cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/72601186

Creator credit: https://tiktok.com/@twonkcomics

Over the same period, such deaths declined in most other developed nations, according to United Nations data.

From the WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/the-deadly-1-5-mile-corridor-that-shows-the-fatal-flaw-in-americas-road-design-8f424579

I shared a link from NPR Tiny Desk but there was no image preview or video embed. After investigating this I learned that when you do that, each instance picks up the link and individually retrieves the link preview nearly simultaneously. For gargantuan sites like YT or Reddit, this is a trivial amount of traffic and not a problem, but for smaller sites like NPR this results in a sort of botnet DDOS attack on the site's servers. More here. Another example here . For that reason, NPR has blocked Fediverse servers like Mastodon.

I have experienced this on my personal server as well (DDOS), but at the time didn't know why, exactly.

This isn't the end of the world, but certainly is not great and hurts engagement with the content. Is there a solution for this? Perhaps using some sort of webtorrent service like PeerTube where they just fetch the information from another fediverse server instead of the source server? Maybe fetching embeds client-side? At least that would stagger the requests.

Archived version

• Bulk Infrastructure proposes a 6,500-kilometer Norway-to-Montreal cable bypassing U.S. territory entirely.
• Costs exceed $620 million, with financing, customers, and route surveys still unresolved.
• Routing around U.S. territory does not guarantee independence from American networks downstream.

Norwegian infrastructure company Bulk Infrastructure is proposing a direct fiber cable from Norway to Canada, routed around the United States entirely. The project, named Leif Erikson, remains a proposal, not a construction announcement.

Canada currently has relatively few direct international cable options that avoid U.S. routing, a structural gap the project is designed to address. That context, combined with growing government interest in infrastructure resilience, gives the proposal its strategic weight.

...

Archived version

Google’s AI search told users that an Aachen doctor had been convicted of a sex crime. The conviction belonged to a different man, and on September 24 the Aachen Regional Court [in Germany] banned Google from repeating it, ruling that the company answers for what its AI Mode says. It is the second German court this year to treat Google’s AI answers as Google’s own words, and the first ruling to say so has now been settled rather than tested on appeal.

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The doctor asked Google to delete the text on August 28 and followed up with a formal legal warning on September 15. Neither worked. The court’s 8th civil chamber then acted without hearing Google first, citing the urgency of false claims that were “publicly visible” to an unlimited audience. Google Ireland, which runs Google Search in the EU, now faces a fine of up to €250,000 for each breach, or detention of its managers, if it repeats three versions of the text. Google can still challenge the order.

The court’s reasoning is blunt: Google “provides AI-generated search and is therefore also responsible for the answers generated in this context.” It added that checking would have been easy: had Google “confronted its own AI” with the doctor’s objections, it would have found the statements were false.

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That reasoning comes almost word for word from Munich. On May 28 the Munich Regional Court I ruled (case 26 O 869/26) on AI Overviews that told searchers two Munich publishing companies were “known for dubious business practices”, ran subscription traps and kept changing their names to avoid being traced. None of the linked sources said that; the first one cited did not mention the companies at all.

Google argued that it was only summarising other people’s pages, the same defence that has long protected search engines in Germany. The court disagreed. AI Overviews, it said, do not just show links but make “independent, new and substantive statements” built by evaluating and combining third-party sites, so Google must treat them as its own, including as the provider of an AI system under the EU’s AI Act. “Only it has influence over the AI,” the judges wrote.

Google said at the time it would appeal. That appeal has ended in a settlement, The Decoder reported on Saturday; the terms are not known and neither Google nor the publishers would comment. The upshot is that no higher court has ruled, so the Munich judgment is not binding precedent, but lower courts such as Aachen are already following it.

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As always, stay tuned here on !comicstrips@lemmy.world for a slow trickle out of Jucika comics, but if you want to find more, here’s a good post with a large collection that /u/JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social posted last year: https://piefed.social/post/1258520

**Also, check out some Jucika fan art! https://piefed.social/c/eurographicnovels/p/2128207/the-best-of-jucika-fan-art-12-pieces-with-two-videos

**You can find more Jucika content in c/graphicnovels by using this search

On Monday, the office of the Mississippi attorney general, Lynn Fitch, announced that the police shooting of Kohen Wiley, a one-year-old, as he sat in his mother’s lap “was justified”. The statement came four months after the baby was killed in Senatobia, Mississippi.

On 14 June, officers in Senatobia, a small city near Memphis, were responding to a shoplifting call alleging Vellesiya Wiley, the baby’s mother, and Latoya Ferrell, a friend, had stolen a pack of diapers. Neither woman has been charged with a crime. Officials have not released any evidence of shoplifting.

According to police reports, on the day of the shooting, the women and child exited the store, entered their vehicle and began to leave the parking lot when officers arrived.

The police drew their weapons. Wiley lifted the baby up to indicate that there was a child in the car. An officer, identified by other records as Sgt Hunter Foster, fired into the vehicle, killing Kohen Wiley and wounding Ferrell. Foster is white; both Wileys and Ferrell are Black.

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During an interview with Fox News, Cruz was asked why so many Republican-held Senate seats were toss-ups this year. Cruz acknowledged the frightening environment for the GOP — “there are eight to 10 Senate races that are tied or within the margin of error” — before saying Republicansappear cursed because their party is in power