"It is clear that the US can no longer be regarded as a reliable ally for the Europeans. But the Trump administration’s political ambitions for Europe mean that, for now, America is also an adversary — threatening democracy in Europe and even European territory, in the case of Greenland.
So what to do? Europeans need to start preparing fast for the day when the US security guarantee to Europe is definitively removed. That must involve building up autonomous defence industries. It should also mean a European mutual defence pact, outside Nato, that extends beyond the EU — to include Britain, Norway and others.
Trump will use any leverage he has to force America’s European allies into compliance on issues from trade and security to their domestic politics. That means that Europe must now start the painful process of “de-risking” its relationship with the US, looking for areas of dangerous dependence on America and stripping them out of the system.
Entrusting critical infrastructure to Musk would create a huge new vulnerability. The Trump administration will also put enormous pressure on Europeans to buy more American weaponry. Under current circumstances that would be folly."
https://www.ft.com/content/11f121f9-391c-4597-93f7-f12894e1b79d
#USA #Musk #NATO #EU Europe #Russia #Putin
MEGAGAMANÇO / MEGATHEFT:
"As the world’s richest man pitches himself as the savior of the American taxpayer, the companies he runs are raking in more federal dollars.
This past Sunday, Tesla finalized a deal to sell 430 megawatts of batteries to Genera, the private company that now operates Puerto Rico’s power plants, for $767 million. The contract, first brokered in October before the election, will be “fully financed with federal funds,” according to a press release.
On Monday, SpaceX netted another $7.5 million supplemental contract with NASA, bringing the total value of that particular deal with Musk’s private rocket firm to $38 million. That’s on top of the more than $4 billion NASA is already paying SpaceX."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/elon-musk-doge-federal-contracts-conflict-interest/
#USA #Musk #NASA #Tesla #Kleptocracy
This Musk guy is so, but so idiotic that he doesn't even know that most of the source of US soft power throughout the world was the funding by the CIA and other federal agencies of cultural activities like jazz shows and art festivals in Europe and Africa. He is a complete and total PHILISTINE. To hell with this guy! I don't want no intellectual retards imposing their will on the world.
"The capture shows that the site contains a list of vague, alleged government-funded tasks and their costs, without sources or context, like “$1.3 million to Arab and Jewish photographers," “$1.5 million for ‘art for inclusion of people with disabilities,’” and "$3.4 million for Malaysian drug-fueled gay sex app.” DEI.gov redirects to waste.gov and is currently inaccessible without a password; Elon Musk told reporters on Tuesday that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is “trying to be as transparent as possible.”
The researcher is Henrik Schönemann, a historian who started the Safeguarding Research & Culture archivalist project, posted screenshots on Mastodon showing the contents. Schönemann also shared the specific site scrapes that he was able to capture, which showed the contents of the site. He told 404 Media he set up a change detection app using PikaPods, and is monitoring changes across hundreds of government websites. When the dei.gov and waste.gov sites were registered 10 days ago, he started tracking them, too.
Before the site administrators added a Wordpress template to the pages, the list was online at those URLs. This list was only online for a maximum of 30 minutes, starting around 4:50 p.m. EST; by 5:23 p.m. on February 11, it was gone from public view, according to the snapshots Schönemann’s app captured."
https://www.404media.co/dei-waste-gov-doge-list-behind-password/
#USA #CyberSecurity #Musk #DOGE #DataProtection
"A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making. Musk’s program has already halted operations altogether at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was responsible for more than forty billion dollars in foreign aid in 2023, and at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that may have drawn Musk’s special notice for its track record of suing tech companies for deploying loosely regulated technology. Trump and Musk both love to blame the country’s problems on the so-called deep state, the federal employees who maintain the government’s day-to-day operations. As many of those people now find themselves locked out of their offices, with their work phones deactivated, a new, inherently undemocratic deep state is moving in to fill the void: a system imposed by machines and the tiny élite who designed them. With DOGE, Musk is not only sidelining Congress and threatening to defy the courts, helping to bring the country to the point of constitutional crisis; he is also smuggling into our federal bureaucracy the seeds of a new authoritarian regime—techno-fascism by chatbot."
