geese_feces

Nearly half of Americans now identify as independent—not necessarily because they’re centrists, or moderates, but because neither party reflects their views.

That’s because, over the past several decades, the parties have switched places, leaving tens of millions of voters unsure about what they stand for or where they belong, Yuval Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of A Time to Build, about reviving the American Dream, told me.

Levin described two axes in American political life—one right-left, and the other insider-outsider. Traditionally, the party of the right has been the party of the inside—the establishment—and the left has fought for those on the outside—the poor, the disenfranchised.

"But in the twenty-first century, they’ve switched sides," he said. "Democrats are the elites, and Republicans feel like they’re fighting the establishment."

One way to think about it, said Michael Lind, author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, was geographic: "From Lincoln to Reagan, New England, the Upper Midwest and the Great Lakes, and the western states were the Republicans, and now they’re the Democrats—while the interior was all the Democrats, and now they’re the Republicans."

This switch has "created a huge amount of confusion, because it’s happened without either party recognizing it," Levin added. "Republicans have gotten pretty comfortable with it, while Democrats are very uncomfortable being the insider party."

That’s because it’s "political suicide" to acknowledge you’re the party of the elite, Thomas Edsall, a New York Times columnist who has reported on national politics for a half-century, told me.

"Democrats are elite, but they can’t say it," Edsall said.

Consider that, in 2016, the median home price of a Hillary Clinton voter was $640,000, while that of a Trump voter was $474,000. In 2018, Democrats took control of the 10 wealthiest congressional districts in the country—all of them on the coasts, mostly in New York and California. Of the top 50, they held 41.

And, increasingly, Democrats recruit their future leaders—their ideas—from a handful of universities that cater to the American elite.

From 2004 to 2016, 20 percent of all Democratic campaign staffers came from seven universities: Harvard, Stanford, New York University, Berkeley, Georgetown, Columbia, and Yale. By contrast, the University of Texas, Austin; Ohio State University; and University of Wisconsin–Madison provided the most Republican staffers.

The reasons for the Great Scramble are legion and stretch back decades, if not longer: the breakup of the Democrats' New Deal coalition, the end of the Cold War, globalization, the internet, the decline of organized religion and the two-parent family, the forever wars, the opioid and fentanyl crises.

"Things are definitely in flux," Michael Lind said.

Several state Republican parties are reportedly going bankrupt and struggling to raise funds while being weakened by infighting, in a year when some of these states could be crucial for the election of America's next president.

In Arizona and Michigan, two states where the GOP presidential candidate will likely have to win a majority of suburban voters to get back in the White House, the state Republican parties are running critically short on money. In Arizona, the state GOP has just $14,800 left in the bank at the end of August, as reported by the Arizona Mirror.

In Michigan, the state Republican Party had $93,000 in its bank accounts as of July 2023. A recent draft report shared by insiders with MLive in early December said that the party was on "the brink of bankruptcy."

According to the report drafted by an attorney hired by GOP activist Warren Carpenter: "In only a matter of a few months, the party is essentially non-functional and, worse yet, the party and others associated with the party are now facing potential civil and criminal consequences for breaking laws."

The state Republican Party in Minnesota is also struggling financially, with a filing revealing that it recently had only $53.81 in the bank and was more than $335,000 in debt, according to a Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing.

A 2023 report by Politico revealed that the Colorado GOP was also struggling and facing eviction from its office because it could not pay rent, Deputy Chief of Staff Roger Hudson said. The party denied the story and accused Hudson of spreading lies, though The Colorado Sun reported that last spring the state party didn't pay a single employee for the first time in 20 years.

In Massachusetts, Politico reported that the state GOP has racked up more than $400,000 in debts to vendors and had less than $70,000 in the bank.

The Florida state GOP is the latest to join this list of near-broke Republican parties, with sources saying it "is essentially broke," Michael Barfield, lead investigator and public access director at the Florida Center for Government Accountability, said on X, formerly Twitter. Barfield wrote that the Florida GOP Chair Christian Ziegler "raised no big money for the party."

Fundraising might not be Ziegler's number one issue as Florida lawmakers will vote on removing him on Monday following allegations that he raped a woman who had been sexually involved with him and his wife. Ziegler has denied the allegation.

The financial challenges are due in part to years of losses against Democrats, and in part because former donors have dropped the party over its embrace of debunked claims like former President Donald Trump still saying that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.

