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

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,

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.”

“Aspiring regional powers such as India, Brazil and Nigeria are studying America’s financial weapons of mass destruction and asking how they can adjust their defenses lest they end up in the crossfire.”

Why should we treat scientific exchanges any differently than Champions League soccer matches, ballet performances, financial transactions, and investment projects—which have all been cancelled in recent days?

to impose non-violent pain and pressure on Russian civil society, especially among the oligarchs and middle class, provoking them to rise up and force Putin to withdraw from Ukraine.

we should cease all science cooperation with Russia, and Russian officials should be excluded from international science meetings.

isolate and punish Russia for its actions.

Document attached to the procedureSWD(2020)036316/12/2020ECDocument attached to the procedureSWD(2020)0364 16/12/2020ECDocument attached to the procedureN9-0019/2021OJ C 147 26.04.2021, p. 000410/02/2021EDPSCommittee draft reportPE692.79201/06/2021EPCommittee of the Regions: opinionCDR5356/202030/06/2021CofRAmendments tabled in committeePE695.14307/07/2021EPAmendments tabled in committeePE695.19607/07/2021EPAmendments tabled in committeePE695.19707/07/2021EPAmendments tabled in committeePE695.19807/07/2021EPCommittee opinionTRANPE691.25329/09/2021EPCommittee opinionCULTPE693.64004/10/2021EPCommittee opinionLIBEPE693.94618/10/2021EPCommittee opinionECONPE693.93028/10/2021EPCommittee opinionJURIPE693.72705/11/2021EPAmendments tabled in committeePE700.38910/11/2021EPCommittee opinionITREPE693.90724/11/2021EPCommittee report tabled for plenary, 1streading/single readingA9-0332/202130/11/2021EPSummaryText adopted by Parliament, partial voteat 1st reading/single readingT9-0499/202115/12/2021EPSummaryAdditional informationDigital Markets ActPURPOSE: to ensure the proper functioning of the internal market by promoting effective competition in digital markets and in particular a fairand contestable online platform environment (Digital Markets Act)

Although “the cloud” became a major buzzword years ago, its definition is still cloudy for some folks. The cloud exists in remote data centers that you can access via the internet. Any data you’ve uploaded to the cloud exists on dedicated servers and storage volumes housed in distant warehouses, often situated on campuses full of such warehouses. Data centers are owned by cloud service providers, who are responsible for keeping the servers up and running.

the clash inside America is over what kind of civilization ours should be.

various battles over race and sex, liberalism, education and religion, are indeed a response to a world that no longer takes American hegemony or liberal universalism for granted

The woke often seem like heirs of the New England Puritans and the utopian zeal of Yankeedom; their foes are often Southern evangelicals and conservative Catholics and the libertarian descendants of the Scots-Irish; and the stakes in the debates are competing interpretations of the American founding, the Constitution, the Civil War and the settlement of the frontier.

Rather than offering a universal message, its key slogans and ideas really make sense only inside America and Europe — what could “interrogating whiteness” possibly mean to the middle class of Mumbai or Jakarta, or to the young elites of Bahrain or Beijing?

wherever smaller countries are somehow “torn,” in his language, between some other civilization and the liberal West, they usually prefer an American alliance to an alignment with Moscow or Beijing.

the split between the Orthodox and Russian-speaking east and the more Catholic and Western-leaning west, his assumption that civilizational alignments would trump national ones hasn’t been borne out in Putin’s war, in which eastern Ukraine has resisted Russia fiercely.

China’s one-party meritocracy, Putin’s uncrowned czardom, the post-Arab Spring triumph of dictatorship and monarchy over religious populism in the Middle East, the Hindutva populism transforming Indian democracy — these aren’t just all indistinguishable forms of “autocracy,” but culturally distinctive developments that fit well with Huntington’s typology, his assumption that specific civilizational inheritances would manifest themselves as Western power diminishes, as American might recedes.

The first years of the 21st century, in other words, provided a fair amount of evidence for the universal appeal of Western capitalism, liberalism and democracy, with outright opposition to those values confined to the margins — Islamists, far-left critics of globalization, the government of North Korea.

the Huntington thesis is more relevant than ever.

