an overview of its possibilities, including the growth of new marketplaces, such as an increased demand for video games and online forms of entertainment.

“The transformation of perception on account of being located in the metaverse will have a meaningful cultural effect on society and will change social behavior, including reducing the importance of moral and ethical norms due to the use of a virtual avatar.” They warn that this could particularly affect children, “the most vulnerable group in the new metaverse.”

could lend itself to illegal transactions conducted in cryptocurrency, including trade between people of different nationalities that could violate border regulations.

India is a veritable lighthouse of knowledge and ideas, which can and will make a difference.

The upcoming collaboration between the Observer Research Foundation and India’s Foreign Service Institute to design and run a programme on new economic diplomacy signals the growing importance of this emerging discipline. Over the years, it is expected to build significant capacity amongst young Indian and foreign diplomats to engage effectively with these issues in the context of both bilateral and multilateral platforms.

If data is the new oil, clear and transparent domestic laws and institutions must be developed to inspire confidence in India as a safe destination for data processing.

Protectionist trends are on the rise, and there is a preference for bilateral over multilateral trade arrangements.

The original ITEC programme was expanded to provide 12,000 fully funded training slots in courses ranging from cybersecurity and climate change to entrepreneurship and education.

India’s aid programmes did not translate into any distinct economic benefits for the country.

the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Programme (ITEC).

promoting national trade, investment and technology interests

Foreign assistance programmes were added as an afterthought to the principal objective of pursuing commercial goals.

“In the history of the Mongol diplomacy, Mongolia now has the highest number of female ambassadors, six out of 31 ambassadors.”

“In the history of the Mongol diplomacy, Mongolia now has the highest number of female ambassadors, six out of 31 ambassadors.”

Gerelmaa Davaasuren was appointed as the ambassador to Switzerland.

As a result, women began to take initiatives to boost their presence in government service, such as holding diplomatic positions, serving in U.N. peacekeeping missions, entering the military, being elected as parliamentary members – all with significant contributions to strengthening Mongolia’s diplomacy as a whole.

Women have regained space and opportunities to participate in politics and foreign affairs once again, with gender equality efforts part of the policymaking.

an abundance of literature on male Mongol leaders, dating back to the 13th century and Chinggis Khan.

The onset of a multipolar world order means that the U.S. would need to prioritize a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific over its rivalry with Russia in Eastern Europe.

As long as Russia can keep NATO’s capabilities invested in Europe, it will create a favorable strategic environment for China in the Indo-Pacific.

the structural balance of power constraint posed by the U.S. keeps them together in their advance toward a multipolar world.

According to the World Bank, in 1992, China’s nominal GDP was $427 billion, slightly less than Russia’s $460 billion; nonetheless, by 2021, China’s GDP of $16.8 trillion was more than 10 times that of Russia’s $1.6 trillion.

asymmetrical.

evolved into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

By 1996, Russia and China formed a strategic partnership, which led to the “Joint Declaration on Multipolarity and the Formation of a New Global Order” during the 1997 Moscow Summit.

The American inability to accept the multipolarity of the 21st century leads it to conceptualize a bipolar framework of great power rivalry between the U.S. and China, as evident in the concept of the “G-2.” On the other hand, the success of Russian and Chinese foreign policy has been possible due to the groundwork they prepared to maneuver in a multipolar world of the future.

This suggests that the Kremlin believes that it is only by highlighting its red lines that it can restore its prestige as a great power in world politics. In the Russian calculation, it is a great power whose red lines cannot be violated, as opposed to a middle power whose concerns matter but not that much. In the context of the emerging multipolar world order, these calculations are becoming accurate.

Russia’s latest A-SAT test, which generated thousands of pieces of dangerous debris threatening both U.S. and Chinese space assets, occurred on the same date as the meeting between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Joe Biden. A plausible argument could be made that Russia’s A-SAT test was inspired by a need to demonstrate its status as a great power in the hierarchy of nations, as Moscow will not quietly accept its demotion to a lesser adversary to the United States. Interestingly, Russia upped the ante on the Ukrainian front following the Biden-Xi meeting. As the headlines became saturated with fears about a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia succeeded in dominating the global geostrategic discourse.

