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You can keep using GitHub but automatically sync your GitHub releases to SourceForge quickly and easily with this tool so your projects have a backup location, and get your project in front of SourceForge’s nearly 20 million monthly users. It takes less than a minute. Get new users downloading your project releases today! × 173780548 story Could Better Data Protections Reduce Big Tech’s Polarizing Power? (nbcnews.com) 3939 Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday May 05, 2024 @04:18PM from the what-if dept. "What if the big tech companies achieved their ultimate business goal — maximizing engagement on their platforms — in a way that has undermined our ability to function as an open society ?" That’s the question being asked by Chuck Todd, chief political analyst for NBC News: What if they realized that when folks agree on a solution to a problem, they are most likely to log off a site or move on? It sure looks like the people at these major data-hoarding companies have optimized their algorithms to do just that. As a new book argues, Big Tech appears to have perfected a model that has created rhetorical paralysis. Using our own data against us to create dopamine triggers, tech platforms have created "a state of perpetual disagreement across the divide and a concurrent state of perpetual agreement within each side," authors Frank McCourt and Michael Casey write, adding: "Once this uneasy state of divisive ’equilibrium’ is established, it creates profit-making opportunities for the platforms to generate revenue from advertisers who prize the sticky highly engaged audiences it generates." In their new book, " Our Biggest Fight ," McCourt (a longtime businessman and onetime owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers) and Casey are attempting a call to action akin to Thomas Paine’s 18th century-era "Common Sense." The book argues that "we must act now to embed the core values of a free, democratic society in the internet of tomorrow." The authors believe many of the current ills in society can be traced to how the internet works. "Information is the lifeblood of any society, and our three-decade-old digital system for distributing it is fatally corrupt at its heart," they write. "It has failed to function as a trusted, neutral exchange of facts and ideas and has therefore catastrophically hindered our ability to gather respectfully to debate, to compromise and to hash out solutions.... Everything, ultimately, comes down to our ability to communicate openly and truthfully with one another. We have lost that ability — thanks to how the internet has evolved away from its open, decentralized ideals...." Ultimately, what the authors are imagining is a new internet that essentially flips the user agreement 180 degrees, so that a tech company has to agree to your terms and conditions to use your data and has to seek your permission (perhaps with compensation) to access your entire social map of whom and what you engage with on the internet. Most important, under such an arrangement, these companies couldn’t prevent you from using their services if you refused to let them have your data... Unlike most anti-Big Tech books, this one isn’t calling for the breakup of companies like Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft or Apple. Instead, it’s calling for a new set of laws that protect data so none of those companies gets to own it, either specifically or in the aggregate... The authors seem mindful that this Congress or a new one isn’t going to act unless the public demands action. And people may not demand this change in our relationship with tech if they don’t have an alternative to point to. That’s why McCourt, through an organization he founded called Project Liberty , is trying to build our new internet with new protocols that make individual data management a lot easier and second nature. (If you want to understand the tech behind this new internet more, read the book!) Wait, there’s more. The article adds that the authors "envision an internet where all apps and the algorithms that power them are open source and can be audited at will. They believe that simply preventing these private companies from owning and mapping our data will deprive them of the manipulative marketing and behavioral tactics they’ve used to derive their own power and fortunes at the expense of democracy." And the NBC News analyst seems to agree. "For whatever reason, despite our societal fear of government databases and government surveillance, we’ve basically handed our entire personas to the techies of Silicon Valley."173641542 story FCC Votes To Restore Net Neutrality Rules (nytimes.com) 5454 Posted by BeauHD on Thursday April 25, 2024 @03:50PM from the long-running-battles dept. An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to restore regulations that expand government oversight of broadband providers and aim to protect consumer access to the internet, a move that will reignite a long-running battle over the open internet. Known as net neutrality , the regulations were first put in place nearly a decade ago under the Obama administration and are aimed at preventing internet service providers like Verizon or Comcast from blocking or degrading the delivery of services from competitors like Netflix and YouTube. The rules were repealed under President Donald J. Trump, and have proved to be a contentious partisan issue over the years while pitting tech giants against broadband providers. In a 3-to-2 vote along party lines, the five-member commission appointed by President Biden revived the rules that declare broadband a utility-like service regulated like phones and water. The rules also give the F.C.C. the ability to demand broadband providers report and respond to outages, as well as expand the agency’s oversight of the providers’ security issues. Broadband providers are expected to sue to try to overturn the reinstated rules. The core purpose of the regulations is to prevent internet service providers from controlling the quality of consumers’ experience when they visit websites and use services online. When the rules were established, Google, Netflix and other online services warned that broadband providers had the incentive to slow down or block access to their services. Consumer and free speech groups supported this view. There have been few examples of blocking or slowing of sites, which proponents of net neutrality say is largely because of fear that the companies would invite scrutiny if they did so. And opponents say the rules could lead to more and unnecessary government oversight of the industry.173455226 story China Will Use AI To Disrupt Elections in the US, South Korea and India, Microsoft Warns (theguardian.com) 157157 Posted by msmash on Friday April 05, 2024 @10:42AM from the shape-of-things-to-come dept. China will attempt to disrupt elections in the US, South Korea and India this year with artificial intelligence-generated content after making a dry run with the presidential poll in Taiwan, Microsoft has warned. From a report: The US tech firm said it expected Chinese state-backed cyber groups to target high-profile elections in 2024, with North Korea also...