> Google says it is in the process of removing the "state" designation from Canadian government buildings, as well as provincial parks, following widespread backlash. > > On Monday, the company said it would be updating its categorization of provincial parks after receiving hundreds of complaints over the weekend from Canadians upset about the designation. > > Although the locations were titled "provincial park" in large text, in small print, many across the country were labelled as "state parks" — a longstanding practice, according to the company. > > However, that language came under increased scrutiny in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump's repeated threat that he wants to annex Canada against the wishes of Canada's political leaders and widespread public opinion.

> As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella presented new products at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, a group of employees positioned themselves about 15 feet to his right. They then unveiled T-shirts which spelled out the question: “Does Our Code Kill Kids, Satya?” > > Photos and videos of the protest, which was live-streamed across Microsoft, show CEO Satya Nadella continuing his speech without acknowledging the demonstrators. Two men quickly approached the protesting employees and escorted them out of the room. > > Microsoft defended its actions in a statement, saying: “We provide many avenues for all voices to be heard. Importantly, we ask that this be done in a way that does not cause a business disruption. If that happens, we ask participants to relocate. We are committed to ensuring our business practices uphold the highest standards.”

> In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.

Edit: I changed the link to the official source.

> Governments frequently disagree over the names of places. Here’s how mapping apps have dealt with various feuds.

> A sustained campaign by U.S. authorities has led to the seizure of a growing number of pirate sports streaming domains. The IPR Center is now listed as the owner of dozens of .DEV domains, which were signed over as part of the seizure operation. Previously, close to a hundred .APP domains linked to piracy suffered the same fate.

> Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Ocelot, a new quantum computing chip that can reduce the costs of implementing quantum error correction by up to 90%, compared to current approaches. Developed by the team at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at the California Institute of Technology, Ocelot represents a breakthrough in the pursuit to build fault-tolerant quantum computers capable of solving problems of commercial and scientific importance that are beyond the reach of today’s conventional computers.

This is very interesting:

> After pulling 250,000 mentions of 30 different search engines from 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” /pol/ board, we identified 1,218 comments that both mentioned at least three search engines and recommended one or more search engines. Comments meeting these criteria appeared an average of 15 times per month between January 2018 and July 2024. Figure 1 displays the monthly mentions of each search engine in the 1,218 /pol/ comments in this same time period. We have noted that spikes in comparisons occurred at the onset of the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and during the vaccine rollout in the spring of 2021. Much of the 2020 spike was driven by a thread titled “The Great Jewtube Exodus,” which was reposted 45 times between March 7 and March 23, 2020.7 In each reposting, the author encouraged others to use Yandex, Bing, Startpage, or Brave Search instead of Google. These threads repeatedly resulted in conversations about search engine quality in the comments.

> It may seem like AI chatbots are taking over every digital application, whether we like it or not. You might have noticed more AI note-taking bots in online conferencing platforms, some of which offer end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Then Apple Intelligence plans were announced, promising application redesigns to offer AI features across its phone and laptop operating systems. The latest changes have come from Meta AI’s integration in WhatsApp, replete with “bots nobody wants.” > > Any time new features are added to an E2EE messaging app, it raises concerns about privacy and security. So, what concerns are raised by the addition of AI bots? How can we evaluate those concerns? As AI becomes more embedded into encrypted services, is it possible to resolve the tension between the privacy users expect from E2EE and the data access needed for AI functionality? With our colleagues at Cornell and NYU, we set out to answer these questions. > > We uncovered several facets of this question from both a technical and legal perspective and published a paper laying practical recommendations for E2EE messaging platforms and regulators. It’s also important that we outline the practical solutions and recommendations for the public. You can read the full preprint paper here.

> In short: > > Meta has removed a page that published two dozen sexually graphic ads that were able to circumvent the platform's auto-review process. > > An ABC NEWS Verify analysis of the ads has linked them to a dubious store that is hawking erectile dysfunction supplements and is filled with deceptive practices. > > What's next? > > The eSafety Commissioner's office asked the social media industry to include proposed safety measures against pornographic materials in draft codes to the commissioner by February 28.

I have a side question here, does pirating this platform is legal?

I am asking because AI can not generate a IP or own a one in the US.

> Most homebuyers get to know the people who live next door after they move in. But a new real estate app allows future homebuyers to learn a potential neighbor’s political leanings before they make what, for many people, is the biggest purchase of their life.

> A renewed attempt to introduce site blocking in the U.S. emerged in late January when U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D) introduced the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act. The FADPA bill received the MPA's full support, and it now transpires that similar legislation is being prepared by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R). A recent meeting to discuss the 'American Copyright Protection Act' was attended by Disney, Paramount, and Amazon, plus Google, YouTube, and Verizon.

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> Flock Safety loves to crow about the thousands of local law enforcement agencies around the United States that have adopted its avian-themed automated license plate readers (ALPRs). But when a privacy activist launched a website to map out the exact locations of these pole-mounted devices, the company tried to clip his wings.

