Linkage

Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users. After testing these briefly with Windows Insiders earlier this month, Microsoft has started to distribute update KB5036980 to Windows 11 users this week, which includes “recommendations” for apps from the Microsoft Store in the Start menu.

“The Recommended section of the Start menu will show some Microsoft Store apps,” says Microsoft in the update notes of its latest public Windows 11 release. “These apps come from a small set of curated developers.” The ads are designed to help Windows 11 users discover more apps, but will largely benefit the developers that Microsoft is trying to tempt into building more Windows apps.

This keynote will look at the connections between where we are now and how we got here. Connecting the “Crypto Wars”, the role of encryption and privacy, and ultimately the hype of AI… all through the lens of Signal.

Full text of Meredith's talk: https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/ndss-key...

The residents of dozens of public housing towers in the southern Australian city of Melbourne heard the state government was planning to demolish their homes on the news.

“Everyone found out from the TV, from the news, with the rest of Victoria,” Sara*, a resident of the first group of towers to be knocked down, told Al Jazeera.

[…] 

The government says the renewal will boost “social housing by at least 10 percent”, a modest increase in a city where there is already a huge gap in affordable housing.

According to Australian census data, the percentage of Australian households who rent their home from a state or territory housing authority dropped from 6 percent in 1999-2000 to 3 percent in 2019-2020.

In the state of Victoria, the share of housing classified as public or community housing, is just 2.8 percent.

By comparison, in Paris and Vienna, the share of public housing has increased since the 1990s, with about 25 percent of the population of both cities now living in socially-rented housing.

Throughout history, military empires have reduced their victims, their subjugated, and their abducted to a state of “The Others.” The political and mass media institutions usually follow suit by supporting their empire’s predatory policies with slanted coverage.

[…] 

Every state has the right to self-defense. Count the many times you have heard, “Israel has a right to defend itself” compared to “Palestine has a right to defend itself.” Members of Congress who bellow the former declaration daily can not get themselves to say the latter. It is a forbidden phrase. Yet, who is the violently occupying, colonizing, land, and water-stealing party? Israel. For over fifty years, more than 400 times more innocent Palestinians have been killed and injured compared to innocent Israeli civilians. Where is the detailed coverage of the loss of life from enforced destitution and denial of life-saving medicines, equipment, and emergency transport to health facilities? Again, it is “The Others.”

“The Others” are always described with less charitable words. In a meticulous content analysis by The Intercept of the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post between October 7 and November 24, the use of the words “slaughtered,” “horrific” and “massacre” in relation to Israeli and Palestinians killed was 218 to 9!

Six years ago, NYU social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind. In the book, he and Greg Lukianoff argued that parents are doing a real disservice to their kids by overprotecting (coddling) them, rather than giving them more freedom and allowing them to make mistakes and learn.

This year, he’s back with a new book, The Anxious Generation, arguing the exact opposite in the digital world: that social media and smartphones have made kids under-protected, rewiring brains and increasing teenage depression rates.

Haidt tries to address this obvious contradiction in his book with the standard cop-out of the purveyor of every modern moral panic: “This time it’s different!” He provides little evidence to support that.

In this new book, Haidt is coddling the American parent: providing them with a clear, simple, and wrong solution to what is ailing their children. But—as with historic moral panics—parents, schools, and politicians will embrace it, absolving themselves of their own failings in raising children in our modern world and pointing to an easy villain.

America’s military-industrial complex has been rapidly expanding from the Capital Beltway to Silicon Valley. Although much of the Pentagon’s budget is spent on conventional weapons systems, the Defense Department has increasingly sought to adopt AI-enabled systems. Big tech companies, venture capital, and private equity firms benefit from multi-billion dollar Defense contracts, and smaller defense tech startups that “move fast and break things” also receive increased Defense funding. This report illustrates how a growing portion of the Defense Department’s spending is going to large, well-known tech firms, including some of the most highly valued corporations in the world.

Given the often-classified nature of large defense and intelligence contracts, a lack of transparency makes it difficult to discern the true amount of U.S. spending diverted to Big Tech. Yet, research reveals that the amount is substantial, and growing. According to the nonprofit research organization Tech Inquiry, three of the world’s biggest tech corporations were awarded approximately $28 billion from 2018 to 2022, including Microsoft ($13.5 billion), Amazon ($10.2 billion), and Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company ($4.3 billion). This paper found that the top five contracts to major tech firms between 2019 and 2022 had contract ceilings totaling at least $53 billion combined.

From 2021 through 2023, venture capital firms reportedly pumped nearly $100 billion into defense tech startup companies — an amount 40 percent higher than the previous seven years combined. This report examines how Silicon Valley startups, big tech, and venture capital who benefit from classified Defense contracts will create costly, high-tech defense products that are ineffective, unpredictable, and unsafe – all on the American taxpayer’s dime.

Berkeley linguist George Lakoff recently came up with the strategy that he decided to call the truth sandwich. Here’s how to build one: Lead with the truth. In the middle of the report, briefly describe the falsehood. And then fact-check the misinformation and repeat the truth.

[…] 

Lakoff has said that he thinks media organizations are unintentionally spreading misinformation when they repeat lies or quote politicians who are asserting falsehoods.

“Avoid retelling the lies. Avoid putting them in headlines, leads or tweets,” Sullivan wrote of Lakoff’s advice. “Because it is that very amplification that gives them power.”

Look at the range of those publication dates. Some are as old as I am, and only five of them were performed in the last decade. These aren’t lazy providers, for clarity! They’re doing their best! The focus on our health is just that bad. Take this study on progesterone, for example—it set out to see if progesterone affected breast growth in trans women… and ran for three months. On nineteen participants. That’s a ludicrously small sample and time period.

That, coincidentally, kind of brings us to the point: I’ve said a whole bunch that all science has a half-life, right? Well, back when most of the “recent” research was done on the effects of estrogen and testosterone on trans people, “the duration of puberty was [thought to be] 1.96 +/- 0.06 years” for cis girls, for instance, and a similar length for cis boys. In the last twenty years, however, a lot more science has been done, prying that window wider and wider, at least doubling that length, now, strong data says that puberty lasts around 10-14 years. It makes sense that doctors studied HRT the way that they did. When they did it, they thought that that was as long as puberty lasted. That part just… turned out to be wrong.

Simply put: trans folks are a marginalized, oppressed group which relies on the dominant group to research our medical needs. We, in general, don’t get a say in the research done on us, and it’s why I haven’t—and won’t—write an article about best practices on HRT that’s more specific than “stay within either male or female ranges, or work with an endocrinologist to find a nonbinary combination of estrogen and testosterone that’s right for you.”

We don’t have the research data.

And frankly? It’s not coming. I’m not aware of any meaningful, long-term research that compares different methods, doses, or approaches for HRT that’s currently in process.

This is just great.

Housing is an investment. And investment prices must go up. Housing is shelter. When the price of shelter goes up, people experience distress. Housing can’t be both a good investment and broadly affordable—yet we insist on both. This is the housing trap.