Liberty Media Corporation, commonly referred to as Liberty Media or just Liberty, is an American mass media company founded by John C. Malone in 1991. The company has three divisions, reflecting its ownership stakes in Formula One, Sirius XM, and Live Nation Entertainment.

Liberty Media - Wikipedia

Liberty Communications of Puerto Rico LLC (d/b/a Liberty) is a telecommunications company that provides broadband Internet access, VoIP, television and wireless services covering the entire island of Puerto Rico (wireless in Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands).

Liberty Puerto Rico - Wikipedia

The Liberty Company Insurance Brokers, LLC | 9,541 followers on LinkedIn. Promoting Peace of Mind with Great Care. | The Liberty Company Insurance Brokers is an independently owned insurance broker handling the commercial, personal and employee benefits insurance needs of businesses, non-profits, ...

The Liberty Company Insurance Brokers, LLC | LinkedIn

Funds will be used to refinance the broker&#x27;s existing debt

Liberty Company announces $340 million refinancing transaction ...

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Leaders in Internet and Mobile phone services

Reference Number: 18.c45e0e17.1618955450.21b12ad

Liberty Mutual

The Liberty Company is a producer-focused, family-owned, and fiercely independent insurance services firm founded in 1987 by Chairman and CEO Bill Johnson. Licensed to operate in all 50 states, Liberty has grown consistently and, in recent years, exponentially by attracting talented and ...

The Liberty Company Insurance Brokers | Insurance Business America

Liberty Energy Launches Bettering Human Lives Foundation to Advance Clean Cooking Solutions Liberty Energy (NYSE: LBRT), a leading North American energy services company, is proud… ... Liberty announced today the commercial launch of Liberty Power Innovations (LPI), an integrated alternative ...

Home - Liberty Energy

Liberty Latin America is a leading telecommunications company operating in over 20 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Home | Liberty Latin America

Get a customized insurance quote from one of the nation&#x27;s largest insurance companies for auto, home, renters, and more and only pay for what you need.

Liberty Mutual: A trusted insurance company for over 100 years

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Safe protocol’s smart account infrastructure has executed over 84 Safe Multi-sig transactions processing over $995M in volume for World Liberty Financial in their institutional wallet. This growing pattern of major institutions choosing Safe for treasury operations reinforces its position as the leading secure infrastructure layer for digital assets. This week the Ethereum Foundation has begun migrating its treasury operations to Safe Protocols RWA Smart Account , implementing a new 3-of-5 multisig wallet for managing 50,000 ETH (Approximately $160M) for DeFi support purposes. This implementation enables the Ethereum Foundation to actively participate in DeFi via Safe Protocol while maintaining institutional-grade security standards, marking another step toward Safe's vision of moving the worlds GDP Onchain Safe recently introduced Safenet, a transaction processing network offering significant revenue-sharing opportunities. This network integrates specialized co-processors to handle both on- and off-chain inputs from AI, RWA, DeFi, PayFi, DEXs, and beyond. See Safe’s full impressive Dune dashboard here Safe's Milestones: Ethereum Foundation begins adding treasury for DeFi onto Safe Protocol
World Liberty Financial processes over $889 Million in transaction volume on Safe institutional wallet
Over $100B in total assets stored
53M transactions executed
20M accounts deployed
200+ ecosystem projects built on the Safe smart account standard This story was distributed as a release by Btcwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here Safe protocol’s smart account infrastructure has executed over 84 Safe Multi-sig transactions processing over $995M in volume for World Liberty Financial in their institutional wallet. World Liberty Financial World Liberty Financial This growing pattern of major institutions choosing Safe for treasury operations reinforces its position as the leading secure infrastructure layer for digital assets. This week the Ethereum Foundation has begun migrating its treasury operations to Safe Protocols RWA Smart Account , implementing a new 3-of-5 multisig wallet for managing 50,000 ETH (Approximately $160M) for DeFi support purposes. This implementation enables the Ethereum Foundation to actively participate in DeFi via Safe Protocol while maintaining institutional-grade security standards, marking another step toward Safe's vision of moving the worlds GDP Onchain Safe recently introduced Safenet, a transaction processing network offering significant revenue-sharing opportunities. Safenet, Safenet, This network integrates specialized co-processors to handle both on- and off-chain inputs from AI, RWA, DeFi, PayFi, DEXs, and beyond. See Safe’s full impressive Dune dashboard here Dune dashboard here Dune dashboard here Safe's Milestones: Ethereum Foundation begins adding treasury for DeFi onto Safe Protocol World Liberty Financial processes over $889 Million in transaction volume on Safe institutional wallet Over $100B in total assets stored 53M transactions executed 20M accounts deployed 200+ ecosystem projects built on the Safe smart account standard Ethereum Foundation begins adding treasury for DeFi onto Safe Protocol World Liberty Financial processes over $889 Million in transaction volume on Safe institutional wallet Over $100B in total assets stored 53M transactions executed 20M accounts deployed 200+ ecosystem projects built on the Safe smart account standard This story was distributed as a release by Btcwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here This story was distributed as a release by Btcwire under HackerNoon’s Business Blogging Program. Learn more about the program here here here

Trump-backed World Liberty Financial Processes Nearly $1 Billion In Volume On Safe Protocol

Кампанія World Liberty, якая падтрымліваецца Трампам, апрацоўвае амаль 1 мільярд долараў па бяспечным пратаколе

World Liberty Financial, respaldada por Trump, procesa casi mil millones de dólares en volumen mediante protocolo seguro

La World Liberty Financial, sostenuta da Trump, elabora quasi 1 miliardo di dollari in volume su protocollo sicuro

トランプ氏が支援するワールド・リバティ・ファイナンシャル、セーフ・プロトコルで約10億ドルの取引を処理

트럼프가 지원하는 World Liberty Financial이 안전 프로토콜에서 거의 10억 달러의 거래량을 처리합니다.