Campbell and Sullivan contended that “coexistence means accepting competition as a condition to be managed rather than a problem to be solved” and added that both nations “will need to be prepared to live with the other as a major power.”

guardrails

With the Biden-Putin summit in June 2021 and the resumption of the Strategic Stability Dialogue, talks of restoration of Russia’s great power status started.

China had become the primary strategic adversary by the time Joe Biden came to power in January 2021.

the rise of China as a peer competitor to the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific has relegated Russia to a middle power in the American strategic calculus.

about 50 percent of global market share,

India appears to be making a major push to increase its presence in the semiconductor manufacturing sector.

to “develop secure and resilient semiconductor supply chains for industrial growth, digital sovereignty, and technological leadership.”

The ministry expects that by 2030, India’s semiconductor market will be driven by wireless communications, consumer electronics, and automotive electronics with 24 percent, 23 percent, and 20 percent of the market share, respectively.

China has surpassed Taiwan for two years in a row, and is only behind Europe and Japan, each of which had a market share of 10 percent in 2020.

In 2015, China had a meager share of 3.8 percent of the global chip sales, amounting to $13 billion, but by 2020 China had improved its score, marking an annual growth rate of 30.6 percent, capturing a 9 percent market share and about $40 billion in annual sales.

Semiconductors are one of the top five U.S. exports, with more than 80 percent of the U.S. sales to overseas customers.

to recognize the importance of global supply chains and the vulnerabilities in the absence of any concrete action to diversify supply chain partners.

This would allow the use of the digital token for the payment of public charges, taxes, debt and other purposes.

I’m intrigued by new business models pioneered by the likes of F1000, Research Square and Qeios, which tweak the preprint publishing approach in various ways. On Qeios, which is based in London, researchers or their institutions don’t pay per article, but they do pay a monthly fee to post an unlimited number of articles. The articles go up right away, as on a preprint server such as medRxiv, but are later peer-reviewed, as in a journal.

What more could be done? In a November article for The Scientist, Dr. Mullins proposes that preprints “have a limited shelf life with a link that expires within 12 months” so that bad research doesn’t linger. If it’s good work, it should have found a publisher by then, he argues. Every page should have a digital watermark identifying it as not peer-reviewed, he says. And preprints should be digitally linked to the peer-reviewed articles they become to “motivate authors to complete the peer-review process,” he writes.

created arXiv, pronounced “archive,” while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1991.

in the form of preprints

peer review can fail. Retraction Watch, a website, maintains a list of more than 100 Covid-19 research papers that were peer reviewed, published and then had to be retracted.

Peer review is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of the scientific research system.

I recommend tuning out divisive rhetoric and cultivating common ground with Americans whom you might not agree with.

I believe Russia is more likely to prefer a path of insidious political polarization to weaken U.S. geopolitical influence.

On Jan. 14, 2022, Russia arrested members of the Russian-based cyber gang REvil who were responsible for the 2021 ransomware attacks against meat supplier JBS Foods, headquartered in Greeley, Colorado, and the Colonial Pipeline, headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia. The unusual move caused cybersecurity analysts to wonder about Russia’s motive, including speculation about making it easier for the government to deny a connection to the cyberattacks.

Democracies are especially vulnerable to these techniques, given the open exchange of ideas and lack of centralized control over sources of information.

The maneuvers, which include dismissing and distorting information and undermining opinion leaders, are carried out in the press and on social media.

confidence in elections, undermine economic stability, damage the energy grid, and even disrupt health care systems.

The SolarWinds attack, uncovered in December 2020, gave the perpetrators access to the computer systems of many U.S. government agencies and private businesses.

“I see this as the most pivotal battle in the crypto space over the next few years, stablecoins versus central bank-created digital currencies,”

He said strong private-sector efforts like the one from Facebook are key to balancing the power of governments that are considering making their own state-backed stablecoins.

Governments are highly skeptical of digital currencies, and the United States is still debating how to legislate them.

One person speculated that it could have been more of a headache to Zuckerberg than it was worth.

But Marcus wanted the project to stay more independent.

ould undermine the stability of the financial system,

Unlike cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, the value of which is not tied to anything external, stablecoins are pegged to major currencies already in circulation, which is why proponents say they are more stable.

Facebook also redesigned the effort around “stablecoins,” a suite of emerging products that use cryptocurrency’s underlying blockchain technology but are pegged to a major currency, such as the U.S. dollar.