What's on the line now, rather than the future of these state parties, is whether they will have the necessary funds for the 2024 election cycle.

In addition to financial issues, the Michigan state GOP recently descended into chaos and infighting after a vote to remove its chair, Kristina Karamo, a 2020 election denier and ally of Trump, who is the party's leading 2024 candidate.

Last year, Big Tech companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft) received about $3.04 billion in fines for breaking laws on both sides of the Atlantic. As of seven days and three hours into 2024, they had already earned enough revenue to pay it all off.

A little over a week of operations is all it would take if the companies tackled their fines one after another. If they each paid their fines simultaneously, Meta would be the last to finish after five days and 13 hours.

This shows how insignificant these fines are for companies whose revenues are often larger than countries’ GDPs. In fact, 2023 was the second straight year these five companies were fined over $3 billion, showing that they view fines as nothing more than the cost of doing business.

This also assumes these companies act in good conscience and pay their fines promptly. Unfortunately, there’s no late payment penalty for Big Tech — and they often delay for years. It’s just another instance of Big Tech using its overwhelming revenue to bend or avoid the rules that govern the rest of us. Clearly, the current remedies for antitrust and privacy breaches are not having the desired effect.

A number of suits have been filed regarding the use of copyrighted material during training of AI systems. But the Times' suit goes well beyond that to show how the material ingested during training can come back out during use. "Defendants’ GenAI tools can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style, as demonstrated by scores of examples," the suit alleges.

The suit alleges—and we were able to verify—that it's comically easy to get GPT-powered systems to offer up content that is normally protected by the Times' paywall. The suit shows a number of examples of GPT-4 reproducing large sections of articles nearly verbatim.

The suit includes screenshots of ChatGPT being given the title of a piece at The New York Times and asked for the first paragraph, which it delivers. Getting the ensuing text is apparently as simple as repeatedly asking for the next paragraph.

The suit is dismissive of attempts to justify this as a form of fair use. "Publicly, Defendants insist that their conduct is protected as 'fair use' because their unlicensed use of copyrighted content to train GenAI models serves a new 'transformative' purpose," the suit notes. "But there is nothing 'transformative' about using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it."

The suit seeks nothing less than the erasure of both any GPT instances that the parties have trained using material from the Times, as well as the destruction of the datasets that were used for the training. It also asks for a permanent injunction to prevent similar conduct in the future. The Times also wants money, lots and lots of money: "statutory damages, compensatory damages, restitution, disgorgement, and any other relief that may be permitted by law or equity."

An 18-year-old hacker who leaked clips of a forthcoming Grand Theft Auto (GTA) game has been sentenced to an indefinite hospital order.

Arion Kurtaj from Oxford, who has autism, was a key member of international gang Lapsus$.

The gang's attacks on tech giants including Uber, Nvidia and Rockstar Games cost the firms nearly $10m.

The judge said Kurtaj's skills and desire to commit cyber crime meant he remained a high risk to the public.

He will remain at a secure hospital for life unless doctors deem him no longer a danger.

The court heard that Kurtaj had been violent while in custody with dozens of reports of injury or property damage.

Doctors deemed Kurtaj unfit to stand trial due to his acute autism so the jury was asked to determine whether or not he committed the alleged acts - not if he did so with criminal intent.

A mental health assessment used as part of the sentencing hearing said he "continued to express the intent to return to cybercrime as soon as possible. He is highly motivated."

The jury was told that while he was on bail for hacking Nvidia and BT/EE and in police protection at a Travelodge hotel, he continued hacking and carried out his most infamous hack.

Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj managed to breach Rockstar, the company behind GTA, using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel TV and a mobile phone.

Kurtaj stole 90 clips of the unreleased and hugely anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6.

He broke into the company's internal Slack messaging system to declare "if Rockstar does not contact me on Telegram within 24 hours I will start releasing the source code".

He then posted the clips and source code on a forum under the username TeaPotUberHacker.

He was re-arrested and detained until his trial.

Democrat Shamaine Daniels is running for Congress, eyeing a seat held by Trump-aligned Republican Representative Scott Perry, who played a key role challenging the 2020 election results.

Daniels, who lost to Perry by less than 10 points last year, hopes a new weapon will help her underdog candidacy: Ashley, an artificial intelligence campaign volunteer.

