Every year, venomous snakes kill over 100,000 people and leave 300,000 more with devastating injuries — amputations, paralysis and permanent disabilities. The victims are often farmers, herders and children in rural communities across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America. For them, a snakebite isn’t just a medical crisis — it’s an economic catastrophe. Treatment hasn’t changed in over a century. Antivenoms — derived from the blood of immunized animals — are expensive, difficult to manufacture and often […]

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In The Gay Science (1882), German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed the death of God. Recognizing the enormous implications of secularization and the uprooting of Christianity’s “fundamental concept” (faith in God) and the resulting moral confusion, he exclaimed: “God is dead! Continue Reading…

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Jina AI has released Jina-VLM, a 2.4B parameter vision language model that targets multilingual visual question answering and document understanding on constrained hardware. The model couples a SigLIP2 vision encoder with a Qwen3 language backbone and uses an attention pooling connector to reduce visual tokens while preserving spatial structure. Among open 2B scale VLMs, it reaches state of the art results on multilingual benchmarks such as MMMB and Multilingual MMBench. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04032 Architecture, overlapping tiles with attention pooling connector […]

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Interviewer: Jillian York Benjamin Ismail is the Campaign and Advocacy Director for GreatFire, where he leads efforts to expose the censorship apparatus of authoritarian regimes worldwide. He also runs/oversees the App Censorship Project, including the AppleCensorship.com and GoogleCensorship.org platforms, which track mobile app censorship globally. From 2011 to 2017, Benjamin headed the Asia-Pacific desk at Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Jillian York: Hi Benjamin, it’s great to chat with you. We got to meet at the Global Gathering recently […]

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This Thanksgiving, I give thanks for something our forebears gave us: property rights.

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In late September, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his government’s plans to introduce a new digital ID scheme in the country to take effect before the end of the Parliament (no later than August 2029). The scheme will, according to the Prime Minister, “cut the faff” in proving people’s identities by creating a virtual ID on personal devices with information like people’s name, date of birth, nationality or residency status, and photo to verify their […]

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Cisco and Splunk have introduced the Cisco Time Series Model, a univariate zero shot time series foundation model designed for observability and security metrics. It is released as an open weight checkpoint on Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license, and it targets forecasting workloads without task specific fine tuning. The model extends TimesFM 2.0 with an explicit multiresolution architecture that fuses coarse and fine history in one context window. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19841 Why observability needs multiresolution context? Production metrics […]

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Mobile Fortify, the new app used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use face recognition technology (FRT) to identify people during street encounters, is an affront to the rights and dignity of migrants and U.S. citizens alike. That’s why a coalition of privacy, civil liberties and civil rights organizations are demanding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shut down the use of Mobile Fortify, release the agency’s privacy analyses of the app, and clarify the agency’s policy […]

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