ຂະ​ບວນ​ການ​ທາງ​ດ້ານ​ການ​ເງິນ​ທີ່​ເປັນ​ອິດ​ສະ​ຫຼະ​ຂອງ​ໂລກ​ທີ່​ສະ​ໜັບ​ສະ​ໜູນ​ທ່ານ​ທ​ຣຳ ດຳ​ເນີນ​ການ​ລົງ​ທຶນ​ເກືອບ 1 ຕື້​ໂດ​ລາ​ສະຫະລັດ

Hannaanka Maaliyadeed ee Xoriyadda Adduunka ee uu Trump taageerayo ku dhawaad 1 Bilyan oo Doollar oo mug ah oo ku saabsan hab-maamuuska badbaadada leh

Trump-stödda World Liberty Financial Processer Nästan 1 miljard dollar i volym på Safe Protocol

ብትራምፕ ዝድገፍ ወርልድ ሊበርቲ ፋይናንሳዊ መስርሕ ዳርጋ ሓደ ቢልዮን ዶላር ዝግመት ኣብ ውሑስ ፕሮቶኮል

Mga Proseso sa Pinansyal ng World Liberty na suportado ni Trump Halos $1 Bilyon Sa Dami Sa Safe Protocol

World Liberty Financial được Trump hậu thuẫn xử lý gần 1 tỷ đô la khối lượng theo giao thức an toàn

Izinqubo Zezezimali Zenkululeko Yomhlaba Zisekelwa nguTrump Cishe Isigidigidi Esiyisi-1 Sevolumu Yephrothokholi Evikelekile

USA v. Google LLC Court Filing, retrieved on January 24, 2023 is part of . You can jump to any part in this filing . This is part 1 of 44. HackerNoon’s Legal PDF Series here I. INTRODUCTION 1. An open, vibrant internet is indispensable to American life. But today’s internet would not exist without the digital advertising revenue that, as a practical matter, funds its creation and expansion. The internet provides the public with unprecedented access to ideas, artistic expression, news, commerce, and services. Content creators span every conceivable industry; they publish diverse material on countless websites that inform, entertain, and connect society in vital ways. Yet the viability of many of these websites depends on their ability to sell digital advertising space. Just as newspaper, radio, and television organizations historically relied on advertising to fund their operations, today’s online publishers likewise rely on advertising revenue to support their activities and reach. But unlike historical media advertising, today’s online ads are bought and sold in enormous volumes in mere fractions of a second, using highly sophisticated tools and automated exchanges that more closely resemble a modern stock exchange than an old-fashioned, bilateral contract negotiation for newspaper ad space. 2. Website publishers in the United States sell more than 5 trillion digital display advertisements on the open web each year—or more than 13 billion advertisements every day. The sheer volume of these online ads make the offline advertisements of yesteryear pale in comparison. To put these numbers in perspective, the daily volume of digital display advertisements grossly outnumbers (by several multiples) the average number of stocks traded each day on the New York Stock Exchange. The digital display advertising business is also lucrative. Collectively, these advertisements generate more than $20 billion in revenue per year, just for publishers based in the United States. 3. To meet this demand, sophisticated technological tools, informally known as “ad tech,” have developed to automate advertising matchmaking between two key groups: website publishers and advertisers. [1] These tools have evolved such that today, every time an internet user opens a webpage with ad space to sell, ad tech tools almost instantly match that website publisher with an advertiser looking to promote its products or services to the website’s individual user. This process typically involves the use of an automated advertising exchange that runs a high-speed auction designed to identify the best match between a publisher selling internet ad space and the advertisers looking to buy it. 4. But competition in the ad tech space is broken, for reasons that were neither accidental nor inevitable. One industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising. Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies. 5. Google’s plan has been simple but effective: (1) neutralize or eliminate ad tech competitors, actual or potential, through a series of acquisitions; and (2) wield its dominance across digital advertising markets to force more publishers and advertisers to use its products while disrupting their ability to use competing products effectively. Whenever Google’s customers and competitors responded with innovation that threatened Google’s stranglehold over any one of these ad tech tools, Google’s anticompetitive response has been swift and effective. Each time a threat has emerged, Google has used its market power in one or more of these ad tech tools to quash the threat. The result: Google’s plan for durable, industry-wide dominance has succeeded. 6. Google, a single company with pervasive conflicts of interest, now controls: (1) the technology used by nearly every major website publisher to offer advertising space for sale; (2) the leading tools used by advertisers to buy that advertising space; and (3) the largest ad exchange that matches publishers with advertisers each time that ad space is sold. Google’s pervasive power over the entire ad tech industry has been questioned by its own digital advertising executives, at least one of whom aptly begged the question: “[I]s there a deeper issue with us owning the platform, the exchange, and a huge network? The analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE.” 7. By deploying opaque rules that benefit itself and harm rivals, Google has wielded its power across the ad tech industry to dictate how digital advertising is sold, and the very terms on which its rivals can compete. Google abuses its monopoly power to disadvantage website publishers and advertisers who dare to use competing ad tech products in a search for higher quality, or lower cost, matches. Google uses its dominion over digital advertising technology to funnel more transactions to its own ad tech products where it extracts inflated fees to line its own pockets at the expense of the advertisers and publishers it purportedly serves. 8. Google’s anticompetitive behavior has raised barriers to entry to artificially high levels, forced key competitors to abandon the market for ad tech tools, dissuaded potential competitors from joining the market, and left Google’s few remaining competitors marginalized and unfairly disadvantaged. Google has thwarted meaningful competition and deterred innovation in the digital advertising industry, taken supra-competitive profits for itself, and prevented the free market from functioning fairly to support the interests of the advertisers and publishers who make today’s powerful internet possible. 9. The harm is clear: website creators earn less, and advertisers pay more, than they would in a market where unfettered competitive pressure could discipline prices and lead to more innovative ad tech tools that would ultimately result in higher quality and lower cost transactions for market participants. And this conduct hurts all of us because, as publishers make less money from advertisements, fewer publishers are able to offer internet content without subscriptions, paywalls, or alternative forms of monetization. One troubling, but revealing, statistic demonstrates the point: on average, Google keeps at least thirty cents—and sometimes far more—of each advertising dollar flowing from advertisers to website publishers through Google’s ad tech tools. Google’s own internal documents concede that Google would earn far less in a competitive market. 10. The United States and Plaintiff States bring this action for violations of the Sherman Act to halt Google’s anticompetitive scheme, unwind Google’s monopolistic grip on the market, and restore competition to digital advertising. [1] Internet advertisers include businesses, agencies of federal and state governments, charitable organizations, political candidates, public interest groups, and more. The money these advertisers spend on digital advertising creates an important stream of revenue for websites to use in creating, developing, and publishing website content. Continue Reading . Here About HackerNoon Legal PDF Series: We bring you the most important technical and insightful public domain court case filings. This court case 1:23-cv-00108 retrieved on September 8, 2023, from is part of the public domain. The court-created documents are works of the federal government, and under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction. justice.gov

