://www.alexsteffen.com/peak_population_and_sustainability

#15yrsago James Boyle’s “The Public Domain” — a brilliant copyfighter’s latest book, from a law prof who writes like a comedian https://memex.craphound.com/2008/11/29/james-boyles-the-public-domain-a-brilliant-copyfighters-latest-book-from-a-law-prof-who-writes-like-a-comedian/

#10yrsago NSA and Canadian spooks illegally spied on diplomats at Toronto G20 summit https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/new-snowden-docs-show-u-s-spied-during-g20-in-toronto-1.2442448

#10yrsago New CC licenses: tighter, shorter, more readable, more global https://creativecommons.org/Version4/

#10yrsago Berlusconi kicked out of Italian senate https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/27/silvio-berlusconi-ousted-italian-parliament-tax-fraud-conviction

#5yrsago Sennheiser’s headphone drivers covertly changed your computer’s root of trust, leaving you vulnerable to undetectable attacks https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/sennheiser-headset-software-could-allow-man-in-the-middle-ssl-attacks/

#5yrsago New York City’s municipal debt collectors have forged an unholy alliance with sleazy subprime lenders https://www.bloomberg.com/confessions-of-judgment

#5yrsago Here’s how the Pentagon swindled Congress with $21 trillion worth of undocumented, untraceable, unaccounted for expenditures https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud/

#5yrsago The prosecutor who helped Jeffrey Epstein escape justice is now a Trump Cabinet member https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html

#5yrsago Reddit takes a stand against the EU’s plan to break the internet https://www.redditinc.com/blog/the-eu-copyright-directive-what-redditors-in-europe-need-to-know/

#5yrsago The secret history of science fiction’s women writers: The Future is Female! https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/29/the-secret-history-of-science-fictions-women-writers-the-future-is-female/

#5yrsago Redaction ineptitude reveals names of Proud Boys’ self-styled new leaders https://splinternews.com/proud-boys-failed-to-redact-their-new-dumb-bylaws-and-a-1830700905

#5yrsago Redaction ineptitude reveals Facebook’s 2012 plan to sell Graph API access to user data for $250,000 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/facebook-pondered-for-a-time-selling-access-to-user-data/

#5yrsago Google engineer calls for a walkout over China censorship and raises $200K strike fund in hours https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1068208484053856256

#5yrsago Correlates of Trump voting: searches for erectile dysfunction, hair loss, how to get girls, penis enlargement, penis size, steroids, testosterone and Viagra https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/11/29/how-donald-trump-appeals-to-men-secretly-insecure-about-their-manhood/

#5yrsago Google’s secret project to build a censored Chinese search engine bypassed the company’s own security and privacy teams https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-search/

#5yrsago Mozilla pulls a popular paywall circumvention tool from Firefox add-ons store https://web.archive.org/web/20181130141509/https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox/issues/82

#1yrago The Big Four accounting firms are one (more) scandal away from collapse https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/29/great-andersens-ghost/#mene-mene-bezzle

#pluralistic

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vilkalizer · 8 months

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“Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy start-up with an innovative way to search the emerging internet,” the Justice Department said in its lawsuit. “That Google is long gone.”

please kill g**gle

(they will never kill g**gle)

In Its First Monopoly Trial of Modern Internet Era, U.S. Sets Sights on Google The Justice Department has spent three years over two presidential administrations building the case that Google illegally abused its power over online search to throttle competition. To defend itself, Google has enlisted hundreds of employees and three powerful law firms and spent millions of dollars on legal fees and lobbyists.

On Tuesday, a judge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will begin considering their arguments at a trial that cuts to the heart of a long-simmering question: Did today’s tech giants become dominant by breaking the law? The case — U.S. et al v. Google — is the federal government’s first monopoly trial of the modern internet era, as a generation of tech companies has come to wield immense influence over commerce, information, public discourse, entertainment and labor. The trial moves the antitrust battle against those companies to a new phase, shifting from challenging their mergers and acquisitions to more deeply examining the businesses that thrust them into power.

Such a consequential case over tech power has not unfolded since the Justice Department took Microsoft to court in 1998 for antitrust violations. But since then, companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have woven themselves into people’s lives to an even greater degree. Any ruling from the trial could have broad ripple effects, slowing down or potentially dismantling the largest internet companies after decades of unbridled growth.

The stakes are particularly high for Google, the Silicon Valley company founded in 1998, which grew into a $1.7 trillion giant by becoming the first place people turned to online to search the web. The government has said in its complaint that it wants Google to change its monopolistic business practices, potentially pay damages and restructure itself.

“This is a pivotal case and a moment to create precedents for these new platforms that lend themselves to real and durable market power,” said Laura Phillips-Sawyer, who teaches antitrust law at the University of Georgia School of Law.

The case centers on whether Google illegally cemented its dominance and squashed competition by paying Apple and other companies to make its internet search engine the default on the iPhone as well as on other devices and platforms.

In legal filings, the Justice Department has argued that Google maintained a monopoly through such agreements, making it harder for consumers to use other search engines. Google has said that its deals with Apple and others were not exclusive and that consumers could alter the default settings on their devices to choose alternative search engines.

Google has amassed 90 percent of the search engine market in the United States and 91 percent globally, according to Similarweb, a data analysis firm. Fireworks are expected at the trial, which is scheduled to last 10 weeks. Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, as well as executives from Apple and other tech companies will probably be called as witnesses.

