Aside from content, pressure on the industry was amplified last year after President Xi Jinping said gaming addiction among the country’s youth had become a social problem that must be fixed.

In a regulatory reshuffle in 2018, the power of licensing new games was centralised within the NPPA, an agency that sits under the supervision of the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party.

all online video games that reach Chinese players must be screened and censored by the state in the same way that it scrutinises books, films and television programmes.

China ended its eight-month freeze on new video game licences on Monday, bringing hope to an industry that has been assailed for inappropriate content and for encouraging addiction among players.

a thorough investigation by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International

Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, first levelled this charge more than a year ago, infuriating the government of Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, which strongly denied it.

Supply chain constraints, delivery, and transport expenses plus difficulties in meeting customer shipping requirements are a challenge for many online platforms forcing customers to opt to shop on marketplaces, rather than e-commerce stores.

Survey results published in a UNCTAD report in March this year also found that more than 40% of customers in four large African countries were planning to reduce their supermarket shopping in the future by purchasing food, clothing, and electronics online.

We’re already putting it toward empowering underserved communities to connect themselves in ways they find relevant and meaningful.”

“Our team is working on making it easier for users to control who gets access to which content and services, which are sometimes sacred and sensitive.”

they can’t find entertaining, educational, or otherwise valuable content in their language.

“About 60 percent to 80 percent of humanitarian funding is spent on logistics and supply-chain activities,

for communities to bring their own hardware and add it to their Nimble

less than 100 watts of power and can handle thousands of users.

small form-factor networking hardware housed in a weatherproof case

planned, designed, built, and operated by the community and local partners

web of wireless nodes is resilient to the failure of individual nodes

can cover a village, a city, or entire regions,

“If it’s open-source software, there’s a good chance we can bring it into the platform and run it offline,”

users can conduct video and voice chats, stream videos, share files, build and run e-learning courses and websites, create shared spreadsheets and documents, read e-books, play games, and more, completely offline.

“The goal is to enable communities to quickly build a low-cost, low-power, and yet still portable network that meets their own connectivity and education needs.”

They proceeded to morph into what I thought was Elon’s face but have since learned was Nikola Tesla’s face, then a Tesla car with rotating wheels, and then the Cybertruck.

A fairly brutalist design that feels incredibly out of place in the Texas Hill Country, with its hallmark bungalows and modern wood-paneled angular homes.

the city would be home to a new, massive car-making factory — the largest in the world by volume, according to Elon

The commitment to spectacle at the Tesla Gigafactory was impressive

Many of his friends also use apps to trade in foreign currencies, cryptocurrency, or foreign stocks—options that weren’t unavailable even a few years ago.

in lobbying universities to block betting sites on their networks:

to introduce an app that allows addicts to block access to all gambling sites on their devices

Data from Safaricom, which controls more than 99% of Kenya’s mobile money market, shows that M-Pesa users’ transactions with betting sites were worth $737 million in the six months ending in September 2021, up from $436 million in the same period of 2020.

to tighter regulations and a growing awareness that sports betting is “not as rosy” as many had thought.

gambling firms can no longer advertise on radio and TV during daytime hours.

New taxes on stakes and winnings appear to have incentivized some bettors to cut back

betting firms themselves have become important sources of employment

taxes derived from betting have become an important source of revenue for Kenya’s cash-strapped government

Some argue that Kenya should ban sports betting entirely.

seven out of 10 with gambling disorders.

One 2016 poll at Kenyatta University found that 78% of male and 57% of female students had tried betting, with nearly half gambling at least once per week (and 80% reporting net losses).

Kenyans were spending $1.3 billion a year to place bets on the platform—more than the annual budget of the country’s Ministry of Health.

SportPesa, a firm founded in Nairobi by a group of Bulgarian and Kenyan investors, including a former mayor of the city, was the vanguard. Established in 2014, it offered a sleek online interface that allowed users to fund accounts via M-Pesa and place bets on matches from around the globe within seconds

“People believe that when you do genuine bets, when you take time to do good analyzation, you can win.”

“Nowadays in Kenya, we term betting as a job,”

New undersea cables and an influx of Chinese-branded smartphones had drastically reduced the cost of getting online (today an estimated 85% of the population has access to a connection).

Kenya’s status as an early tech adopter helped fuel the trend.

“People are comparing themselves not just with their neighbors but with everyone, even strangers from across the globe,” Ogachi says. “That breeds an even higher level of frustration.”

citizens have long complained that this new wealth hasn’t trickled down.

the country’s GDP doubled in the 15 years before the pandemic

there were 310 mobile money services available in 96 countries, with 300 million active accounts—more than half of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

improves resilience to financial shocks and facilitates higher rates of household saving.

access to M-Pesa helped pull 2% of Kenya’s households out of extreme poverty

In 2006, according to the Central Bank of Kenya, only 27% of Kenyan adults had access to formal financial services, such as means for saving, borrowing, or making non-cash payments. Thanks to M-Pesa, 84% do now

Today, Safaricom boasts 30 million active M-Pesa accounts in Kenya, roughly equivalent to the country’s adult population

Safaricom invested heavily in building a network of agents who acted like human ATMs so recipients could withdraw cash from their digital wallets

sending money home

to disburse and repay microfinance loans.

