Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has won the backing of a judge in a copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors, in the second legal victory for the US artificial intelligence industry this week.

The writers, who included Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, had argued that the Facebook owner had breached copyright law by using their books without permission to train its AI system.

The ruling follows a decision on Monday that Anthropic, another major player in the AI field, had not infringed authors’ copyright.

The US district judge Vince Chhabria, in San Francisco, said in his decision on the Meta case that the authors had not presented enough evidence that the technology company’s AI would dilute the market for their work to show that its conduct was illegal under US copyright law.

Meta wins AI copyright lawsuit as US judge rules against authors

Writers accused Facebook owner of breach over using books without permission to train its AI system

^{Dan Milmo (The Guardian)}

We all know the feeling: having spent a little too much time on our phones, scrolling aimlessly and without purpose. But what exactly are we dissatisfied with when we talk about “too much screen time”? And why is it so difficult to do something about it?

A new research project from the University of Copenhagen has investigated precisely these questions – and the answers are both surprising and thought-provoking.

Screen time: Passive and solitary use makes us most dissatisfied

What lies behind our dissatisfaction with our screen use – and why does the dissatisfaction rarely lead to action? A new Danish study sheds light on this.

^{Media team}

https://apnews.com/article/mortgages-crypto-fannie-mae-freddie-mac-housing-285fad5490a59c3476f7908f444e9fe9

U.S. Sen. John Fetterman is more popular among Pennsylvania Republicans than fellow Democrats, according to a new poll of state voters.

Susquehanna Polling and Research president James Lee told PennLive Tuesday that Fetterman’s overall approval rating among state voters is a “mediocre” 41%, compared to 37% who disapprove of him.

However, the eyebrow-raising result that 45% of Republicans approve of Fetterman while just 40% of Democrats do will surely get political tongues wagging from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C.

A player of the popular online military simulator War Thunder has been banned from the game’s official forums after sharing a page from a restricted AV-8B Harrier flight manual. The incident marks at least the ninth known case in which classified or export-controlled material has been posted by users attempting to influence in-game accuracy.

In this latest case, a user uploaded a section from a NATOPS manual for the AV-8B and TAV-8B Harrier, used by the United States Navy and Marine Corps. The manual is marked “Distribution Statement C,” which means it is not approved for public release and is restricted to authorised U.S. government personnel and contractors. War Thunder’s community manager confirmed the document breached the forum’s rules and was removed immediately. The user received a temporary ban.

This is the latest in a growing list of similar incidents. Previous leaks involved documentation for the UK’s Challenger 2 main battle tank, France’s Leclerc, China’s ZTZ-99, the Eurocopter Tiger, and several U.S. aircraft including the F-16, F-15E, F-117, and most recently, the Eurofighter Typhoon. Each case followed a similar pattern: a user attempted to support a technical argument by uploading documents that were either classified or export restricted. Each time, moderators deleted the posts and sanctioned the accounts involved.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has won the backing of a judge in a copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors, in the second legal victory for the US artificial intelligence industry this week.

The writers, who included Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, had argued that the Facebook owner had breached copyright law by using their books without permission to train its AI system.

The ruling follows a decision on Monday that Anthropic, another major player in the AI field, had not infringed authors’ copyright.

The US district judge Vince Chhabria, in San Francisco, said in his decision on the Meta case that the authors had not presented enough evidence that the technology company’s AI would dilute the market for their work to show that its conduct was illegal under US copyright law.

Meta wins AI copyright lawsuit as US judge rules against authors

Writers accused Facebook owner of breach over using books without permission to train its AI system

^{Dan Milmo (The Guardian)}

cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/32848147

Pro

2025-06-25 10:37:55

Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts

Switch to fair. Switch to The Fairphone (Gen. 6).

Future-proof. Long-lasting. Modular design inside and out. Switch to The Fairphone (Gen. 6). It's two phones in one. For a more mindful you.

^Fairphone

This is a short analysis of the official Fairphone 2024 impact report.

Fairphone is kinda cagey about how much money they exactly spend on fair/eco initiatives, giving only very little information on what exactly it spends in these departments.

For a good reason, it is not a lot.

Specifically, these numbers are given in the report for 2024:

• The workers assembling the phones get $1.20 of "living wage bonus" for each phone assembled. This bonus is spread over all workers in the factory, no matter if they worked on fairphones or not, coming out to a yearly bonus of $60.67 per worker.
• $3000 was spent on gold fairwashing credits for some artisanal gold mine in Tanzania
• $13000 was spent on fairwashing credits for 2.5 tonnes of cobalt (that's 20% of the raw world market price of cobalt).

That's everything. They do talk about a few other fair/eco initiatives in there, but if you read about what they are doing there, it's usually very little and mostly marketing speech. We can safely assume that if any other initiatives would cost more than the ones mentioned above, they would have put these values into the impact report.

They sold 103 053 phones in 2024, so the credits mentioned above come out to just $0.155 per phone.

So to account for the rest of their initiatives and credits, let's be ultra generous and assume they paid 10x of that for all of these initiatives and credits, bringing this value up to $1.55 per phone plus $1.20 in living wage bonus, which gives us a total of $2.75 per phone.

To double check how realistic these numbers are, lets look at their use of fair materials using the Fairphone 5 as our example.

