🇪🇺 EU Approves Historic AI Act: Pioneering Comprehensive AI Regulation | vcsi.org
"One of the key aspects of the AI Act is the enforcement mechanism, which includes substantial penalties for non-compliance. The EU Commission is vested with the authority to impose fines of up to €35 million ($38 million) or 7% of a company’s annual global revenue, whichever is higher"
So the Environmental Agency, is embarrassed to reveal the true state of our environment...
They find it difficult to answer prescient questions from NGOs with significant expertise (the implications being, better informed that the EA staff) & (it would seem) would like the NGO's Q.s to be more simply put to help EA staff offer better answers?
If you wanted a picture of a failing regulatory agency this would be it....
"Whether for fuel breaks, salvage logging, or private land logging, native forest logging hasn’t stopped in Victoria. It will continue for many years, and the logs cut from these operations will be sold commercially."
"Fire management in Victoria amounts to de facto native logging industry, conservationists say. On Thursday conservationists and the Victorian National Parks Association expressed shock after discovering a dead greater glider in an area where trees had been felled by FFMV."
"Logging in Victoria’s native forests ended at the beginning of this year but Prof David Lindenmayer, a forest ecologist at Australian National University, said: “There’s a de facto logging industry now emerging under the guise of fire suppression.“To me, when you cut down big trees and put them on a truck and take them to a sawmill … that is logging.”"
‘Somebody is going to die’ because of polluted rivers
I think that might be a little late. Directly, because people are already being infected and life ‘changing' infections have already occurred, indirectly because people are being scared away from the water.
#EU#EC#Regulation: "The issues are diverse, but connected: collapse of information; protecting children; electoral integrity; unassailable tech monopolies; security and war; labour; carbon. Any of these profound problems is enough to threaten our way of life. Together they are the great challenge of our age.
In the crucial half-year before they take up their role, the next President of the Commission must start planning now. We need a whole-of-Commission approach. Too often, the Commission’s many directorates and units work in silos, contradicting and cancelling each other. We propose a new structure to marshal Europe’s diverse powers and resources.
First, the next European Commission must adopt a whole-of-Commission approach. Too often, the Commission’s many directorates and units work in siloes, contradicting and cancelling each other. We need a new structure to marshal Europe’s diverse powers and resources."
Almost feels like news worth celebrating until you remember the track record of child protection regulations in the UK, a country where the economy is being propped up by pushing junk food and nicotine onto children.
#EU#DMA#BigTech#Regulation#Antitrust: "The DMA is a first, and a great deal of earnest effort is going into its implementation. But we don’t know what “success” will look like, even on its own terms. Of course, even a limited set of improvements would be better than the status quo. Godspeed, but let’s be realistic also. The more fundamental point is that the real interesting question is not if we can nibble the gatekeepers at the margin: but whether we can disintermediate them at least in part so that we do not need to rely entirely on a proprietary Web 2.0 that they comprehensively control. Antitrust complaints in the US have at least some prospect of involving divestments and break ups as the eventual remedy – though this will also be a long and inevitably hard fought road. This is not on the cards in Europe through digital markets regulation."
here's the ever interesting David Allen Green on why regulating the press/media may be easy to demand but is (now) much more difficult to achieve.
For this of us who see the control of the media & what its owners do with that control as a key problem for the UK's democracy, this is what one can call a 'sobering read'!
How willing are public institutions to respond to Subject Access Requests, allowing you to find out what personal information is held by that organisation.
Incomplete returns & delays in even getting the information requested can have significant impact on those needing such information.
Open Democracy's investigation suggests there is a massive problem of a lack of proper oversight & a weakness of enforcement by the Information Commissioner Office.
Interesting web comic about nuclear technology and regulation. Especially in the context of current events (AFIK only 3 countries that have had nuclear weapons and ICBMs have ever disarmed... One of them is now being invaded).
'#Sharing with minimal #regulation? Evidence from neighborhood book exchange' by Anouk Schippers and Adriaan Soetevent is April's #OpenAccess publication in the spotlight.
Their study shows that peer-to-peer book exchanges, like little free #libraries, experience minimal free riding due to strong #SocialNorms among users, with a return rate of 9 #books for every 10 taken.
@rbreich What they’re basically saying is you can steal and manipulate data from US citizens if the company is US owned.
This bill doesn’t even remotely get to the root of the mega-social-media problem. #regulation#tictocban#x#meta#bluesky
Fun drinking game for the next 9-12 months: take a shot every time a news article uses the phrase "Section 230" or "chilling effect on free speech" -- that way you'll be in the hospital with liver poisoning instead of having to keep up with all the TikTok news and court challenges
#Oil Companies Must Set Aside More Money to Plug Wells, a New Rule Says. But It Won’t Be Enough.
The new Bureau of Land Management #regulation, which applies to nearly 90,000 wells on federal public land, is hampered by math errors and overly optimistic cost projections.
Social regulation may be becoming more acceptable; in support of that let me relate this anecdote.
Watching a documentary some years ago about the illegal rave scene, a while after the ban on smoking in public buildings had come into force, I was amused to see that even at an illegal rave (they were already breaking the law!), smokers for the most part came out of the building to smoke... laws can & do shift social norms (for the better).
"The early results come after the EU's sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing #bigtech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web #browsers from a #choicescreen."
“‘while allowing #theFed the flexibility to unwisely expand its remit into inherently #political areas such as #credit rationing & #banking#regulation.’ Here is #groupthink: ‘Despite the biggest #monetary errors in 4 decades,’ Katz & Miran write, none of the 9 recent appointees to the Board of Governors was on record as having made accurate predictions about #inflation’s path.