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Motorists are advised of changed traffic conditions from next week on City West Link and The Crescent, Annandale, as The Crescent overpass opens to traffic.

From Tuesday 7 November, motorists can access the overpass via Johnston Street or Link Road to travel over City West Link and onto Victoria Road or Anzac Bridge.

From 8pm on Monday 6 November, City West Link and The Crescent will be permanently reduced from two lanes to one lane approaching the Anzac Bridge.

There will be a temporary no left turn from The Crescent onto City West Link to allow for final elements of construction to be completed from Tuesday 7 November for approximately four weeks.

James Craig Road cannot be accessed via the Crescent overpass. To access James Craig Road from Annandale from this date motorists will join City West Link via Balmain Road. Detours and traffic control will be in place. Motorists are advised to follow the signs and use caution.

For more information on road closures and changed traffic conditions, including real-time traffic updates, visit livetraffic.com.

Read more:
Changed traffic conditions on City West Link and The Crescent ... - Transport for NSW

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Spread across four computer monitors arranged in a grid, a blue and green interface shows the location of more than 50 different surveillance cameras. Ordinarily, these cameras and others like them might be disparate, their feeds only available to their respective owners: a business, a government building, a resident and their doorbell camera. But the screens, overlooking a pair of long conference tables, bring them all together at once, allowing law enforcement to tap into cameras owned by different entities around the entire town all at once. This is a demonstration of Fusus, an AI-powered system that is rapidly springing up across small town America and major cities alike. Fusus' product not only funnels live feeds from usually siloed cameras into one central location, but also adds the ability to scan for people wearing certain clothes, carrying a particular bag, or look for a certain vehicle.

404 Media has obtained a cache of internal emails, presentations, memos, photos, and more which provide insight into how Fusus teams up with police departments to sell its surveillance technology. All around the country, city councils are debating whether they want to have a system that qualitatively changes what surveillance cameras mean for a town's residents and public agencies. While many have adopted Fusus, others have pushed back, and refused to have the hardware and software installed in their neighborhoods. In some ways, Fusus is deploying smart camera technology that historically has been used in places like South Africa, where experts warned about it creating an ever present blanket of surveillance. Now, tech with some of the same capabilities is being used across small town America.

Rather than selling cameras themselves, Fusus' hardware and software latches onto existing installations, which can include government-owned surveillance cameras as well as privately owned cameras at businesses and homes. It turns dumb cameras into smart ones. "In essence, the Fusus solution puts a brain into every camera connected with the system," one memorandum obtained by 404 Media reads. In addition to integrating with existing surveillance installations, Fusus' hardware, called SmartCORE, can turn cameras into automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). It can reportedly offer facial recognition features, too, although Fusus hasn't provided clear clarification on this matter.

The report says the system has been adopted by numerous police departments across the United States, with approximately 150 jurisdictions using Fusus. Orland Park police have called it a "game-changer." It's also being used internationally, launching in the United Kingdom.

Here's what Beryl Lipton, investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), had to say about it: "The lack of transparency and community conversation around Fusus exacerbates concerns around police access of the system, AI analysis of video, and analytics involving surveillance and crime data, which can influence officer patrols and priorities. In the absence of clear policies, auditable access logs, and community transparency about the capabilities and costs of Fusus, any community in which this technology is adopted should be concerned about its use and abuse."

More:
Fusus' AI-Powered Cameras Are Spreading Across the United States - Slashdot

Today, the Department of State released a landmark report on how the Peoples Republic of China, or PRC, seeks to reshape the global information environment to its advantage. Beijing has invested billions of dollars to construct a global information ecosystem that promotes its propaganda and facilitates censorship and the spread of disinformation. While formidable, the PRCs efforts have faced setbacks in democratic countries, due in large part to resistance from local media and civil society.

The report finds that the PRCs information manipulation efforts feature five primary elements: leveraging propaganda and censorship, promoting digital authoritarianism, exploiting international organizations and bilateral partnerships, pairing co-optation and pressure, and exercising control over Chinese-language media. These five elements enable Beijing to bend the global information environment to its advantage. If successful, the PRCs efforts could transform the global information landscape, creating biases and gaps that lead nations to make decisions that subordinate their economic and security interests to Beijings.

The PRC is gaining overt and covert influence over content and platforms

The PRC is constraining global freedom of expression

The PRC is promoting an emerging community of digital authoritarians

Original post:
How the People's Republic of China Seeks to Reshape the Global ... - Department of State

This fall, Ive been starting my sociology classes by asking my students to share some uplifting news theyve come across.

On Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2023, they were abuzz aboutTaylor Swifts appearance at the Kansas City Chiefs game on Sunday. Swift and Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce had left Arrowhead Stadium together in Kelces convertible, confirming dating rumors.

As a scholar of the attention economy, I wasnt exactly surprised. Many of my students love Swifts music, and the story had dominated major social media platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter, as a trending topic.

But I was taken aback when I learned that not a single student had heard that the Writers Guild of Americahad reached a dealwith the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, or AMPTP, after a nearly 150-day strike. Thishistoric deal includes significant raises, improvements in health care and pension support, and unique to our times protections against the use of artificial intelligence to write screenplays.

Across online media platforms, the WGA announcement on Sept. 24, 2023, ended up buried under headlines and posts about the celebrity duo. To me, this disconnect felt like a microcosm of the entire online media ecosystem.

It almost goes without saying that news and social media platforms promote some stories and narratives over others.

This particular occurrence is fascinating, however, because the AMPTP represents some of the media conglomerates that directly disseminate news. For example,CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, a member of the AMPTP.

