Japan’s Fair Trade Commission raided Microsoft Japan’s offices on Wednesday as part of an investigation into whether it improperly restricted customers of its Azure platform from using rival cloud services, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has confirmed officials were in talks with the US on the requirements and scope of an Enhanced Border Security Partnership (EBSP).

The US has given the 42 countries in its Visa Waiver Program - a reciprocal agreement that allowed citizens to visit for up to 90 days without a visa - until the end of the year to conclude EBSP negotiations or risk losing visa-free travel status.

Any information handed over to the US may end up with the country's controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement border force - or ICE as it is commonly known - and concerns have been raised about the opaque process, data sovereignity and surveillance overreach.

New Zealand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) refused to clarify what safeguards were being considered to protect New Zealanders' private information or if it was aware of any ICE personnel stationed in New Zealand at present.

Biometric sharing programmes already exist between Five Eyes countries (New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom) as part of Migration Five arrangements but typically operated on a 'hit/no-hit' basis where initial biometric checks provided minimal information, and further data requests were considered on a case by case basis.

But EBSPs could provide full automated access to other countries' national databases, according to critics and minutes from European Union member state negotiations.

PDF.

We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator. We then design attacks for the closed-world setting. Given two databases of pseudonymous individuals, each containing unstructured text written by or about that individual, we implement a scalable attack pipeline that uses LLMs to: (1) extract identity-relevant features, (2) search for candidate matches via semantic embeddings, and (3) reason over top candidates to verify matches and reduce false positives. Compared to prior deanonymization work (e.g., on the Netflix prize) that required structured data or manual feature engineering, our approach works directly on raw user content across arbitrary platforms. We construct three datasets with known ground-truth data to evaluate our attacks. The first links Hacker News to LinkedIn profiles, using cross-platform references that appear in the profiles. Our second dataset matches users across Reddit movie discussion communities; and the third splits a single user's Reddit history in time to create two pseudonymous profiles to be matched. In each setting, LLM-based methods substantially outperform classical baselines, achieving up to 68% recall at 90% precision compared to near 0% for the best non-LLM method. Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered.

• LessWrong;
• Hacker News.

Yet despite the resolution’s growing support, Democratic leadership has not clearly rallied behind it. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has issued public concerns about Trump’s rush to war, but has not said whether or not he supports the Khanna-Massie bill.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y) statement did not oppose a war, but instead noted the “risks” involved and called for confronting Iran’s “ruthless campaign of terror, nuclear ambitions, regional aggression, and horrific oppression” with “strength, resolve, regional coordination, and strategic clarity” and urged the administration “to consult with Congress and explain to the American people the objectives and exactly why he is risking more American lives.”

Following the Trump administration’s Tuesday briefing to the Gang of 8, Schumer added, “This is serious. The administration has to make its case to the American people," fueling criticism that he was prepared to accept the president’s justifications.

“Leader Schumer’s statements are insufficient. Democratic voters want leadership that’s willing to take a clear stand and oppose the president on major issues like this,” Dylan Williams, Vice President for Government Affairs at the Center for International Policy, told RS.

What a pathetic, useless opposition party. We will never win if this what we continue to settle for as representatives of our best interests...

We are expanding support of lightweight formatting to include additional Markdown syntax features. This includes strikethrough formatting and nested lists. To get started, explore these new options in the formatting toolbar, keyboard shortcuts, or by editing the Markdown syntax directly.

Source: Microsoft.

Does anyone actually like those silicone tips vs a solid body?

I personally cannot wear the silicone ones. they either fallout, or don't fit/hurt my ears.

it's just a royal pain finding the non silicone ones for cheap. it's just for dog walking. I also don't do wireless because well.. they fall out.

photo examples.

After Israeli settlers killed 19-year-old United States citizen Nasrallah Abu Siyam in the occupied West Bank last week, the US Department orf State said it “has no higher priority than the safety and security of Americans”.

But, as the number of US citizens killed by Israel continues to mount, rights advocates say Washington’s failure to ensure accountability is driving a deadly cycle of impunity.

According to Taiwan tech publication DigiTimes, most AI firms are unwilling to wait two years for HDD supplies to stabilize and are shifting to SSDs instead. To contain costs, they are choosing QLC NAND-based drives over the faster, more durable, and more expensive TLC variants.

When Venezuelan authorities arrested a group of military academy cadets last year, prosecutors pointed to an unusual piece of evidence: their use of the popular video game Call of Duty.

Now, after nearly a year behind bars, the young men are free — part of a wave of releases under a new amnesty law that is reigniting debate over the country’s justice system.

On top of the grotesque and horrifying photos and emails that appear to offer more evidence of systemic and widespread child abuse, the Epstein files revealed further allegations of his ties to Israel and its intelligence agency Mossad.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43494035

Kennedy made the swipe at the Democratic lawmaker during an interview with Fox News, saying she is "kind of like Vice President Kamala Harris, but with more bartending experience." He went on to say that she has "never been accused of being a policy maven."

AOC reacted on social media, saying "my having been a waitress makes me 1000x more qualified to govern on behalf of working people than whatever lifelong politician nonsense you've swung from your whole career."

"Why should working people vote for you if this is what you think of them?," she added.

