United Kingdom

They did, however, do a public good.
I'm sure Channel 4 loses similar amounts for some of the Dispatches.

Can you guess which ones?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/14099083

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/14099080

Archived version: https://archive.ph/eWBnr

Grindr, the world's biggest dating app for the LGBT community, is being sued for allegedly sharing personal information such as people's HIV status with third parties.

According to the claim, lodged at the High Court in London, "covert tracking technology" was deployed, and highly sensitive information was illegally shared with advertisers.

Law firm Austen Hays says there are more than 650 claimants and "thousands" of UK users were affected.

Grindr says it will "respond vigorously" to the claim.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/13328418

Christopher Cash, 29, the researcher, and Christopher Berry, 32, were charged under the Official Secrets Act.

They are accused of giving "articles, notes, documents or information" to a foreign state, the Met Police in the UK said.

Mr Berry, from Witney in Oxfordshire, and Mr Cash, of Whitechapel, London, were arrested last March in connection with the investigation.

It was previously reported that one of the men - Mr Cash - was a parliamentary researcher involved with the China Research Group, and who is understood to have had access to several Conservative MPs.

Despite a recently proposed smoking ban, it’s been revealed the UK government has been providing cigarettes to Ukrainian troops training in the country.

Under a scheme with the Ministry of Defence, Ukrainian soldiers undergoing training in the UK are given duty-free tobacco as part of their rations.

It came after soldiers reportedly complained about the high prices of cigarettes in the UK – which average around an eyewatering £15 per pack.

In Ukraine, a pack of 20 cigarettes will only set you back roughly £1.70.

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It’s said the move has helped Ukrainian soldiers focus, with the lack of cigarettes posing a ‘risk to morale’.

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A source, familiar with the deal, told the Telegraph: ‘It is fair to say that smoking is going to be less of a threat to these brave soldiers’ lives than fighting Putin’s illegal invasion of their country.’

Evidence suggests dozens of suppliers are advertising openly on the internet and sending nitazenes in the post from China, where they are manufactured in laboratories. The majority of suppliers claimed to work for companies that otherwise appeared legitimate, with professional websites and business addresses in Chinese cities.

Nitazenes, which are illegal in the UK, are synthetic drugs produced in laboratories. They are similar to heroin and morphine, but can be several hundred times more potent.

It's thought users often take them unknowingly - because they are hidden within other illegal substances by dealers looking to cut production costs.

Nitazenes have been found by a publicly funded testing lab in a range of drugs, including street heroin and black market pills which dealers had wrongly claimed contained anti-anxiety drugs, such as Xanax and Valium.

After the BBC alerted SoundCloud, it removed the posts. X, formerly Twitter, took down hundreds but many listings remain.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/14065157

Muhammad cannot afford legal action or £20,000 fees, with Rwanda deportation a threat if his wife and children join him

Archived version: https://archive.ph/7szq0

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/14041409

Exclusive: Ex-double agent allegedly admitted to murder during training presentations to members of the security services

Archived version: https://archive.ph/Y1TIH

Harborough District Council uses cameras made by Chinese firm Hikvision in Market Harborough and Lutterworth, but a councillor has called for the cameras to be replaced over "security" concerns.

District councillor Simon Whelband told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) the company had previously been accused of "aiding the oppression of Tibetans and Uyghur Muslims".

Mr Whelband is urging the the council to follow the lead of other authorities which have agreed to phase out Hikvision cameras.

He cited a 2021 House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee report which said "equipment manufactured by companies such as Hikvision should not be permitted to operate within the UK".

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/13987724

Chain changes ‘That’s why mums go to Iceland’ line to reflect fact other people also do grocery shopping

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.smeargle.fans/post/148874

HN Discussion

Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run by one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movement and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. Musk had donated £1m to the FIH in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence. He had also boosted the ideas of its leader for nearly a decade on X, formerly Twitter.

The center was run by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term threat of AI replacing humanity turned him into a celebrity figure among the tech elite and routinely landed him on lists of top global thinkers. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Tesla chief Musk all wrote blurbs for his 2014 bestselling book Superintelligence.

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Bostrom resigned from Oxford following the institute’s closure, he told the Guardian.

The closure of Bostrom’s center is a further blow to the effective altruism and longtermism movements that the philosopher has spent decades championing, which in recent years have become mired in scandals related to racism, sexual harassment and financial fraud. Bostrom himself issued an apology last year after a decades-old email surfaced in which he claimed “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and used the N-word.

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Effective altruism, the utilitarian belief that people should focus their lives and resources on maximizing the amount of global good they can do, has become a heavily promoted philosophy in recent years. The philosophers at the center of it, such as Oxford professor William MacAskill, also became the subject of immense amounts of news coverage and glossy magazine profiles. One of the movement’s biggest backers was Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-disgraced former billionaire who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.

Bostrom is a proponent of the related longtermism movement, which held that humanity should concern itself mostly with long term existential threats to its existence such as AI and space travel. Critics of longtermism tend to argue that the movement applies an extreme calculus to the world that disregards tangible current problems, such as climate change and poverty, and veers into authoritarian ideas. In one paper, Bostrom proposed the concept of a universally worn “freedom tag” that would constantly surveil individuals using AI and relate any suspicious activity to a police force that could arrest them for threatening humanity.

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The past few years have been tumultuous for effective altruism, however, as Bankman-Fried’s multibillion-dollar fraud marred the movement and spurred accusations that its leaders ignored warnings about his conduct. Concerns over effective altruism being used to whitewash the reputation of Bankman-Fried, and questions over what good effective altruist organizations are actually doing, proliferated in the years since his downfall.

Meanwhile, Bostrom’s email from the 1990s resurfaced last year and resulted in him issuing a statement repudiating his racist remarks and clarifying his views on subjects such as eugenics. Some of his answers – “Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood” – led to further criticism from fellow academics that he was being evasive.

"The peak of the cost-of-living crisis may have passed, but millions of families are struggling to buy enough food to feed their children. Experiencing food insecurity can be deeply damaging for children and negatively affects their achievement at school.," says Will Baker, Senior Lecturer for the School of Education at University of Bristol.

This shows how the education system – from early years to secondary schools – is increasingly at the front line in responding to child poverty, food insecurity, and destitution, he adds.

The UK's telecoms regulator has found that nearly a quarter of children between the ages of five and seven own a smartphone while a similar percentage use social media unsupervised.

In its annual study of children's relationships with the media and online worlds, comms regulator Ofcom found infant schoolchildren are increasingly online and given more digital independence by parents, as calls grow for greater regulation of social media use among under 14s.

The research showed 24 percent of five- to seven-year-olds own a smartphone, while 76 percent use a tablet.

It also documents increasing use of online platforms, social media and games. The proportion of 5-7s using of social media has increased from 30 percent last year to 38 percent in the 2024 survey. Many of the most popular apps in the market have seen big increases in the same period: WhatsApp use is up from 29 percent to 37 percent; TikTok from 25 percent to 30 percent; and Instagram from 14 percent to 22 percent.

Online gaming within the same age group has also jumped from 34 percent to 41 percent, with the number of kids aged five to seven playing shooter games rising from 10 percent to 15 percent.

Of the children using social media, 42 percent do so with parental supervision while 32 percent use it independently.

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Ministers are said to be considering banning sales of smartphones to children under the age of 16, while there have also been calls to enforce bans of social media use among under-14s.