Linkage

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Josh Paul, former director of congressional and public affairs for the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. Paul recently resigned in protest against the administration’s plans to rush weapons to Israel. ​“A proposal in a legislative request to Congress to waive Congressional notification entirely for FMF-funded Foreign Military Sales or Direct Commercial Contracts is unprecedented in my experience. … Frankly, [it’s] an insult to Congressional oversight prerogatives.”

[…] 

“It’s also redundant with existing laws,” Paul says. The White House can unilaterally approve foreign military sales in ​“emergency” situations but must notify Congress and provide a ​“detailed justification.” The Israel waiver does not require any communication with Congress.

“So this doesn’t actually reduce the time, it just reduces the oversight,” Paul says. ​“It removes that mechanism for Congress to actually understand what is being transferred at the time it is being transferred.” Paul adds that the language came from the White House and received ​“pushback” within the executive branch.

Certainly, if you’re a smaller publisher, the likelihood of receiving a demand letter is lower, but if codec licensing goes through Patel’s “inflection point,” it’s going to affect a broad swath. After Apple lost and paid Nokia $2 billion, how many companies of any size would opt to challenge Nokia in court?

What to do? Clearly, you can’t assume that what’s happened in the past will keep happening in the future. In this regard, my initial article provided bad advice.

You should keep your ear to the ground and pay attention to any patent-related lawsuits or agreements. Now might be a good time to consult with a patent attorney to identify your risk and formulate mitigation strategies.

As stated in Patel’s article:

"Whether you’re a patent owner, a product/service provider or an IP services company, the acceleration of video licensing will affect your business. The companies that best prepare for this transition are most likely to avoid significant liabilities and capture a significant share of the value that will flow into the video IP marketplace. The video epoch is entering a new phase. Are you prepared?"

The home secretary claimed streets risked being “taken over” and that without action British cities would see “an explosion of crime, drug taking, and squalor”.

She added that many of those living in tents were “from abroad”. Those who were genuinely homeless would always be supported, she said.

But in a raft of criticism over her remarks, she was accused of “disgraceful” politics and of blaming the most vulnerable for her government’s failings.

Even former Tory MPs condemned her push to fine charities who give tents to the homeless – part of proposals pitched to be included in the King’s Speech on Tuesday.

Britain's two main political parties each made an example this week of an MP brave enough to break ranks and call for an end to the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

The ruling Conservative party sacked Paul Bristow MP from his government post after he wrote to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: "A permanent ceasefire would save lives and allow for a continued column of humanitarian aid [to] reach the people who need it the most."

Labour withdrew the whip from Andy McDonald MP, effectively kicking him out of the parliamentary party. McDonald had said at a rally against the killing in Gaza: "We won’t rest until we have justice, until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty.”

This should be a moment of great moral clarity for all of us. 

Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar, Naftali Bennett, and Ayelet Shaked. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

There has always been a strain of Jewish fascist within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state.

“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”

Google intended its Web Environment Integrity API, announced on a developer mailing list in May, to serve as a way to limit online fraud and abuse without enabling privacy problems like cross-site tracking or browser fingerprinting.

[…] 

To do this, the system would need to check, via attestation, whether the visitor's software and hardware stack met certain criteria and thus was authentic. That's great until it's abused to turn away visitors who have a setup a website owner isn't happy with – such as running a content blocker or video downloader.

Technical types saw this immediately, and became concerned that Google wanted to create a form of digital rights/restriction management (DRM) for the web. One benefit could be that ad fraud might be easier to prevent; but the risk is that the API could be used to limit web freedom, by giving websites or third-parties a say in the browser and software stack used by visitors.

Apple incidentally has already shipped its own attestation scheme called Private Access Tokens, which while it presents some of the same concerns is arguably less worrisome than Google's proposal because Safari's overall share of the web browser market across all devices is far lower than Chrome's.

According to Choice, third-party platforms such as Ignite, 2Apply and Snug regularly require users to hand over excessive amounts of personal data including bank statements, references from five jobs and photos of children.

Samantha Floreani, program lead at charity Digital Rights Watch, said: "The sheer volume and type of personal information that renters are being compelled to provide creates unreasonable privacy and digital security risks.

"It's often very unclear who gets access to this information, and how long it will be kept for."

Major cities have scaled back those requirements in recent years while others like Portland and Minneapolis have gotten rid of them altogether. San Jose, which has only a few thousand fewer residents than Austin, did away with the requirements last year.

Austin City Council Member Zohaib “Zo” Qadri, the proposal’s author, said keeping those requirements makes no sense as the city faces an affordability crisis and pumps billions of dollars into expanding public transit.

“It gobbles up scarce land. It adds burdensome costs to developments that get passed on to renters and buyers. It makes it harder for small businesses to get off the ground. And it harms walkability and actively works against our public investments in transit, bike lanes, trails and sidewalks,” Qadri said Thursday.

Like “detransition,” “regret” can also have different meanings. Narayan et al. (2021) surveyed surgeons who perform gender-affirming surgeries about their experiences with patient regret (which they reported to be in the 0.2–0.3% range). They documented three different “types” of regret: “true gender-related regret” (typically a change in gender identity), “social regret” (typically due to external pressure from family members or societal transphobia), and “medical regret” (e.g., complications due to surgery). Notably, they reported that only 6.5% of patients who experienced regret believed that they had been “misdiagnosed.”

In other words, just as we shouldn’t conflate “detransition” with “regret,” we also shouldn’t conflate “regret” with inadequate assessment or having been misdiagnosed as transgender. Once again, this confirms my previous point that the “mistaken and regretted transition” narrative only applies to a small fraction of those who detransition, and thus represents a miniscule number of people who choose to transition in the first place.

To put these numbers in perspective, let’s try a thought experiment: Imagine 10,000 people transitioning. If 2% of them experienced detransition or regret, but only 6.5% of those individuals felt that they had been misdiagnosed as transgender in the first place, that would represent 13 people. Out of 10,000. That’s an incredibly small number of people — no wonder journalists and politicians who want to promote the “mistaken and regretted transition” narrative have to rely on the same handful of detrans interviewees over and over again.

Glasgow, Scotland – The atmosphere at Celtic Park on European nights needs few added extras, the electricity in the air on such occasions is enough to light up the Glasgow skyline several times over.

But as 60,000 Celtic fans flocked to the famous arena last Wednesday evening for the Champions League tie against Atletico Madrid, it was not just anticipation for the game powering the pre-match energy.

As kickoff neared, the stadium transformed into a sea of Palestinian flags, every stand awash with the colours of Palestine in a show of solidarity with those in Gaza under Israeli assault.

A few days before, when Celtic fans displayed Palestinian flags at a domestic away fixture, television networks were accused of purposefully avoiding the display. They had no such option this time. The display was beamed around the world, and quickly shared millions of times on social media.