Amaq News Agency (Arabic: وكالة أعماق الإخبارية, romanized: Wakālat Aʻmāq al-Ikhbārīyah) is a news outlet linked to the Islamic State (IS). Amaq is often the "first point of publication for claims of responsibility" for terrorist attacks in Western countries by the Islamic State. In March 2019, Amaq News Agency was designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States Department of State. == History == Among the founders of Amaq was Syrian journalist Baraa Kadek, who joined IS in late 2013, Abu Muhammad al-Furqan, and seven others who originally worked for Halab News Network. According to The New York Times, it has a direct connection with IS, from which it "gets tips". Its name was taken from Amik Valley in Hatay Province, which is mentioned in a hadith as the site of an "apocalyptic victory over non-believers". Amaq News Agency was first noticed by SITE during the Siege of Kobanî (Syria) in 2014, when its updates were shared among IS fighters. It became more widely known after it began reporting claims of responsibility for terrorist attacks in Western countries, such as the 2015 San Bernardino attack, for which IS officially claimed responsibility the next day. An Amaq cameraman shot the first footage of the capture of Palmyra in 2015. Amaq launched an official mobile app in 2015 and has warned against unofficial versions that reportedly have been used to spy on its users. It also uses a Telegram account. It had a WordPress-based blog, but it was removed without explanation in April 2016. On 12 June 2016, IS claimed responsibility for the Pulse nightclub shooting through Amaq, without prior knowledge of the attack. The shooter, Omar Mateen had later pledged allegiance to IS via a phone call with emergency services. On 31 May 2017, a Facebook post announced Amaq's founder, Baraa Kadek AKA Rayan Meshaal, had been killed with his daughter by an American airstrike on Mayadin. The post was reportedly made by his younger brother. Reuters could not immediately verify this account. On 27 July 2017, the US confirmed that Kadek had been killed by a coalition airstrike near Mayadin between 25 and 27 May 2017. In June 2017, German police arrested a 23-year-old Syrian man identified only as Mohammed G., accusing him of communicating with the alleged perpetrator of the 2016 Malmö Muslim community centre arson in order to report to Amaq. On 21 March 2019, the U.S. Department of State officially deemed Amaq an alias of IS, and thus a Foreign Terrorist Organization. On 22 March 2024, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Crocus City Hall attack through Amaq, U.S. officials confirmed the claim shortly after. A day after the attack, Amaq published a video of the attack, filmed by one of the attackers. It showed the attackers shooting victims and slitting the throat of another, while the filming attacker praises Allah and speaks against infidels. == Character == Amaq publishes a stream of short news reports, both text and video, on the mobile app Telegram. The reports take on the trappings of mainstream journalism, with "Breaking News" headings, and embedded reporters at the scenes of IS battles. The reports try to appear neutral, toning down the jihadist language and sectarian slurs IS uses in its official releases. Charlie Winter of the Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative at Georgia State University, and Rita Katz of SITE Intelligence Group in Washington say Amaq functions much like the state-owned news agency of IS, though the group does not acknowledge it as such. Katz said it behaves "like a state media". Amaq appears to have been allowed to develop by IS as a way to have a news outlet that is controlled by the group but is somewhat removed from it, giving IS more of the appearance of legitimacy. == Reliability == According to Rukmini Callimachi in The New York Times: "Despite a widespread view that the Islamic State opportunistically claims attacks with which it has little genuine connection, its track record—minus a handful of exceptions—suggests a more rigorous protocol. At times, the Islamic State has got details wrong, or inflated casualty figures, but the gist of its claims is typically correct." According to Callimachi, the group considers itself responsible for acts carried out by people who were inspired by its propaganda, as well as acts carried out by its own personnel and in some instances, had claimed attacks before the identities of the killers were known. Graeme Wood writing in The Atlantic in October 2017, wrote "The idea that the Islamic State simply scans the news in search of mass killings, then sends out press releases in hope of stealing glory, is false. Amaq may learn details of the attacks from mainstream media ... but its claim of credit typically flows from an Amaq-specific source." An October 2017 article in The Hill, points to two false claims made in the summer of 2017, the Resorts World Manila attack and a false claim that bombs had been planted at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Also, a claimed IS connection to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting proved to be false. According to Rita Katz on the SITE Intelligence Group website, calling a terrorist a "soldier of the caliphate (warrior from the caliphate)" in a statement issued by Amaq, was the usual way in which IS indicated that it inspired an attack. Centrally coordinated attacks were usually described as "executed by a detachment belonging to the Islamic State", and were often announced by both Amaq and by IS' central media command. == Online presence == In November 2019, Belgian police said they had carried out a successful cyberattack on Amaq, thus leaving IS without an operational communication channel. However, Amaq has since regained online presence, primarily on dark web platforms to make it harder for law enforcement to take them down without physical access to the server hosting the specific platform.