Regulators came away from an initial meeting with Facebook stunned that the company wasn’t more prepared to address concerns about money laundering, consumer protection and other potential financial risks

But on the first day Facebook announced its plans, the project was criticized by the French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, who called on central bank governors around the world to scrutinize the project.

Facebook has been trying to escape its baggage by pushing into emerging technologies, including virtual reality hardware, smart glasses and a smartwatch that could be used for health tracking. It changed its name to Meta last year — one week after a whistleblower had come forward with thousands of internal documents showing its role in promoting societal polarization and harming teens’ mental health.

Marcus, a well-liked executive who was formerly president of PayPal, announced his resignation in November — just two months after he had traveled to Washington to pitch the recently rebranded project to journalists and regulators.

with Google hiring a team of engineers to work on blockchain technology, which underpins cryptocurrency.

concerns about money laundering, consumer protection and other potential financial risks.

But the decision to fold the project called Diem is the first that appears to relate directly to regulatory pushback, suggesting that bringing future products to market in heavily regulated spaces will be an uphill battle, the people said.

It took Facebook less than three years to fail in its high-profile cryptocurrency project.

We Met in Virtual Reality never really probes the psychological implications of whole emotional lives lived out online, or the possibilities for harassment and bullying in virtual spaces. And it never touches on what happens to communities like VRChat when companies like Meta bring people into the metaverse en masse. Hunting spends a lot of time showing there’s a culture worth preserving; if only he’d shown if anyone is trying to do it.

We Met in Virtual Reality never really probes the psychological implications of whole emotional lives lived out online, or the possibilities for harassment and bullying in virtual spaces.

If ever there was an argument for virtual reality still being reality, this is it.

Hunting’s goal, then, was to show “what being present in VR is truly like.” And that he does.

it’s about showcasing the people in the small progressive communities that have built social VR into what it is. There’s Jenny, an American Sign Language teacher who is working to create a space for deaf and hard-of-hearing people in VR. There are nonbinary folks discussing the possibilities of exploring identity in virtual space. And there are two couples who, as the title suggests, met in VRChat. Their stories are similar, but not overlapping, and they provide a snapshot of the metaverse—and I’m using that term in its broadest possible definition here—as it stands on the precipice of transforming from an online outsider space to whatever it will be next.

We Met in Virtual Reality,

That’s especially important because most Internet connections are much better at downloading things than uploading them. To see if that’s true for you, check out Speedtest by Ookla and compare your download speed to your upload speed.

If for some reason your Internet connection is shaky, which could happen for a number of reasons, consider leaving video off entirely.

The best way to see if your approach works in Zoom is to open Settings, click on Audio, and start talking. At a normal speaking volume, the blue bar next to Input Level should peak right in the middle.

try your best to keep your mouth between six inches and one feet away from it.

it’s time to make sure you and everyone else on those calls are wearing a pair of headphones or ear buds.

we will need to treat virtual realities as genuine realities.

Actions in virtual worlds will potentially be as meaningful as actions in the physical world

virtual worlds will move far beyond games to become part of our everyday lives.

but with anonymous users this may be hard to arrange. As virtual worlds become more central to our lives, and virtual crimes take on increasing seriousness, we may well find that it becomes difficult to find punishments that fit the crime.

Virtual penalties and virtual imprisonment likewise may have some effect, but the effects will be limited when users can easily take on new bodies.

Those are all morally serious actions, even if they’re not as serious as murder in the ordinary world.

Killing an avatar might be more akin to murder followed by reincarnation, at least if reincarnation produces full-​grown people with memories intact.

the nearest thing to murder is “killing” an avatar.

Virtual realism, which holds that virtual objects are real objects, gives a much more natural explanation.

Nathan Wildman and Neil McDonnell

the puzzle of virtual theft.

How can you “steal” an object that doesn’t exist?

In 2012, the Dutch Supreme Court upheld the conviction of two teenagers for stealing a virtual amulet from another teenager in the online game Runescape. The court declared that the amulet had real value in virtue of the time and effort invested in obtaining it.

in long-​term games, and all the more in nongame environments, possessions can be important to a user, and the harm can be correspondingly significant.

Most of us would agree that objects owned in a game matter less than possessions in the nonvirtual world.

