Login
Appeals Court Blocks Jen Psaki Deposition in Social Media Lawsuit
A federal appeals court has blocked efforts by Republican-led states to force former White House press secretary Jen Psaki to testify about efforts by the Biden administration to urge social media firms to take down certain kinds of posts or bar users from posting.
The order on Thursday afternoon from the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is another not-so-veiled rebuke to District Court Judge Terry Doughty, who has been overseeing the suit the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed last year claiming that the administration’s pressure on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube was so intense that it amounted to censorship.
The three-judge appeals court panel said Doughty failed to give adequate weight to longstanding legal principles calling for depositions of current and former senior government officials to be limited to instances where they are truly essential.
The attorneys general and several private individuals have argued that Psaki’s statements about encouraging social media firms to take down misinformation about the coronavirus and about election fraud are grounds to subject her to questioning, but the appeals judges sharply disagreed.
ChatGPT Creator OpenAI Discussing Offer Valuing Company At $29 Billion, Report Says
OpenAI — the artificial intelligence company behind the viral ChatGPT chatbot program — is in discussions to sell shares valuing the firm at $29 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, after the launch of ChatGPT was lauded by many as a revolutionary advance in artificial intelligence despite some problems.
The valuation appears very bullish on the company’s future ability to churn out revolutionary products that are able to generate profits since Reuters reported last month that the company is only expected to make about $80 million in revenue for 2022. OpenAI has reportedly been telling investors it expects to increase its annual revenue to $1 billion by 2024.
Microsoft in 2019 invested $1 billion in OpenAI and is hoping to integrate ChatGPT software with its Bing search engine to drive traffic away from Google, according to Bloomberg. Microsoft is also actively in talks to increase its investment stake, according to the Journal.
Pentagon Has Rescinded COVID Vaccine Mandate: Spokesman
The U.S. Department of Defense has withdrawn its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, a Pentagon official said on Jan. 5.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a Biden appointee, imposed the mandate for all troops in August 2021, saying it was necessary to protect military readiness. The military had kept the mandate, which was for a primary series of a vaccine, in place even as the initial shots have proven increasingly less effective against infection and severe illness.
Even some of the original backers of the requirement, such as House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), said the mandate no longer made sense in light of such developments, and Congress inserted a provision into the 2023 defense funding bill that required Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to rescind the mandate within 30 days of its enactment.
President Joe Biden signed the bill on Dec. 23, 2022. That same day, the Pentagon said it was halting all actions related to the mandate but that it had not yet withdrawn it.
As of late 2022, nearly 8,500 troops had been discharged for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
UI Ends Vaccine, Testing Requirements
The University of Illinois has removed its COVID-19 vaccination and testing requirements for all students and employees, System President Tim Killeen announced.
Since the advent of the pandemic, unvaccinated students and employees on UI campuses were required to keep up a regular testing schedule.
In the 2021 fall semester, after the vaccines debuted, all students and staff had to receive their primary vaccination series or face stricter testing guidelines. The Urbana-Champaign campus has maintained a 95% vaccination rate since then.
235 Million Twitter Accounts Were Leaked in a Huge Data Breach
The email addresses tied to 235 million Twitter accounts have been shared in an online hacking forum, per the Washington Post. While it doesn’t look like any other information leaked out, the obvious worry here is that malicious actors could potentially expose the identities of people who like to post anonymously using said email addresses. In countries that crack down hard on political dissent, for example, that could be a huge problem for online activists.
Right now, the consensus seems to be that these accounts were scraped in late 2021 using an exploit that Twitter identified and fixed in January 2022. The cybersecurity website Have I Been Pwned added this leak to its database, so you can go there, enter your email address and find out if your account was affected by the hack.
The Twitter Purge Continues: Musk Lays off About 40 Data Scientists and Engineers Working on Ad Team
For years Twitter had operated less like a company and more like a cult compound for leftist ideologues, with free lunches, yoga rooms, smoothie, wine and espresso bars, and minimal work buffered by pointless meetings and near zero productivity.
Those days appear to be over. The latest proof? Twitter laid off “about 40 data scientists and engineers working on the advertising team” late on Wednesday night of this week, according to The Information.
Elon Musk has also been systematically releasing internal communications from the company confirming that it was working with intelligence agencies to censor users. He has promised a forthcoming “Fauci Files” disclosure of more additional internal documents slated for this week.
Federal Reserve Recommends Banks Stay Away From Crypto as Possible ‘Central Bank Digital Currency’ Is Weighed
Regulators advised banks and other financial institutions to avoid cryptocurrencies, a warning that comes after the implosion of digital asset company FTX and deliberations over a possible central bank digital currency in the United States.
Officials at the Federal Reserve have long considered the creation of a central bank digital currency which, unlike bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies, would be managed by policymakers and tethered to the dollar.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has told lawmakers that his “mind is open” to a digital dollar, noting he was “legitimately undecided” on whether the “benefits outweigh the costs” of central bank digital currencies. “We would want very broad support in society and in Congress,” he remarked.
Critics of central bank digital currencies assert that digital assets present a number of privacy and security concerns. Republican members of the House Financial Services Committee have issued a series of principles that any potential digital dollar project must fulfill, including the establishment of privacy guarantees, the promotion of private sector innovation, and the protection of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