Google Research
Google Research (also known as Research at Google) is the research division of Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.. According to its official website, Google Research publishes findings, releases open-source software, and applies research results within Google products and services as well as within the wider scientific community. == Notable contributions == The 2017 landmark paper Attention Is All You Need, which introduced the Transformer architecture, which has subsequently been used to build modern large language models. Advances in neural machine translation powering Google Translate. Time series forecasting. Development of scalable learning systems and infrastructure for large-model training. Flood forecasting. Research into computational discovery via Google Accelerated Science including demonstrating the first below-threshold quantum calculations.
Frictionless sharing
Frictionless sharing refers to the transparent or automatic dissemination of user activity across social media platforms, typically without requiring explicit action from the user each time content is shared. The concept gained prominence in 2011 after Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of new features for Facebook at the F8 developers conference, framing the changes as enabling “real-time serendipity in a friction-less experience.” == History and concept == Before 2011, the term “frictionless sharing” was occasionally used in academic and technical contexts to describe sharing of resources with minimal effort, such as through social bookmarking or Creative Commons licensing to reduce barriers to reuse of research data. The concept took on a broader cultural meaning when Facebook introduced its Timeline interface and new “social apps” in 2011. These features enabled third-party applications to automatically publish user activity to the platform—effectively shifting sharing from a deliberate act to a passive process. For example, integrating music streaming service Spotify meant that any song a user listened to could automatically appear in a Facebook “Ticker,” allowing friends to see the activity and click through to play the song themselves. == Zuckerberg’s vision == Zuckerberg articulated a vision of a Web in which sharing occurs by default rather than by choice: “You read, you watch, you listen, you buy—and everyone you know will hear all about it on Facebook.” This “frictionless” model assumes ongoing consent after an initial opt-in. Once users connect an app to their profile, any future activity with that app may be automatically shared. This shift from intentional posting to ambient sharing represented a significant evolution in how personal data is distributed online. == Criticism and debate == Many commentators and users have raised concerns about frictionless sharing. While some criticism centers on online privacy, others focus on how automatic updates can flood news feeds and erode the social value of sharing. Critics argue that when sharing becomes automatic, it dilutes the personal curation that makes social media exchanges meaningful. According to Slate, this approach risks “killing taste,” because users typically choose to share only select content they find worth highlighting, rather than everything they consume. AL.com similarly observed that the frictionless model encourages over-sharing, overwhelming both users and their networks with minor or trivial activities. For example, integrating multiple platforms—such as Twitter, Foursquare, Pinterest, Spotify, and others—can create an incessant stream of updates that some users may find intrusive or irritating. This can lead to what critics describe as “narcissistic” or noisy timelines, potentially undermining the “social” nature of social media. == Business model and data implications == For Facebook, frictionless sharing offers clear business advantages. More frequent and detailed sharing provides valuable data that can be used to refine targeted advertising and personalize content delivery. The model also encourages users to spend more time on the platform, reinforcing its position as a central hub of online social activity. Other technology companies have experimented with similar approaches. Google has introduced forms of cross-platform integration that facilitate automatic activity sharing, though with a more explicit opt-in structure compared to Facebook. This approach has been described as “friction with consent,” allowing users to manually enable or disable integrations on a per-service basis.
Content adaptation
Content adaptation is the action of transforming content to adapt to device capabilities. Content adaptation is usually related to mobile devices, which require special handling because of their limited computational power, small screen size, and constrained keyboard functionality. Content adaptation could roughly be divided to two fields: Media content adaptation that adapts media files. Browsing content adaptation that adapts a website to mobile devices. == Browsing content adaptation == Advances in the capabilities of small, mobile devices such as mobile phones (cell phones) and Personal Digital Assistants have led to an explosion in the number of types of device that can now access the Web. Some commentators refer to the Web that can be accessed from mobile devices as the Mobile Web. The sheer number and variety of Web-enabled devices poses significant challenges for authors of websites who want to support access from mobile devices. The W3C Device Independence Working Group described many of the issues in its report Authoring Challenges for Device Independence. Content adaptation is one approach to a solution. Rather than requiring authors to create pages explicitly for each type of device that might request them, content adaptation transforms an author's materials automatically. For example, content might be converted from a device-independent markup language, such as XDIME, an implementation of the W3C's DIAL specification, into a form suitable for the device, such as XHTML Basic, C-HTML, or WML. Similarly, a suitable device-specific CSS style sheet or a set of in-line styles might be generated from abstract style definitions. Likewise, a device specific layout might be generated from abstract layout definitions. Once created, the device-specific materials form the response returned to the device from which the request was made. Another way is to use the latest trend responsive design based on CSS, covered in this article (RWD). Content adaptation requires a processor that performs the selection, modification, and generation of materials to form the device-specific result. IBM's Websphere Everyplace Mobile Portal (WEMP), BEA Systems' WebLogic Mobility Server, Morfeo's MyMobileWeb, and Apache Cocoon are examples of such processors. Wurfl and WALL are popular open source tools for content adaptation. WURFL is an XML-based Device Description Repository with APIs to access the data in Java and PHP (and other popular programming languages). WALL (Wireless Abstraction Library) lets a developer author mobile pages which look like plain HTML, but converts them to WML, C-HTML, or XHTML Mobile Profile, depending on the capabilities of the device from which the HTTP request originates. GreasySpoon lets the developer build plugins for content editing, in JavaScript, Ruby (programming language), and more, just like the Firefox application GreaseMonkey. Alembik (Media Transcoding Server) is a Java (J2EE) application providing transcoding services for variety of clients and for different media types (image, audio, video, etc.). It is fully compliant with OMA's Standard Transcoder Interface specification and is distributed under the LGPL open source license. In 2007, the first large scale carrier-grade deployments of content transformation, on existing mass-market handsets, with no software download required, were deployed by Vodafone in the UK and globally for Yahoo! oneSearch, using the Novarra Vision solution. Novarra's content adaptation solution had been used in enterprise intranet deployments as early as 2003 (at that time, the platform was named "Engines for Wireless Data"). InfoGin, the 9-year-old content-adaptation company with customers like Vodafone, Orange, Telefónica and PCCW. The patented "Web to Mobile adaptation", Mobile Matrix Transcoder, Multimedia and Documents transcoders, Video adaptation supporte. Launched in 2007, Bytemobile's Web Fidelity Service was another carrier-grade, commercial infrastructure solution, which provided wireless content adaptation to mobile subscribers on their existing mass-market handsets, with no client download required.