Once one sees virtual worlds as genuine realities, however, then the ethics of virtual worlds becomes in principle as serious as ethics in general.

If these virtual worlds were merely games or fictions, then the ethics of virtual worlds would be limited to the ethics of games or fictions.

we don’t think that “ordinary” virtual murder is indicative of a moral flaw, so we regard it as unproblematic. Still, the ethical issues here are subtle.

virtue ethics,

In his 2009 article “The Gamer’s Dilemma,” the philosopher Morgan Luck observes that while most people think that virtual murder (killing nonplayer characters) is morally permissible, they think that virtual pedophilia is not.

LambdaMOO was now a democracy of sorts. The wizards retained a degree of power, however, and after a while they decided that democracy wasn’t working and they took some decision-​making power back. Their decree was ratified by a democratic vote after the fact, but they had made it clear that the shift would be made regardless. The world of LambdaMOO moved fairly seamlessly through these different forms of government.

Curtis designed LambdaMOO to mimic the shape of his house, and initially it was a sort of dictatorship.

As the experience of our virtual bodies grows richer still, violations of our virtual bodies may at some point become as serious as violations of our physical bodies.

this “avatar attachment” is morally significant.

we may identify with our virtual bodies much more than in a short-​term textual environment.

the harm is correspondingly less.

to virtual realism—the view that virtual reality is genuine reality, and that what happens in virtual worlds can be as meaningful as what happens in the physical world.

MUDs, or multi-user domains.

As platforms like Spotify open their gates to more user-generated content, the same free-speech battles are coming to audio.

may choose not to risk debating the efficacy of vaccines,

imperfect rules that are open to public scrutiny can be improved over time.

predictable rules can protect speech as much as containing it. Rules determine not just what is banned, but also help defend what is allowed.

Apple, the next-biggest streamer, has content guidelines for podcasts but a rough style guide for music. Amazon, the third-largest, has published even less in the way of rules. And whereas Facebook and co release regular reports on what content they have taken down and why, the audio streamers are opaque.

The starting point is transparency

Some good podcasts will stoke controversy. Free speech must be the default.

On the other hand, few want tech executives to become censors.

the content mix on audio platforms is starting to look less like the curated library of Netflix and more like the infinite hotch-potch of YouTube.

Mr Rogan is a bigmouth who is wrong about covid-19 and probably much else. Yet he has broken no laws, nor even, Spotify seems to believe, the company’s content rules.

Mr Rogan is a bigmouth who is wrong about covid-19 and probably much else. Yet he has broken no laws, nor even, Spotify seems to believe, the company’s content rules.

In December America and Britain announced they plan, this spring, to launch a “grand challenge” prize around PET systems.

America and Britain announced they plan, this spring, to launch a “grand challenge”

into trade data

The use of PETs offers not only a means of bringing together data sets that cannot currently interact because of worries about privacy, but also a way for all sorts of organisations to collaborate securely across borders.

For extra security, cryptographic hashes and digital signatures are applied, to prove that only authorised operations have taken place.

to test “trusted execution environments”, also called “enclaves”, as a form of input privacy.

They put several kinds of PETs through their paces. In one trial, OpenMined, a charity based in Oxford, tested a technique called secure multiparty computation (SMPC). This approach involves the data to be analysed being encrypted by their keeper and staying on the premises. The organisation running the analysis (in this case OpenMined) sends its algorithm to the keeper, who runs it on the encrypted data.

The UN PETs Lab

These so-called privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are still in the early stages of development.

Reasons of confidentiality mean that many medical, financial, educational and other personal records, from the analysis of which much public good could be derived, are in practice unavailable.

Israel also cannot afford to alienate Russia, which can severely curb its air operations in Syria and beyond, and whose at least partial cooperation on the nuclear issue remains essential.

If, as expected, Russia launches a major cyber campaign against Ukraine prior to an actual invasion, to soften it up, or as part of the invasion itself, Israel will have much to learn for its own future cyber capabilities, both offensive and defensive. Russia has repeatedly launched cyber attacks against Ukraine, using it as a testing ground for its cyber capabilities.

A resentful Russia, smarting from the imposition of heavy additional U.S. sanctions, will be even less inclined to pressure Iran to reach a nuclear compromise.

by signing long-term agreements for air and naval bases there and made Israel’s efforts to thwart Iranian entrenchment in Syria dependent on its goodwill.

