technocrit

Privileged babies get their disgusting bottles.

As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed "courageous whistleblowers" who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user's messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app's end-to-end encryption. "A worker need only send a 'task' (i.e., request via Meta's internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job," the lawsuit claims. "The Meta engineering team will then grant access -- often without any scrutiny at all -- and the worker's workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user's messages based on the user's User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products."

"Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users' messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required," the 51-page complaint adds. "The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated -- essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted." The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.

After years of litigation, courts ultimately sided with Reddit in a decision now referred to as the "Rogozinski Ruling," a precedent that grants platforms broad authority to assert trademark ownership over user-created communities. That ruling now forms the basis for Reddit's demand that the words "WallStreetBets" be physically removed from the event. "They aren't afraid of the name being used," said Rogozinski. "If they were, they'd have to sue the internet. What they're afraid of is the creator hanging out with his creation. They're afraid of the community's independence. And they're afraid it's evolved into something bigger than a subreddit."

"But what do you do in the snow?!?!?!"

Meanwhile in reality...

“We’re out here today because the city of Los Angeles signed Vision Zero as a directive in August 2015 to prioritize saving lives on our roads — to achieve zero traffic fatalities by 2025,” said SAFE founder and executive director Damian Kevitt, who lost his right leg in a violent traffic incident in 2013. “Not manage or reduce [them] but eliminate traffic fatalities. We are a decade later and we are at 290 traffic fatalities. ... It’s a 26% increase in traffic fatalities since the start of Vision Zero.”

Kevitt had been bicycling in Griffith Park with his wife in 2013 when he was hit by a car, pinned underneath it and dragged a quarter mile onto and along the 5 Freeway. The driver was never found. Kevitt not only survived but vowed to dedicate his life to road safety advocacy, founding SAFE in 2015.

...

“The city has tools, it’s just not using them,” Kevitt told The Times. “In 2024, voters approved measure HLA by a two-thirds margin. It requires the city must follow its own mobility plan … to make roads safer for cyclists, for pedestrians, for better transit.” He also cited state measure AB 645, which in 2023 authorized a pilot program for speed cameras in a handful of California cities including Los Angeles, as “a tool the city could be implementing — it’s speed safety systems.”

City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez was on hand to support the demonstrators.

“When we have a city where more people die of traffic violence than homicides, and it doesn’t get that level of attention, yes, absolutely we could be doing more,” he said in an interview. “These are things that are absolutely preventable. But unfortunately, we don’t put enough funding into making our streets safer.”

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Kevitt had one parting comment for The Times: “Don’t use the word traffic ‘accident’ when writing about this,” he said.

“In the road safety arena, it’s ‘crash’ or ‘collision,’” he said. “ ‘Accident’ implies non-responsibility. It’s just an ‘oops.’ But when you’re driving drunk or distracted, that’s a choice. If you hit and kill or severely injure someone, it’s not an ‘oops.’ We’re trying to say: This is preventable.”

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Republicans made no secret of what Democrats were voting for. After the vote Thursday, Representative Tom Cole, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, declared the legislation would “champion American military power, ensuring that our brave warfighters have the tools, weapon systems and capabilities to meet any foe anywhere in the world at any time.” He summarized the bill’s purpose in three words: “America First, Fully Funded.”

Representative Ken Calvert, chairman of the Defense Subcommittee, said the bill “protects the administration’s ‘America first’ defense agenda.”

The House Appropriations Committee issued a statement hailing the “Republican-led funding that puts America First. These bills advance President Trump’s agenda.”

Despite Republicans openly proclaiming that the legislation would fund Trump’s fascistic agenda, nearly two-thirds of House Democrats voted in favor of the defense and consolidated spending bill.

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Osuna-Mascaró hopes the work will inspire scientists to pay more attention to farm animals as well. Though he’s largely studied chimpanzees and cockatoos until now, he wants to continue to work with cows. He’s even put a cow screensaver on his phone. “I think most animals are living a rich life and have something really interesting to tell us,” he says. “We just have to ask the right questions.”

The continuing row highlights long-standing tensions over clinical research trials in Africa that are proposed and run by researchers in other countries. African scientists say that the Guinea-Bissau study shows how political pressure, funding interests and fragmented oversight can push local health priorities aside.

... The rise of neoclassical economics at the beginning of the twentieth century portrayed economic theory as objective. “Pure economics” emerged as the new label for what until then had been known as “political economy.” This astute rebranding reimagined an economy that was somehow beyond power relations. Economists became the gatekeepers of infallible models on par with those used by the hard sciences — like, say, quantum mechanics — and too sophisticated for most citizens to understand. This coincided with the rise of allegedly politically independent economic institutions such as central banks, which began removing key policy decisions from democratic scrutiny.

The tidying of the economic discourse placed any suggestion of a more human, more commonsensical political project out of bounds. Even well-meaning progressives limit themselves to pointing the finger at exceptional corporate greed or the out-of-control rise of the financial sector. These critiques go nowhere because they ignore the problems within the basic structure. Neoclassical economists have peddled the market society as one in which everyone, if rational and virtuous enough, can thrive. They claim that social hierarchies are reflections of individual merit, meaning that those who aren’t at the top don’t deserve to be. It is an argument that supports those in power very well.

According to this perspective, the profits of saver-entrepreneurs are the result of their virtuous behavior, enabling them to sign workers’ paychecks, which sounds good. The message is so persuasive that today almost everyone has internalized it: if we try hard enough, each of us can become a rich investor. Those who cannot make it can blame only themselves...

Drone video shows a massive 100+ vehicle pileup in Michigan with injuries reported amid dangerous winter conditions.