Judge Amit P. Mehta, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014, is presiding over the trial, which will not have a jury, and he will issue the final ruling. Kenneth Dintzer, a 30-year veteran litigator for the Justice Department, will lead the government’s arguments in the courtroom, while John E. Schmidtlein, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly, will do the same for Google.

The jockeying over the trial has already been intense. The Justice Department and Google have deposed more than 150 people for the case and produced more than five million pages of documents. Google has argued that Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s head of antitrust, is biased because of his earlier work as a private lawyer representing Microsoft and News Corp. The Justice Department has accused Google of destroying employees’ instant messages that could have contained relevant information for the case.

Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said in an interview last month that the company’s tactics were “completely lawful” and that its success “comes down to the quality of our products.”

“It’s frustrating — maybe it’s ironic — that we’re seeing this backward-looking case and really unprecedented, forward-looking innovation,” he said.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Google’s search engine was created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page when they were students at Stanford University in the 1990s. Their technology was widely praised for serving up more relevant results than other web search tools. Google eventually parlayed that success into new business lines including online advertising, video streaming, maps, office apps, driverless cars and artificial intelligence.

Rivals have long accused Google of brandishing its power in search to suppress competitors’ links to travel, restaurant reviews and maps, while giving greater prominence to its own content. Those complaints brought scrutiny from regulators, though little action was taken.

In 2019, under President Donald J. Trump, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission decided to mount new antitrust investigations into tech companies as part of a broad crackdown. The Justice Department agreed to oversee inquiries into Apple and Google.

In October 2020, the government sued Google for abusing its dominance in online search. In its lawsuit, the government accused Google of hurting rivals like Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo by employing agreements with Apple and other smartphone makers to become the default search engine on their web browsers or be preinstalled on their devices.

Google’s actions had harmed consumers and stifled competition, the agency said, and could affect the future technological landscape as the company positioned itself to control “emerging channels” for search distribution. The agency added that Google had behaved similarly to Microsoft in the 1990s, when the software giant made its own web browser the default on the Windows operating system, crushing competitors.

A group of 35 states, Guam, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia also filed a lawsuit in 2020 accusing Google of abusing its monopoly in search and search advertising to illegally wedge out competitors. That case will be tried alongside the Justice Department lawsuit, though Judge Mehta threw out many of the states’ key arguments in a ruling last month.

In January, the Justice Department filed a separate antitrust suit against Google, accusing it of abusing its monopoly power in advertising technology. The company faces two other lawsuits from states that accused it of abusing monopolies in ad tech and for blocking competition in its Google Play app store.

For decades, judges have generally ruled against companies in antitrust cases only when their conduct hurts consumers, particularly if they have raised prices. Critics have said that lets companies like Google — which provides internet search for free — off the hook.

Google’s Mr. Walker said the case was a moment for the court to double down on that standard.

“American law should be about promoting benefits for consumers,” he said, adding: “If we move away from that and make it harder for companies to provide great goods and services for consumers, that’s going to be bad for everyone.”

Monopoly trials can change the direction of industries. In 1984, under pressure from the Justice Department, AT&T split itself into seven regional telecom companies. The breakup transformed the telecommunications industry by making it more competitive at the dawn of the mobile phone era.

But the effects of the government’s antitrust battle with Microsoft in the early 2000s were less clear cut. The two sides eventually settled after Microsoft agreed to end certain contracts with PC makers that blocked rival software makers.

Some tech executives said the Justice Department’s actions made Microsoft more cautious, clearing the way for start-ups like Google to compete in the next era of computing. Bill Gates, a Microsoft founder, has blamed the hangover from the antitrust suit for the company’s slow entry into mobile technology and the failure of its Windows phone. But others have argued that the settlement did little to increase competition.

Ultimately, the Google trial will test whether antitrust laws written in 1890 to break up sugar, steel and railroad monopolies can still work in today’s economy, said Rebecca Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s law school.

“The Google trial is a big test for the government’s entire antitrust agenda because its theory of monopolization is very much in play with many big tech companies,” she said.

#google delenda est

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mariacallous · 10 months

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Last month, a court in Kenya issued a landmark ruling against Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram. The US tech giant was, the court ruled, the “true employer” of the hundreds of people employed in Nairobi as moderators on its platforms, trawling through posts and images to filter out violence, hate speech and other shocking content. That means Meta can be sued in Kenya for labor rights violations, even though moderators are technically employed by a third party contractor.

Social media giant TikTok was watching the case closely. The company also uses outsourced moderators in Kenya, and in other countries in the global south, through a contract with Luxembourg-based Majorel. Leaked documents obtained by the NGO Foxglove Legal, seen by WIRED, show that TikTok is concerned it could be next in line for possible litigation.

“TikTok will likely face reputational and regulatory risks for its contractual arrangement with Majorel in Kenya,” the memo says. If the Kenyan courts rule in the moderators’ favor, the memo warns “TikTok and its competitors could face scrutiny for real or perceived labor rights violations.”

The ruling against Meta came after the tech company tried to get the court to dismiss a case brought against it and its outsourcing partner, Sama, by the South African moderator, Daniel Motaung, who was fired after trying to form a union in 2019.

Motaung said the work, which meant watching hours of violent, graphic, or otherwise traumatizing content daily, left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He also alleged that he hadn’t been fully informed about the nature of the work before he’d relocated from South Africa to Kenya to start the job. Motaung accuses Meta and Sama of several abuses of Kenyan labor law, including human trafficking and union busting. Should Motaung’s case succeed, it could allow other large tech companies that outsource to Kenya to be held accountable for the way staff there are treated, and provide a framework for similar cases in other countries.