On page 42 they claim "Fair materials: 76%", but with the disclaimer "Average across 14 focus materials" next to it.

These 76% do not consider materials that are not "focus materials" (and aren't acquired fairly at all) and it also doesn't take into consideration the different distributions of the materials in the phone. Some materials (e.g. iridium) are only found in trace amounts in the phone, while other materials (e.g. aluminium or plastics) make up a large part of the weight of the phone.

On page 67 they go into more detail. Here they claim that only 44% of the materials by weight are "fair". To make this even worse, 37% of these 44% are recycled. Specifically, the materials they use in recycled form are metals, plastics and rare earth elements. These are materials that are cheaper to recycle than to mine, which means these 37% of "fair" materials cost nothing to Fairphone and might even save them money. You will likely find similar shares of recycled materials in any other phone too.

Of the 7% "fair" materials that are left, only 1% is actually mined fairly, the remaining 6% are fairwashed using credits. As we have seen above, these credits are really cheap (adding maybe 20% to the price of the material).

On top of that comes the fact that the raw materials make up only a tiny fraction of the manufacturing cost of a smartphone. The expensive part is turning a pile of minerals, metals and plastic into chips, PCBs, screens, batteries and assembling all of that. So even if they paid fairwashing credits for all materials in the phone it would likely not cost more than a few dollars.

TLDR: Less than $5 per phone are spent on fair/eco.

So where does the money go? In 2024 they had an EBITDA of just €1 745 840, or €16.94 per phone. That's not a lot at all, so it's not like they are pocketing huge sums of money.

Their main problem is that they are a tiny company with low sales figures that has to outsource almost everything they do. On their website they claim to have "70+ employees". That's barely enough for supply chain management, sales and marketing. They don't have an in-house production and likely not even in-house development. They don't have any economies of scale on their side and they certainly don't produce screens, batteries, chips or PCBs in house, like other major manufacturers like e.g. Samsung can do. Their development cost is spread over far fewer sold units.

All of this costs a lot of money.

So when you pay an extra €200-300 to buy a Fairphone instead of a comparable mainstream phone, you are mostly paying for a boutique manufacturing process that can't benefit from economies of scale.

Which is ok, that's nothing bad to do. Just be aware where that extra money is going.

Buying a Fairphone is hardly fairer than buying a regular phone and it is certainly not more eco friendly than buying an used phone.

"The reconciliation bill that Republicans are attempting to ram through the Senate this week would be a death sentence for working-class and low-income Americans," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.

GOP Bill Would Strip Healthcare From 19 People for Every Millionaire Getting a Tax Cut: Sanders Report

^{jake-johnson (Common Dreams)}

Zohran Mamdani's victory over Cuomo in NYC's mayoral primary has sparked a progressive movement demanding change in the Democratic Party. Will this seismic shift lead to more insurgent candidates challenging establishment lawmakers? The time for change is now. #ProgressiveRevolt #Mamdani

After Mamdani Victory, Progressives Call for Primary Challenges to Democratic Establishment

"The establishment has never been more weak than they are now," one advocate told potential progressive candidates. "You need to run."

^{julia-conley (Common Dreams)}

Gaza City’s main high street has been destroyed but Palestinian memories of life before the ongoing Israeli assault survive. As those in Gaza face bombing, starvation and miserable living conditions, here’s how they try to hold both the past and the present in their minds

Archived version: archive.is/20250626125624/theg…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

A street in Gaza, a map of dreams, and the people desperate to live

^{Ana Lucía González Paz (The Guardian)}

The European Union’s top official, Ursula von der Leyen, has declared rearmament the bloc’s emergency priority. While military spending soars to new heights, working people face a fresh era of austerity.

Ursula von der Leyen Is Waging War on Workers

^jacobin.com

"Governments should heed widespread demands to tax the rich—and match it with a vision to build public goods from healthcare to energy," said the executive director of Oxfam International.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/commondreams…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Wealth of Global 1% Has Skyrocketed by Over $33 Trillion Since 2015: Report

^{jake-johnson (Common Dreams)}

A Trump appointee suggests NASA may not have a new administrator until next year.

During a town hall Wednesday, NASA officials on stage looked like hostages

^{Stephen Clark (Ars Technica)}

Billionaire Bill Ackman and his rich friends want someone, anyone, to bring down Zohran Mamdani. Their pitch: take our money, it won’t be much time and energy, and maybe you’ll get famous enough to use the campaign as a stepping stone to higher office.

A Billionaire Trump Backer Is Desperate to Stop Zohran Mamdani

Billionaire Bill Ackman and his rich friends want someone, anyone, to bring down Zohran Mamdani. Their pitch: take our money, it won’t be much time and energy, and maybe you’ll get famous enough to use the campaign as a stepping stone to higher offic…

^jacobin.com

A mix of iron, chlorine, and lithium is conductive, stores lithium, and self-heals.

Researchers develop a battery cathode material that does it all

^{John Timmer (Ars Technica)}

"This is a systematic decimation of access to reproductive healthcare and a signifier of what else is likely to come," warned one critic.

Case file: supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pd…

'People Will Die,' Warn Progressives as Supreme Court Lets States Defund Planned Parenthood

^{brett-wilkins (Common Dreams)}