Yet it's 2026 and we see extreme examples of spam content and misinformation to the point that it's killing the internet, but AI companies have collectively decided to not care
In a circle of irony, reuters.com is denying my request to read the article about Apple deciding to deny rolling out Siri in EU due to being denied their request for an exemption to law
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Omg, I don’t now know how to cope without reading your comment.
It was probably really relevant and life-changing. Well I guess I’ll just get on the way I did before.
The same with Siri, I don’t need it and don’t care about some hyped up AI that Apple wants to push down my throat.
Similar to your comments, I don’t need it and if you (and Apple) don’t want to share or comply with the rules, well why should that make me unhappy? Or make me get angry at the EU?
There is a uniform centralized group that operated for a decade under the name of Internet Research Agency, and almost certainly something like it continues to operate to this day. These had paid employees who got directions on what to promote with the goal of manipulating the public debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
That was a private company operated by Prigozhin [1] who was, almost certainly, an extremely mentally unwell individual. He was the guy who formed the 'Wagner' private military company, supported Putin, then seemingly tried to overthrow Putin, and then was likely killed by Putin. When he left the stage, it was unceremoniously shut down alongside most of his other ventures. The spastic operations of the org would be pretty much in the character of Prigozhin without any grand 5D chess going on.
I'm also of the mindset that the effort to suggest there's state propaganda everywhere is, itself, mostly domestic state propaganda in an effort to try to 'otherize' dissenting views, especially as politicians and their actions become ever more unpopular.
So that page didn't exist before December 2024, and was created by a guy whose done nothing but push anti-Russian propaganda, and links to a video in Ukrainian on his user page showing Russian soldiers being killed. Interestingly the page has also had segments of its edit timeline permanently deleted as well, which is something that never used to happen on Wiki.
Anyhow apparently examples of "Russian hybrid warfare" are the West cynically claiming Russia blew up its own oil pipeline. Those tricky Russians multiplying their forces by blowing up their own pipelines. Just imagine what they could achieve if they nuked themselves! Imagine, just for a second somebody linking to an article/account that was pro-Russian, but otherwise everything was equal but opposite. Can you even begin to imagine what you might think? Well that's what I'm thinking.
Thanks for the info! I've literally never once seen that done on Wikipedia, and pretty much the first thing I do when looking at a new page is go to the history.
I imagine Israel's various hasbara operation dwarfs its relevance and funding by multiple orders of magnitude. I don't see much evidence it plays a role outside of being useful to blame for inconvenient discourse.
Sure, but that's a good example. They obviously push pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and probably a good deal of outright anti-Muslim positions.
But do you think they push random divisive issues, unrelated to their own interests, just to destabilize countries they don't like? I think the evidence for that is much weaker.
That wouldn't really make sense for Israel. They don't want America to be destabilised. They want it stable and supporting them. Same for European countries. They want Palestine and Iran unstable, but they've already achieved that through other means.
For a country of 8 million to "dwarf by multiple orders of magnitude" a country of 140 million in almost anything requires very lively imagination indeed.
Soft power operations are hard to measure. You cannot measure the impact of Israeli activities either.
> For a country of 8 million to "dwarf by multiple orders of magnitude" a country of 140 million in almost anything requires very lively imagination indeed.
I see you've never heard of Hasbara.
Anyway, there's little reason to think that influence scales with the size of the population as opposed to the number of people involved in active influence and funding, especially with Russia locking down access to the global internet. Israel simply has much, much, much, much more to gain from interfering in american culture than russia does (despite its being scapegoated by the least capable of our politicians).
Russia has its own Great Power status to lose, which they worked on since the 16th century. If they cannot defeat Ukraine and be seen as clear winners of this long war, no amount of nuclear weapons will help them regain their clout. Even their own heavily Muslim regions like Caucasus may well secede.
What incentives does OpenAI have to make sure the AI actually works well with Norwegian beyond capturing a (small) Norwegian market? What incentives do they have to take Norwegian values into consideration, or to preserve Norwegian culture into the future? The matter is also a question of national sovereignty, so to simply release the data and nicely ask foreign companies to solve the problem for you, would be a fool's move
It's also a bit funny because Norway definitely has enough money to hire a team of Anthropic's best to go out there and train them a model that does whatever they want. They probably have enough money to fund their own Anthropic competitor.
I highly doubt that hiring people who don't even speak the language would result in a better model for Norwegian. If anything, they could pay Anthropic for some tips and tricks for training. But that does not seem necessary as Deepseek & co detail everything for free
Considering the fact that the US is complaining about Norway putting too much money into the US market, imagine what would happen if all that money was spent in Norway. It would be chaos.
It was tried in early 1980s and nearly drove any non oil-related industry in the country extinct.
Norway has a manpower bottleneck. The UK had spent its oil windfall domestically and it barely registered. But for a nation of then some 4 million the economy melts down with so much monetary mass.
So blaming population is a cheap excuse that doesn't hold water. Especially that you can always import the skilled people you lack, when you have virtually unlimited money and some of the highest standards of living in the world.
My experience with Google hardware is that they shipped an update for Pixel 4a that crippled the battery. In Australia, they announced a safety recall due to a discovered battery safety issue, but in the rest of the world, it seems they wanted to save money by crippling people's phones of their own volition without much explanation. But no worries, they're offering 3 methods of compensation: free battery replacement to restore it, $50 cash, or $100 credit for another Google phone.
I went to redeem my compensation - free battery replacement unavailable in your country, $100 credit unavailable in your country. I guess I'll take the $50 cash...? I fill in the form with my IMEI, full name, address, etc etc. After a week they send a response saying unfortunately after thoroughly looking into my case, I'm not eligible, and no further explanation is offered as to why. In effect it's as if they hacked into my phone and installed a virus that cripples the battery and there's nothing I can do about it, like this is just a normal way to do business now. You don't really own your phone after all...
Because taking Windows from an operating system to an intelligence system worked out so well for them, that now they're trying to figure out how Windows can reach performance parity with Linux running Windows software :)
Google could actually do everyone a solid by killing gmail. They have enough influence in the industry that they could create a standard for email address portability, and then slowly force everybody to move off. By the end, one of the biggest problems with email would be solved and people would be able to switch email providers like how we can switch phone providers without needing to change our phone numbers. And Google would get to save a lot of money by no longer needing to provide everyone's emails
Retail phones for sale without Google Play Services:
All Huawei phones, which uses Huawei AppGallery after sanctions
FairPhone 6 /e/OS
Practically all modern feature phones: Nokia phones, HMD phones, etc. As I understand it, predominantly used by elderly and kids. But it's also gaining traction among millennials and Gen Z for digital detox and defeating mobile addiction.
Linux phones (Jolla Phone, PinePhone, FuriPhone, etc) - these you probably won't find in your local retail store but this is another competing platform being built from effectively an entirely different lineage minus the kernel
Google has already been crippling the audio CAPTCHA access for many years. If your trust score is low enough, the visual challenge is ridiculously slow and noisy, and pressing the audio challenge button will just give you an error saying "To protect our users, we can't process your request right now", accessibility be damned. Where are the lawsuits? I want to believe there are still forces that would create hell to pay for doing something so evil, but I'm not seeing any.
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