“[TikTok] reads it as a reputational threat,” says Cori Crider, director of Foxglove Legal. “The fact that they are exploiting people is the reputational threat.”

TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.

In January, as Motaung’s lawsuit progressed, Meta attempted to cut ties with Sama and move its outsourcing operations to Majorel—TikTok’s partner.

In the process, 260 Sama moderators were expected to lose their jobs. In March, a judge issued an injunction preventing Meta from terminating its contract with Sama and moving it to Majorel until the court was able to determine whether the layoffs violated Kenyan labor laws. In a separate lawsuit, Sama moderators, some of whom spoke to WIRED earlier this year, alleged that Majorel had blacklisted them from applying to the new Meta moderator jobs, in retaliation for trying to push for better working conditions at Sama. In May, 150 outsourced moderators working for TikTok, ChatGPT, and Meta via third-party companies voted to form and register the African Content Moderators Union.

Majorel declined to comment.

The TikTok documents show that the company is considering an independent audit of Majorel’s site in Kenya. Majorel has sites around the world, including in Morocco, where its moderators work for both Meta and TikTok. Such an exercise, which often involves hiring an outside law firm or consultancy to conduct interviews and deliver a formal assessment against criteria like local labor laws or international human rights standards, “may mitigate additional scrutiny from union representatives and news media,” the memo said.

Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, says that these audits can be a way for companies to look like they’re taking action to improve conditions in their supply chain, without having to make the drastic changes they need.

“There have been instances in a number of industries where audits have been largely performative, just a little bit of theater to give to a global company a gold star so that they can say they're complying with all relevant standards,” he says, noting that it’s difficult to tell in advance whether a potential audit of TikTok’s moderation operations would be similarly cosmetic.

Meta has conducted multiple audits, including in 2018, contracting consultants Business for Social Responsibility to assess its human rights impact in Myanmar in the wake of a genocide that UN investigators alleged was partially fueled by hate speech on Facebook. Last year, Meta released its first human rights report. The company has, however, repeatedly delayed the release of the full, unredacted copy of its human rights impact report on India, commissioned in 2019 following pressure from rights groups who accused it of contributing to the erosion of civil liberties in the country.

The TikTok memo says nothing about how the company might use such an assessment to help guide improvements in the material conditions of its outsourced workers. “You'll note, the recommendations are not suddenly saying, they should just give people access to psychiatrists, or allow them to opt out of the toxic content and prescreen them in a very careful way, or to pay them in a more equal way that acknowledges the inherent hazards of the job,” says Crider. “I think it's about the performance of doing something.”

Barrett says that there is an opportunity for TikTok to approach the issue in a more proactive way than its predecessors have. “I think it would be very unfortunate if TikTok said, ‘We’re going to try to minimize liability, minimize our responsibility, and not only outsource this work, but outsource our responsibility for making sure the work that's being done on behalf of our platform is done in an appropriate and humane way.’”

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indigenouspeopleday · 9 months

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Statement by the High Representative on behalf of the European Union.

On the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (9 August 2023), the European Union reiterates its firm and continued commitment to the respect, protection and fulfilment of indigenous peoples’ rights as set out in international human rights law and in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

As this year the International Day is dedicated to “Indigenous Youth as Agents of Change for Self-determination”, we pay in particular tribute to the voices and agency of indigenous youth. Indigenous youth stand at the frontline of some of the most pressing crises humanity faces today, such as the loss of biodiversity and climate change. At the same time, they lack avenues for full participation in political and public life, to address challenges such as loss of territories, livelihoods and resources, or to advocate for self-determination and defend their rights. The EU continues to promote the participation of indigenous leaders and indigenous human rights defenders, including indigenous youth, in development processes and key global decision-making fora.

This year the EU has for example invested €2.3 million in a new Arctic Youth Dialogues initiative to involve Arctic and European youth, including indigenous youth, in policy and decision-making, for a peaceful, sustainable and prosperous future for the region, in line with the EU’s Arctic Policy and the Youth Action Plan in EU external relations.

Today, the EU stands with the more than 476 million indigenous peoples – in the Arctic and worldwide – and celebrates their resilience and the vibrant diversity of their cultures.

#9 august #indigenous communities #indigenous youth #International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples #statements

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govindhtech · 7 months

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IBM Maximo AWS Deployment Strategies

The Business Value of IBM Maximo, a recent IDC report that surveyed 9 companies with an average of 8,500 employees, found that adopting IBM Maximo resulted in a business benefit of USD 14.6 million per year per organization, 43% less unplanned downtime, and USD 8.6 million in total equipment cost avoidances.

One comprehensive, cloud-based application platform for asset monitoring, management, predictive maintenance, and reliability planning is IBM Maximo Application Suite (MAS). Maximo optimizes performance, extends asset lifecycles, and reduces downtime and costs for high-value assets using AI and analytics. Hosting Maximo on a scalable infrastructure maximizes performance, hence the current tendency is to shift it to the cloud. In this trip, MAS migration and deployment on AWS Cloud are gaining popularity.

The growing demand for Maximo AWS Cloud migration

Migrating to cloud helps enterprises improve operational resilience and dependability while updating software with minimal effort and infrastructure constraints. Due to the growing demand for data-driven asset management, firms must aggregate data from diverse departments to identify trends, generate predictions, and make better asset management decisions.

