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The Oakland Town Commission voted at its May 9 meeting to terminate interim town manager Jack Butler without cause and to appoint Town Clerk Elise Hui as the interim manager until a permanent one can be hired. A search is being conducted.

The town of Oakland has voted to terminate Jack Butler without cause effective immediately, Mayor Kathy Stark said. Severances will be paid based on his contract terms.

Butler has been serving as interim manager since the previous town manager, Steve Koontz, retired April 1.

Its not for cause, and we wish him well, Stark stressed of Butlers termination.

The Town Commission engaged an executive recruitment firm to manage the process of recruiting a permanent town manager. The town has looked at all the applications, and the search has been narrowed to five.

We have some very good candidates, Stark said. We are hopeful that well be able to make an offer next Friday (May 19).

Hui will handle both job duties until a new manager is hired.

The five candidates will be in Oakland Thursday, May 18, to take a tour of the town with Stark and Public Works director Mike Parker. That evening, a reception will be held from 5:30 to 7 at the Oakland Meeting Hall, 221 N. Arrington St., and Stark said the public is invited to meet the candidates. Those interested in attending should RSVP to [emailprotected]

IN OTHER NEWS:

The Oakland Town Commission approved its consent agenda, which included an agreement to allow the Oakland Police Department to conduct traffic enforcement in the gated communities of Johns Cove and Johns Landing. The homeowners associations made the request. State statute doesnt allow traffic enforcement on private property without a written agreement. The police department will solely be responsible for enforcement, including the scheduling of patrols and the use of radar. All decisions regarding the level of traffic enforcement on the private roads and staffing will be within the sole discretion of the police department.

The commission approved a fourth amendment to the development agreement with Oakland Park regarding a buffer fence between Macchi Avenue and the seventh phase of the neighborhood.

The town proclaimed May 15, 2023, Peace Officers Memorial Day and May 15 through 21, 2023, National Police Week. The proclamation was presented to Chief Darron Esan.

I cant tell you how happy I am with our community policing police department, Mayor Kathy Stark said.

You guys are phenomenal, Commissioner Mike Satterfield said.

A proclamation was read declaring May 21 through 27, 2023, National Public Works Week and presented to Public Works director Mike Parker.

We love the job that you do, Stark said. You have been for a very long time a welcome addition to this town.

Continued here:
Oakland narrows town manager search to five | West Orange Times ... - West Orange Times & SouthWest Orange Observer

On Monday, Special Counsel John Durham released the conclusions of his three-year investigation into the FBI's surveillance of former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, arguing that the FBI used uncorroborated evidence to secure search warrants against a former Trump campaign aide and "displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor" toward information they received from partisan sources.

Durham's 316-page report found that the FBI failed to act with "appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power" and that the agency "discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia."

Former Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham in 2020 to investigate whether any federal officials had violated the law in connection with the intelligence and law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns. On that score, Durham's investigation has been long on expectations from Trump and his supporters, but short on results. After three years, Durham has secured one guilty plea and lost two cases at trial after the defendants were acquitted.

However, the investigation has highlighted serious deficiencies with the FBI's warrant applications before the highly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which is supposed to provide oversight of surveillance activities by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The Durham report found that the FBI's decision to open an investigation into possible foreign influence on several members of Trump's campaign team and apply for electronic surveillance search warrants against them was "based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence" that likely did not meet the standard for probable cause.

Some of the Durham report's findings have been corroborated by other investigators. In 2019, the Justice Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a bombshell report that FBI agents made a number of significant omissions and errors in their four warrant applications to surveil Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide. It also found that FBI personnel "did not give appropriate attention to facts that cut against probable cause." However, unlike Durham, the OIG did not conclude that anti-Trump bias fueled the investigation.

But if FBI agents were willing to cut corners to get a FISA warrant against a presidential campaign aide, it seems highly unlikely Page was the only victim. Follow-up investigations revealed just that.

In a 2020 report, the OIG determined that the FBI regularly ignored its own procedures to make sure FISA warrant applications were accurate. In a review of 29 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrantapplications to surveil Americans, the OIG found that 25 of them had errors or "inadequately supported facts."

As Reason's Scott Shackford wrote, the fact that the FBI was regularly botching search warrant applications before a court with no outside review or oversight should be alarming: "This should be seen as a big dealthe secrecy of the FISC means that Americans who are targeted for surveillance don't know they've been singled out and don't have any defense or due process to stop it. The court itself serves as oversight to protect citizens' Fourth Amendment rights. But until all of this came out, we had little idea how carelessly these warrants were written and reviewed."

