Google is threatening to pull its search engine from an entire country — Australia — if a proposed law goes into effect that would force Google to pay news publishers for their content.

“If this version of the Code were to become law it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia,” Google Australia and New Zealand VP Meg Silva told Australia’s Senate Economics Legislation Committee today.

Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which drafted the law, seemed to suggest in August that this shouldn’t affect Google’s search business: “Google will not be required to charge Australians for the use of its free services such as Google Search and YouTube, unless it chooses to do so.” Clearly, Google disagrees.

The company’s managing director Mel Silva played Google’s trump card on Friday at a Senate inquiry into the bill underpinning the proposed code.

Facebook is also unhappy with the plan, arguing in its submission to the inquiry that the proposal has already deterred its planned investments in Australian news.

Representatives from Twitter won’t be appearing on Friday, but in its submission, the company has expressed concern the code won’t protect consumer welfare and choice and instead entrench dominant players.

Just last year, Loon had secured approval from the government of Kenya to launch first balloons to provide commercial connectivity services — something it did successfully achieve months later, giving an impression that things were moving in the right direction.

We are in discussions with telecommunications companies and governments worldwide to provide a solution to help extend internet connectivity to these underserved areas.”

“We talk a lot about connecting the next billion users, but the reality is Loon has been chasing the hardest problem of all in connectivity — the last billion users,” said Alastair Westgarth, chief executive of Loon, in a blog post.

Google says it will stop making its search function available in Australia if Parliament passes the Morrison government's proposed laws to force it and Facebook to pay news businesses for their journalism.

Google Australia managing director Mel Silva told a Senate hearing on Friday the proposed news media bargaining code remained "unworkable", and the company was prepared to exit the Australian market.

"If this version of the code were to become law, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia," Ms Silva told the inquiry.

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An agreement between Google and the French news industry "establishes a framework within which Google will negotiate individual licensing agreements" with individual news organizations, according to Google.

French authorities ordered Google to conduct "good faith negotiations" with the news industry to decide how much Google would pay news sites for their content.

The agreement is particularly significant because it offers a model for other European countries that want to force Google to fork over cash to their own news sites.

A federal judge has refused to restore the social media site Parler after Amazon kicked the company off of its Web-hosting services over content seen as inciting violence.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein sided with Amazon, which argued that Parler would not take down posts threatening public safety even in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol and that it is within Amazon's rights to punish the company over its refusal.

The company flagged dozens of posts advocating violence, which is against its policies, and Parler failed to remove the posts, according to Amazon's attorneys.

Dorsey said that Bluesky would “take time to build.” If it results in a protocol, that system might be created from scratch, or it might build on an existing standard like ActivityPub — a possibility Dorsey mentioned in 2019 upon unveiling the initiative.

The report focuses on monetization options like membership fees and cryptocurrency microtransactions, but it also notes that “many decentralized projects run on volunteer work and donations” — something that isn’t ideal for a platform supporting commercial networks like Twitter.

As some decentralized developers mentioned in 2019, Twitter could also potentially do more good by contributing resources to existing projects — not trying to spearhead a unified standard.

Jan 21 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Thursday rejected Parler’s demand that Amazon.com Inc restore web hosting services for the social media platform, which Amazon had cut off following the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle said Parler failed to show it was likely to prevail on the merits of its claims, or that the public interest supported granting an injunction requiring the restoration of service.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

A federal judge has refused to restore the social media site Parler after Amazon kicked the company off of its Web-hosting services over content seen as inciting violence.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein sided with Amazon, which argued that Parler would not take down posts threatening public safety even in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol and that it is within Amazon's rights to punish the company over its refusal.

The company flagged dozens of posts advocating violence, which is against its policies, and Parler failed to remove the posts, according to Amazon's attorneys.

PARIS (Reuters) - Google and a French publishers’ lobby said on Thursday they had agreed to a copyright framework for the U.S. tech giant to pay news publishers for content online, in a first for Europe.

“Reuters is committed to developing new ways of providing access to trusted, high-quality and reliable global news coverage at a time when it’s never been more important,” Eric Danetz, Global Head of Revenue, Reuters, said in a statement.

The deal follows months of bargaining between Google, French publishers and news agencies over how to apply revamped EU copyright rules, which allow publishers to demand a fee from online platforms showing extracts of their news.

The crate lets you call any Windows API past, present, and future using code generated on the fly directly from the metadata describing the API and right into your Rust package where you can call them as if they were just another Rust module.

The Rust language projection follows in the tradition established by C++/WinRT of building language projections for Windows using standard languages and compilers, providing a natural and idiomatic way for Rust developers to call Windows APIs.

This can be useful to figure out how the various Windows APIs map to Rust modules and which paths you need to use from within the macro.

Much like the scientific method, when an article has been vetted by intelligent actors from diverse fields, veracity and insights can be far superior than what any AI can offer.

Compare this with Google, where the wisdom of the crowd is influenced by popularity or profit, with AI augmenting the darkest parts of human nature.

Minimal social elements could encourage constructive feedback for intellectual development.

Brave has just taken a step toward supporting a decentralized web by becoming the first browser to offer native integration with a peer-to-peer networking protocol that aims to fundamentally change how the internet works.