Last April, IBM said Maximo 7.6 and add-on support would stop in September 2025. All Maximo EAM customers must upgrade to the latest cloud-based MAS. Maximo migration and modernization are become increasingly significant to clients.

IBM has released new containerized versions of Maximo Application Suite as a Service (MAS SaaS) on AWS Marketplace with Bring Your Own License (BYOL) to assist Maximo migration to AWS. MAS SaaS on AWS is another milestone in Maximo’s integration of Monitor, Health, and Visual Inspection into a unified suite.

What makes MAS SaaS distinct

IBM Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) specialists use best practices to continuously maintain and administer MAS SaaS, a subscription-based AWS service. This partnership gives customers an industry-leading IBM asset management system underpinned by AWS’s size, agility, and cost-efficiency.

Upgrades and migrations to MAS 8 are possible with MAS SaaS. The data update is similar to prior upgrades, but ROSA and other dependencies require architecture changes. The migration is comparable to how clients transitioned from on-premise to Maximo EAM SaaS Flex, but with MAS changes. Perpetual on-premises customers would stop paying Service & Support (S&S) and purchase a SaaS subscription, on-premises Subscription License customers would start a new subscription, and existing MAS Flex and MAS Managed Service customers would start a new subscription to migrate to MAS SaaS.

Our IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator (ICCA) technology lets firms plan migration and upgrade strategies before investing.

Maximo migration strategy of a global energy firm

IBM worked closely with an energy company confronting the following challenges:

Infrastructure needed for latest Maximo version takes longer.

WebSphere, Maximo’s core, experienced high-availability and performance difficulties.

Lack of data fabric and integration layer hinders cross-application data interchange.

Complex setup, failures, and security with manual end-to-end deployment.

Since Maximo Application Suite 8 (MAS8) tackles industry issues like failure risk, escalating maintenance costs, sustainability, and compliance laws, the customer chose it. The client chose AWS Cloud for its deployment flexibility, scalability, high availability, and secure architecture.

Approach to solution

This is how IBM accelerated the energy company’s Maximo move to AWS:

Used Infra as a code to upgrade Maximo from 7.6.0.9 to 7.6.1.2.

IaC allowed instance spin-up for auto scaling. This automation reduces the time to spin up and execute the new environment and addresses multi-AWS availability zone deployment latency.

Used AWS DMS for data migration and schema conversion.

IaC spun the DR environment on demand to reduce database replication (DR) infrastructure and expense. DR capabilities update data in availability zone and DR area.

Achieved data exchange across applications using IBM Cloud Pak for Data and standardized integration using IBM Cloud Pak for Integration components.

Solution components

Maximum Enterprise Application Management (EAM) has a 3-tier design with these components:

HTTP/Web Tier and Application Tier using IBM WebSphere and HIS installed EC2 instance under private subnet for application security.

Database Tier uses AWS Oracle RDS with replication for DR under private subnet.

AWS best practices were used to configure VPC with public and private subnets.

Application servers and deployment manager were autoscaled by Auto Scaling Group.

Maximum web-based UI resolution for external access using AWS Route 53.

WAF was the initial line of defense against web exploits.

Integration of Terraform and CFT IaC scripts provided autoscaling architecture.

AWS Reference Architecture

Max on RedHat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) helps clients

Containerized MAS 8.0 runs on RedHat OpenShift. AWS, IBM, and RedHat developed an IBM MAS on ROSA reference architecture to help customers inexperienced with production containerization. ROSA, a fully managed, turnkey application platform, supports IBM MAS configuration and offloads cluster lifecycle management to RedHat and AWS, allowing organizations to focus on application deployment and innovation. This means IBM MAS clients don’t need to develop, administer, or maintain RedHat OpenShift clusters.

Operating Model and Maximo Migration

Top 3 Maximo AWS migration accelerators

Clients can migrate to the cloud using three IBM MAS deployment methods on AWS Cloud:

ROSA-powered MAS SaaS on AWS

ROSA-powered AWS MAS

Customer-hosted ROSA

Why use customer-hosted ROSA

The customer-hosted ROSA option for hosting IBM MAS in a customer’s VPC with ROSA is powerful. ROSA is perfect for MAS deployments because it seamlessly deploys, scales, and manages containerized applications.

The benefits of this choice are enormous. Full control over the infrastructure while still subject to the organization’s monitoring, controls, and governance standards allows businesses to customize and adjust the environment to their needs. This control includes adding MAS integrations and enforcing cloud security and governance requirements. ROSA charges are combined into one AWS bill and drawn from any AWS enterprise agreement, simplifying financial management.

AWS enterprise agreements and Compute Savings Plans offer infrastructure savings for MAS implementations. Because the ROSA cluster operates under the customer’s AWS account, customers can buy upfront ROSA contracts and get a one-year or three-year ROSA service charge discount.

Why IBM for Maximo AWS migration?

Any modernization effort must include cloud migration. Cloud migration is not a one-size-fits-all method, and each organization faces unique cloud adoption difficulties.

IBM Consulting’s Application Modernization offering helps clients migrate and modernize AWS applications faster, cheaper, and more efficiently, reducing technical debt and accelerating digital initiatives while minimizing business risk and improving business agility.