> A first-of-its-kind policy allows Chinese firms to treat data as an asset, but compliance hurdles are keeping many companies on the sidelines.

> - The government has allowed all Chinese companies to register data as assets on their balance sheets. > - Adoption of the policy has been slow, with only a small percentage of companies logging data as assets. > - Compliance hurdles are high, but China’s experiment could potentially shape global accounting norms.

Inocencia en Juego: An Investigation into Groups Targeting Children on Facebook

> I am a professor of Latin American history and Director of the Civic Resilience Initiative of the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security at the University of Pittsburgh. I am also a mother of four: my older children were born and raised in Costa Rica, where we lived for nearly a decade and I taught at the main public university. In my research, I study various phenomena related to social media. In 2022, I published an account of my failed efforts to get Facebook to remove public Spanish-language groups in which children were being openly targeted for online sexual exploitation in Wired. > > Eventually, in the months after publication, those specific groups disappeared. However, in 2023, I stumbled into a new set of public groups permeated by the same type of content. These were framed as fan groups for the Mexico kid hip-hop trio Los Picus. I wrote an initial report on the phenomenon in Tech Policy Press last January. > > In this update and extension of that work, I report that the scope of the problem is far greater than I had initially found, encompassing multiple different fandoms and many dozens of public Facebook groups with over two and a half million members. Groups that center around popular celebrities, such as YouTube stars Mau McMahon and Karla Bustillos and the child members of their household; Phoenix, Arizona-born teen entertainer Xavi; and K-Pop stars, become host to what appears to be child predation. > > The groups I have identified likely represent just a fraction of the problem. In addition to my own research, over the past few months, five journalists in Spanish-language news organizations in Latin America, coordinated by the investigative journalism consortium El CLIP, looked into these phenomena. Today, they published their reports in El CLIP, Chequeado, Crónica Uno, El Espectador, and Factchequeado. Their reporting indicates that this problem extends to even further Facebook groups—many not associated with any fandom, but rather branded as places to discuss teen issues— that the legislation in the countries investigated is often insufficient to deal with this sort of digital grooming, and that Meta collaborates too little with local authorities to try to curb this behavior. > > In this report, I use the fact that posters in these Facebook groups sometimes ask participants to post their age and country of origin to provide rough quantitative data on the regional spread of stated ages and national origin. Numerous accounts in these groups identify themselves as children from Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, with others from across the hemisphere. Accounts identifying as children as young as 7 and 8 are present, and 10, 11, and 12-year-olds are common. > > Towards the end of this report, I look in detail at some of the interactions in comments within these—again, fully public—groups to describe some forms of emotional luring and manipulation that very young Spanish-speaking Facebook users are apparently subject to. > > We presented a range of questions to Meta about these phenomena. A Meta spokesperson responded with a statement and provided a link to Meta’s proactive steps to address these and similar phenomena: > > Child exploitation is a horrific crime. We work aggressively to fight it on and off our platforms and to support law enforcement in its efforts to arrest and prosecute the criminals behind it. Our policies prohibit child exploitation, inappropriate interactions with children, and the sexualization of minors; these rules apply globally, in different languages, including English and Spanish, and across each of our platforms. While predators constantly change their tactics to evade detection, our global teams and tools work to identify and quickly remove violating content. > > Please note that the report below contains disturbing descriptions and screenshots of posts and interactions involving accounts identifying as children. These images have been edited to remove any information that could be used to identify a particular account or user identity.

> Following the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France last summer, some positive changes were reported. The criminal probe is not centered on piracy, but Telegram appeared more responsive. Some reported that the speed at which takedown requests were processed, went from more than 24 hours to less than 20 minutes, for example. > > In addition, Telegram updated its terms of service and privacy policy to clarify that, going forward, personal details of alleged infringers, including their IP addresses, would be handed over in response to valid legal requests.

> This stricter policy was evident to outsiders as well. Telegram removed accounts of piracy associated websites and services, after initially leaving these untouched for years. That included the official Z-Library channel, which had more than half a million subscribers at its peak. > > Although Z-Library’s communication channel didn’t directly link to pirated books, it served as a key information hub, providing updates on new features and access methods. That was enough to warrant a permanent suspension last month. > > The Telegram ban was a setback for Z-Library, but the shadow library wasted no time creating a new account and regaining tens of thousands of subscribers. Progress ground to a halt last weekend when the ‘new’ @zlibrary_news account was also suspended for copyright infringement. > > “The channel is unavailable due to copyright infringement,” Telegram reports. > > !The channel is unavailable due to copyright infringement. > > In addition to the main communication channel, one of the most used Z-Library download bots on Telegram was also taken offline. The @1lib account had more than 20,000 monthly users, who presumably used it as a handy tool to download books for free. > > According to a Z-Library representative posting on X, Telegram took action in response to complaints from a major publisher. Many other ‘personal’ bots are unaffected and remain online for the time being. > > !