Ashley is not your typical robocaller; none of her responses are canned or pre-recorded. Her creators, who intend to mainly work with Democratic campaigns and candidates, say she is the first political phone banker powered by generative AI technology similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. She is capable of having an infinite number of customized one-on-one conversations at the same time.

Ashley is one of the first examples of how generative AI is ushering in a new era of political campaigning in which candidates use technology to engage with voters in ways increasingly difficult to track.

To some, it is an exciting new tool for conducting high-quality conversations on a large scale. Others worry this will worsen disinformation in the polarized landscape of American politics already battling "deepfakes," realistic but fabricated videos and images created using AI algorithms.

Over the weekend, Ashley called thousands of Pennsylvania voters on behalf of Daniels. Like a seasoned campaign volunteer, Ashley analyzes voters' profiles to tailor conversations around their key issues. Unlike a human, Ashley always shows up for the job, has perfect recall of all of Daniels' positions, and does not feel dejected when she's hung up on.

"This is going to scale fast," said 30-year-old Ilya Mouzykantskii, the London-based CEO of Civox, the company behind Ashley. "We intend to be making tens of thousands of calls a day by the end of the year and into the six digits pretty soon. This is coming for the 2024 election and it's coming in a very big way. ... The future is now."

For Daniels, the tool levels the playing field: as the underdog, she is now armed with another way to understand voters better, reach out in different languages (Ashley is fluent in over 20), and conduct many more "high bandwidth" conversations.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackWolfFeed/comments/18dfyc6/789_eack_feat_liz_franczak_12723_70_mins/

Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users via their apps' push notifications, a U.S. senator warned on Wednesday. In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Google and Apple. Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones.

Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple's servers.

That gives the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from those apps to their users, and in turn puts them "in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps," Wyden said. He asked the Department of Justice to "repeal or modify any policies" that hindered public discussions of push notification spying.

In a statement, Apple said that Wyden's letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications.

"In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information," the company said in a statement. "Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests."

Wyden's letter cited a "tip" as the source of the information about the surveillance. His staff did not elaborate on the tip, but a source familiar with the matter confirmed that both foreign and U.S. government agencies have been asking Apple and Google for metadata related to push notifications to, for example, help tie anonymous users of messaging apps to specific Apple or Google accounts. The source declined to identify the foreign governments involved in making the requests but described them as democracies allied to the United States.

• The US is among countries arguing against new laws to regulate AI-controlled killer drones.
• The US, China, and others are developing so-called "killer robots."
• Critics are concerned about the development of machines that can decide to take human lives.

In a speech in August, US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, said technology like AI-controlled drone swarms would enable the US to offset China's People's Liberation Army's (PLA) numerical advantage in weapons and people.

"We'll counter the PLA's mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat," she said, reported Reuters.

Frank Kendall, the Air Force secretary, told The Times that AI drones will need to have the capability to make lethal decisions while under human supervision.

"Individual decisions versus not doing individual decisions is the difference between winning and losing — and you're not going to lose," he said.

"I don't think people we would be up against would do that, and it would give them a huge advantage if we put that limitation on ourselves."

The nuclear research hub Idaho National Laboratory (INL) confirmed that it fell victim to a data breach on Tuesday. SiegedSec, a group of self-proclaimed "gay furry hackers," took responsibility for the attack and claimed they accessed sensitive employee data like social security numbers, home addresses and more.

"We're willing to make a deal with INL. If they research creating irl catgirls we will take down this post," SiegedSec wrote in a post announcing the leak on Monday.

The hacktivist group SiegedSec conducted a high profile attack on NATO last month, leaking internal documents as a retaliation against those countries for their attacks on human rights. The group commonly attacks government and affiliated organizations for political reasons, like targeting state governments for passing anti-trans legislation earlier this year.

A spokesperson confirmed the breach to Engadget on Wednesday. "On Monday, Nov. 20, Idaho National Laboratory determined that it was the target of a cybersecurity data breach in a federally approved vendor system outside the lab that supports INL cloud Human Resources services. INL has taken immediate action to protect employee data," an INL spokesperson said. The lab said it has reached out to authorities for help on how to proceed as it determines how to handle the breach.

INL works as a Department of Energy affiliate researching nuclear reactors, among other projects like sustainable energy. It employs more than 5,000 people.