IBM offers unique cloud migration services to accelerate customer application migration to AWS:

Cloud migration factory capabilities including proven frameworks and processes, automation, migrating templates, security policies, and AWS-specific migration squads speed up delivery.

IBM Garage Methodology, IBM’s cloud services delivery capabilities, ROSA, and AWS Migration tools and accelerators accelerate migration and cloud adoption.

ICCA, IBM’s proprietary framework for migration and modernization, reduces risk. ICCA for AWS Cloud automates various modernization procedures, simplifying and speeding up company agility. Before investing, businesses can plan migration and modernization strategies. Discover IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator for AWS Cloud.

Our well-defined pattern-based migration methodology includes re-factor, re-platform, and containerization using AWS managed services and industry-leading tools to remove and optimize technical debt.

Finally, IBM offers customizable t-shirt-sized price models for small, medium, and large migration sizes, ensuring clients’ migration scope is obvious.

IBM helps clients migrate applications, like Maximo to AWS Cloud

In conclusion, clients seek IBM’s expertise to:

1.Upgrade Maximo 7.6x (expiring 2025) to MAS 8.

2.On-premise workload to AWS Cloud for elastic, scalable, and highly available infrastructure and runtime

IBM Consulting can help

AWS Premier Partner IBM Consulting accelerates hybrid cloud journeys on the AWS Cloud by leveraging business and IT transformation skills, processes, and tools from many industries. On AWS Cloud, IBM’s security, enterprise scalability, and open innovation with Red Hat OpenShift enable enterprises grow swiftly.

BM Consulting develops cloud-native apps in AWS Cloud with 21,000+ AWS-certified cloud practitioners, 17 validated SDD programs, and 16 AWS competencies. IBM Consulting is the best AWS partner due to acquisitions like Nordcloud and Taos, advancements at IBM Research, and co-development with AWS.

Read more on Govindhtech.com

#govindhtech #technology #technews #news #ai #ibm #aws #ibm maximo #hybridcloud #oracle #redhat

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randombusinessoflawthoughts · 10 months

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'Customer service' vs 'Customer experience'

Ever wondered if there is a difference between ‘customer service’ and ‘customer experience’? I was fortunate enough to come across this quote by Paul Roberts, CEO at My Customer Lens that, frankly, sums it up better than anyone else I have seen lately: “It’s important to define the difference between customer service and customer experience. I like to define customer service as what you do, and…

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#Auslaw issues #BizDevTip #Australian law firms #business development #customer experience #cx #Global law firm issues #Law firm #law firm management #law firms #legal services #PSFs #strategy #ux

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nicklloydnow · 9 months

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“Still the arrangement is bringing new attention to the company’s scale and ubiquity. “It’s impossible to think of BlackRock without thinking of them as a fourth branch of government,” says William Birdthistle, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law who studies the fund industry.

(…)

There’s probably no other financial institution that brings to the table what BlackRock does. It’s experienced in running large portfolios on behalf of others. It’s ubiquitous in markets for everything from passive, index-linked products to hands-on mutual funds, with $6.5 trillion in assets under management as of March 31. It’s the largest issuer of ETFs, which act like mutual funds but trade on an exchange. It actively manages more than $625 billion in bond funds for pension plans and other institutional clients. Almost anyone looking to buy a diverse portfolio quickly would consider BlackRock—and the Fed did the same. In a virtual hearing of the Senate Banking Committee on May 19, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said BlackRock was hired for its expertise and “it was done very quickly due to the urgency” of the matter.

Beyond money management, BlackRock’s software platform, Aladdin, appealed to the Fed. The program evaluates risk for clients that include governments, insurers, and rival wealth managers, monitoring more than $20 trillion in assets. (Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, sells financial software that competes with Aladdin.)

BlackRock has ascended to speed-dial status among Washington officialdom in part through shrewd business maneuvering. It scooped up Barclays Global Investors, including its iShares ETF division, in the fallout from the 2008 crisis. That gave BlackRock a stronghold in low-cost index funds, transforming it into the world’s largest asset manager almost overnight—and supercharging more than a decade of growth.

At the same time, the money manager built a powerful advocacy arm. Its sphere of influence reaches beyond the central bank to lawmakers, presidents, and government agency heads from both political parties, though its hiring leans Democratic. Bloomberg found only a handful of current BlackRock executives who came out of the George W. Bush administration, but more than a dozen Barack Obama alumni. These include Obama’s national security adviser, senior adviser for climate policy, the former Federal Reserve vice chairman he appointed, and numerous White House, Treasury, and Fed economists.

(…)

BlackRock, however, was handed three Fed assignments without any competitive process—though the Fed plans to rebid the contracts once the programs are in full swing. BlackRock will manage portfolios of corporate bonds and debt ETFs. It will do the same for newly issued bonds—sometimes acting as the sole buyer—and for up to 25% of bank-syndicated loans. And it will purchase commercial mortgage-backed securities from quasi-government agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

BlackRock could reap as much as $48 million a year in fees for its Fed work, according to a Bloomberg analysis. That’s no windfall, especially in relation to its $4.5 billion in earnings last year. But it may further cement the money manager’s ties with policymakers. On May 12, BlackRock began the first stage of these programs when it began buying ETFs.

As with technology companies Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc., BlackRock’s growth raises questions over how big and useful a company can become before its size poses a risk. The firm has long argued that, unlike banks, it’s not making investments for itself with tons of borrowed money. Watching over large sums of money for clients doesn’t make its business a threat to the broader financial system.