Durham's report notes one suggestion from former National Security Agency general counsel Stewart Baker to improve oversight of potentially partisan FBI investigations: having an FBI official who will challenge them at every stepessentially a devil's advocate, or in this case perhaps an angel's advocate.

"As a way to ensure full consideration of the issues in applications that may present very difficultand vitally importantissues, we recommend that the Department seriously consider Baker's proposal for an official to challenge both a politically sensitive FISA application and other stages of the investigation," says the report.

Trump's fantasies of Durham prosecuting and locking up a coterie of deep state agents who orchestrated the "crime of the century" against him are just thatfantasiesbut the civil liberties problems inside the FBI are very real.

More:
The Durham Report Is Right About the Need for More FBI Oversight - Reason

Can an AI become sentient? As fantastic as it sounds, maybe its already happened. Skeptical. Me too. But when I read the conversation between a researcher and Googles LaMDa, I didnt know what to think. Listen to it on Hashtag Trending the weekend edition when it goes live on Saturday morning and judge for yourself.

The US government is using invasive, AI-powered monitoring to track refugees, asylum seekers and their own citizens. OpenAI puts ChatGPT on the iPhone. And Microsoft is placing a bet on nuclear fusion.

These top tech news stories and more for Friday May 19, 2023, Im your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada, and Tech News Day in the US.

According to a report in Vice, Customs and Border Protection in the US is using an invasive, AI-powered monitoring tool to screen travelers.

Theyll be using this on refugees, people seeking asylum and even citizens and permanent residents.

The tool is called Babel X and it can take a specific piece of information about a person name, email, telephone number or social security number and get back an enormous amount of data from social media and other sources. The data includes things like name, address, date of birth, email, phone number, drivers license, social security number and even employment history. But it doesnt stop there. It gets info from social media postings, location data linked and even the unique identifiers from their mobile phone used by advertisers.

A lot of this information is publicly or commercially available from providers who gather it on the so-called dark web, where hackers exchange information and the deep web which is not necessarily nefarious but consists of content that is not indexed by standard web search.

Critics say that even legitimately purchasing some of this data without a warrant may violate Fourth Amendment rights.

For example, warrants are required to access location data from cell towers, but the location data obtained by Babel X is generated from a variety of other sources using location data generated by smart phone apps.

In addition, the system not only collects information, but it also uses AI tools to do sentiment analysis from social and other data. But that data can be used to geo-fence a person and very accurately track a person, without them ever knowing.

The use of these tools was uncovered by a Freedom of Information filing by journalists at Motherboard. Organizations are required to file a document called a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) when they are initiating or updating a program that is regarded as privacy invading.

While these assessments must be done every three years, the data that is captured may be stored in other systems for up to 75 years.

Opponents of the program, like Carrie DeCell, an attorney with the Knight First Amendment Institute, argue that the government has no legitimate interest in collecting and retaining such sensitive information on an immense scale.

Customs and Border Services, it turns out are just the tip of the iceberg. The company that makes Babel X has also sold their system to the TSA, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Navy, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI and the State Department according to public records.

Sources include: Vice

Open AI has released a version of ChatGPT for the iPhone.

While the app largely functions much like the web version, it does address a concern about the vast number of apps that have proliferated, many of which contain malware or are used as a part of cyber scams. Microsoft has already addressed these same concerns with an app for their Bing AI.

The iOS app will bring this same security to those who want to use ChatGPT directly.

Like the web offering, it allows users to subscribe for a fee and get the more advanced capabilities of GPT-4.

The app does have one difference from the web version. Speech input is supported using Whisper, OpenAIs open-source speech recognition system.

The app will be available in the U.S. and expanding to other countries in the coming weeks. Android users may take heart. In a posting announcing the app and the timing, they noted:

P.S. Android users, youre next. ChatGPT will be coming to your devices soon.

Sources include: Axios

And the US Supreme Court upheld the legal protections provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that protect internet companies from lawsuits regarding content posted by users.

Section 230 provides safeguards for what it terms interactive computer services by ensuring that they are not regarded as a publisher or speaker.