#USA #AI #GenerativeAI #Musk #DOGE
"In this course, you will:
📖 Study AI Agents in theory, design, and practice.
🧑💻 Learn to use established AI Agent libraries such as smolagents, LangChain, and LlamaIndex.
💾 Share your agents on the Hugging Face Hub and explore agents created by the community.
🏆 Participate in challenges where you will evaluate your agents against other students’.
🎓 Earn a certificate of completion by completing assignments.
And more!
At the end of this course you’ll understand how Agents work and how to build your own Agents using the latest libraries and tools."
https://huggingface.co/learn/agents-course/unit0/introduction
#AI #AIAgents #LLMs #Smolagents #LangChain
"The problem, I believe, is that the tech media has become poisoned by a mixture of ignorance and cynical optimism where the narratives are driven not by any particular interest or domain expertise, but by whatever they believe the market (or the powerful people they admire) would like it to be.
I know for a fact that the senior editorial staff handling technology at multiple major mainstream publications do not really care about, understand or have any real interest in tech other than a vague attachment to the idea that it’s “important, somehow.” As a result, mainstream tech coverage is focused on market effects (like artificial intelligence, or whatever other “thing” everybody wants to read about) rather than directing coverage from the perspective of “what things are happening to people in real life as a result of technology.”
I also think that the tech media has been infiltrated and controlled by people that want to be famous or associated with famous people. They want them to win. They want a benevolent dictator. They want their products to do well so that they can get the interview with the big-name founder or CEO on stage at a conference. They want access to them for interviews, and they want to make sure they get the first look at their next product release. While one might argue that “people want to hear about AI,” what people want to hear about is largely driven by the narratives the media agrees upon."
https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-were-fighting-for/
#BigTech #RotEconomy #Enshittification #Technology #TechJournalism #Media #News
NeoStalinism, Maoism, or just plain Idiocracism?
"The Trump administration is still prohibiting National Institutes of Health (NIH) staff from issuing virtually all grant funding, an NIH official tells Popular Information. The ongoing funding freeze is also reflected in internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information and was reiterated to staff in a meeting on Monday. The funding freeze at NIH violates two federal court injunctions, two legal experts said.
The funding freeze at NIH puts all of the research the agency funds at risk. As the primary funder of biomedical research in the United States, NIH-funded research includes everything from cancer treatments to heart disease prevention to stroke interventions.
On January 27, the Trump administration, through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), issued a memo requiring federal agencies to "temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance," including "grants and loans" beginning at 5 PM on January 28. The purpose of the spending freeze was to ensure compliance with President Trump's Executive Orders prohibiting funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or "DEI," and "woke gender ideology.""
https://popular.info/p/trump-maintains-funding-freeze-at
#USA #Trump #NHS #Health #Science #Ideology
"Between February 3, 2024, and February 10, 2024, the NIH issued 513 grant awards totaling $218,273,053. Between February 3 and February 10 this year, the NIH issued just 11 grant awards totaling $4,981,089. In other words, since the courts ordered a full resumption in grant funding, the agency approved a handful of grants accounting for 2.2% of its typical volume. An NIH official says a small number of grants are being approved by NIH leadership, but nearly all grants remain frozen."
"Earth is crossing the threshold of 1.5°C of global warming, according to two major global studies which together suggest the planet’s climate has likely entered a frightening new phase.
Under the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, humanity is seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep planetary heating to no more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average. In 2024, temperatures on Earth surpassed that limit.
This was not enough to declare the Paris threshold had been crossed, because the temperature goals under the agreement are measured over several decades, rather than short excursions over the 1.5°C mark.
But the two papers just released use a different measure. Both examined historical climate data to determine whether very hot years in the recent past were a sign that a future, long-term warming threshold would be breached.
The answer, alarmingly, was yes. The researchers say the record-hot 2024 indicates Earth is passing the 1.5°C limit, beyond which scientists predict catastrophic harm to the natural systems that support life on Earth."