With its latest assignment, that argument could be harder to make, says Graham Steele, director of the Corporations and Society Initiative at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “They are so intertwined in the market and government that it’s a really interesting tangle of conflicts,” says Steele, who formerly worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “In the advocacy community there’s an opinion that asset managers, and this one in particular, need greater oversight.”

Already there are growing worries about the power of BlackRock, Vanguard Group Inc., and State Street, often called the Big Three because they hold about 80% of all indexed money. That raises concerns about how they wield their voting power as shareholders and has even drawn attention from antitrust officials.

(…)

And then there are the potential conflicts. One arm of BlackRock knows what the Fed is buying, while other parts of the business participating in credit markets could benefit from that knowledge. To avoid conflicts, “there are stringent information barriers in place,” says the BlackRock spokesman. BlackRock employees working on the Fed programs must segregate their operations from all other units, including trading, brokerage, and sales. The fee waiver on ETFs helps avoid the appearance of self-dealing.

But BlackRock’s contract with the Fed also acknowledges that senior executives “may sit atop of the information barrier” and “have access to confidential information on one side of a wall while carrying out duties on the other side.” Staff working on the Fed programs must go through a cooling-off period before moving to jobs on the corporate side, but it would last only two weeks.

Birdthistle, the Chicago-Kent law professor, suggests the Fed could have made its process more competitive by allocating some of its funds for buying corporate credit to a group of asset managers from the outset, instead of just one. “It raises the question: Why did all the money have to go to one company?” he asks. “I get why BlackRock would be on the list, but I don’t understand why it would be the only one on the list.””

#blackrock #fink #larry fink #government #wall street

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ukrainenews · 2 years

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Daily Wrap Up July 19, 2022

Under the cut:

The Biden administration is putting $100 million into a new program to provide Ukrainian farmers with vital supplies in order to maintain future harvests and alleviate the global food security crisis that has been exasperated by Russia's war on the country

Russian gas flows via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline are seen restarting on time on Thursday after the completion of scheduled maintenance, two sources familiar with the export plans told Reuters

U.S. President Joe Biden, with flowers in hand, and first lady Jill Biden welcomed Ukraine's first lady, Olena Zelenska, to the White House on Tuesday for a visit ahead of her address to Congress on Wednesday

The European Union is set to add Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, and the head of giant zinc and copper firm UMMC to its blacklist of individuals and companies accused of supporting Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine

The mayor of Mykolaiv, Oleksandr Sienkevych, said the number of missiles being fired at the southern city on a daily basis far exceeds what its air defenses can deal with

“The Biden administration is putting $100 million into a new program to provide Ukrainian farmers with vital supplies in order to maintain future harvests and alleviate the global food security crisis that has been exasperated by Russia's war on the country.

Some Ukrainian farms have turned into battlefields and farmers who have maintained their harvests have been unable to get machinery and other key supplies including fertilizer, seeds and storage bins that would typically arrive through Black Sea ports. Ukraine — the world's fourth-largest exporter of corn and the fifth-largest exporter of wheat — has also been largely unable to export their agricultural products due to Russia's invasion.

The initiative will also include financing for farmers who are facing rising prices at a time their incomes have been severely hit.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has already been working with more than 8,000 Ukrainian farmers to get the inputs they need to bolster their yields and the new Ukraine Agriculture Resilience Initiative (AGRI-Ukraine) effort will expend those efforts.”-via CNN

“Russian gas flows via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline are seen restarting on time on Thursday after the completion of scheduled maintenance, two sources familiar with the export plans told Reuters.

The pipeline, which accounts for more than a third of Russian natural gas exports to the European Union, was halted for ten days of annual maintenance on July 11.

The sources, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, told Reuters the pipeline was expected to resume operation on time, but at less than its capacity of some 160 million cubic metres (mcm) per day.”-via Reuters (this article comes with the note “This content was produced in Russia where the law restricts coverage of Russian military operations in Ukraine”)

“U.S. President Joe Biden, with flowers in hand, and first lady Jill Biden welcomed Ukraine's first lady, Olena Zelenska, to the White House on Tuesday for a visit ahead of her address to Congress on Wednesday.

Zelenska, the wife of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, embraced Jill Biden and received the flowers from the president, who met her vehicle outside.

Afterwards, the two women and delegations from both countries sat down for a meeting in the White House Blue Room.

Jill Biden had made a surprise visit to Ukraine, which Russia invaded on Feb. 24, in May, visiting her counterpart and a school that was sheltering displaced Ukrainians.

Zelenskiy later said he expected "significant results" from his wife's meetings in Washington.

Her tasks include increasing U.S. support for Ukraine, obtaining additional support to "protect people from Russian terror" and boosting humanitarian assistance, he said in a late-night video address.”-via Reuters

“The European Union is set to add Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, and the head of giant zinc and copper firm UMMC to its blacklist of individuals and companies accused of supporting Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, according a draft document seen by Reuters.

The new list of 48 officials and nine entities to be blacklisted, prepared by the EU foreign affairs service, also includes leaders of the Night Wolves motorcycle club, actors, politicians, the deputy head of a Russian security service, family members of sanctioned oligarchs and military people.

Adding Sberbank to the blacklist would freeze its assets in the west and completely prevent transactions, with the exception of financial operations for the trade in food and fertiliser, an EU official told Reuters.”-via The Guardian

“The mayor of Mykolaiv, Oleksandr Sienkevych, said the number of missiles being fired at the southern city on a daily basis far exceeds what its air defenses can deal with.