The Supreme Courts 9-0 ruling reversed a lower court decision where a family had sued Twitter maintaining that their son had been killed in a New Years celebration by Islamist gunmen arguing that the presence of militant groups on their platforms on Twitter was related to the killing. The family argued Twitter had aided and abetted the Islamic State by failing to police the platform for the groups accounts or posts and that this was a violation of the Anti-Terrorist act.

Controversial conservative Justice Clarence Thomas authored the Supreme Court ruling and said, the allegations point to no act of encouraging, soliciting or advising the commission of the attack and didnt constitute anything that could be described as aiding or abetting an act of terrorism.

While Twitter was the party in the suit, other companies like Google and Facebook were certainly watching this closely, but one of the most interested parties may have been Reddit and Wikipedia, who worried that their armies of volunteer moderators would have been severely affected if Twitter had been found liable.

Sources include: Reuters

And Microsoft is placing a big bet on an incredible technological leap to cut its carbon emissions fusion power.

Fusion is a nuclear reaction that has been used to develop bombs that have immense destructive power. But fusion reactors dont explode. Nor do they use uranium or other radioactive elements.

They use hydrogen and turn it into harmless gases like helium and the process generate huge amounts of heat energy. Its the same reaction that powers the sun.

The catch is, its amazingly difficult to contain that reaction which happens at temperatures of over 100 million degrees Kelvin, which for those who are still struggling with Fahrenheit or Celsius, is six times hotter than the core of the sun.

The other catch is that it takes an enormous amount of energy to start the reaction and until recently, nobody has been able to get more power from the reaction than it took to heat it up and contain it. That is, until recently.

Last year, researchers at Lawrence Liverpool National Laboratories made a major breakthrough and, if you do a little fuzzy accounting, could make the claim that they generated more energy than it took to kick off the reaction. They got 3.15 megajoules of energy and it took 2.05 megajoules to kick it off. Success.

Well, unless you count the fact that it need power to run the lasers that start the reaction and those lasers take 322 megajoules.

And before we get carried away about megajoules 3.15 megajoules is about .875 kilowatt hours not even enough to run a small air conditioner.

Despite that, it was a victory. Based on that, a company named Helion has convinced Microsoft that it will have a commercial reactor producing commercial levels of power by 2028.

One critic calls their claims voodoo fusion.

Despite that, and other issues, Microsoft has agreed to buy power from the company to run its many data centres.

It seems a little fantastic, but Microsoft is serious enough to agree to buy the power no one knows if theyve invested money in the company as well.

Is it a good decision? Well, lets ask our WWBD. What would Bill do? Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft is investing in small nuclear reactors, using standard nuclear fission but on a small scale to make them safer and generating less nuclear waste. Its also a technology that is proven and functioning.

Who will win the bet on this one? We dont care. But with data centers using about one per cent of electrical energy and expect to grow to eight per cent of global electrical energy by 2030, we just know that we cant power our lust for computing on current carbon burning technology.

Source: The Register

And Montana became the first state to ban TikTok on personal devices. Governments around the world have insisted that users removed TikTok from government supplied devices, but this is the first instance of it being banned on private devices.

TikTok responded saying that there were hundreds of thousands of users in Montana and that the ban infringes on the first amendment rights of the people of Montana. TikTok is expected to challenge the ban.

There are going to be difficulties in enforcing this ban because the penalties apply only to corporations and not individual users. That would mean that Apple or Google or others who have an app store could be fined up to 10,000 dollars if they fail to comply with the Montana ban which, unless the penalty was per download would be minimal. Plus, almost everyone in Montana who wants TikTok probably has downloaded it already.

But the ban might be the thin edge of the wedge. Despite its popularity with over 150 million users in the US, just under half of the population of the country use TikTok governments seem inclined to weather the storm and take action against what they perceive is a threat from the Chinese government. Early in March the US government said that the Chinese parent company ByteDance should sell TikTok or face a ban.

Even the claim that the data is stored and protected by Oracle, a US company, has not reduced the criticism.

So if Montana, where perhaps a third of the population use the app, is willing to face the heat and ban it, it could encourage others. And if other governments join in, it could become a trend the ban could go viral.

Just a matter of time.

TikTok.

Sources include: BBC

Thats the top tech news for today. We go to air with a daily newscast five days a week, as well as a special weekend interview with an expert on topics relevant to todays tech news.

Follow Hashtag Trending on Google, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can even get us on your Alexa or Google smart speaker. You can even find us on YouTube only. We are called TechNewsDay.