#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #ParisAgreement
"In the nascent field of AI hacking, indirect prompt injection has become a basic building block for inducing chatbots to exfiltrate sensitive data or perform other malicious actions. Developers of platforms such as Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT are generally good at plugging these security holes, but hackers keep finding new ways to poke through them again and again.
On Monday, researcher Johann Rehberger demonstrated a new way to override prompt injection defenses Google developers have built into Gemini—specifically, defenses that restrict the invocation of Google Workspace or other sensitive tools when processing untrusted data, such as incoming emails or shared documents. The result of Rehberger’s attack is the permanent planting of long-term memories that will be present in all future sessions, opening the potential for the chatbot to act on false information or instructions in perpetuity."
#AI #GenerativeAI #CyberSecurity #PromptEngineering #Gemini #Google #PromptInjection
"Hackers leaked thousands of files from Lexipol, a Texas-based company that develops policy manuals, training bulletins, and consulting services for first responders.
The manuals, which are crafted by Lexipol’s team of public sector attorneys, practitioners, and subject-matter experts, are customized to align with the specific needs and local legal requirements of agencies across the country.
But the firm also faces criticism for its blanket approach to police policies and pushback on reforms.
The data, a sample of which was given to the Daily Dot by a group referring to itself as “the puppygirl hacker polycule,” includes approximately 8,543 files related to training, procedural, and policy manuals, as well as customer records that contain names, usernames, agency names, hashed passwords, physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers.
Among the manuals seen by the Daily Dot, agencies include police departments, fire departments, sheriff’s offices, and narcotics units."
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/lexipol-data-leak-puppygirl-hacker-polycule/
#USA #Hacking #Lexipol #DataLeaks #PoliceState
"Notably, Judge Bibas ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor on the question of fair use. The fair use doctrine is a key component of how AI companies are seeking to defend themselves against claims that they used copyrighted materials illegally. The idea underpinning fair use is that sometimes it’s legally permissible to use copyrighted works without permission—for example, to create parody works, or in noncommercial research or news production. When determining whether fair use applies, courts use a four-factor test, looking at the reason behind the work, the nature of the work (whether it’s poetry, nonfiction, private letters, et cetera), the amount of copyrighted work used, and how the use impacts the market value of the original. Thomson Reuters prevailed on two of the four factors, but Bibas described the fourth as the most important, and ruled that Ross “meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute.”"
https://www.wired.com/story/thomson-reuters-ai-copyright-lawsuit/
#AI #GenerativeAI #ThomsonReuters #FairUse #Copyright #IP
"Thomson Reuters won the first significant copyright case against an AI company today. Reuters, which, in addition to owning the international news agency, creates a legal research database through its firm Westlaw, claims Ross, the makers of a similar, AI-powered database, stole copyrighted information to train its system. Following a 2023 decision in favor of a jury trial to determine how much “creative spark” Ross’ product had, U.S. District Court Judge Stephanos Bibas revised his previous decision and granted Reuters a partial summary judgment. The judge determined that the AI industry’s understanding of fair use is flawed."
https://www.avclub.com/ai-thomson-reuters-ross-court-decision
"Notably, Judge Bibas ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor on the question of fair use. The fair use doctrine is a key component of how AI companies are seeking to defend themselves against claims that they used copyrighted materials illegally. The idea underpinning fair use is that sometimes it’s legally permissible to use copyrighted works without permission—for example, to create parody works, or in noncommercial research or news production. When determining whether fair use applies, courts use a four-factor test, looking at the reason behind the work, the nature of the work (whether it’s poetry, nonfiction, private letters, et cetera), the amount of copyrighted work used, and how the use impacts the market value of the original. Thomson Reuters prevailed on two of the four factors, but Bibas described the fourth as the most important, and ruled that Ross “meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute.”"
https://www.wired.com/story/thomson-reuters-ai-copyright-lawsuit/
#AI #GenerativeAI #ThomsonReuters #FairUse #Copyright #IP
"O órgão brasileiro de defesa da concorrência, o Cade, se prepara para julgar sanções à Apple e ao Google por práticas anticoncorrenciais nas suas lojas de aplicativos, no que deve se transformar no primeiro confronto com empresas americanas empoderadas sob o governo de Donald Trump.