US v. Google: Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness, and Advertising

ইউএস বনাম গুগল: লাইফ, লিবার্টি, পারস্যুট অফ হ্যাপিনেস এবং বিজ্ঞাপন

USA gegen Google: Leben, Freiheit, Streben nach Glück und Werbung

Estados Unidos contra Google: vida, libertad, búsqueda de la felicidad y publicidad

États-Unis contre Google : vie, liberté, recherche du bonheur et publicité

यूएस बनाम गूगल: जीवन, स्वतंत्रता, खुशी की तलाश, और विज्ञापन

米国対グーグル: 生命、自由、幸福の追求、そして広告

미국 대 Google: 생명, 자유, 행복 추구 및 광고

EUA x Google: Vida, Liberdade, Busca pela Felicidade e Publicidade

США против Google: жизнь, свобода, стремление к счастью и реклама

ABD v. Google: Yaşam, Özgürlük, Mutluluk Arayışı ve Reklamcılık

Hoa Kỳ và Google: Cuộc sống, Tự do, Mưu cầu Hạnh phúc và Quảng cáo

美国诉谷歌：生活、自由、追求幸福和广告

SWITZERLAND, THE CRADLE OF LIBERTY

A BREAK FOR LIBERTY

Hey HackerNoon Readers! I’m Ryan Wilson and I am a Web Developer and Blogger at www.ryanwilsondesign.com. I want to thank the HackerNoon community and staff for their nomination in the as well as for sponsoring the Web 3 category of the . Web 3 category, BingX 2022 Noonies awards I’ve been nominated for the following awards and if you like my writing, please do check out these award pages and vote for me: HACKERNOON CONTRIBUTOR OF THE YEAR- : DEFI Web 3 is one of the most “exciting” technologies in the current tech landscape because it is such a threat to individual liberty and autonomy. Learn more about my thoughts and opinions on Web 3 and my journey in the tech industry via the interview below. 1. Please tell us your story. What do you currently do in the Web 3 landscape and how did you get started doing it? I have been a web developer since before the term was coined.  Back when I was first starting out in the late 1990’s, I was known as a Web Designer — someone who designs websites.  Since I was already skilled in Graphic Design, it was a natural extension to design for the web in addition to conventional graphic design areas (logos, posters, etc). This was before programming became a part of the process of creating websites and the focus was mostly on getting sites to look halfway decent while actually functioning online. The current concerted effort to promote what is being called “Web3” is concerning to me, as there seems to be a deficiency in critical analysis in favor of cheerleading and apologetics. I started writing about Web3 on my personal blog, because I was tired of seeing articles that gloss over the real dangers and risks inherent in Web3. 2. Tell us more! What are the things you make / write / manage / build in the world of Web3? I create and build websites for a variety of purposes, and write about how “Web3” is a buzzword that has already become a cliche. The sites I build are not dependent upon any cryptocurrency or blockchain database, nor do they need to be. 3. What is your inspiration for writing and what made you want to get published on HackerNoon? I started writing blog posts on my own website as an outlet for expressing my thoughts about how Web technologies need to be evaluated and thought about, and not just accepted and integrated into people’s lives without question. I have been an avid reader of Hacker Noon for many years, and finally got around to submitting an article this year. One of the things I appreciate about Hacker Noon is that they are willing to publish articles from varying points of view that may be antagonistic to popular narratives about new technologies. 4. What do you think is the most exciting development in Web3 right now? and on a personal level, what are you most excited or passionate about in this space? The word “exciting” is not necessarily a positive thing. The entire concept of money is on the verge of being redefined in terms of Central Bank Digital Currency, and so little is being written about it. Personally, I take it as a challenge to at least put some sort of dissenting voice out there so that some people at least start thinking about how all aspects of life could very soon be totally changed for the worse. The potential for abuse is like nothing that has come before, in terms of total surveillance and loss of autonomy. These issues urgently need attention and discussion before decisions are made for us. 5. What are your concerns about Web3 and why do they worry you? The most concerning aspect of Web3 is how quickly and easily words and terms have been redefined according to the goals of those pushing Web3 (mostly governments and major corporations). The Orwellian rewriting of what certain words mean (such as decentralization) is a disturbing trend that needs to be stopped. The digital enslavement of everyone on Earth is within reach by those who have the money and power to execute it. Web3 is a convenient vehicle for carrying out totalitarianism on a global scale. 6. If we gave you $10 million to invest in a web 3 project today, what would you invest in and why? I would invest the 10 million in educational and information awareness programs that help people to understand what is really meant by Web3. The attendant loss of all privacy, the redefinition of what money is, the ways in which compliance will be demanded in order to live a private life without being manipulated. There seem to be few dissenting voices and this needs to change quickly. 7. What are you currently learning? Currently, I am learning more about the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, and Node). This is a very versatile tech stack that can be used for nearly anything on the web, from simple to complex. No “metaverse” or blockchain necessary. 