We love your comments. You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or on Mastodon as @therealjimlove on our Mastodon site technews.social. Or if thats too much, just leave a comment under the text version at itworldcanada.com/podcasts and you can find all of the links in those text versions.

Im your host, Jim Love. Have a Fantastic Friday!

Originally posted here:
Hashtag Trending May 19- U.S. government use invasive AI to track refugees; OpenAI releases iOS ChatGPT app; Microsoft bets on nuclear fusion - IT...

Following NASA's recently proposed rule that requires federal contractors to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, two Republican senators have accused the space agency of overstepping its authority and straying from its core space exploration mission.

Sen. Ted Cruz from Texas, a senior member of the Senate Commerce Committee, and Sen. Eric Schmitt from Missouri, another senior member of the committees space wing, voiced concerns that NASA is advancing the "woke" agenda of the Biden administration and could threaten the rare bipartisan support that NASA receives in Congress.

"I do worry sometimes that we may be losing focus on what makes America the preeminent spacefaring nation," Sen. Cruz told NASA Administrator Bill Nelson during a budget hearing on Tuesday (May 16), according to Space News' Jeff Foust. "Rather than helping us win the space race, the proposed rule would ensure that NASA could do less exploration and less science for more taxpayer dollars."

Related: NASA highlights climate research at opening of inaugural summit

"You and I in this committee have a different approach to what is happening to the Earth's climate," Nelson said. "It so happens that NASA is in the middle of this."

The regulation being slammed by Republicans was proposed jointly by NASA, the General Services Administration and the Department of Defense on Nov. 14, 2022. The rule, which requires federal contractors to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and submit science-backed targets to reduce them, would increase costs for federal agencies and contractors by $4 billion, over a dozen Republicans argued in a letter sent to the space agency in early March.

In addition to disclosing and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the proposed rule also requires contractors to estimate and reveal climate-related financial risk, measures that are "ever-changing" and "impossible" for an entire industry to follow, Republicans said in the same letter. The high upfront and annual costs to adhere to the proposed rule would prompt companies with limited resources to quit working with government contracts, they wrote.

NASA would end up bearing a large chunk of the $4 billion costs, which would in turn "remove dollars that otherwise would be available to go to the moon and Mars Just how much are y'all driving up costs because of the political mandate from the White House?" Sen. Cruz told Nelson on Tuesday, according to SpacePolicyOnline.com's Marcia Smith.

Nelson defended the specifics of the proposed rule, saying he could waive the requirement for small businesses and emphasized that NASA will continue to operate as "not only bipartisan but non-partisan."

Cruz and Schmitt also raised concerns about NASA's budget request for fiscal year 2024, which includes $22 million for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives via its Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity. The senators said such efforts could cause NASA to lose focus from the purported space race between the United States and China, which has announced its own planned crewed landing mission to the moon around 2030.

The requested funds for NASA's diversity initiatives have "little to do with winning what you have called a space race between the free world and China," Sen. Cruz told Nelson on Tuesday.

"America cannot afford to take its eye off the ball with the rising threat of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. We must be laser-like focused on our approach, and I can assure you that China has no interest in out-DEI-ing us, and they're not intimidated at all by this divisive radical policy that's found its way into this budget," Cruz said.

Follow Sharmila Kuthunur on Twitter @skuthunur. Follow us @Spacedotcom, or on Facebook and Instagram.

Excerpt from:
Senate Republicans criticize NASA for its climate change and diversity efforts - Space.com

WASHINGTON (AP) Debt limit talks between the White House and House Republicans stopped, started and stopped again Friday at the U.S. Capitol, a dizzying series of events in high-stakes negotiations to avoid a potentially catastrophic federal default.

President Joe Bidens administrationis reaching for a dealwith Republicans led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as the nation faces a deadline as soon as June 1 to raise the country's borrowing limit, now at $31 trillion, to keep paying the nations bills. Republicans are demandingsteep spending cutsthe Democrats oppose.

Negotiations came to an abrupt standstill earlier in the day when McCarthy said its time to pause talks. But the negotiating teams convened again in the evening only to quickly call it quits for the night.

Biden, attending the Group of Seven summit in Japan, continued to express optimism that an agreement will be reached, saying that negotiating happens in stages.

I still believe we'll be able to avoid a default and get something done, he said.

His press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, earlier had acknowledged the difficulty of the talks.

Theres no question we have serious differences," she said, without outlining any of them.