Drop Site Daily: February 25, 2026

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34528122

For this reason, elected authoritarians who wish to consolidate control typically win not by flashy displays of might, but by convincing a critical mass of people that they’re just a normal politician — no threat to democracy at all.

That means the survival of democracy depends, to an extent not fully appreciated, on perceptions and narratives. In three recent countries where a democracy survived an incumbent government bent on destroying it — Brazil, South Korea, and Poland — the belief among elites, the public, and the opposition that democracy was at stake played a critical role in motivating pushback.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/60961820

Four children were among 18 people killed when a Myanmar regime warplane bombed a market in Rakhine State’s Ponnagyun Township on Tuesday, in the latest airstrike on civilians in Arakan Army (AA)-held territory.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55897489

President Trump’s State of the Union address last night was very like the man who delivered it: divisive, abusive, and childish.

The speech turned reality on its head in many ways. The president who has enriched himself and his family by more than a billion dollars in his first few months in office called on Congress to clean up its corruption. The president who has collected about $175 billion in illegal tariffs from the American people falsely told them that he had given them a great big tax cut. The president solemnly condemned political violence—the same president who ended his first term by inciting a mob to sack Congress and overturn an election. Maybe most shocking, Trump demanded that members of Congress rise to agree that it’s the first duty of government to protect American citizens—even as his own government by its brutal police methods has shot American citizens dead on the streets and then tried to deceive the country about how those Americans had been killed and why. Then of course there were the many misstatements of fact about the economy, about crime, and about wars and peace—many of which look like deliberate decisions to deceive the public watching on television.

The most radical fantasy in the speech, though, was its claims of a new golden age of prosperity. That misstatement surely deceived nobody. Prices continue to rise; the job market stagnates. In almost every way that can be measured, Americans are communicating economic anxiety and discontent. Trump insisted that they are all wrong. It is as if the nation were being soaked by a torrential downpour, water rolling over umbrellas and into boats, soaking everyone’s clothes—and the leader whose job it is to lead them through the deluge insists that it is not raining at all, that in fact it is sunny, the sunniest day ever.

States of the Union are rituals intended to demonstrate the unity of the nation: the president addressing two houses of Congress, backed by his Cabinet, speaking to the largest audience in the regularly scheduled year. Even the nonpartisan institutions of government—the Supreme Court and Joint Chiefs of Staff—attend in robes and uniforms, adding the symbolism of their respectful neutrality.

The ritual depends for its meaning, however, on certain standards of behavior. Something important broke when a member of the House shouted, “You lie!” at President Obama during his first joint-session speech in 2009. Last night, Trump repeatedly and persistently hurled much worse accusations at his political opponents—only days after he accused the six-justice majority of the Supreme Court that overturned his illegal tariffs of being “swayed by foreign powers.”

Through the first Trump term, many Americans consoled themselves that Trump’s outrageous antics would not last forever. He would depart in time, and the old ways could then reassert themselves. The best response to Trump, it was often said in those days, was to defend existing institutions. And the worst response was to respond in kind—because somebody had to protect the institutions that Trump seemed determined to wreck. As former First Lady Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.”

But there comes a point when sad realities must be faced. The speech last night was empty and uselessly garrulous. Its length was its first declaration of disrespect for those obliged to sit through it. Trump’s name-calling of his predecessor and of the members of Congress in the chamber, his demands that legislators rise at his command, his strategic deployment of systematic untruth in service of those demands to rise and clap—put together, he misused the State of the Union ritual in ways so radical as to call the ritual itself into question. Are members of Congress really supposed to sit meekly and quietly while the president uses the rostrum of their chamber to abuse and insult them in the ugliest language? The president is present in Congress as a guest: That’s the reason for the famous language about the “high honor and distinct privilege” of welcoming him to speak. He has no right to be heard in person; it’s a courtesy.

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution provides that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” The Constitution does not set an annual schedule for such information, nor does it require the information to be delivered in person. George Washington and John Adams started the in-person tradition. Thomas Jefferson ended it, both because it reminded him too much of the British practice of the speech from the throne that opens a session of Parliament and (very likely) also because he disliked speaking in public. Woodrow Wilson reverted to the Washington-Adams precedent. Then came television, and the modern State of the Union spectacle. The spectacle is founded, however, on an invitation from the speaker of the House. No invitation, no spectacle.

Given the intentional abuse of Congress’s time and hospitality last night, the next speaker, if there is a different next speaker, should consider very hard whether to extend another such invitation. The case for suffering Trump is that the tradition, if interrupted, may take a long time to return. A future Republican Congress will requite the next Democratic president the same way. But there’s also a risk of setting a precedent that anti-institutional Republicans get to smash things, which pro-institutional Democrats must then clean up. Maybe the only way to restore norms is by imposing some meaningful costs for breaking them. Next January, the next speaker could do everyone a favor with a letter that begins: “Dear Mr. President, the time has come for your State of the Union message. Please send it in writing in the enclosed envelope. Congress will give it all the attention it deserves. This is the method that was good enough for Rutherford B. Hayes, and, Mr. Trump, it is more than good enough for you.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43567702

Source: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-orders-diplomats-fight-data-sovereignty-initiatives-2026-02-25/