When online betting came along, it found this ideal system was in place.”

Most people who bet in Kenya are not doing it for recreation—they’re doing it because they want to make money,”

a December 2021 survey by the US research firm GeoPoll found that 84% of Kenyan youth polled had tried betting, and one-third of those reported betting on at least a daily basis.

M-Pesa’s role in betting presents something of a paradox. T

not an entirely digital phenomenon

The practice has produced tales of riches far greater than Kirwa’s, but it has also broken families, consumed college tuitions, and even driven some to suicide.

Mobile money has widened financial opportunities in Kenya. It has also made sports betting, which still persists in brick-and-mortar locations even easier.

broken families, consumed college tuitions, and even driven some to suicide.

the alarm over the rising popularity of sports betting

matter more in terms of geopolitics than economics.

when asked why India will not ally with America in this democratic cause, the mandarins who run its deep state and shape its foreign policy respond with looks of cynical scorn.

But many are refraining from either openly criticising or penalising Russia, owing to commercial incentives, ideological commitments, strategic ambitions or simple fear.

In Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, even longtime allies and clients of America are rebuffing its entreaties to impose sanctions on Russia or merely to criticise it.

Rather than point a finger at Russia, he called for “an independent inquiry” into the horrors reported from the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

A selective approach would confirm China’s suspicion that, deep down, all countries are guided by interests alone, and use principles as a weapon. China’s challenge to the post-1945 order is in the open now. More cynicism is a weak defence.

“These two superpowers want to change the world. We are capable of stopping it, but it depends on how many friends we have on our side. That will require flexibility and compromises.”

Some diplomats ask whether it is wise to lecture China about repression in Xinjiang at such a moment.

Chinese diplomats have cast Western angst about Ukraine as racist hypocrisy, when much non-European suffering is ignored.

In February this year Mr Xi signed a joint statement with Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, that reads like a manifesto for a new order.

It seeks to redefine such terms as “democracy”, calling China’s one-party system more responsive to public needs than dysfunctional Western democracy.

Such aggressions, he said, had left Chinese with strong feelings about human rights, and about foreigners who employ double standards to criticise other countries.

“No Dogs and Chinese Allowed”.

Charles Michel, that Europeans care greatly about human rights because of the extent of suffering on their soil, notably during the second world war and the Holocaust.

THERE IS NOTHING magic about the year 1945 to China’s Communist Party.

AI and human rights? Why? If yes, what should it focus on?

it has become binding as a part of customary international law. We can say for sure that the UDHR

combat online hate speech which constitutes incitement to discrimination or violence (

stablish a ‘PD Board’ which would include all home actors that directly or indirectly contribute to a country’s image (

arrow definition confines the focus of PD to influencing publics, at home and abroad, on issues relating to foreign affairs.

PD integrates all outreach promotional activities, covering culture, education, the media, and even some elements of economic work

PD, covering networking among non-state actors in world affairs and related activities, is diplomacy. (

Singapore and some European states now hold them accountable for damaging posts and levy heavy fines

each country has its own value system. U

work on interacting with the audiences, rather than just broadcasting information,

need to use visual enhancement and emotional framing

it is not enough to be heard. You need to be listened to and followed

every person and even country needs to have a digital identity, otherwise somebody else will define it for you.

‘ability to read, interpret and manage emotions inhabiting the digital medium’ (Bjola et al., 2018)

need to develop ‘digital emotional intelligence’,

. A democratic republic can only function if there are forums for cultural values that support deliberation across different groups. 

address such segmented targets.

easier

ative absence of dialogue among different groups.

reinforces these views and indirectly leads to polarisation

new media apps tend to aggregate those who hold similar views,

inability ‘to perceived own biases and prejudices’

Bias blindness,

Congruence bias,

ndowment effect, ‘which leads people to prefer the possessions they already have

exposure effect, which entails that ‘familiarity with an idea promotes its acceptance

Confirmation

Confirmation, in which people ‘are more likely to believe information that confirms a pre-held idea’

or pessimism

ptimism

A person´s disposition,

Prejudice, where there is a ‘preference to information which affirms preexisting notions and opinion

ognitive and social biases

important information can be missed when a source is regarded as not credible’

Public Diplomacy: Foundations for Global Engagement the Digital Ages (Cull, 2019), Prof. Nicholas Cull

oals must be precise and well-defined [

he purpose of public diplomacy is to advance the strategic interests of the country

Philip Seib

Soft power is an asset, but useful only if it is actually utilised

getting funds from their finance ministries.

costs, including the lack of reputational security.