Top Republican negotiators for McCarthy said after the evening session that they were uncertain on next steps, though it's likely discussions will resume over the weekend. The White House publicly expressed optimism that a resolution could be reached if parties negotiated in good faith.

We reengaged, had a very, very candid discussion, talking about where we are, talking about where things need to be, whats reasonably acceptable," said Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., a top McCarthy ally leading the talks for his side.

Another Republican negotiator, Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, was asked if he was confident an agreement over budget issues could be reached with the White House. He replied, No.

As the White House team left the nighttime session, counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, who is leading talks for the Democrats, said he was hopeful. We're going to keep working, he said.

Biden had already planned to cut short the rest of his trip and is expected to return to Washington Sunday night.

Earlier in the day, McCarthy said resolution to the standoff is easy, if only Biden's team would agree to somespending cutsRepublicans are demanding. The biggest impasse was over the fiscal 2024 top-line budget amount, according to a person briefed on the talks and granted anonymity to discuss them. Democrats staunchly oppose the steep reductions Republicans have put on the table as potentially harmful to Americans, and are insisting that Republicans agree to tax hikes on the wealthy, in addition to spending cuts, to close the deficit.

Weve got to get movement by the White House and we dont have any movement yet,McCarthy, R-Calif.,told reporters at the Capitol. "So, yeah, weve got to pause.

White House communications director Ben LaBolt said Saturday that Any serious budget negotiation must include discussion both of spending and of revenues, but Republicans have refused to discuss revenue.

He added: "President Biden will not accept a wishlist of extreme MAGA priorities that would punish the middle class and neediest Americans and set our economic progress back."

Jean-Pierre insisted Biden was not negotiating on raising the borrowing limit, despite the clear linkage in talks between securing a budget deal and raising the debt ceiling.

It is not negotiable we should not be negotiating on the debt, she said.

Wall Streetturned loweras negotiations came to a sudden halt. Experts have warned that even the threat of a debt default would could spark a recession.

Republicans argue the nation's deficit spending needs to get under control, aiming to roll back spending to fiscal 2022 levels and restrict future growth. But Biden's team is countering that the caps Republicans proposed in their House-passed bill would amount to 30% reductions in some programs if Defense and veterans are spared, according to a memo from the Office of Management and Budget.

Any deal would need the support of both Republicans and Democrats to find approval in a divided Congress and be passed into law. Negotiators are eyeing a more narrow budget cap deal of a few years, rather than the decade-long caps Republicans initially wanted, and clawing back some $30 billion of unspent COVID-19 funds.

Still up for debate are policy changes, including a framework for permitting reforms to speed the development of energy projects, as well as the Republican push to impose work requirements on government aid recipients that Biden has been open to but the House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has said was a "nonstarter."

Look, we cant be spending more money next year, McCarthy said at the Capitol. "We have to spend less than we spent the year before. Its pretty easy.

McCarthy faces pressures from his hard-right flank to cut the strongest deal possible for Republicans, and he risks a threat to his leadership as speaker if he fails to deliver. Many House Republicans are unlikely to accept any deal with the White House.

The internal political dynamics confronting the embattled McCarthy leave the Democrats skeptical about giving away too much to the Republicans and driving off the support they will need to pass any compromise through Congress.

Biden is facing increased pushback from Democrats, particularly progressives, who argue the reductions will fall too heavily on domestic programs that Americans rely on.

Some Democrats want Biden to invoke his authorityunder the 14th amendmentto raise the debt ceiling on his own, an idea that raises legal questions and that the president has so far said he is not inclined to consider.

Pressure on McCarthy comes from the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which said late Thursday there should be no further discussions until the Senate takes action on the House Republican plan. That bill approved last month would raise the debt limit into 2024 in exchange for spending caps and policy changes. Biden has said he would veto that Republican measure.

In the Senate, which is controlled by majority Democrats, Republican leader Mitch McConnell has taken a backseat publicly, and is pushing Biden to strike a deal directly with McCarthy.

They are the only two who can reach an agreement, McConnell said in a tweet. It is past time for the White House to get serious. Time is of the essence.

___

Miller reported from Hiroshima, Japan. Associated Press Business Writer Stan Choe and writers Kevin Freking, Seung Min Kim, Stephen Groves and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Josh Boak in Hiroshima, Japan, contributed to this report.

Read more from the original source:
Debt limit talks start, stop as Republicans, White House face 'serious ... - Chattanooga Times Free Press