But Caldwell’s analysis resembles the popular liberal argument that the world is increasingly divided between liberalism and authoritarianism, democracy and autocracy, rather than being divided into multiple poles and competing civilizations.

we have been moving back to a world of explicitly ideological conflict — one defined by a Western elite preaching a universal gospel of “neoliberalism” and “wokeness,” and various regimes and movements that are trying to resist it.

That’s the argument offered, for instance, by the French scholar of Islam Olivier Roy in a recent interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. Roy describes the Ukraine war as “definitive proof (because we have many others) that the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory does not work” — mostly because Huntington had predicted that countries that share Orthodox Christianity would be unlikely to go to war with one another, but instead here we have Putin’s Russia making war, and not for the first time, against a largely Orthodox Christian neighbor, even as he accommodates Muslim constituencies inside Russia.

These claims were the backbone of Huntington’s book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” which was seen as a sweeping interpretive alternative to Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, with its vision of liberal democracy as the horizon toward which post-Cold War societies were likely to converge.

in which societies “sharing cultural affinities” were more likely to group themselves into alliances or blocs.

The campaign, which uses the slogan "Change the code, not the climate," aims to highlight the amount of energy needed to power the network, an amount that has been estimated to be greater than that of many countries.

Though the law has been approved by EU member states, the language still needs to be finalized and approved by both Parliament and the Council, then officially adopted by the 27 countries that make up the EU, but that's considered more of a formality.

can levy fines of up to 10% of the company's global revenue and 20% in the event of a second violation.

The DMA includes any company that provides web browsers, social media services, messaging apps or other online services to at least 45 million EU users, or 10,000 businesses, and has a market capitalization of at least 75 billion euros (about $82 billion).

Allowing third-party services (like messenger apps) to interact with gatekeeper systems.Letting users access services they may've acquired outside of a gatekeeper platform.Enabling users to uninstall any pre-installed software or apps.Allowing companies that advertise on gatekeeper platforms to access performance-measuring tools.Letting business users access data generated by their activities.

send files or make video calls across messaging apps,"

"have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms,"

The goal of the act isn't to break tech companies apart but to "break them open,"

the Digital Markets Act is aimed at regulating massive "gatekeeper" providers, requiring them to exchange more information between services and provide space for smaller platforms to thrive in the market.

The EU Cybersecurity Act defines cybersecurity as “the activities necessary to protect network and information systems, the users of such systems, and other persons affected by cyber threats”.

increase their focus on EUIBAs that are less mature in cybersecurity

the Interinstitutional Committee for the Digital Transformation, promotes further synergies among EUIBAs

a legislative proposal introducing common binding rules on cybersecurity for all EUIBAs and increased resources for CERT-EU

Although CERT-EU is highly valued by the EUIBAs, its effectiveness is compromised by an increasing workload, unstable funding and staffing, and insufficient cooperation from some EUIBA

are not fully interoperable.

do not systematically share with each other information on cybersecurity-related projects, security assessments and service contracts.

potential synergies are not fully exploited.

Cybersecurity training is not always systematic.

IT security strategies are in many cases lacking or are not endorsed by senior management, security policies are not always formalised, and risk assessments do not cover the entire IT environment. Not all EUIBAs have their cybersecurity regularly subject to independent assurance

cybersecurity governance

he EUIBA community has not achieved a level of cyber preparedness commensurate with the threats.

strongly interconnected

attractive targets for potential attackers,

“Dark web underground shops contain compromised email accounts of law enforcement agencies, which could be sold with the attached cookies and metadata for anywhere from $10 to $50,”

“There’s no one system or centralized system for submitting these things,”

there are tens of thousands of different law enforcement agencies, from small police departments to federal agencies, around the world.

The systems for requesting data from companies is a patchwork of different email addresses and company portals.

The forged legal requests are believed to be sent via hacked email domains belonging to law enforcement agencies in multiple countries,

The three people said it may be primarily used to facilitate financial fraud schemes.

The emergency requests are intended to be used in cases of imminent danger and don’t require a judge to sign off on it.

routinely asks social media platforms for information about users as part of criminal investigations.