8. What’s the best advice you’ve ever given someone? The best advice I have ever given is to question anything and everything you read online or see on tv! It is easier than ever to attempt to control the way people think, via social media, tv media, or mass marketing campaigns. Realize that most of the things we see on a daily basis were put there on purpose by those with moneyed agendas. 9. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? The best advice I ever received was to always be suspicious of the motives of those with power and money (usually governments and corporations). So much time and money is spent on a daily basis to influence people in different ways -- it is very important to always be critical of the motives of those who are trying to influence you, About HackerNoon’s 2022 Noonie Awards The annual Noonies Awards celebrate the best and brightest of the tech industry, bringing together all who are making the Internet and the world of tech what it is today. The 2022 Noonies Awards for the Web 3 category are sponsored by . BingX A BIG thank you to the sponsor who is helping us celebrate the accomplishments of all our nominees!

Web Developer Ryan Wilson Considers Web 3 a "Threat to Individual Liberty and Autonomy"

Podcasting has taken the world by storm; podcasting is one of the biggest markets in the world right now. Whatever it's about sports, to music to even stock, podcasts exist on every topic on all your music platforms. But can podcasts help developers, founders, and makers? Yes, yes and yes! Podcasts can actually help you with not only building a startup, but even for a product, and one person took a big leap, Alex Edmonds! Today we're interviewing Alex Edmonds, in his first-ever interview on how you can use podcasting to start, build and reach your startup or product, his story, and a second opinion on how you should build a startup! Tell us a bit about yourself I am a podcast host, My podcast is the Building an Indie Business podcast! I'm also a web developer, who's currently building the Open Podcast Community. A podcasting community. Currently, I am writing a book to help podcast host and people that want to start a podcast called What’s The Deal With Podcasting How did you discover podcasting, in the way that it can help you build products or even start a startup? I started podcasting because I noticed people that have successful products create content. I saw podcasting as one way to create content for my product. I started by discussing the project I was building, a podcast directory. I did not have enough updates to have a weekly show. I filled in the episodes will ideas that were in my head. My most popular episode is one of these episodes, Dogs and Web Development. I thought that people would be more willing to click on dog content. I made an episode about dogs to see if it was true. I was correct! Wow  Alex, that's amazing how dogs can help your podcast. Next question, What odd Jobs did you had in your life? Well, when I was 16, I worked for a company called Liberty Tax during spring break. I was a sign waver and they made sign wavers and they made me wear a Statue of Liberty costume. I would wave the sign around at stoplights but I don't know if it worked. This is how I got started in marketing! Now let's talk about how podcasts can help your brand if that's okay with you? Startup founders can use podcasting as a way for potential customers to find their products. Customers can about future plans for the products. Podcasting adds personality to a product because customers are hearing from the founders directly not only reading the information. What Mistakes do First time founders, and even serial founders make while with podcasts, or without podcasts to the point of building their startup? Not creating content, I recently someone post on a website that they built a product and will start promoting after a year. They should have created content around the build process. This would get them customers waiting to use the product as soon as the product is built. They could have used podcasting. Many people, just want to quit their jobs when they are building a startup? What do you think of that? If you really want to to that have venture backing and have a salary. Another option is to save up money and move somewhere cheaper. That way the money can stretch out. You don't need to quit your jobs right way, you can work on the weekends or just finish your work faster. You shouldn't quit. As we're on the topic of using podcasts, how has covid-19 helped podcasting? I would say podcasting has grown since covid-19 started because people are home now and they less to do, and they start a podcast! Then, they have to buy the equipment and software. The podcast industry has grown. Lastly, What do you think of communities, and makerlog? Communities give startups support. That support will give the startup founders support to keep building. When showing a product to new people the community can show support to help get more support for the product A positive experience I had with communities is when I launched the Building an Indie Business podcast on ProductHunt. The members of Open Podcast and Makerlog left comments of support on the page. New people saw the comments and gave the podcast a chance because of the positive comments. Makerlog is great. The founder Sergio is smart. If I could buy stock in his future I would. I can’t wait to see what he does. I’ve said this before about Makerlog itself, I can draw a direct line between my success and Makerlog. Without Makerlog I wouldn’t have had the confidence to start a podcast, which means I wouldn’t have Open Podcast, and there would be no podcasting book. /done Also published on MakersRocket .