Na semana que vem, o Cade fará uma audiência pública para ouvir as big techs sobre a regulação de práticas comerciais
Há seis processos em análise no Cade envolvendo as big techs. O primeiro da fila, que tem previsão para entrar na pauta de julgamentos ainda neste semestre, segundo apurou a reportagem, é um recurso da Apple contra a proibição imposta pelo órgão à cobrança de desenvolvedores de aplicativos que estão na Apple Store.
A investigação constatou que a empresa cobra 30% dos desenvolvedores de apps a título de taxa de solução de pagamentos, o que a Apple nega."
#Brasil #RedesSociais #BigTech #Cade
"This is what his critics do not understand. They mistakenly think that he thinks that his tariffs will reduce America’s trade deficit on their own. He knows they will not. Their utility comes from their capacity to shock foreign central bankers into reducing domestic interest rates. Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.
But tariffs are only the first phase of his masterplan. With high tariffs as the new default, and with foreign money accumulating in the Treasury, Trump can bide his time as friends and foes in Europe and Asia clamour to talk. That’s when the second phase of Trump’s plan kicks in: the grand negotiation.
Unlike his predecessors, from Carter to Biden, Trump disdains multilateral meetings and crowded negotiations. He is a one-on-one man."
https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-trumps-tariffs-are-a-masterplan/
#USA #Trump #Tariffs #TradeWar #PoliticalEconomy #Protectionism
"Another person who was allegedly targeted on WhatsApp with spyware made by Israeli company Paragon has come forward.
Beppe Caccia, one of the co-founders of Mediterranea Saving Humans, an Italian non-government organization that helps immigrants, told TechCrunch that he had been targeted by the spyware campaign.
Caccia disclosed he was targeted after another one of his organization’s co-founders, Luca Casarini, said publicly last week that he had also received a notification from WhatsApp alerting him to the suspected spyware attack.
On Monday, during a press conference organized by Sandro Ruotolo, an Italian member of the European Parliament, Casarini said that he filed a complaint with the Prosecutor’s Office in Palermo, Italy, regarding the alleged hack. Casarini said his goal was to find out who targeted him and his organization.
“We don’t have anything to hide. Those who spy have a lot to hide,” said Casarini.
(...)
In the same press release, the Italian government said that Meta told it there were other targets in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden."
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/11/another-person-targeted-by-paragon-spyware-comes-forward/
#CyberSecurity #Spyware #Paragon #WhatsApp #SocialMedia
"Vance came out swinging today, implying — exactly as the big companies might have hoped he might – that any regulation around AI was “excessive regulation” that would throttle innovation.
In reality, the phrase “excessive regulation” is sophistry. Of course in any domain there can be “excessive regulation”, by definition. What Vance doesn’t have is any evidence whatsoever that the US has excessive regulation around AI; arguably, in fact, it has almost none at all. His warning about a bogeyman is a tip-off, however, for how all this is going to go. The new administration will do everything in its power to protect businesses, and nothing to protect individuals.
As if all this wasn’t clear enough, the administration apparently told the AI Summit that they would not sign anything that mentioned environmental costs or “existential risks” of AI that could potentially going rogue.
If AI has significant negative externalities upon the world, we the citizens are screwed."
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/everything-i-warned-about-in-taming?r=8tdk6
#AI #GenerativeAI #AISafety #USA #Trump #AIRegulation
"The UK and US have not signed an international agreement on artificial intelligence (AI) at a global summit in Paris.
The statement, signed by dozens of countries including France, China and India, pledges an "open", "inclusive" and "ethical" approach to the technology's development.
In a brief statement, the UK government said it had not been able to add its name to it because of concerns about national security and "global governance."
Earlier, US Vice President JD Vance told delegates in Paris that too much regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) could "kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off".
Vance told world leaders that AI was "an opportunity that the Trump administration will not squander" and said "pro-growth AI policies" should be prioritised over safety.
