cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/54054286

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/54061344

https://archive.ph/2026.11.05-224738/https://www.ft.com/content/32fd4450-5880-437d-9bd9-df13289ada24

The US midterm elections — in which voters elected anti-data centre governors in Texas, Georgia and Ohio and passed 38 local votes in favour of restrictions on their development — have forced the tech industry to reflect on its failure to connect with the public.

“The reason is not that people are Luddites . . . it’s much like the protests against the masks in Covid. It has become a political symbol,” said Vik Bajaj, co-chief executive of the Jeff Bezos-backed AI start-up Prometheus.

. . . “As a profession, we have spent two years pretty dangerously telling people that AI will change the future of work for the worse — that they will be out of jobs, that their children will be out of jobs, their grandchildren will live in a world that’s unrecognisable. And then for the last year or so, we’ve also been flirting with the idea that it’s an existential crisis.”

“I think this election was a big wake-up call . . . to take a pause and think about what’s happening and approach this in a way that’s maybe a little more thoughtful,” said John Hanke, founder of Niantic Spatial, the AI world model company and gaming group that made Pokémon Go. “It’s been go, go, go, build, build, build, and some of that has been . . . with head buried in sand.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/50122791

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/61465093

Archived

Here is the full report: A Formula for Repression – China’s Global Grid for Community Control (pdf)

In 2022, Safeguard Defenders published 110 Overseas and Patrol & Persuade: two reports detailing the activity of over 100 overseas Chinese police stations operating in more than 50 countries.

After the report was published, many of the countries affected denounced the stations’ illegal operations. Some pursued criminal investigations. Beijing responded by claiming they had closed.

[...]

Now a new report exposes Beijing’s claim to be false. Far from closing, the evidence shows expansion.

[...]

Today, more than ten police forces from five Chinese provinces are engaged in the work of a global network of Chinese Communist Party operatives abroad. The police involvement is only the beginning, and these are not isolated initiatives by a few local governments in China.

Since late 2024, five new national policies instruct authorities across China to expand designated liaison activities abroad. The core aim is to export the domestic system of grid management to control the diaspora.

[...]

In China, the Party divides every city, town and village into grids, each square representing a few hundred households, and each with a grid manager who reports upward. The manager has ten tasks, nine of which have to do with surveillance and control. There is a file on every resident.

Anything seen as a threat to Party rule is escalated to a hub where enforcement stands ready to act.

Internationally, this system of mass surveillance, control and suppression is projected through a global grid of united front affiliated organizations or designated liaisons. They are run by the Party's "bridge and bond" to the diaspora: the Overseas Chinese Federation.

These Party liaisons provide the infrastructure other Chinese authorities - police, prosecutors, courts, justice bureaus and others - simply plug into. Or, as the Party calls it: through which they "extend their tentacles".

How the 'grid' extends abroad

The authorities sometimes use the word “grid” themselves when talking about overseas functions. In May 2019, eight months after opening their first “police-overseas-Chinese stations” [警侨驿站] abroad, the Qingtian county police, in Zhejiang Province, reported to the national police newspaper that they had hired 135 diaspora association leaders and chairs as center directors, deputies and liaison officers, and “put together an overseas grid-service informant corps of more than 1,000” [组建了1000余人的海外网格服务信息员队伍] ...

[The report describes how the Chinese grid of police stations extends abroad. It is fairly impossible to paraphrased what the report calls "The machinery: 1 + n + X + Y(y)". Everyone is stronglu encouraged to read the report (pdf).]

[...]

In its new report, the NGO Safeguard Defenders finds nearly 1,250 formally designated liaisons in at least 91 countries which exist to carry out domestic grid functions abroad.

This number is based on a conservative methodology, and a likely underrepresentation of actual activity. The Party numbers its affiliated associations abroad in the tens of thousands, every one of them a potential grid liaison in the waiting.

Included in this number are the very liaison stations Safeguard Defenders exposed years ago and were told "merely" provided services to the diaspora community. Yet the functions of service and control cannot be separated, as the official policies and public statements that form the basis for this report make clear. In fact, the power to provide or deny services directly adds to the Party liaisons’ ability to exercise control.

Every liaison designated and every task carried out by them are breaches of sovereignty. They are transnational repression embodied, affecting entire communities around the world. Their standing order to carry out any task as required by the Party represents an active national security threat.

[...]

Beneath it all sits one structure: the Party’s united front, and its global network of affiliated associations.

The names given to such designated liaisons may change; the underlying structure does not.

Policymakers must urgently devise strategies to confront this superstructure of CCP interference if the stations and their activities are to be shut down for good.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/76163261

Reuters reports that around 100 people made it into the construction site, with some scaling a crane to place a “fuck AI” banner. Protesters also unfurled a “Microsoft powers genocide” banner on the construction site, and chanted “Microsoft has got to go” and “free Palestine.”

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/69491251

After a disastrous midterm showing that placed the future of the MAGA movement in abject peril, the White House decided it was a good time to let conservative groups know that they were being watched.

...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/73388265

A rainy winter photo walk through Lisbon & Sintra.

Experience the rainy (and sunny) streets of Lisbon & foggy Sintra in my full calm photo walk video:
https://youtu.be/BsK9Fw0o-lQ

(Zählt für den heutigen #FotoVorschlag eigentlich auch eine Tram-Haltestelle statt eine Bushaltestelle? 😉)

@photography@lemmy.world

#FensterFreitag #FotoVorschlag #Photography #StreetPhotography #m43 #MicroFourThirds #PhotoWalk #Lisbon #RainyDay #SilentWalk

Uh-oh! I've been torrenting away without a care in the world for decades, but soon my ISP might cut me off.

It's almost as if the Trump administration (who pressured Mexico for this change) wants me to use the Putin-aligned video site OK.ru...

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/69491251

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/73394701

20 famous European road trips, each coloured by whether a car towing a caravan may drive it: 10 the whole road, 7 with a bypass, 3 not at all (Stelvio, the Amalfi coast road, the Lake District's Hardknott/Wrynose loop).

A few things that surprised me while reading the rules:

• Amalfi coast road (SS163): campers and caravans are banned 06:30–24:00, while motorbikes are exempt from the odd/even number-plate days cars get in summer.
• Grossglockner: a motorcycle's day ticket is €36.50 against €46.50 for a car — and a car with a caravan pays the car rate.
• Geiranger–Hellesylt ferry: about €76 for a car with its driver, €187 for a car + caravan (10–14 m), €61 for a motorbike.

Rules read on 5 Nov from the road authorities and operators (where only a secondary source says it, the page says so). Each road is priced for car, car + caravan, motorhome and motorcycle: https://copilot.travel/maps/famous-road-trips Corrections welcome.

A federal judge has blocked construction of Donald Trump’s arch for 14 days after a final vote approving the structure passed late Thursday despite fierce opposition from citizens who voiced concern during a marathon public hearing.

The National Capital Planning Commission, one of two federal agencies that oversees architectural and design changes in Washington, gave the final green light to build the 250-foot monument at its virtual meeting on Thursday after more than 120 citizens, many of them veterans, lined up to plead with the panel to block the project.

Within an hour of its passage, US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee who is overseeing a high profile lawsuit to stop construction, ruled that the administration, the defendants in the case, would be prohibited from “initiating, making or otherwise effectuating” any “construction-related activity” near the proposed site of the arch.

Too much mushy brown! Whole wheat flour too so these are extra dense.

I tried to make an image post but it kept getting an error and my post gets eaten so I give up.