The U.S. was not pleased to see its Gulf partner abstain

U.S. officials had urged China not to join Russia in vetoing the resolution and watered down the text to make it palatable to Beijing. They saw China’s abstention as a win.

acting on climate is not being restricted by a lack of scientific knowledge or technological options, but by entrenched power structures and an absence of political will.

it’s not about information deficit, it’s about power relations,

if we could only get the information to policymakers they would do the right thing,”

Less than 1% of research funding on climate from 1990 to 2018 went toward social sciences, including political science, sociology, and economics. That’s despite the fact that even physical scientists themselves agree that inaction on climate will probably not be solved by more scientific evidence.

between social justice and climate mitigation

senior staffer for Saudi Aramco – Saudia Arabia’s state-owned oil and gas company – was one of the two coordinating lead authors,

“The political process of creating the Summary for Policymakers ended up editing all of this information out.”

the technologies and policies necessary to adequately address climate change exist, and the only real obstacles are politics and fossil fuel interests.

how do you talk about mitigating climate change without confronting the fossil fuel industry?

to influence and engage the people of the world with optimistic, factual messages about a country with international audiences on a real-world stage.

The communication power of architecture is as old as civilization. It’s a universal human language, but it’s not well understood by those outside the design world.

The power of expo architecture is in its visionary, technological, and human connections.

Perhaps an answer was captured best in people’s playful interactions with the child-sized AI robots designed by a leading Chinese digital transformation pioneer. A battalion of 162 robots roamed the expo site greeting, servicing, dancing, telling jokes to the delight of children and adults.

Finland’s pavilion diplomatically encapsulated international collaboration and goodwill i

distinctive (emotional, psychological, sensory) experiences

personal connections that produce immersive environments and authentic artifacts

Morocco’s revisit with its rammed earth technologies stacked like a Bauhaus jumble,

The Saudi Pavilion broke three Guinness World Records for size and scale. Using design as a diplomatic tool, their pavilion is a paean to the country’s forward-thinking vision.

“The days of supercheap and very targeted online marketing are over,” Mr. Greenberg said. “We need to experiment with other platforms.”

people are not being trailed from app to app or site to site. But companies are still gathering information on what people are doing on their specific site or app, with users’ consent. This kind of tracking, which companies have practiced for years, is growing.

“first party” tracking.

For years, digital businesses relied on what is known as “third party” tracking. Companies such as Facebook and Google deployed technology to trail people everywhere they went online. If someone scrolled through Instagram and then browsed an online shoe store, marketers could use that information to target footwear ads to that person and reap a sale.

Another issue, he adds, concerns how realistic the synthetic datasets might be—and possibly how they might mislead a neural net into normalizing something that isn't normal.

for generative datasets,

on synthetic data are on par with those trained on real data.

If you had a mechanism to control the attributes of the text that the model is generating, she explains, you could perhaps push it away from generating certain kinds of data, such as, personal details like names, social security numbers, and phone numbers, for instance.

Synthetic data is useful to simulate conditions that may not (yet) exist. These datasets can also be edited, and potentially at scale.

Synthetic data has some advantages over traditional datasets, the researchers note. For instance, not all research teams have the resources to access high-volume, high-quality data, especially when it could involve sensitive information, such as personal data.

GANs are deep learning models that use two neural networks working against each other—a generator that creates synthetic data, and a discriminator that distinguishes between real and synthetic data—to generate synthetic images that are almost indistinguishable from real ones. GANs are popular for generating images and videos, including deepfakes.

A recent survey has revealed that 99 percent of computer vision engineers have had a machine learning project completely canceled due to insufficient training data.

From 2010 to 2012, tension in Maritime Asia was rising fast. The US excluded China from a regional grouping, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and was seen as creating de facto geostrategic encirclement around China.

“Deepening Mutual Connectivity and Realizing Sustainable Development,” stating that “infrastructure is the basis for economic development; connectivity is critical to trade integration; and Asian leaders need to promote communication and cooperation across borders.

