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In their effort to “exert total control” over religion and to “sinicise” Catholic and Protestant Christianity, the authorities have “ordered the removal of crosses from churches [and] replaced images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary with pictures of President Xi Jinping,” the report said.

The report concluded that “every facet of religious life for Buddhists, Catholics and Protestant Christians, Muslims, and Taoists” was facing pressure to incorporate CCP ideology, and religious elements considered contradictory to the state’s political agenda were being eradicated.

Google's notoriously wonky AI Overviews feature — you know, the one that repeatedly makes up facts and literally tells users to eat rocks — is about to get a whole lot more annoying.

On Thursday, the tech giant announced that its AI-generated search summaries will now begin to show ads above, below, and within them, as a way of demonstrating that the technology is capable of actually making money.

It will also serve to assuage concerns that AI chatbots could eat into search ad revenues, which are Google's biggest cash cow.

Now, if you search how to get a grass stain out of jeans, as seen in an example in Google's blog post, you'll get an AI summary which contains a carousel of relevant website links, plus a heavy helping of "Sponsored" ads for stain removers. Revolutionary stuff.

• Fed up with China's employment situation, young people on the mainland are retreating to the countryside.

• Job hunting has been particularly difficult for young people as the Chinese economy struggles, said Chung Chi Nien, chair professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

I made a post in programming.dev/c/privacy, but it's not there on the programming.dev side

And I checked my profile https://programming.dev/u/[email protected]

And it shows this

What's going on here?

Some of the top browser makers around have issued a letter to the European Commission (EC) alleging that Microsoft gives the Edge browser an unfair advantage and should be subject to EU tech rules.

A letter seen by Reuters, sent by Vivaldi, Waterfox, and Wavebox, and supported by a group of web developers, also supports Opera’s move to take the EC to court over its decision to exclude Microsoft Edge from being subject to the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

As Edge comes pre-installed by default on Windows machines, users must navigate the Microsoft offering in order to download their browser of choice. The letter states that, “No platform independent browser can aspire to match Edge's unparalleled distribution advantage on Windows. Edge is, moreover, the most important gateway for consumers to download an independent browser on Windows PCs.”

Vegetation cover across the Antarctic Peninsula has increased more than 10-fold over the last four decades, new research shows.

The Antarctic Peninsula, like many polar regions, is warming faster than the global average, with extreme heat events in Antarctica becoming more common.

The new study—by the universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire, and the British Antarctic Survey—used satellite data to assess how much the Antarctic Peninsula has been "greening" in response to climate change.

It found that the area of vegetation cover across the Peninsula increased from less than one square kilometer in 1986 to almost 12 square kilometers by 2021.

On Monday, Microsoft unveiled updates to its consumer AI assistant Copilot, introducing two new experimental features for a limited group of $20/month Copilot Pro subscribers: Copilot Labs and Copilot Vision. Labs integrates OpenAI's latest o1 "reasoning" model, and Vision allows Copilot to see what you're browsing in Edge.

Microsoft says Copilot Labs will serve as a testing ground for Microsoft's latest AI tools before they see wider release. The company describes it as offering "a glimpse into 'work-in-progress' projects." The first feature available in Labs is called "Think Deeper," and it uses step-by-step processing to solve more complex problems than the regular Copilot. Think Deeper is Microsoft's version of OpenAI's new o1-preview and o1-mini AI models, and it has so far rolled out to some Copilot Pro users in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.