“may be contacted and asked to confirm to Apple that the emergency request was legitimate,”

City of London Police recently arrested seven people in connection with an investigation into the Lapsus$ hacking group; the probe is ongoing.

such requests are only provided with a search warrant or subpoena signed by a judge, according to the people. However, the emergency requests don’t require a court order.

provided customer data to hackers who masqueraded as law enforcement officials,

“The legitimacy crises that have plagued the WTO since its creation suggest that ordoglobalism as a distinct strain of neoliberalism may have overreached. If the goal was to fine-tune the rules to prevent disruptive demands for social justice or redistribution, then victory is nowhere in sight.”

Quinn Slobodian made in his 2018 book, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism,

The difference is that the American social scientist bet on Islamic civilisation becoming the main challenger to the West. Dugin, however, is betting on a new world order in which Russia is the one countering Western civilisation as the leading Eurasian power.

Samuel Huntington in the Clash of Civilizations (1996)

must “destabilise internal political processes in the US”, encourage Britain’s exit from the European Union and begin the annexation of Ukraine.

that “Atlanticism” – the liberalism, free markets and democracy representing North America and Western Europe – loses its influence over “Eurasia” – the territories once governed by the Soviet Union, which needs to stand for hierarchy, tradition and a strict legal structure.

Foundations of Geopolitics.

combine Neo-paganism, Slavic Nativism, and Eastern Orthodox traditions under Dugin’s “Fourth Political Theory”, which integrates elements of liberal democracy, Marxism, and fascism in a new ideology designed to counter liberalism and its individualist denial of mysticism and traditions.

Alexandr Dugin

a set of concepts expressing the historical uniqueness, special vocation and global purpose of the Russian people and, by extension, of the Russian state.

In 2014, he recommended his regional governors read Ilyin’s book, Our Side, alongside Justification of the Good by Vladimir Solovyov and Philosophy of Inequality by Nicholas Berdyaev.

a form of Christian authoritarianism

who died in exile in Switzerland in 1954

it is the ideas of Ivan Ilyin

authoritarian brand of mild liberalism

Russian “sovereign democracy” that has been guiding the Kremlin since at least 2006

Vladislav Surkov, or “Putin’s Rasputin”

none of these motivations can justify Putin’s actions – but they can help us understand the many dimensions

there were also deeper philosophical and ideological motivations behind this invasion

many political scientists and journalists, from John Mearsheimer to Pepe Escobar, have long been warning that if NATO continues expanding towards Russia’s borders, a deadly confrontation in Ukraine could be on the cards.

set common binding rules on cybersecurity for all the bloc’s institutions.

Because the EU’s organizations are strongly interconnected, a vulnerability anywhere could have a cascading effect, it said.

Nonetheless, the European auditors said Tuesday that EU organizations were failing to enact some “essential” cybersecurity controls and underspending in this area. The auditors also alleged a lack of “systematic” cybersecurity training and information sharing.

“A lot of the influencers who tend to align with Modi see at least some amount of common cause or some of their own viewpoints espoused by Putin’s brand of ethnonationalism,” Mr. Brookie said.

Pro-Russian sentiment has taken hold in right-wing circles in the United States, misinformation has spread within Russia that claims Ukrainians have staged bombings or bombed their own neighborhoods, and myths about Ukrainian fortitude have gone viral across social media platforms. But in India and other countries where social media users joined the hashtag, pro-Russian narratives have focused on ethnonationalism and Western hypocrisy over the war, themes that have resonated with social media users.

GDPR has been poorly enforced—including a provision that says people should be able to transport their data from one app to another.

These standards already exist—for instance, the Matrix messaging protocol, the XMPP standard, and the upcoming Messaging Layer Security. “If every player in the field—so the gatekeepers but also the smaller player—all connect to the same standard, it ends up being a big glue between the different services,” says Amandine Le Pape, a cofounder of the Matrix standard.

for all companies to adopt one encryption standard and stick to it.

who would manage the exchange of public encryption keys and how cryptographic metadata would be shared between companies.

The first involves tech companies allowing access to APIs that connect to their messaging services—this is the option Schwab and lawmakers are leaning toward. The second involves more radical change: All companies would have to adopt and implement one universal encryption standard.

“The main challenge is the trade-off between interoperability and privacy for gatekeepers who provide end-to-end encryption,”

the DMA will create “unnecessary privacy and security vulnerabilities.”

“Interoperable E2EE [end-to-end encryption] is somewhere between extraordinarily difficult and impossible,”

cryptography experts are concerned the proposals will not be technically possible without compromising end-to-end encryption,

the largest messaging platforms—including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage, which the DMA designates as gatekeepers—will have to open up to rivals.