At the time of this writing, CNN.com hasthree headlinesabout the WGA strike andeight headlinesabout Swift at the Chiefs game.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomskys 1988 book Manufacturing Consent outlines the problem of media ownership by conglomerates. According to this theory, powerful interests control narratives, in part, by owning news sources.

Theres a free press in the U.S. But Herman and Chomsky argue that the news that reaches everyday people tends to be framed by a set of assumptions that align with the ideological interests of the media corporations and their advertisers: maintaining the economic status quo and spurring consumerism.

In the U.S. today,six conglomerates own and control 90% of media outlets.

Per Pew Research Center data, a majority of Americansget their news from online sources. Scholars have since adapted Herman and Chomskys propaganda modelto explain how social media ecosystems function.

The role ofalgorithms is a key focusof emergent research on manufacturing consent online. Sociologist Ruha Benjamins work consistently shows thatalgorithms are encoded with their developers biases. Other studies show thatcritiques about algorithmic biases are suppressedby corporate digital media platforms throughstrategies like shadow-banning, which refers to covertly banning users of concern without their knowledge. These algorithms determine what is trending on websites like X. This, in turn, influences trends on other platforms, like Google searches.

Google trend results show an enormous increase in search queries about Travis Kelce since Sept. 20, 2023, with the WGA strike victory receiving almost no interest in comparison. The massive gap in interest between these topics serves as an example of algorithms supporting trending topics over other newsworthy content.

Another key focus of the propaganda model for social media istargeted advertising.

Unlike their predecessors in television, social media companies use big data to know users intimately and present ads that are personalized to each user. This strategy includes guerrilla marketing techniques like the ones employed by several companies after Swifts appearance.

For example, the National Football Leaguechanged its X bioto read NFL (Taylors Version). Sales of Kelces jerseyskyrocketed in the few daysafter Swifts appearance at the Chiefs game. Hidden Valley Ranch changed its X handle to Seemingly Ranch after a Swift fan account noted that during the game, Swift had dipped her chicken fingers in seemingly ranch.

The muted coverage of the writers strike fits intoa longer historical patternof tension between labor movements and corporate media.

In many cases, corporate media hasframed disproportionately negative narrativesabout strikes and union activities.

For example,an analysis of media coverageof tensions between the United Auto Workers and General Motors from 1991-93 found that major newspapers, including The New York Times, consistently framed GMs position in a positive light, while crafting significantly more negative stories about the strike and autoworkers.Similar patterns are visiblein media reporting on the 1993 American Airlines flight attendant strike and the 1997 United Parcel Service strike.

When not covering labor issues in a negative light, corporate media has a track record of ignoring and minimizing these issues. Communications scholar Jon Bekkens meta-analysis of media coverage discoveredsubstantial drops in coverage of labor issuesby major outlets like the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and CBS throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century.

This historical dynamic isbeginning to change. Increasingpublic support for labor unionsand worker action have made it difficult to ignore the bubbling currents of organized labor across many industries, fromStarbuckstoautoworkers.

Today,58% of Americans support the ongoing United Auto Workers strikesagainst GM, Ford and Stellantis, the company that makes Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge vehicles.

Despite corporate ownership and biased algorithms, labor movements have managed to secure public support, demonstrating that Americans are increasingly aware of their own class interests. During such a fraught political climate for the economic status quo, the WGA victory is a major indicator that strikes work.

So, amid these tensions, a feel-good story about Taylor Swift and football is a gift to media executives and one that helps sell more ranch dressing, too.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Link:
Taylor Swift and the end of the Hollywood writers strike a tale of ... - Kansas Reflector

Companies such as China's Xiaomi have developed foldable smartphones in a bid to break into the market. AFP

Many people, and in particular younger generations (Gen Z and late Millennials), have an online presence that they are not entirely happy with, and either have, or would like to, make or want to make attempts to rectify this compared.

How should this be approached? Max Beckett, expert at Uswitch.com Broadband shares his top tips for minimising an unwanted digital footprint and how to clean up an existing online presence. These take the form of:

Google yourself

Beckett recommends: Input your personal information such as your full name, address, and phone number into a search engine, and work backwards by deleting any public accounts that appear, or contact the website directly asking to be removed.

Cull social media accounts

Becketts next piece of advice is: If youre no longer using a social media account, or its simply out of fashion, take steps to permanently delete or privatise it. Social media is often the first thing to appear in an online search result for someones name, so its worth taking time to remove the information they display.

Make a list of all the sites you visit

T avoid forgetting where personal information may have been stored, Beckett recommends: By keeping an ongoing list of sites you visit either frequently or infrequently, you can then regularly keep check of what information they hold on you, and delete any accounts or personal information that you no longer want them to have.

Make a direct request to the search engines

If there is something of particular concern, Beckett states: You can ask Google directly to remove any outdated content.

Think about the past

MySpace may now be a distant memory, but to be sure remnants of your online past are gone for good, you can use the Wayback Machine to search for personal information in its archive, including from sites that have shut down, advises Beckett.

Delete email address accounts

Another hint, in relation to email, is: Removing this crucial element from many account logins is one way of decreasing your chances of being found online.

Utilise GDPR

For those in Europe, Beckett proposes making the most of the GDPR regulation: (a) A consumer shall have the right to request that a business delete any personal information about the consumer which the business has collected from the consumer. Having this right is a great advantage when contacting businesses for your personal data removal.

Official removal sites

Finally Beckett states For a cost, these services will search the web for your information and remove what they can. However, be aware that in order for them to clean up your personal information online, you will first have to give them personal information.

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Taking back control of your digital footprint - Digital Journal