How Alex Edmonds Went From a Statue of Liberty Costume to a Podcasting Career

Growing up in Iran, where state surveillance is widespread, it’s hard not to be cognizant of digital privacy. Though not unique to Iran, bloggers, journalists, and average citizens face the threat of arrest for what they write or share online. The Iranian state censors most social media platforms and the website to international news agencies–requiring people to use some form of a or a (VPN) to get around internet censorship. As a result, digital privacy and internet freedom are topics I’ve been exploring for over a decade. Proxy server virtual private network Digital privacy isn’t just a nice thing to have; it’s our right as humans. According to of the Article 12 Universal Declaration of Human Rights : “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.” The internet is a space that was expected to liberate citizenry, but instead, it turned into an ecosystem for state and corporate surveillance. In 1996, late John Perry Barlow–the lyricist of The Grateful Dead and a world-renowned internet freedom advocate–wrote the . In it he writes: Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.” Barlow ends the declaration stating: “We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” After the by the secret service Barlow–along with Mitch Kapor, and John Gilmore–formed the (EFF) to protect , and . In the age of mass surveillance, the defeat of Net Neutrality, , and the takeover of the web by –Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google–his vision and the mission of EFF are more important than ever before. Steve Jackson Games raid Electronic Frontier Foundation digital privacy digital security, free speech, creativity, innovation tailored algorithms for oppressive regimes FANG The revelations of – , , , and secret court orders, among other things–brought popular attention to the need for digital privacy to the masses. The recent reports on how social media platforms take advantage of user data for their benefit, knowing it violates the interests of their users (e.g., ) added even more interest to the topic of mass state and corporate surveillance on the population. As a result, there is increasingly more interest by people to protect their digital privacy. Edward Snowden PRISM Boundless Informant XKeyscore Facebook’s “project Atlas” Nevertheless, it’s still common to hear people say, “why does digital privacy matter if I have nothing to hide.” As Edward Snowden put it: “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” It’s also not true that , as James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and former defense attorney notes: you have nothing to hide “Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA [American Bar Association] thinks there are nearly 10,000.” When even the federal government doesn’t know how many laws there are, what are the chances that you as an individual have not violated one of them? In a popular statement is claimed to have said: “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” A state can use all the data it has collected on citizenry–either directly or indirectly (e.g., FISA orders in the U.S.) to justify prosecuting or blackmailing its critics. Cardinal Richelieu More importantly, we have no idea who will have access to our emails, messages, web searches, etc. within a decade. As I mentioned in an earlier essay on , if we can learn anything from the , , , , and data breaches in the past few years, it’s that central repositories of data–honeypots–where companies store private records on millions of people, are vulnerable. Worse yet, ultimately, it’s the users, not the platforms who pay the highest cost for these vulnerabilities. digital identity Yahoo Equifax Facebook Google Target medium.com Digital Identity: Removing the Barrier to Entry I Am Not a Bad Person The idea that only should fear state surveillance is another popular misguided statement that has proven to be inaccurate, unless you consider people such as civil rights, environmental, and animal rights activists to be bad people. In 2016, the ACLU reported that , a company that law enforcement use to monitor and target activists. Soon after the report, these platforms suspended Geofeedia’s access, but there are numerous other platforms–Media Sonar, Dunami, and Dataminr–that have similar real-time geolocation features, and keyword filtering. bad people Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram shared its user’s information with Geofeedia Facebook and Google are collecting as much data on us as they can get away with. In a recent article published by Wired, wrote: Issie Lapowsky “The report [referring to a report on Facebook’s ‘ ] found that Facebook has been paying people as young as 13 years old to download an app that grants Facebook access to users’ entire phone and web history, including encrypted activity and private messages and emails. The app, called Research, allows Facebook to see how people’s friends, who have not consented to having their data collected, interact with those users, too.” TechCrunch Project Atlas’ Social Networks, through the gathering of indiscriminate data on their users, know more about them than they know about themselves; much of which can easily be handed over to the state and other third parties — through ambiguous “privacy policies” that we agree to when we register. When a state can monitor its citizenry, control access to information, and has access to the tools to control dissent, that state has the capacity to be totalitarian. There are those who blame the naïveté of people who share private data publicly and make themselves vulnerable as a result; however, it wouldn’t make much of a difference even if they didn’t. The revelations of Edward Snowden and our knowledge of programs such as PRISM, Boundless Informant, and FISA orders, leave little doubt that we are living under mass surveillance. If there is anything to be learned from the , it’s that the NSA has goals for even more power. SIGINT Strategy 2012–2016 The corporate state and private entities have access to years of information on our browsing habits, private information, and communications. It’s to care about freedom, justice, transparency, and democracy while being passive about digital privacy. As –one of the world’s most well-known security experts and cryptographers–put it: “Too many wrongly characterize the debate as ‘security versus privacy.’ The real choice is liberty versus control.” doublethink Bruce Schneier If you enjoyed what you read, I’d appreciate a clap. Follow me on for more coverage from the frontiers of emerging technologies, privacy wars, and security vulnerabilities. Twitter My Ethereum address is open for donations 😊0x3E78Fd46f98549E5c5A3799e0BfDae7684133b78

Digital Privacy: A Conversation on Liberty Versus Control

Are Judeo-Christian Values the Foundation of American Democracy?