But with version 1.19 of the Brave browser releasing today, Brave users will be able to access IPFS content directly by resolving URIs that start with ipfs://.

“IPFS gives users a solution to the problem of centralized servers creating a central point of failure for content access,” Brave CTO Brian Bondy said in a statement, adding that this gives Brave users “the power to seamlessly serve content to millions of new users across the globe via a new and secure protocol.”

To determine whether or not a group recommended to our panelists was political, The Markup looked at the group’s name, it’s “about” page, and its rules; and for groups that were public or that accepted our request to join, we read through recent posts in the group’s “discussion” feed to assess whether the group mentions politicians, political commentators, movements, parties, or ideologies.

Of those that responded, the Candace Owens for POTUS, 2024 and Steve Schmidt fan club groups told The Markup they consider their groups “political.” The Giuliani fan group’s administrator, Patricia Brackett, said in a Facebook voice message that her page was meant for Trump supporters.

Our analysis showed that for our panelists, the political groups Facebook recommended did not necessarily have much to do with their social connections: Panelists who voted for Trump were only recommended to join a political group containing one of their friends 1.4 percent of the time—for Biden voters it was 2.4 percent of the time.

Twint is an advanced Twitter scraping tool written in Python that allows for scraping Tweets from Twitter profiles without using Twitter's API.

Twint utilizes Twitter's search operators to let you scrape Tweets from specific users, scrape Tweets relating to certain topics, hashtags & trends, or sort out sensitive information from Tweets like e-mail and phone numbers.

Twint also makes special queries to Twitter allowing you to also scrape a Twitter user's followers, Tweets a user has liked, and who they follow without any authentication, API, Selenium, or browser emulation.

That covers the “OSS” in “FOSS”.

You cannot stop someone from making money from your software, but you can obligate them to share their improvements with everyone else, which you can incorporate back into the original product to make it more compelling for everyone.

FOSS licenses are important, and you should make it your business to understand them, both as a user, contributor, and author of free and open source software.

When fed a semantic patch and a C file, Coccinelle parses the semantic patch to create an AST, and parses the C file to create an AST as well.

During my work on Coccinelle, I implemented a performance boosting algorithm to speed up recursive parsing of header files in the Linux Kernel.

• While parsing a header file, create a dependency graph to figure out what header file is reachable from which C file.

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• The newsletter platform Substack, whose business model uses subscriptions rather than advertisements, has seen some of its most prominent users incorporate advertising into their newsletters.

The founders of Swapstack, Jake Schonberger and Jake Singer, originally hatched the idea as a form of audience sharing: You promote my newsletter in your newsletter, and I'll promote yours in mine.

Both allow newsletter writers to submit their products for inclusion on the platform, free of charge, and Letterwell already has a number of high-profile clients on its roster, including Scott's Cheap Flights, a popular newsletter with 1.8 million subscribers.

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But Sawhney’s creation, born out of a group chat with friends, added layers of personalization, ease of use, and absurdity; because it fixes Sanders in the same coordinates regardless of his location, he occasionally looks as though he’s floating, or sitting on a car, or in an otherwise unlikely orientation.

The site gained traction on Twitter slowly at first; friends retweeting, then friends of friends.

“I was freaking out because I was like, oh my god I’m going viral,” says Sawhney, who by day is a New York University grad student focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Producing the class labels ended up being a little tricky—if a drive is in poor enough health to be a member of the failing class, it might already be failing badly enough to not report SMART stats.

Base_score helps handle imbalanced data similarly to scale_pos_weight, but does so through defining the default classification score to encourage the model to err toward either positives or negatives.

Predicting failure using SMART stats is a cool idea and sounds logical, but there might not be enough predictive power in SMART to make anything better than “pretty good.”

Amazon Web Services was within its rights to shut down social media platform Parler, a federal judge ruled Thursday, rejecting a move by the site to force Amazon to reinstate it.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle denied a request by Parler for a preliminary injunction that sought to require AWS to continue hosting the site.

Rothstein said Parler offered little more than conjecture that AWS had conspired with Twitter to harm its business and said the web hosting service “argued convincingly” that it sought to prevent Parler from being used to promote violence.

It is pure Python and requires no dependencies beyond the standard library.

aims to be a repository for utility functions, particularly those that come from the functional programming and list processing traditions.

The ideal contribution is significantly different from existing functions and has precedent in a few other functional systems.

The thought of her WhatsApp messages being exposed frightened Jadwani’s aunt so much, she said, that she stopped sending messages on WhatsApp altogether.

India is WhatsApp’s largest consumer market by many measures, but backlash against the recent privacy policy change is now threatening its future in the country.

Many of these WhatsApp family groups — including my own — erupted with anger and confusion in the days after the platform sent the pop-up message announcing its new policy.

Read further to find out why they chose Rust for their product, the benefits of Rust for security-centered applications, and what cool libraries you should look into if you’re developing something similar in Rust.

One of the main things that drew us to Rust initially was the memory safety; it definitely excites us knowing that Rust helps us maximize our confidence in the safety of our customers’ secrets.

Another very powerful (and often overlooked) feature of Rust is its procedural macro system, which has allowed us to write a tool that automatically shares types defined in Rust with our client-side languages (Swift, Kotlin, and TypeScript).