Sienkevych said in a news conference Tuesday that "for several weeks, the city has been shelled every morning."

"Therefore, it is better to leave the city to save (lives)," he added.

Russia has recently resorted to using S-300 missiles — which are normally anti-air weapons — against Mykolaiv.

He said there are 230,000 residents in the city — about half of the pre-war population. Most of those who remain are the elderly, he said.”-via CNN

#Daily Update #Ukraine #Russia #War in Ukraine #Mykolaiv #EU #Sberbank #US

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beardedmrbean · 7 months

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The EU has warned Mark Zuckerberg over the spread of "disinformation" on Meta's social media platforms after Hamas' attack on Israel.

It told Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, it "has 24 hours" to take action and comply with European law.

Social media firms have seen a surge in misinformation about the conflict, including doctored images and mislabelled videos.

On Tuesday the EU warned X, formerly known as Twitter, about such content.

The bloc's industry chief, Thierry Breton, told Meta it must prove it has taken "timely, diligent and objective action".

In a letter, he said the firm had 24 hours to tell him about the "proportionate and effective" measures it had taken to counter the spread of disinformation on its platforms.

The European Commission meanwhile reminded all social media companies that they are legally required to prevent the spread of harmful content related to Palestinian militant group Hamas, which is a proscribed terrorist group in the EU.

"Content circulating online that can be associated to Hamas qualifies as terrorist content, is illegal, and needs to be removed under both the Digital Services Act and Terrorist Content Online Regulation," a Commission spokesperson said.

Musk warning

On Tuesday, Mr Breton wrote in a letter to Mr Musk that "violent and terrorist content" had not been taken down from X, despite warnings.

Mr Musk said his company had taken action, including by removing newly-created Hamas-affiliated accounts.

He asked the EU to list the alleged violations.

Mr Breton did not give details on the disinformation he was referring to in his letter to Mr Musk.

However, he said that instances of "fake and manipulated images and facts" were widely reported on the social media platform.

"I therefore invite you to urgently ensure that your systems are effective, and report on the crisis measures taken to my team," he wrote in his letter which he shared on social media.

The interventions come days after the Hamas launched an attack on Israel, killing hundreds of residents and taking dozens of hostages.

In response, Israeli forces have launched waves of missile strikes on Gaza which have killed more than 900 people.

In his response on X, Mr Musk said: "Our policy is that everything is open and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports.

"Please list the violations you allude to on X, so that the public can see them."

Mr Breton said that Mr Musk was "well aware of your users' - and authorities' - reports on fake content and glorification of violence", adding that it was up to him to "demonstrate that you walk the talk".

The EU Digital Services Act (DSA) is designed to protect users of big tech platforms.

It became law last November but firms were given time to make sure their systems complied.

On 25 April, the commission named the very large online platforms - those with over 45 million EU users - that would be subject to the toughest rules, among them X. The law came into effect four months later in August.

Under the tougher rules, larger firms have to assess potential risks they may cause, report that assessment and put in place measures to deal with the problem.

Failure to comply with the DSA can result in EU fines of as much as 6% of a company's global turnover, or potentially suspension of the service.

Mr Musk dissolved Twitter's Trust and Safety Council shortly after acquiring the company in 2022. Formed in 2016, the volunteer council contained about 100 independent groups who advised on issues such as self-harm, child abuse and hate speech.

#nunyas news

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hamzaaslam · 11 months

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ROSEN, RECOGNIZED INVESTOR COUNSEL, Encourages Xponential Fitness, Inc. Investors With Losses to Inquire About Securities Class Action Investigation - XPOF

New York, New York – Newsfile Corp. – July 2, 2023 – WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, announces an investigation of potential securities claims on behalf of shareholders of Xponential Fitness, Inc. (NYSE: XPOF) resulting from allegations that Xponential Fitness may have issued materially misleading business information to the investing public. SO WHAT: If you purchased…

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mariacallous · 6 months

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The UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, says it is prepared to “disrupt” tech platforms that don’t comply with the country’s controversial new Online Safety Act, including cutting them off from payment systems or even blocking them from the UK.

The act—a sprawling piece of legislation that covers a spectrum of issues, from how technology platforms should protect children from abuse to scam advertising and terrorist content—became law in October. Today, the regulator released its first round of proposals for how the act will be implemented and what technology companies will need to do to comply.

The proposed regulations would compel Big Tech companies to tackle avenues for grooming children for abuse on their platforms, and to have “adequate” trust and safety teams to limit the spread of harmful content. Companies will also have to name an individual in the UK who can be held personally accountable for violations.

“Our supervision activity starts today,” says Gill Whitehead, a former Google executive who now heads Ofcom’s Online Safety Group. “From today, we will be supervising, one-to-one, the largest firms and the firms that we think may have the highest risks of certain types of illegal harms … The tech firms need to step up and really take action.”

Ofcom’s proposals give some clarity over what tech companies will need to do to avoid penalties for breaching the act, which could include fines of up to 10 percent of their global revenue and criminal charges for executives. But the proposals are unlikely to reassure messaging platforms and online privacy advocates, who say that the act will compel platforms to undermine end-to-end encryption and create backdoors into their services, opening them up to privacy violations and security risks.