¿Son los valores judío-cristianos la base de la democracia estadounidense?

Ovatko juutalais-kristilliset arvot amerikkalaisen demokratian perusta?

Les valeurs judéo-chrétiennes sont-elles le fondement de la démocratie américaine ?

Son os valores xudeo-cristiáns a base da democracia americana?

Jesu li židovsko-kršćanske vrijednosti temelj američke demokracije?

I valori ebraico-cristiani sono il fondamento della democrazia americana?

ユダヤ・キリスト教の価値観は、アメリカの民主主義の基礎なのでしょうか。

იუდიო ქრისტიანული ღირებულებები არის საფუძველზე ამერიკული დოკუმენტაცია?

ຄຸນນະສົມບັດ Judeo-Christian ແມ່ນພື້ນຖານຂອງສະພາບແວດລ້ອມອາເມລິກາ?

Еврей-христийн үнэ цэнэ нь АНУ-ын демократийн суурь юм?

Sú židovsko-kresťanské hodnoty základom americkej demokracie?

Iimpawu ze-Judeo-Christian ziquka isakhiwo se-American Democracy?

Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 Terminology 2 Terminology 3 Exploring the design space of vision-language models and 3.1 Are all pre-trained backbones equivalent for VLMs? 3 Exploring the design space of vision-language models and 3.1 Are all pre-trained backbones equivalent for VLMs? 3.2 How does the fully autoregressive architecture compare to the cross-attention architecture? 3.2 How does the fully autoregressive architecture compare to the cross-attention architecture? 3.3 Where are the efficiency gains? 3.3 Where are the efficiency gains? 3.4 How can one trade compute for performance? 3.4 How can one trade compute for performance? 4 Idefics2 - an open state-of-the-art vision-language foundation model and 4.1 Multi-stage pre-training 4 Idefics2 - an open state-of-the-art vision-language foundation model and 4.1 Multi-stage pre-training 4.2 Instruction fine-tuning and 4.3 Optimizing for chat scenarios 4.2 Instruction fine-tuning and 4.3 Optimizing for chat scenarios 5 Conclusion, Acknowledgement, and References 5 Conclusion, Acknowledgement, and References A Appendix A Appendix A.1 Further experimental details of the ablations A.1 Further experimental details of the ablations A.2 Details of the instruction fine-tuning A.2 Details of the instruction fine-tuning A.3 Details of the evaluations A.3 Details of the evaluations A.4 Red-teaming A.4 Red-teaming 3.2 How does the fully autoregressive architecture compare to the cross-attention architecture? To our knowledge, there is no proper comparison between the fully autoregressive and the cross-attention architecture. We aim to fill this gap by considering their trade-offs, namely performance, parameter count, and inference cost. Following (Alayrac et al., 2022), we first compare the two architectures by freezing the unimodal backbones and training only the newly initialized parameters (cross-attention on one side, and modality projection along with learned pooling on the other side), while fixing the amount of training data. Alayrac et al. (2022) shows that the more frequently the crossattention blocks are interleaved with the language model layers, and the higher the vision-language performance. As such, we note that under this setup, the cross-attention architecture has 1.3B more trainable parameters (2B trainable parameters in total) than the fully autoregressive architecture. Additionally, at inference time, the former uses 10% more flops than the latter. Under these conditions, we observe that the cross-attention architecture performs 7 points better in Table 3. Out of the total number of parameters, approximately 15% for the fully autoregressive architecture and 25% for the cross-attention are trained. We hypothesize that this low proportion limits the expressivity of the training and hinders performance. To test that hypothesis, we compare the two architectures by unfreezing all parameters (newly initialized parameters and parameters of the pre-trained unimodal backbones). Under these conditions, training the fully autoregressive architecture would yield loss divergences, and we were not successful in stabilizing the training even by aggressively lowering the learning rate or gradually unfreezing various components. To overcome this stability challenge, we leverage Low-Rank Adaptation (Hu et al., 2022) to adapt the pre-trained parameters while using standard full fine-tuning for the newly initialized ones. This setup yields significantly more stable trainings, and more importantly, we observe a 12.9 points increase under the fully autoregressive architecture, and 0.6 point under the cross-attention architecture. While the cross-attention architecture performs better than the fully autoregressive architecture with frozen backbones, it is worse when we add degrees of liberty for the pre-trained backbones. Besides, using LoRA allows training the unimodal backbones at a fraction of the GPU memory cost of full fine-tuning, and LoRA layers can be merged back into the original linear layers yielding no additional cost at inference. We therefore choose the fully autoregressive architecture in the rest of this work. It is interesting to note that this finding contradicts (Karamcheti et al., 2024) in which the authors observed that unfreezing the pre-trained visual backbone would significantly degrade the performance. We hypothesize that using parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods is a key difference. 