The cost is one deterrent

Criticism of local authorities via the prolific Chinese social media is encouraged, but not of higher government levels.

the Chinese media practice self-censorship;

efforts to ‘sell’ the Gaimusho (Japan´s Ministry of Foreign Affairs) as a credible agency

disadvantages of incumbency, especially in our times of high public expectations.

nternally, PD runs the risk of being taken as partisan politics by the opposition parties,

Alumni events

sustainability over a long period of time is the main challenge,

credibility is of the utmost importance, and in the digital realm it is derived from ‘people-like-me’, MFAs are collaborating with social media influencers

Should PD prioritise decision makers or mass audiences abroad?

PD cannot rectify a policy deficit

what is being projected fits with the interests and/or the needs of the target audience.

massive investments of

Hard propaganda on political issues has built-in limits of acceptability.

not easy to coordinate the actions of disparate agencies, state, and non-state.

Qatar

And it is well known that the targeted audiences will not go against their own interests, even with effective PD strategies

1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR)?

country’s foreign policy interests.

undermined

US soft power has been undermined by the way in which hard power has been used’ (

nfluence of leaders on national brand as the `halo effect´ (Manor, 2017).

articulate leader

information overload makes it harder to win attention and produce impact.

shaping

computer

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2.

And Frame.io takes it into a website. It’s basically Google Docs for video.

The privacy regulator says, “Make it really hard to export data,” and the competition regulator says, “Make it easy to export data.” And the engineers at Instagram or YouTube are, like, “Well, we’re engineers. We can do either, but you’re going to have to choose.” All of that is to say, “Yes, regulation, but that’s not one thing. That’s, like, 50 things.”

technology is going to be a quote-unquote “regulated industry” in that sense.

open source just tended to be a better way of making software.

It turns out a free market is just a better way to organize economic activity than central planning. It might be immoral, but functionally it works better

One of them is, open source didn’t exactly let you build software you couldn’t build before.

But behind all of that noise, there’s this very, very powerful, interesting technology that lets you build internet applications, lets you build software in a different way.

Early open-source people thought they were going to destroy Microsoft and no one would ever buy software again. And early internet people thought that this was the end of government, and there’d be no war again, because everyone would understand each other.

Web3 is, well, if you were to build Yelp or Tripadvisor or Twitter on a blockchain, then the users would control it as well.

Crypto, blockchain is an open-source computer, but the code is open as it’s running. It’s not just that you could get the code, it’s that you can see the code as it’s running.

another wave of open source at this point.

“What is a blockchain?” It’s a distributed, decentralized, community-based computing system that has trust incentives, contracts, structure, ownership, portability built in.

That gets you DeFi [decentralized finance]. So this is crypto two, it’s distributed finance. You could build a lending application on this.

But it’s a public database, which is important. It’s not just a database, it’s a public trustless distributed database.

“the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Which was true. It wasn’t any of those things. Cryptocurrency is not cryptography, and it’s not a currency, or not only a currency.

the first wave of crypto

the hardware was good enough to show that this would be cool if we had vastly better hardware.

We tried to do VR in the early ’90s, late ’80s, early ’90s.

So there’s this technology determinism which also applies a bit to Web3, which is to say, look, smartphones, PCs, the internet, cars, aircraft—it starts out looking like a toy and it gets better.

It doesn’t matter how amazingly cool a games console is, it’s still basically not a universal device.

And the same thing now with metaverse—you write a whole bunch of words on a whiteboard. You write “games” and “virtual reality” and “popular culture” and “self-expression,” and maybe “NFTs” and “Web3” as well, maybe. And “augmented reality” and “glasses” and “3-D” and “spatial internet.” You write all this stuff on the board. And then you call it metaverse.

Maybe, but that’s not necessarily what’s going to happen. It may not play out like that.

“All models are wrong, but they’re all useful.”

“History teaches us nothing, except that something will happen.”

there’s a lot of value to looking and seeing, what happened the last time this happened?

there’s always patterns in technology.

this Danish proverb

decacorns (private companies that are worth over $10bn)

“television” and “monolingual”, which mix up Greek and Latin roots

femto- and atto-

pico-

nano-,

It would be the first of the prefixes for huge numbers not to come from the classical languages. “Hell” is a Germanic word.

a new prefix, hella-, for 1027

to zetta- (1,0007) and yotta- (1,0008)

septa- and octo- for 1,0007 and 1,0008

peta- and exa- come from Greek penta (five) and hexa (six), representing 1,0005 and 1,0006

As billions become workaday, tera- will become the new giga-.

teras means “monster”

A megalomaniac has delusions of greatness

Megas, too, was generic in Greek, meaning “great”

Giga- is a prefix meaning “a billion” of something.

a gigafactory in Sunderland

“gigafabs”.

a “gigafactory”

To Russian entrepreneurs living abroad, these workers were a known quantity, and they were not as expensive as specialists in Silicon Valley and other parts of the United States.