https://archive.ph/6tjt3

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/29802

Google handed a British graduate student’s bank and credit card information over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after he was targeted by the agency for attending a pro-Palestine protest for just five minutes. 

The tech giant fulfilled a subpoena request from ICE for “a wide array of personal data” on Amandla Thomas-Johnson, an activist and journalist who was studying in the US at Cornell University, The Intercept reported.   

Thomas-Johnson went into hiding in the college town of Ithaca, upstate New York, in spring last year as Donald Trump’s administration began rounding up foreign students who opposed Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

He had briefly attended a 2024 protest against companies supplying weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair, which got him banned from campus. 

As well as financial information, the data requested by ICE included usernames, addresses, a list of any IP masking services, telephone numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers. 

Thomas-Johnson had no opportunity to challenge the subpoena. 

He believes ICE was planning to monitor and then detain him, but by the time of the subpoena he had already fled to Switzerland. 

“We need to think very hard about what resistance looks like under these conditions,” he told The Intercept, “where government and big tech know so much about us, can track us, can imprison, can destroy us in a variety of ways.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment from the outlet. 

From Novara Media via This RSS Feed.

Trying to get away from my phone more, and an e reader sounds like a good way to get myself to read more. Kobo is sounding like the most recommended one based on some googling, but I’m also ok with jailbreaking something like an older kindle from eBay. Something that plays nice with Libby would be ideal but not required.

I found a few helpful git tips and tricks at work the other day, so I figured I might share them.

Google Maps no longer shows user reviews of locations if you're not logged in. It just shows the star rating. Probably for the same reason that Google Maps is not on its own domain, but the main google.com one: user tracking using google.com cookies.

Palliser Capital recently sent a letter to Toto, the $7 billion Japanese toilet maker. They called the company "the most undervalued and overlooked AI memory beneficiary." That might seem strange at first, but the connection is in materials science.

Toto is famous for its bidet toilets, but its deep expertise is in advanced ceramics. According to the FT, Toto's chuck technology uses ceramics engineered to remain perfectly stable at extremely low temperatures. This turns out to be really handy for holding silicon wafers firmly in place during cryogenic etching, which is becoming more important as memory chips get more layered and complex. Palliser believes Toto has about a five-year lead in this specific technology and should expand this side of its business.

Their advanced ceramics division already contributes 40% of the company's operating profit, despite making up less than 10% of its revenue.

Toto isn't even the most extreme example. Another company called Ajinomoto is known MSG, leveraged decades of amino acid research to development insulating film, called Ajinomoto Build-up Film (ABF), that is used in virtually every high-end GPU. They hold an estimated 95% global monopoly on this material. During the 2021 chip shortage, a major bottleneck was the supply of Ajinomoto's film.

It turns out that Japanese companies hold a majority global share in at least 14 critical semiconductor materials, showing how industrial processes are deeply connected. The sintering technique used to create a non-porous ceramic toilet is the same one used to create a contamination-free wafer chuck. The most foundational layer of computing hardware relies on companies whose public identity is built on consumer goods like toilets, food seasoning, and window glass. It's a good reminder that physical material science underpins digital advancement.

https://archive.ph/LhvNo

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7710578

Humanoid robots just delivered one of the most unbelievable live dance performances ever seen.

But how did they actually learn to do this?

In this video, we reveal the secret training process behind China’s insane robot dance show — breaking down how these humanoid robots learned to flip, balance, perform kung fu, handle weapons, and move in perfect synchronization.

This includes:

• • Behind-the-scenes robot training
• • AI learning process
• • Rehearsal footage analysis
• • Factory work demonstrations
• • Why this marks a major turning point in robotics

This is not CGI. This is real AI training.