3.3 Where are the efficiency gains? Number of visual tokens Recent VLMs typically route the entire sequence of the vision encoder’s hidden states directly into the modality projection layer, which subsequently inputs into the language model, without no pooling. This is motivated by previous works in which adding a pooling strategy, like average pooling, was found to deteriorate the performance (Vallaeys et al., 2024). This results in a high number of visual tokens for each image ranging from 576 for DeepSeek-VL (Lu et al., 2024) to 2890 for SPHINX-2k (Lin et al., 2023). With the resulting sequence lengths, training is computationally costly, and in-context learning with interleaved images and texts is challenging because it requires modifications to the language models to handle very large context windows. Number of visual tokens We reduce the sequence length of each image’s hidden states by using a perceiver resampler (Jaegle et al., 2021; Alayrac et al., 2022; Bai et al., 2023) as a form of trainable Transformer-based pooling. The number of queries (also referred to as latents) corresponds to the number of resulting visual tokens after the pooling. We observe that the learned pooling is effective in two ways: it increases the performance by 8.5 points on average and reduces the number of visual tokens necessary for each image from 729 to 64 (see Table 3). In contrast to (Vallaeys et al., 2024; McKinzie et al., 2024) which find that the more visual tokens the higher the performance, we observe no gains when using more than 64 visual tokens. We hypothesize that in a hypothetical scenario of infinite training on unlimited data, performance might eventually improve, at the cost of a longer training time. Other variations over the Perceiver architecture (Mañas et al., 2023; Darcet et al., 2024; Vallaeys et al., 2024) resulted in decreased performance. Preserving the original aspect ratio and image resolution Vision encoders, such as SigLIP, are typically trained on fixed-size square images. Resizing images alters their original aspect ratio, which is problematic, for instance, for tasks requiring reading long texts. Furthermore, conditioning the training on a single resolution size inherently introduces limitations: a low resolution omits crucial visual details, while a high resolution leads to inefficiency in training and inference. Allowing the model to encode images at various resolutions allows users to decide how much compute is spent on each image. Preserving the original aspect ratio and image resolution Following Lee et al. (2023); Dehghani et al. (2023), we pass the image patches to the vision encoder without resizing the image or modifying its aspect ratio. Given that SigLIP was trained on fixed-size low-resolution square images, we interpolate the pre-trained positional embeddings to allow for a higher resolution and train the vision encoder with LoRA parameters to adapt to these modifications.[2] Our findings indicate that the aspect ratio preserving strategy maintains performance levels on downstream tasks while unlocking computational flexibility during both training and inference (see Table 5). In particular, not having to resize images to the same high resolution allows for saving GPU memory and handling images at the resolution they require. 3.4 How can one trade compute for performance? (Lin et al., 2023; Li et al., 2024; Liu et al., 2024; McKinzie et al., 2024) show that splitting an image into sub-images allows boosting the downstream performance with no changes to the model’s signature. An image is decomposed into sub-images (for instance 4 equal sub-images), which are then concatenated to the original image to form a sequence of 5 images. Additionally, the sub-images are resized to the original image’s size. This strategy however comes at the cost of a much higher number of tokens to encode the images. We adopt this strategy during the instruction fine-tuning stage. Each single image becomes a list of 5 images: 4 crops and the original image. This way, at inference, the model is able to deal with standalone images (64 visual tokens per image), as well as artificially augmented images (320 visual tokens in total per image). We notice that this strategy is particularly useful for benchmarks like TextVQA and DocVQA, which require a sufficiently high resolution to extract the text in an image (see Table 9). Moreover, when we apply image spitting to only 50% of the training samples (instead of 100% of the samples), we observe that it does not impair the performance increase that image splitting provides. Surprisingly, we find at evaluation time that increasing the resolution of the sub-images (and the standalone image) provides only a minor boost in performance compared to the improvement yielded by sole image splitting: 73.6% when increasing the resolution of the sub-images to the maximum vs 73.0% accuracy on our validation set of TextVQA, and respectively 72.7 vs 72.9 ANLS on the validation set of DocVQA. Authors:
(1) Hugo Laurençon, Hugging Face and Sorbonne Université, (the order was chosen randomly);
(2) Léo Tronchon, Hugging Face (the order was chosen randomly);
(3) Matthieu Cord, Sorbonne Université;
(4) Victor Sanh, Hugging Face. Authors: Authors: (1) Hugo Laurençon, Hugging Face and Sorbonne Université, (the order was chosen randomly); (2) Léo Tronchon, Hugging Face (the order was chosen randomly); (3) Matthieu Cord, Sorbonne Université; (4) Victor Sanh, Hugging Face. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. available on arxiv available on arxiv [2] Since SigLIP is trained with a fixed resolution, the positional embeddings can be interpreted both as absolute or relative positions. With the aspect ratio and resolution preserving, these positions become relative positional embeddings.