In defending the Online Safety Act, the government and its backers have portrayed it as essential to protecting children online. Ofcom’s first tranche of proposals, which will be followed by more consultations stretching into 2024, focus heavily on limiting minors’ access to disturbing or dangerous content, and on preventing them from being groomed by potential abusers.

Ofcom says its research shows that three out of five children between the ages 11 and 18 in the UK have received unwanted approaches that made them feel uncomfortable online, and that one in six have been sent or been asked to share naked or semi-naked images. “Scattergun” friend requests are used by adults looking to groom children for abuse, Whitehead says. Under Ofcom’s proposals, companies would need to take steps to prevent children from being approached by people outside of their immediate networks, including making it impossible for accounts they’re not connected to to send them direct messages. Their friend lists would be hidden from other users, and they wouldn’t appear in their own connections’ lists.

To comply with this is likely to mean that platforms and websites will need to improve their ability to verify users’ ages, which will mean collecting more data on the people accessing their services. Wikipedia has said that it may have to block access for UK users, because complying would “violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors.” Companies in the UK are already subject to some regulations that require them to, for example, prevent underage people from accessing adverts for age-restricted products, but have previously struggled to implement so-called age-gating services that are acceptable to both regulators and customers, according to Geraint Lloyd-Taylor, a partner at the law firm Lewis Silkin. “There does need to be a focus on solutions, not just identifying the problems.” Lloyd-Taylor says.

Whitehead says that Ofcom would be putting out more detail about specific approaches to age verification in another consultation next month.

One of the most controversial clauses of the Online Safety Act dictates that companies that offer peer-to-peer communications, such as messenger apps like WhatsApp, must take steps to ensure that their services aren’t used to transmit child sexual abuse material (CSAM). That means that companies need to find a way to scan or search the content of users’ messages, something that security experts and tech executives say is impossible without breaking the end-to-end encryption that is used to keep the platforms private.

Under end-to-end encryption, only the sender and recipient of a message can view its content—even the operator of the platform cannot decrypt it. To meet the requirements under the act, platforms would have to be able to look at users’ messages, most likely using so-called client-side scanning, essentially viewing the message at the device level—something that privacy activists have equated to putting spyware on a user’s phone. That, they say, creates a backdoor that could be exploited by security services or cybercriminals.

“Let’s assume the UK government is completely virtuous. And assume that they will use this technology only for its intended purpose. It doesn’t matter because … you can’t stop other actors from using it if they hack you,” says Harry Halpin, CEO and founder of the privacy technology company NYM. “Which means not only will the UK government be reading your messages and have access to your device, but so will foreign governments and cybercriminals.”

Meta’s WhatsApp messaging service, as well as the encrypted platform Signal, threatened to leave the UK over the proposals.

Ofcom’s proposed rules say that public platforms—those that aren’t encrypted—should use “hash matching” to identify CSAM. That technology, which is already used by Google and others, compares images to a preexisting database of illegal images using cryptographic hashes—essentially, encrypted identity codes. Advocates of the technology, including child protection NGOs, have argued that this preserves users’ privacy as it doesn’t mean actively looking at their images, merely comparing hashes. Critics say that it’s not necessarily effective, as it’s relatively easy to deceive the system. “You only have to change one pixel and the hash changes completely,” Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, told WIRED in September, before the act became law.

It is unlikely that the same technology could be used in private, end-to-end encrypted communications without undermining those protections.

In 2021, Apple said it was building a “privacy preserving” CSAM detection tool for iCloud, based on hash matching. In December last year, it abandoned the initiative, later saying that scanning users’ private iCloud data would create security risks and “inject the potential for a slippery slope of unintended consequences. Scanning for one type of content, for instance, opens the door for bulk surveillance and could create a desire to search other encrypted messaging systems across content types.”

Andy Yen, founder and CEO of Proton, which offers secure email, browsing and other services, says that discussions about the use of hash matching are a positive step “compared to where the Online Safety [Act] started.”

“While we still need clarity on the exact requirements for where hash matching will be required, this is a victory for privacy,” Yen says. But, he adds, “hash matching is not the privacy-protecting silver bullet that some might claim it is and we are concerned about the potential impacts on file sharing and storage services…Hash matching would be a fudge that poses other risks.”

The hash-matching rule would apply only to public services, not private messengers, according to Whitehead. But “for those [encrypted] services, what we are saying is: ‘Your safety duties still apply,’” she says. These platforms will have to deploy or develop “accredited” technology to limit the spread of CSAM, and further consultations will take place next year.

“Encrypted services carry a higher risk of child sexual abuse material being shared across their platforms, and for services who choose to run their messaging services and file-sharing services encrypted, they now still have to comply with safety duties,” she says—putting significant emphasis on the word “choose.”

Today’s proposed rules also state that technology platforms will need to have clear pathways for users to report harmful content, or to block or report problematic accounts. Companies that use algorithms to recommend content to their users will need to conduct safety tests. And they will need to have “well-resourced and trained” content- and search-moderation teams to manage what goes on on their platforms.

The act applies to any company that has users in the UK, even those without headquarters in the country. Whitehead says she thinks that the size of the UK market means that companies will have a strong incentive to comply. Those that don’t could face serious consequences.

“We have strong enforcement powers in those situations. We have the power to fine up to 10 percent of global turnover, we have the power to prosecute senior managers, and we have the power to disrupt services,” Whitehead says. Blocking platforms isn’t a first resort, she adds—the regulator would rather “make contact with services and work with them to compliance,” but it is an option. “We do have those powers,” she says.

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