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9
After midterm rout, Vance tries to build his own 2028 brand (www.reuters.com)
 

[...]

Vance took a more public step on Wednesday toward reinforcing his own political brand with an unusually blunt election postmortem. In a social media post, he blamed the Iran war for Republicans’ midterm defeat and laid out a ​platform for a Republican rebound.

He called for a swift end to the conflict and urged Republicans to focus on affordability, reevaluate foreign relations and overhaul the US relationship with Israel.

Trump has called Americans’ affordability concerns a Democratic “hoax.” He ​launched a war against Iran following sustained lobbying from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump went on to endorse Netanyahu in the Israeli election.

[...]

31
Greens suspends Trans Woman due to running for a woman's space on party council. (quokk.au)
 

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/unitedkingdom/p/1159289/greens-suspends-trans-woman-due-to-running-for-a-woman-s-space-on-party-council

https://bsky.app/profile/leftiestats.bsky.social/post/3muwxjieu7k2j

Sorry only news sources reporting this is the Daily Mail and Telegraph, not worth linking to their thoughts on trans women.

Of note is that Eleanora was elected to the spot and backed by 'Greens for Palestine' . 2 Weeks later she is out on transphobic grounds and seems to have her suspension leaked to the Daily Mail potentially by someone in the Greens.

Xitter conversation between Greens Party Council and Eleanora
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Greens Party Council member Kai Taylor has put the Greens party into disrepute.

437
37,000 Fake AI Comments Mysteriously Oppose Washington State’s Effort To Tax The Rich (www.techdirt.com)
 

Ideally, the U.S. public is supposed to be able to comment on government policy proceedings, and the government is supposed to listen to that input.

Of course, it doesn’t really work that way: For years we’ve noted how U.S. regulatory comment proceedings are full of bots and fake comments from industries trying to game regulators, and make shitty policy (giant mergers, mindless deregulation, the elimination of consumer protection) seem like it has broad public support (remember when dead people opposed net neutrality?).

Unsurprisingly the U.S. hasn’t done anything to seriously rein in this problem. And when officials do act, it tends to be largely toothless, resulting in the problem getting steadily worse.

And that was before AI made it significantly easier for bad actors to quickly automate this sort of gamesmanship. Washington State has been exploring the RADICAL SOCIALIST ANTIFA EXTREMIST idea of having the state’s rich actually pay their taxes. That’s not been received particularly well by the extraction class, which has been making empty promises about leaving the state.

We later get this tidbit:

“More than 60,000 people signed in against SB 6346 when it received a rushed hearing in the Senate,” Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, said in a Feb. 16 statement. “That is so impressive that Democrats have tried to say bots are responsible, even though the Legislature blocks bots.”

Centralia? That's the equivalent of flyover country along I-5. (I have driven through Centralia numerous times but never found any reason to stop ... it's basically Chehalis.)

80
Disney will pay $10 million to settle children's data privacy lawsuit (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
 

According to a complaint filed by the U.S. Justice Department, following a referral from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Disney allegedly failed to tag kid-directed videos on YouTube as "Made for Kids" (MFK), a label that instructs YouTube to block personal data collection and stop displaying personalized ads on correctly designated content to protect children's privacy.

92
Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox (www.theverge.com)
 

cross-posted from: https://news.idlestate.org/post/2337003

Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.

Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”

-_-

372
Trump shock spurs Japan to think about the unthinkable: nuclear arms (www.reuters.com)
 

In Japan and South Korea there is deepening concern over the reliability of long-time American security guarantees – whether the U.S. will come to their aid in the event of a war. This has been turbo-charged by Donald Trump’s tough treatment of traditional U.S. allies, which has some in Tokyo and Seoul calling for a reassessment of their non-nuclear policies.