Russia’s rapid resurgence, however, may be more than China bargained for, a fully tripolar global system, rather than the primarily bipolar one they had anticipated, with Russia playing a supporting junior role.

The Open Data Barometer

the adoption of open standards for FOSS.

he following questions may help with preparing open innovation processes:

Open innovation describes a decentralised and participatory notion of how ideas are generated and implemented in organisations. It involves moving from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ innovations; in other words, finding ideas outside the boundaries of one’s own organisation.

WHY OPEN CONTENT?

For more information, go to:

Open Knowledge International

WHAT ARE OPEN DATA

Checklist for using open-source software solution

Technology centres called ‘makerspaces’ and ‘fablabs’ (open fabrication laboratories) are increasingly making 3D printing available around the world.

Using data to fight droughts, Namibia

Use open standards, open data, open source and open innovation: An ‘open’ approach allows for collaboration in digital DC and avoids duplication. Open source also supports scaling (Principle 3) and sustainability (Principle 4).

Another is to do a “Zoom loom”, placing yourself so close to the camera that you will give everyone nightmares.

these participants have no way of knowing that you are gazing specifically at them.

And if there is one thing for which online interactions are not suited, it is body language.

so much of it is blindingly obvious.

receiving more eye contact from a bigwig led to greater participation in group interactions.

They nod; they touch others but not themselves; they gesture; they furrow their brows; they hold themselves erect; their facial expressions are more animated.

“One of the dreams of the far right is not just a blockchain cryptocurrency, but a decentralised future where they don’t have to rely on mainstream structures,” says Mr Squirrell. “They want blockchain blogging websites, blockchain streaming websites” to escape deplatforming.

which distances people and their money from “elites and banksters”.

This idea appeals to libertarians or those who distrust the traditional banking system.

with an anti-establishment spirit

Technological advances in crypto have since made privacy tokens like Monero, which hide transactions, possible. These groups have probably flocked to them.

They advertise their wallets on their websites and social media, asking for donations. And they get them. Stefan Molyneux, a far-right podcaster who was ousted from YouTube, has received over $1.67m in bitcoin. Mr Anglin has reportedly received over 100 bitcoins ($3.8m).

While there have been other DNS resolver projects around the world with government support or involvement (for instance, in the UK and Canada), there was a sense that DNS4EU represents a new kind and degree of government intervention in the space.

the concerns driving this initiative relate to consolidation of DNS resolution services in the hands of a few (non-EU) companies (i.e. the emergence of public DNS resolver services hosted by Google and Cloudflare), privacy and data protection in the processing of DNS data, and the perceived need for EU investment in the field to better identify and filter EU-specific “cyber-threats”.

Zakonom o budžetu Republike Srbije za 2022.

o json files on disk

a tripolar arrangement,

Sports diplomacy started with the very first Olympics in 776 B.C.

the combined resources, scientific contributions, and technological superiority shared by US academic and corporate institutions in the field of AI is more than enough to overcome the advantages given China by its policy of socialized data.

But the PRC is non-competitive when it comes to luring outside talent.

This leaves US soil fertile for the development of monolithic business empires with a GDP eclipsing many modernized countries.

“China has a massive data advantage when it comes to medical AI research,”

In December 2021, just weeks after NSO landed on the American blacklist,

What Facebook didn’t appear to know was that the attack on a U.S. phone number, far from being an assault by a foreign power, was part of the NSO demonstrations to the F.B.I. of Phantom — the system NSO designed for American law-enforcement agencies to turn the nation’s smartphones into an “intelligence gold mine.”

The capability to hack WhatsApp, according to the presentation, “doesn’t currently exist” in the United States government, and the intelligence community was interested in acquiring that capability.

its presence on an American blacklist will probably scare away prospective clients — and employees.

the decision about NSO has everything to do with reining in a dangerous company and nothing to do with America’s relationship with Israel.

behind the scenes of the peace deal was a Middle East weapons bazaar.

In September 2020, Netanyahu, Donald Trump and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords, and all the signatories heralded it as a new era of peace for the region.

In 2017, Israeli authorities decided to approve the sale of Pegasus to the kingdom, and in particular to a Saudi security agency under the supervision of Prince Mohammed.

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