One of Washington’s largest corporate tax breaks has grown alongside a data center boom in Central Washington, including this data center in East Wenatchee owned by the Sabey Corp. Despite forgoing more than $474 million since 2018, the state can’t say how many jobs were created by the tax break. During that same time frame, it also hasn’t evaluated whether the revenue loss was worth it.

Palantir, the company named for the dangerous seeing-stones that tended to mislead their users, has announced a partnership with Microsoft to deliver services for classified networks in US defense and intelligence agencies.

“This is a first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology that will allow critical national security missions to operationalize Microsoft’s best-in-class large language models (LLMs) via Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platforms (AIP) in Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments,” the announcement says.

Palantir is a data-analysis company that sucks down huge amounts of personal data to assist governments and companies with surveillance. It is somewhat unclear from the text of the announcement what services Palantir and Microsoft will offer. What we do know is that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services will integrate Palantir products. Previously, Azure incorporated OpenAI’s Chat-GPT4 into a “top secret” version of its software.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/39237508

https://archive.is/jm3lR

“We’re aware of reports that access to Signal has been blocked in some countries,” Signal says. If you are affected by the blocks, the company recommends turning on its censorship circumvention feature. (NetBlocks reports that this feature lets Signal “remain usable” in Russia.)

https://archive.is/bSCnV

The Free Software Foundation Europe is intervening in a litigation brought by Apple against the European Commission before the Court of Justice of the European Union. The case relates to Digital Markets Act, with Apple seeking to avoid obligations related to its App Store and the interoperability of its operating systems. The FSFE aims to hold Apple accountable under the DMA to protect Free Software against monopolistic corporate control.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5326994

I'm gonna use neocities, I think.

But honestly, I just want to know what people are looking for in a website and what people might want.

It's something I want to experiment with, and the first one is just that: an experiment. But later on, I aim to make more and implement more of my own more "serious" ideas.

Shoot.

The Israeli army is using Amazon’s cloud service to store surveillance information on Gaza’s population, while procuring further AI tools from Google and Microsoft for military purposes, an investigation reveals.

We’re happy to announce the launch of Raspberry Pi Pico 2, our second-generation microcontroller board, built on RP2350: a new high-performance, secure microcontroller designed here at Raspberry Pi.

With a higher core clock speed, twice the memory, more powerful Arm cores, new security features, and upgraded interfacing capabilities, Pico 2 delivers a significant performance and feature uplift, while retaining hardware and software compatibility with earlier members of the Pico series.

Pico 2 is on sale now, priced at $5.

Microsoft is ruining Windows. It just keeps getting worse. Whether it be their insistence on AI and cloud garbage, or just a general sense of incompetence, I can’t help but feel like the operating system has seen better days.

Normally I wouldn’t care too much, big tech ruins another thing, whatever.

But the problem is Microsoft has such a dominant market share that you can’t really escape them.

I guess unless you use a Mac or something I don’t know.

A federal judge has ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in the US. “The market reality is that Google is the only real choice” as the default search engine, Judge Amit Mehta said in his decision, and he determined it had gotten that way unfairly. It’s a ruling that could portend big changes for the company, but we yet don’t know how big, and we might not for years.

Mehta declared on Monday that Google was liable for violating antitrust laws, vindicating the Department of Justice and a coalition of states that sued the tech giant in 2020. The next step — deciding on remedies for its illegal conduct — begins next month. Both parties must submit a proposed schedule for remedy proceedings by September 4th and then appear at a status conference on September 6th.

Hello, if you are still using them, which one do you use ?

I have 300 GB of music. I am looking for one that is privacy respectful and able to read flac. Any recommandation ?