China’s domestic overcapacity intensified in 2010,

It seems that the BRI follows the “infrastructure diplomacy” initiated by China in the 2000s. Afterwards, the BRI has succeeded in mobilizing every economic actor in China.

the work to protect people from “hate speech and trolls” is “bigger than any board member.”

“Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” he tweeted.

Musk could make moves to restore Trump’s account and to push the company to go softer on the right.

”He has made his fortune largely on the manipulation of attention in the public interest, not making electric cars.“

should take a more liberatarian approach to policing speech on its service, and many executives within the company who have championed stronger actions to reduce misinformation and harm.

to have a significant impact on the Russian cybercrime community

leaves a tremendous vacuum in the cybercrime world,

Elliptic also said the darknet site helped launder money the Dark Side ransomware group extorted in a hack of Colonial Pipeline last year.

was the Bitcoin Bank Mixer, a service for obfuscating digital transactions

they confiscated Hydra’s server infrastructure and 543 bitcoins, worth about $25 million.

had 17 million customers and more than 19,000 seller accounts registered.

In 2020, it had annual revenue of more than $1.37 billion,

Authorities in Germany have seized servers and other infrastructure used by the sprawling, billion-dollar enterprise along with a stash of about $25 million in bitcoin.

$349 billion on peacekeeping, humanitarian relief and refugee support.  And global military expenditures rose to nearly $2 trillion in 2020

and strategic data and analytics to address hate speech and detect and avoid looming crises.

spilling across borders and causing skyrocketing food, fuel and fertilizer prices that spell disaster for developing countries

And third, we need Member States, the United Nations system, international financial institutions and all partners to do far more to join up our humanitarian, peace and development efforts.  The flames of conflict are fuelled by inequality, deprivation, and underfunded systems.

Peacebuilding works — it is a proven investment.  As you know, we’ve developed a series of mechanisms to expand and grow the resources required to deliver.  And we’re making progress.  For example, the Peacebuilding Fund has been steadily growing — investing $195 million last year.

New Agenda for Peace

one quarter of humanity lives in conflict-affected areas.  Two billion people.  Last year, 84 million were forcibly displaced because of conflict, violence and human rights violations.  And this year, we estimate that at least 274 million will need humanitarian assistance.  All of this is taking place at a moment of multiplying risks that are pushing peace further out of reach — inequalities, COVID-19, climate change and cyberthreats, to name just a few.

Resources are being diverted away from badly needed support to address the sharp increases in hunger and poverty resulting from COVID-19. 

we are facing the highest number of violent conflicts since 1945.

Do you think this is how a fifth industrial revolution could/should look? Why, or why not?

Do you think this is how a fifth industrial revolution could/should look? Why, or why not?

Should we start thinking about the fifth industrial revolution?

Should we start thinking about the fifth industrial revolution?

The application of advanced technologies in the field of industrial production has been called ‘Industry 4.0’, ‘smart manufacturing’ or ‘smart production’. Industry 4.0 combines hardware (advanced robots and 3D printers), software (big data analytics, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence), and connectivity (the Internet of Things) (UNIDO, 2020).

The application of advanced technologies in the field of industrial production has been called ‘Industry 4.0’, ‘smart manufacturing’ or ‘smart production’. Industry 4.0 combines hardware (advanced robots and 3D printers), software (big data analytics, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence), and connectivity (the Internet of Things) (UNIDO, 2020).

the revolutionary nature of the current transformations in the economy and society stems from (a) the unprecedented speed of economic and social change; (b) the fact that technological convergence is disrupting almost every industry; and (c) the systemic impact of the changes, which touch upon systems of production, management, and governance.

convergence of technologies

The impact that AI is expected to have on economic growth and gross domestic product (GDP) is similar to the impact of other general-purpose technologies that underpinned previous industrial revolutions

‘fourth industrial revolution’.

‘fourth industrial revolution’.

The U.N. report notes that the path to a noncatastrophic future is technologically feasible. “Climate AI” could be a key part of that equation. It’s up to us to make the most of it.

rest on broad-based input as an empirical foundation that motivates, validates and diversifies.

