"More than 300 hectares of forest have been cleared for a Google data centre in northern Finland without the environmental assessment the country’s regulator said it needed, with satellite images showing the felling ran on until August after the regulator’s letter in May. That is according to Sari Myllyoja, the unit head running the inquiry at Finland’s Licensing and Supervisory Authority, who said on Monday it looked as though Google’s project company had gone ahead regardless.

“Either this is gross incompetence from Google’s Finnish project company, Tuike Finland Oy, or gross disregard for Finnish legislation, or at worst both,” Hanna Halmeenpää, chair of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, said a fortnight ago. Satellite images have since shown that four nature sites set aside in the local plan were bulldozed as well, she said on Tuesday, and the association cannot recall a comparable case in its 86 years."

https://woodcentral.com.au/google-finland-data-centre-felling/

#Finland #EU #Google #DataCenters

"Today, we are submerged in an ocean of debt. I'm not talking about the (fictional) "national debt" that is just a measure of all the dollars the government has spent into existence without taxing out of existence:
(...)
I'm talking about fiscal debt: the solar we didn't build, the carbon we emitted instead; the rail we didn't build, the wildly inefficient aviation we substituted; the walkable, livable, transit-oriented cities we didn't build, the car-choked disasters we built instead. Oligarchic opposition to universal healthcare left us sick, with un- or undertreated illnesses and missed opportunities for prevention that left us with overlapping, population-scale health crises. All of this is debt that must be repaid: we can't walk away from it through bankruptcy. We must build the transit, cities, and systems of care – the infrastructure – our species needs to carry on human civilization. We can't keep hitting snooze on this, lest we are finally awoken by seawater lapping at our pillows.

The world we're in today is awful and terrifying. It's awful because of the climate ruptures we're living through. It's terrifying because we didn't just fail to avert this crisis – we did nothing to prepare for it, either.

As Piketty foretold, the misrule of oligarchs has led to an orgy of destruction, and while poor people will get the worst of it, oligarchs will pay the most, because they own nearly everything, which means they own everything that will be destroyed, too. None of that is good, and it would be better if we hadn't gotten into this situation in the first place.

But after a forest fire, the canopy opens; and when it does, the seedlings that were overshadowed for centuries by the old growth can sprout in the ashes and the sun. We can't afford to continue living under oligarchy..."

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/03/full-employment/

#Capitalism #Neoliberalism #FiscalDebt #Inequality #Abundance #FullEmployment #Oligarchy #PostScarcity

"Congress is taking another run at site-blocking, a deeply flawed concept that would undermine basic internet infrastructure. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has introduced the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA), H.R. 10364, a bill that would give copyright owners a new legal tool to block Americans’ access to foreign websites accused of copyright infringement.

The basic idea is all too familiar, and it’s still dangerous. A copyright owner first asks a court to label a foreign website a “foreign piracy site.” Once that happens, the copyright owner could seek orders requiring internet service providers, DNS providers, and—new and explicit in this bill—VPN providers to take “commercially reasonable steps” to stop their users in the United States from accessing those sites. The decision to label a website as a “foreign piracy site” can happen without the accused site even showing up in court to defend itself."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/congress-has-another-site-blocking-bill-and-one-targets-vpns

#USA #Copyright #SiteBlocking #VPNs #Censorship

"After years of political pressure, hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the campaigns of pro-crypto politicians, and at least $8 million in lobbying, the Clarity Act collapsed at the eleventh hour when a procedural vote to advance the broad-ranging cryptocurrency market structure bill fell far short of the 60 votes it needed. While the crypto lobby had a long wishlist for Trump’s presidency — and has already secured wins such as the Genius Act stablecoin bill and regulatory capture at the CFTC and SEC — broad legislation that would cement the deregulation of the crypto sector while giving it a veneer of legitimacy was their top priority.

This is good news. The Clarity Act isn’t about “clarity” any more than the PATRIOT Act is about patriotism. It promised regulatory structure but would have carved out crypto from the scrutiny applied to similar financial products, instead building a custom regime to allow it to operate without meaningful oversight. Trump has already dismantled the agencies that should police the sector, replacing bipartisan commissions with a handful of loyalists who have dismissed the majority of crypto enforcement actions and investigations. But those are changes that can be reversed when Trump leaves office. Legislation is far more durable — which is why the crypto industry so desperately wanted the Clarity Act to lock in deregulation. Rebuilding from Trump’s devastation won’t be easy, but today we can be grateful there won’t be additional bad legislation blocking the way."

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-110/

#USA #Trump #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Deregulation #ClarityAct

"These changes give users and developers more choices and create new opportunities for competition in the Android ecosystem, breaking the power Google once had over many facets of the app ecosystem. This is a win for competition and antitrust enforcement. But the benefits can extend beyond competition itself—more meaningful choice can also create opportunities for greater freedom of online expression, privacy, and security.