But it’s not possible to send a message from one encrypted app to another.

If science engagement is no different than soccer, the case for science diplomacy’s potential to build bridges when other means of communication have ceased to function has just become far less persuasive.

the unique role of the scientific community as a purveyor of rational discourse and mutual understanding

the head of the Russian Space Agency responded to international sanctions with a threat to let the International Space Station crash into the U.S. or Europe.

science diplomacy “serves as a critical medium of international political communication when regular diplomatic channels are strained, blocked, or nonexistent.”

who share common principles and objectives underpins arguments for science diplomacy.

My position is not a political one: I have served current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and I will serve Secretary-designate Hillary Clinton upon her assumption of office this month. I accepted the position because my involvement in scientific interactions between US scientists and scientists in the former Soviet Union through the 1990s convinced me of the profound stabilizing influence that scientific interactions can exert between countries with deeply discordant ideologies and political systems.

Nina Fedoroff, a former president of AAAS and former science and technology adviser to the U.S. secretary of state, explained her engagement in science diplomacy as follows:

Many Central Asians working in Russia will be forced to return home as work opportunities decline. An influx of largely young men to countries with little economic prospects to offer them will have a destabilising impact. Russia may soon be called upon to quell unrest in the guise of the CSTO, unrest the Kremlin is largely responsible for.

For instance, the percentage of GDP that remittances comprise for Kyrgyzstan in 2020 was 31.3 per cent, with the vast majority last year coming from Russia. Analysts forecast a 33 per cent decline in remittances for Kyrgyzstan in 2022.

fair use only matters for copyright holders, it doesn’t matter for data subjects and it doesn’t matter for the people who are affected by the decisions when these models are deployed.

There are lots of people in communities who are not writing papers, but they have other forms of knowledge that are very important for our projects.

How do we make sure that when we extract knowledge from people, we appropriately compensate them?

I wonder about AI for social good.

AI for the value of AI itself.

the Harmony operating system

Huawei and Chinese peer ZTE control roughly 40 to 60 percent of the market for wireless network equipment in Russia, according to market research company Dell’Oro, with Nokia and Ericsson making up most of the rest.

Russia needs Huawei. Apple's and Samsung’s retreat has put half the smartphone market up for grabs, while Ericsson and Nokia’s suspension of their Russia business has left a hole in the supply of telecoms equipment for broadband and mobile network infrastructure that will need to be maintained and eventually upgraded.

“It is theoretically possible that [Huawei] has been able to figure out how to make a cell or base station without US tools, software etc. But it’s hard to believe they would be able to find all the [semiconductors] that were not made with US tools.”

Its phone sales in Russia rose 300 percent in the first two weeks of March, while other Chinese brands Oppo and Vivo also recorded triple-digit sales increases, according to analysts at MTS, Russia’s largest mobile operator.

“The theme for this cycle is to clean everything up, make small improvements, debug.

Ready to start your Email Newsletter? Here are some tips to get you started:

fully transparent with their suggestions.

Review tools and products related to one topic: I

to take short interviews with noted people and introduce them to your readers in a digestible format.

Curated Resources:

Make each section shareable:

Remember that your readers are humans too, and they love it when you sound like a normal person in their personal inbox instead of like a TV News Anchor.

Conversion.ai is handy for unlocking writing ideas.

With these challenges in mind, content teams should assume that anything generated via GPT-3 will need fine-tuning.

OpenAI’s GPT-3 was first to market, but there are more general pretrained transformer engines on the way. GPT-Neo, aka “open-source GPT-3,” is already available thanks to the work of the grassroots AI research scientists at EleutherAI.

GPT-3 is a commercially available API for developers.

GPT-3 only needs a few (2-3) examples to deliver on specific writing tasks.

Let’s strip away the hype

Writing style

Once your Styleguide is published, it will be viewable to anyone with the URL (and password, if you have password protection enabled). It’s not limited to teammates who have Writer seats. This way, your entire organization has easy access to the content guidelines you’ve created.

The complete list of the blocks we've optimised:

This is not a conflict. This is a war.

China needs Europe as a market, and as a source of technology and investments, they note, especially when China’s ties with America are in dire shape.