The program is designed throughout to minimize barriers to participation and make sure that anyone interested in environmental data can pitch in, turning this platform into a vehicle for on-the-ground vigilance and inventiveness.

The cloud-based AI platform then integrates the data analytically to make it sharable for everyone.

the job for AI is to combine these heterogeneous data sets and make them “interoperable.”

The “planetary computer is incredibly complex,” he stated, “and we cannot build it alone” without “the work and demands of our grantees.” To make a difference to at-risk ecosystems, AI needs engaged communities as much as multinational datasets.

Toward that end, it aggregates data from NASA, NOAA and the European Space Agency, as well as data collected through the partnership between the U.K. Met Office, the Chinese Meteorological Administration and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Microsoft is building a planetary computer as the centerpiece of its AI for Earth program.

Two other initiatives, from Microsoft and NASA, make clear that to fulfill ambitious climate goals, AI needs a participatory democracy, networks of on-site innovators deeply knowledgeable about their locales and acting urgently for just that reason.

Using the same machine learning algorithm that swaps visual and audio data to produce fabricated, hyperrealistic videos called deepfakes, it generates similarly real-looking views of floods or wildfires for any street address.

this “climate AI” could be a game changer in the tech ecosystem, as in the physical ecosystems now facing their worst risks.

There’s every chance that global temperatures will soar by 3 degrees Celsius, twice as much as the agreed-upon 1.5 C limit. Unless we take drastic steps and cut down emissions by 43 percent within this decade, the full force of this existential threat will be upon us.

directly to mobile technology

Reflection point

it unimportant, even annoying

oes it seem contradictory to highlight divides in the USA when there are more significant divides in less privileged regions?

An estimated 84 million people were "forcibly displaced because of conflict, violence and human rights violations," and an estimated 274 million people will need humanitarian assistance due to conflict,

Two billion people, or a quarter of the world's population, now lives in conflict-affected areas,

peace-building is a bargain and a prerequisite for development and a better future for all."

his plan "places prevention and peace-building at the heart of our efforts."

An estimated 84 million people were "forcibly displaced because of conflict, violence and human rights violations," and an estimated 274 million people will need humanitarian assistance due to conflict,

Two billion people, or a quarter of the world's population, now lives in conflict-affected areas

Lynch’s bill also appeals to believers in modern monetary theory, or M.M.T., which contends that government spending is constrained only by the threat of inflation, because the bill would provide for the Treasury Department to issue money directly. The department would do so under an authority similar to the one that allows it to mint coins, subject to congressional approval, said Rohan Grey, an assistant professor at Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Ore.

Ecash would not be a central bank digital currency of the kind being tested around the world.

To curb crime, there would be a low limit on the value that could be stored on any one card,

There’s no cryptocurrency blockchain or distributed ledger technology involved in the proposed Ecash system

Transactions on the proposed new Treasury cards would be strictly peer to peer, like cash. Funds could also be uploaded onto phones or other hardware.

the Electronic Currency and Secure Hardware Act, or Ecash.

with issuing digital dollar technologies “that replicate the privacy-respecting features of physical cash.

“We’re trying to preserve some element of anonymity and not have full-spectrum surveillance of every aspect of people’s lives,”

any digital currency it issued “would differ materially from cash, which enables anonymous transactions.”

As cash disappears from the modern economy, privacy disappears with it.

the implementation of censorship would be much more total and much more efficient,”

Such a move suggests Russia could be moving toward a centralized, Chinese-style approach to online censorship.

TSPU (“technical solution for threat countermeasures”), was implemented.

y December 24, 2019, Russia claimed it had successfully tested uncoupling itself from the global internet, without needing to be connected to the rest of the world through Russia’s 10 known public internet exchange points—though the effectiveness and legitimacy of the tests are both disputed.

The national DNS system maintains a localized copy of the global internet within Russia,

reates a national DNS system

gives authorities powers to centralize control of the internet

packet-snooping hardware on company networks

In May 2019, Putin announced the RuNet, a sovereign internet disconnected from the rest of the world, as part of a domestic internet law that came into force in November 2019

Russia is still reliant on international companies to power large parts of its internet, though it did cope relatively well with Cogent’s departure. It simply ported traffic onto other internet backbones, which handled the disruption.