The Artistry Behind Efficient AI Conversations

Who or what made me make such a claim? It’s just the way I write. It happens. I come up with a title, and then, I try to figure it out along the way. I spend more time choosing my story’s illustrations and memes than words. Me being me, but what’s in it for you, my busy little tech bee? You should get a book about this question, not a five-minute read, but it is what it is. I was thinking about crypto and AI. Not necessarily in that order, though. Then, about programming. Social media. And, finally, about tariffs. That’s five, and it sounds about right. So, let’s fight, fight, fight. I mean, write, write, write. AI AI Do you remember? It was one day in November. I wrote a story with the red hat as an illustration. Now, I’m using a blue one to make things even. I got some things wrong, though. a story with the red hat Trump didn’t save the future of AI, he turned into an AI extravaganza beyond any SF writer’s wildest imagination. Marc Andreessen and Joe Rogan talked about bad AI and evil Democrats. Do you remember that one? This isn’t the only podcast transcription/screenshot I used in my story. Feel free to brush up on your memory with the most important ones. You’re welcome. the most important ones Trump saved us, and then, he gave us Palpatine. Sorry. I mean, Palantir. I don’t know why I keep confusing these two. Palantir “Basically just full government control.” In Andreessen’s own words. Lucky for us, the Stargate Initiative will take us where no man has gone before. Stargate Initiative “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” This is something from Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” I’m more into the Bee Gees’ “Tragedy.” So, let me fix it quickly for you. Abandon all your data, Palantir welcomes ye here. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Crypto Crypto “Data provided to The New Republic from Open Secrets adds some staggering details: Crypto companies have spent over $121 million to sway elections during this cycle. By comparison, since the Citizens United ruling in 2010, the fossil fuel industry has collectively spent $176 million over 14 years of election cycles.” “Data provided to The New Republic from Open Secrets adds some staggering details: Crypto companies have spent over $121 million to sway elections during this cycle. By comparison, since the Citizens United ruling in 2010, the fossil fuel industry has collectively spent $176 million over 14 years of election cycles.” The New Republic Crypto companies have spent over $121 million to sway elections during this cycle the fossil fuel industry has collectively spent $176 million over 14 years of election cycles That was easy. All I needed was one quote and picture. What happened to the World Liberty Financial, asking for a crypto friend? Here are the top five news headlines: I don’t have the time to read. Let me try to “extract” the eye-catching keywords: “Acquire Major Stake”
“Cease and Desist”
“Secret Deals”
“Abu Dhabi”
“Banned. Fined.” “Acquire Major Stake” “Cease and Desist” “Secret Deals” “Abu Dhabi” “Banned. Fined.” On the brighter side of crypto things, a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve is on its way to becoming a real thing. Programming Programming Trump’s "Buy American, Hire American" executive order had its H-1B aftermath. Here’s how Investopedia summarized it: nvestopedia “Fewer students applying to American colleges”
“Jobs for international students declined since 2015”
“Canada receiving more tech workers”
“Outsourcing Firms Receive Fewer Visas, Big Tech Sees Increase” “Fewer students applying to American colleges” “Jobs for international students declined since 2015” “Canada receiving more tech workers” “Outsourcing Firms Receive Fewer Visas, Big Tech Sees Increase” “During the 2023-2024 academic year, international students contributed US$43.8 billion to the U.S. economy through tuition and living expenses, which supported an estimated 378,175 U.S. jobs. US$43.8 billion to the U.S. economy US$43.8 billion to the U.S. economy Their contributions don’t end following graduation, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Many go on to launch successful startups at a rate that is eight to nine times higher than their domestic peers. In fact, 25% of billion-dollar companies in the U.S. were founded by a former international student. contributions don’t end following graduation contributions don’t end following graduation 25% of billion-dollar companies 25% of billion-dollar companies Such companies include Eventbrite, Grammarly, Moderna, OpenAI, Robinhood and SpaceX.” Such companies Such companies Eventbrite, Grammarly, Moderna, OpenAI, Robinhood and SpaceX Eventbrite, Grammarly, Moderna, OpenAI, Robinhood and SpaceX For SpaceX, it makes perfect sense. I can’t say the same for OpenAI, but then again, there are quite a few co-founders. So, it’s safe to presume that some of them were foreign students. I know how it hurts to have your visa rejected. I would’ve been the second generation of cyberlaw master graduates in the world, but Uncle Sam said, wait, there’s a problem. No San Francisco for you. Plus, one huge minus. Only human rights. If you’re asking me, better that than to be deported. Social Media Social Media Do you remember when Twitter “watchdogs” used to be a thing? I recall and feel about it differently. I used to, and arguably still do, write the craziest edgy stuff. That’s how and why I won one award for the Most Controversial Writer and two awards for the Critical Thinker of the Year. It never crossed my mind that some of my stories might get me in trouble on Twitter. Stick to the facts, and don’t care how everybody reacts. That’s my rule of thumb. Now, I’m a bit worried about Elon and his X legionaries. I’m not saying that I’m writing with Starlink satellites monitoring me. That’s called writing under the influence. I just don’t want to get my favorite publication in trouble on X. Am I exaggerating? Musk has never suspended critical accounts. That’s an urban social media legend. I’m just wondering if my last story is going to be the last shared on X, for good. Indeed, they do. Here’s an illustration for my story published in October 2024: Tariffs Tariffs Who could’ve thought that COD: Black Ops 2 predicted the future like The Simpsons? Quantum computers, encryption, super rare minerals, and a cherry on top - tariffs. Truth to be told, Apple is gold, so there are some tariff exceptions. You know, tariffs for thee but not for me style. COD: Black Ops 2 predicted the future tariffs for thee but not for me Why the past tense? That's nonsense. “Were” instead of “Are” because you had a choice, dear US tech people, and now, you have to wait. For what? For what's left on Trump's plate, after Trump.

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