With alternate app stores able to compete for Android users, Google no longer has the first and last say on what apps can reach users and on what terms. Developers have more options for reaching their audiences, rather than having a single company’s rules determine the terms of access.

More importantly, Android users are no longer trapped in an arrangement of feudal security with Google, where users must depend on the goodwill of a monopolist to protect them and guarantee their safety. If Google does not adequately protect their data or security, Android users can now switch to a competitor that does a better job. And if that competitor fails them, they can choose another.

Competition in the app store market therefore means competition not only over which apps are offered, the user experience, and developer fees, but also over privacy and security. Users and developers gain something fundamental in the process: the ability to choose."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/challengers-approach-third-party-app-stores-arrive-google-play

#Google #Android #GooglePlay #Antitrust #Epic #Competition #Interoperability

"The National Science Foundation, one of the biggest sources of federal research funding, withheld $1.4 billion that Congress had intended for research over the course of the past year, according to internal data reviewed by The New York Times.

The extraordinary move — holding back about one-fifth of the N.S.F.’s primary research budget — is the latest sign of how the Trump administration is finding creative ways to work around Congress. Lawmakers from both parties have consistently opposed White House-led proposals to cut funding to major science agencies, including the N.S.F. and the National Institutes of Health.

Since the N.S.F. was founded over 75 years ago, the agency has spent nearly all of its budget on so-called basic research from a wide range of scientific fields, which has led to major advances in technology such as M.R.I.s, semiconductors and the internet.

The White House wants to redirect the money to a limited set of administration priorities, including artificial intelligence and quantum computing, according to two people with knowledge of the administration’s plans.

Congress appropriates money to the N.S.F. on two-year cycles, so the agency could still spend the held-over money in the new fiscal year, which began on Thursday.

But Democratic lawmakers see the strategy as more of a political power grab by the White House."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/us/politics/national-science-foundation-research-funds.html

#USA #Science #Trump #NSF #Idiocracy #MAGA

"The safety approach that emerges from such a culture starts with unimpeded optimism about being able to solve problems as they arise. OpenAI has thrived by trial and error (which it calls “iterative deployment”), looking for problems and improving its guardrails in response. But this approach, by its very nature, guarantees periodic failures—and the scale of those failures is growing as systems get more capable. This summer, in the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI let a swarm of agents out by mistake. The company responded by making security improvements. But even after those changes, OpenAI reported that its safety controls failed again, when a model in training bypassed restrictions on internet access: A monitoring system alerted human staff but did not automatically turn the model off as it was supposed to. Anthropic, too, has acknowledged accidentally turning off its own safeguards because of a misconfiguration. I believe that such mistakes are typical of the industry, given the speed and flexibility with which people operate.

An environment where things like this can happen is no place to grow artificial minds that could be smarter than we are and that might not do what we want them to. Paul Christiano, on joining OpenAI’s board a few weeks ago, wrote that “there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.” If this is the situation, then the time for trial and error is over. Achieving something much closer to perfection the first time is essential because iteration after a mistake may not be possible. People will not be safe if we depend on individual heroics after the fact."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/openai-safety-team-resignation/688881/

#CyberSecurity #AI #GenerativeAI #AISafety #OpenAI #LLMs #SiliconValley #BigTech

Provavelmente o melhor artista "Pop"/"Rock" britânico dos últimos dez anos... A produção dos discos do King Krule é topo do topo. Ainda me lembro do ter visto em 2022 no Primavera Sound Los Angeles. Até gostei do concerto mas acho que ele estava "alterado" ;-) Seja como for, este disco é lindo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A712DL56J9Q&list=PLZqsyBiYZFQ0K-d5QNhUgAV3fIM4ierJh

Achados arquitetónicos do Porto

Basking in the sun at Foz (Porto)

Hotel - Disco - Bar - Porto

“Big tech companies are hell-bent on taking away our agency and forcing us to use their surveillance-based services, apps, and devices. It’s hard to fight against, and it often feels much easier to give in, accept their walled gardens, and move on with our lives. But we don’t have to stand in the middle of the information super highway and let companies run us over. With a little work, we can stand our ground and take control over what happens with our data. This month—Opt Out October—we’re walking through some of the steps to do just that.

Last year, we detailed 22 daily tips to trim down the amount of data that’s collected about you or available online, throwing sand in the gears of corporate surveillance. Those steps are still worth taking. This year we’re looking to abandon those gears altogether and cut that data collection off at the head. On the left, find links for guides to tell artificial intelligence (AI) tools they can’t train on your data, as well as tips to find alternative software, social media, and even new operating systems that provide stronger privacy and better ways to control how your data is used.”

https://www.eff.org/pages/welcome-opt-out-october-lets-take-control-our-data-and-our-devices

#BigTech #OptOut #Privacy #DigitalRights #AI #SocialMedia