“We see a lot of foreign companies involved in running their infrastructure, from telecommunications to data delivery networks.”

Russia has made some steps toward trying to rectify that, but in recent history it has struggled to implement nationwide blocks or bars on websites deemed unsavory. That’s because of the way Russian internet infrastructure works. 

Russian ISPs reset user connections as they try to access websites, leaving them trapped in a frustrating loop of unfulfilled requests.

Russia has more than 3,000 ISPs, which implement diktats at different speeds.

both are harder for Russia than China because it’s starting from a comparatively open internet,

By 2001, the International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development estimated, China spent $20 billion on censorious telecom equipment every year. The famed Great Firewall is just that: a firewall that inspects every bit of traffic entering Chinese cyberspace and checks it against a block list. Most internet traffic into China passes through three choke points, which block any untoward content.

it demonstrated Russia’s progress in creating a “splinternet,” a move that would effectively detach the country from the rest of the world’s internet infrastructure.

One of the cardinal principles of science is that issues are settled through reasoned discussion, by adhering to strict standards of conduct, and by documenting assertions—never by violence.

SESAME in Jordan, the first synchrotron light source

And perhaps this might also help to improve relations between Switzerland and the EU.”

While only one country can host the accelerator, the aim is to have a number of hubs in different countries covering activities such as medical data collection, medical physics, and imaging. Another hub will be a solar power station, generating enough green energy to balance the accelerator’s consumption.

Two options were on the table: a synchrotron radiation light source, or an accelerator for biomedical research and cancer treatment.

the South East European International Institute for Sustainable Technologies (SEEIIST)

“I think SESAME is the only organisation where government representatives from Israel, Iran, Palestine and Pakistan all sit together,” Schopper says, “and it works very well.”

“If you have a common project, with scientists working together, that transfers to the politicians and you can build up confidence, which is a benefit for everybody,”

It was through CERN, for example, that German and Israeli scientists first started to work together, and during the Cold War the research centre was one of the few open channels of communication between East and West.

The divide between Russian sciences and global sciences is happening.

A lot of collaborations are finished. The collaboration between Russian medics and COVID researchers is finished. Collaboration projects with foreign scientists are finished and I fear they will not come here any more.

a potential “secondary sanction risk” that many Chinese businesses are trying to manage.

the use of digital sequence information (DSI) of genetic biodiversity, known as biopiracy.

the spectre of a biodiversity “Copenhagen moment” – a reference to when 2009 climate talks in the Danish capital collapsed – in Kunming is lurking.

While delegates left Geneva with much of the text in brackets, governments have agreed a stable negotiating text. It will include targets on subsidies, protected areas and invasive species. The ambition is now up to negotiators.

The final plenary session also saw a lengthy standoff over biopiracy, which some fear could scupper the entire agreement, as developing countries demand they are paid for drug discoveries and other commercial products based on their biodiversity.

called for developed countries to commit to providing $100bn (£76bn) a year of biodiversity finance from public and provide sources, which would rise to $700bn by 2030, closing the “nature funding gap”.

But rich countries’ failure to provide at least $100bn a year of climate finance to the developing world at Cop26 in Glasgow has undermined trust and that is spilling over into the biodiversity process.

not being followed through with resources

little progress was made on the targets and goals that are meant to herald nature’s “Paris moment”.

I recently learned that uppercase and lowercase letters got their names from actual wooden cases of lead that were used by compositors for printing.

It began as a term from French railroad engineering referring to the layers of material that go beneath (“infra”) the tracks. Its meaning expanded to include roads, bridges, sewers and power lines, and very recently expanded again to include people, specifically caregivers, as in this fact sheet from the Biden White House

I.C.E. is short for internal combustion engine, a modifier that was superfluous until electric cars came on the scene.

It refers simply to the physical world, where we have tangible bodies made of … meat. “Meatspace” is a word that didn’t need to exist until the invention of cyberspace. Technological progress gives us a new perspective on things we once took for granted, in this case reality itself.