His comments appear to put him at odds with French President Emmanuel Macron, who defended the need for further regulation.
"We need these rules for AI to move forward," Macron said at the summit."
"Vance came out swinging today, implying — exactly as the big companies might have hoped he might – that any regulation around AI was “excessive regulation” that would throttle innovation.
In reality, the phrase “excessive regulation” is sophistry. Of course in any domain there can be “excessive regulation”, by definition. What Vance doesn’t have is any evidence whatsoever that the US has excessive regulation around AI; arguably, in fact, it has almost none at all. His warning about a bogeyman is a tip-off, however, for how all this is going to go. The new administration will do everything in its power to protect businesses, and nothing to protect individuals.
As if all this wasn’t clear enough, the administration apparently told the AI Summit that they would not sign anything that mentioned environmental costs or “existential risks” of AI that could potentially going rogue.
If AI has significant negative externalities upon the world, we the citizens are screwed."
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/everything-i-warned-about-in-taming?r=8tdk6
#AI #GenerativeAI #AISafety #USA #Trump #AIRegulation
"The second Trump administration may violate basic civil liberties in ways that unambiguously subvert democracy. The president, for example, could order the army to shoot protesters, as he reportedly wanted to do during his first term. He could also fulfill his campaign promise to launch the “largest deportation operation in American history,” targeting millions of people in an abuse-ridden process that would inevitably lead to the mistaken detention of thousands of U.S. citizens.
But much of the coming authoritarianism will take a less visible form: the politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy. Modern states are powerful entities. The U.S. federal government employs over two million people and has an annual budget of nearly $7 trillion. Government officials serve as important arbiters of political, economic, and social life. They help determine who gets prosecuted for crimes, whose taxes are audited, when and how rules and regulations are enforced, which organizations receive tax-exempt status, which private agencies get contracts to accredit universities, and which companies obtain critical licenses, concessions, contracts, subsidies, tariff waivers, and bailouts. Even in countries such as the United States that have relatively small, laissez-faire governments, this authority creates a plethora of opportunities for leaders to reward allies and punish opponents. No democracy is entirely free of such politicization. But when governments weaponize the state by using its power to systematically disadvantage and weaken the opposition, they undermine liberal democracy. Politics becomes like a soccer match in which the referees, the groundskeepers, and the scorekeepers work for one team to sabotage its rival.
This is why all established democracies have elaborate sets of laws, rules, and norms to prevent the state’s weaponization."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump
#USA #Trump #Democracy #Authoritarianism
"EFF and a coalition of privacy defenders have filed a lawsuit today asking a federal court to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing the private information of millions of Americans that is stored by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and to delete any data that has been collected or removed from databases thus far. The lawsuit also names OPM, and asks the court to block OPM from sharing further data with DOGE.
The Plaintiffs who have stepped forward to bring this lawsuit include individual federal employees as well as multiple employee unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees and the Association of Administrative Law Judges.
This brazen ransacking of Americans’ sensitive data is unheard of in scale."
#USA #Trump #Musk #DOGE #DataProtection #Privacy #CyberSecurity #OPM
NeoStalinism, Maoism, or just plain Idiocracism?
"The Trump administration is still prohibiting National Institutes of Health (NIH) staff from issuing virtually all grant funding, an NIH official tells Popular Information. The ongoing funding freeze is also reflected in internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information and was reiterated to staff in a meeting on Monday. The funding freeze at NIH violates two federal court injunctions, two legal experts said.
The funding freeze at NIH puts all of the research the agency funds at risk. As the primary funder of biomedical research in the United States, NIH-funded research includes everything from cancer treatments to heart disease prevention to stroke interventions.
On January 27, the Trump administration, through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), issued a memo requiring federal agencies to "temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance," including "grants and loans" beginning at 5 PM on January 28. The purpose of the spending freeze was to ensure compliance with President Trump's Executive Orders prohibiting funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or "DEI," and "woke gender ideology.""
https://popular.info/p/trump-maintains-funding-freeze-at
#USA #Trump #NHS #Health #Science #Ideology