Technology

https://www.watchduty.org/

The European Commission has asked X to hand over internal documents about its algorithms, as it steps up its investigation into whether Elon Musk’s social media platform has breached EU rules on content moderation.

The EU’s executive branch told the company it wanted to see internal documentation about its “recommender system”, which makes content suggestions to users, and any recent changes made to it, by 15 February.

X has been under investigation since December 2023 under the EU’s content law – known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) – over how it tackles the spread of illegal content and information manipulation. The company has been accused of manipulating the platform’s systems to give far-right posts and politicians greater visibility over other political groups.

The Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu—better known internationally as RedNote—is scrambling to boost its ability to moderate English-language content after hundreds of thousands of American users suddenly joined the platform in anticipation of TikTok potentially being banned in the United States on Sunday.

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cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/981497

Note this post evaluates Linux systems. Microsoft presumably has a different, hopefully better, implementation.

WASHINGTON, Jan 16 (Reuters) - A SpaceX Starship rocket broke up in space minutes after launching from Texas on Thursday, forcing airline flights over the Gulf of Mexico to alter course to avoid falling debris and setting back Elon Musk's flagship rocket program.

SpaceX mission control lost contact with the newly upgraded Starship, carrying its first test payload of mock satellites but no crew, eight minutes after liftoff from its South Texas rocket facilities at 5:38 p.m. EST (2238 GMT).

Video shot by Reuters showed orange balls of light streaking across the sky over the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, leaving trails of smoke behind.

FORSMARK, Sweden, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Sweden started building a final storage facility for spent nuclear fuel on Wednesday, only the second such site in the world, where highly radioactive waste will be stored for 100,000 years.

How to store deadly radioactive waste until it is safe is a question that has dogged the nuclear industry since commercial reactors began operating in the 1950s.

Finland is the only country close to completing a permanent storage site.

TikTok is reportedly planning a total shutdown of the Chinese-owned video-sharing app when the law requiring a ban or sale of the app takes effect on Sunday.

The roughly 170 million US users who try to access the app will be greeted with a pop-up message directing them to a website with details about the ban, according to the Information.

Users will also be given the option of downloading their data from the app, sources familiar with the plan told the outlet.

WASHINGTON, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Scientists have detected emanating from the nucleus of a galaxy relatively close to our Milky Way flashes of X-rays gradually increasing in frequency that seem to be coming from a white dwarf - a highly compact stellar ember - with a death wish.

The observations made using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope appear to show a white dwarf nearing the point of no return - called the event horizon - as it orbits the galaxy's supermassive black hole, according to the researchers.

"It is probably the closest object we've ever observed orbiting around a supermassive black hole. This is extremely close to the black hole's event horizon," said Megan Masterson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral student in physics and lead author of the study that was presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Maryland this week and will be published in the journal Nature.

Drag and drag's friends have all been listening to a new podcast lately. One of drag's friends is an iPhone user, and bot only just got around to listening to episode 1 of the podcast today. Except.. bot didn't.

Drag sent thing a link to the podcast on Spotify, which drag and the rest of us use, but bot decided to use Apple Podcasts instead. Bot told the show to play from oldest to newest. So naturally, Apple decided to start on Season 7 Episode 1, and cover the season indicator with an ad, so bot thought bot was on season 1.

This is atrocious. What kind of app covers its own important information with ads? Bot's been given a bunch of spoilers and had no way of knowing, except for the fact bot should have known not to trust Apple.

Drag hopes that nobody ever uses that terrible app again. Drag was looking forward to vicariously experiencing the early episodes through thing and talking about the show with ALL of drag's friends. Now it looks like that might not happen. Drag's furious.

New users have piled in to the Chinese social media app RedNote just days before a proposed US ban on the popular social media app TikTok, as the lesser-known company rushes to capitalize on the sudden influx while walking a delicate line of moderating English-language content.

Since Meta announced they would stop moderating posts much of the mainstream discussion surrounding social media has been centered on whether a platform has a responsibility or not for the content being posted on their service. Which I think is a fair discussion though I favor the side of less moderation in almost every instance.

But as I think about it the problem is not moderation at all: we had very little moderation in the early days of the internet and social media and yet people didn’t believe the nonsense they saw online, unlike nowadays were even official news platforms have reported on outright bullshit being made up on social media. To me the problem is the godamn algorithm that pushes people into bubbles that reinforce their correct or incorrect views; and I think anyone with two brain cells and an iota of understanding of how engagement algorithms works can see this. So why is the discussion about moderation and not about banning algorithms?

cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/974805

Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, fears of a renewed ISIS insurgency have intensified. MintPress News has uncovered that, despite Meta’s previously strict policies on banning terrorism-related content, ISIS-linked accounts have been posting freely on its platforms.

Although Meta previously removed 26 million pieces of terrorism-related content—an impressive 99% of such material on its platform—MintPress News has revealed that content supporting ISIS, often referred to by its pejorative epithet ‘Daesh’ in the Arab world, is now flourishing on the platform. Many of these accounts are based in regions of Syria historically known as strongholds for the extremist group.

A series of seemingly pro-ISIS accounts have emerged, concentrated in areas such as Binish, Sarmeen, Jarablous, Manbij, Palmyra and Deir Ezzor—regions historically known as strongholds for the terrorist group. New accounts appear daily, with some prominently displaying ISIS flags as their profile pictures.

These accounts frequently post speeches by ISIS leaders, which remain active on the platform and often garner hundreds of likes and comments. These include videos of the group’s fighters parading with weapons in the back of SUVs, attracting significant attention and interaction on the platform.

from #TheRegister #Register Thomas Claburn Fri 10 Jan 2025 // 13:37 UTC

Sebastian Steck, a software developer based in Germany, has obtained the source code and library installation scripts for his AVM FRITZ!Box 4020 router, thanks to a lawsuit funded by the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).