United Nations Convention on Countering the Use of Informationand Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes

seldom called into question

Restoring credibility

briefings in different languages

understanding,

strategic goals

knock-on effects

opinion of its appeal,

retreat

demonstrated by

proliferating.

ong-term solutions

he Global Initiative on Data Security,

to develop cooperation within the ”Russia-India-China“ format,

a plan for cooperation between Russia and China in this area.

a joint draft convention as a basis for negotiations.

to agree as soon as possible on a credible, universal, and comprehensive convention and provide it to the United Nations General Assembly at its 78th session in strict compliance with resolution 75/282

process on international information security within a single mechanism and support in this context the work of the UN Open-ended Working Group on security of and in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) 2021–2025 (OEWG) and express their willingness to speak with one voice within it.

The Chinese side is sympathetic to and supports the proposals put forward by the Russian Federation to create long-term legally binding security guarantees in Europe.

seriously concerned about the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom (AUKUS)

highly vigilant about the negative impact of the United States' Indo-Pacific strategy on peace and stability in the region

The sides oppose further enlargement of NATO and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized cold war approaches, to respect the sovereignty, security and interests of other countries, the diversity of their civilizational, cultural and

greater interconnectedness between the Asia Pacific and Eurasian regions.

The sides believe that peace, development and cooperation lie at the core of the modern international system.

There is no one-size-fits-all template to guide countries in establishing democracy. A nation can choose such forms and methods of implementing democracy that would best suit its particular state, based on its social and political system, its historical background, traditions and unique cultural characteristics. It is only up to the people of the country to decide whether their State is a democratic one.

The sides share the understanding that democracy is a universal human value, rather than a privilege of a limited number of States, and that its promotion and protection is a common responsibility of the entire world community.

The sides support the internationalization of Internet governance, advocate equal rights to its governance, believe that any attempts to limit their sovereign right to regulate national segments of the Internet and ensure their security are unacceptable, are interested in greater participation of the International Telecommunication Union in addressing these issues.

we will build bridges between the Indo-Pacific and the Euro-Atlantic,

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Elasticdump

ExpressVPN, which was one of the companies on the list, says it was targeted because it refused to block access to news sites, secure email services, and political opposition content. “We said at the time, publicly, that's not something we would do. It's antithetical to the reason that we provide a VPN service,” says ExpressVPN’s Li, speaking from Singapore. “As we understand it, [the ban] was a follow-up action to that.”

the country introduced the so-called VPN law, which tried to force companies to block restricted websites.

Around 20 VPN services have already been blocked in the country, and the authorities have plans to block more, according to politician Alexander Khinshtein, chairman of Russia’s Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies, and Communication in the Duma, the country’s main legislative body.

Almost 400 news websites, 138 finance sites, 93 antiwar sites, and three social media platforms have been blocked, according to Top10VPN.com.

AI-based warfare might seem like a video game, but last September, according to Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, the U.S. Air Force, for the first time, used AI to help to identify a target or targets in “a live operational kill chain.” Presumably, this means AI was used to identify and kill human targets.

“After the End of Globalization”

“The high tide of globalization has passed for now; the question is how far the water will drop.”

“Russia’s attempts to make itself economically independent actually made it more likely to be subject to sanctions, because the West did not have to risk as much to impose them.”

A rise in military spending?

The burden of globalization’s reversal, then, might be felt most acutely by the world’s poor.

deglobalization could make the transition to renewable energy more difficult by erecting barriers to the trade of raw materials.

Particularly in Europe, the fusion of foreign-policy and energy interests has lent more political momentum to decarbonization

A surge in prices and an increase in domestic jobs

“I don’t think economic integration survives a period of political disintegration.”

“What we’re headed toward is a more divided world economically that will mirror what is clearly a more divided world politically,”

the European Union vowed this month to slash Russian natural gas imports by two-thirds by next winter, and to phase them out by 2027.

“the rice bowls of the Chinese people must be filled with Chinese grain.”

the Chinese government has become particularly concerned about reducing its dependence on foreign agricultural products,

“to make sure everything from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the steel on highway guardrails is made in America from beginning to end.”