Proximedia Group
Proximedia Group is a Belgian media group. == History == Proximedia Belgium was founded in 1998, by Fabrice Wuyts and Eric Glachant. The company specializes in providing websites for SMEs. The Proximedia Group SA was founded in 1999 and became the coordinating organization of Proximedia Belgium, Online, Bizbook Channel, Globule Bleu bvba, Click+, Proximedia France, Proximedia Nederland, and Proximedia Spain. The Proximedia Group has been listed at the Free Market of Euronext Brussels since 2005. In 2007, the Proximedia Group founded the Bizbook Channel. This branch specialized in creating corporate videos. In 2008, Proximedia SA took over the web agency Globule Bleu. The following year, Proximedia launched the brand BeUP. They were also elected ‘Enterprise of The Year 2009’ by Ernst & Young. Proximedia launched two new services in 2011: Videobiz and Promobook. In 2012, the Bizbook Channel was launched. Proximedia was acquired by Publicis Groupe S.A. in July 2014. == Branches == Proximedia Belgium: the oldest branch of the Proximedia Group. It makes websites and provides support for their customers. Similar branches are Proximedia France and Proximedia Nederland. Batibouw +: specialized in bringing contractors and clients together. Bizbook Channel: specialized in creating corporate videos for SMEs. Click+: offers the management of Google AdWords campaigns. This contains advertising in Google's search results. Globule Bleu: specialized in digital campaigns for larger companies or organisations. Online: an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that provides internet access, domain names, hosting of websites and data centers, email service, etc. Bizbook: an online guestbook where users can post reviews on products and services of a company. Promobook: an online service which can be used to print promotions and coupons. == Key figures == == Sale tactics and lawsuits == There are a lot of websites, forums and blogs that warn for Proximedia. This is because of the long duration of the contract, the inability to terminate the contract and the alleged aggressive approach of Proximedia and the alleged low quality of service that Proximedia offers. Also, there are a lot of lawsuits every month, some of which are customers that wish to terminate the contract, others that allege Proximedia of misguiding. List of some example lawsuits: Mitigation of contractual termination compensation on the basis of article 6:248 paragraph 2 of the Dutch Civil Code A clause on the basis of which a termination fee is claimed can be considered a penalty clause. Mitigation of the penalty based on article 6:94 of the Dutch Civil Code? Performance claim rejected; successful appeal to breach of contract; dissolution; restitution claim awarded. Agreement for IT services. Contents of the agreement. No reflex effect of the Door-to-Door Sales Act for small entrepreneurs. Implementation Act of the Consumer Rights Directive. Breach of contract? Unreasonably onerous clause? Cassation: ECLI:NL:HR:2016:996, (Partial) annulment with referral. Final judgment: ECLI:NL:GHSHE:2014:4228 Error. Reflex effect of the unfair commercial practices law? Compelling evidentiary force of written agreement. (No summary provided by court) Proximedia case. No valid defense against the claim concerning a number of monthly invoices. Article 7.1 of the agreement (containing a termination fee) is a general term in the sense of article 6:231 introductory text and under a of the Dutch Civil Code. No "reflex effect" of article 6:237 introductory text and under i of the Dutch Civil Code. Insufficiently argued why article 7.1 would be unreasonably onerous in the sense of article 6:233 of the Dutch Civil Code and that granting the claim would be unacceptable according to standards of reasonableness and fairness. Termination fee is not a penalty in the sense of article 6:91 of the Dutch Civil Code. A retailer (sole proprietorship) is approached by a representative of a company and enters into an "agreement for IT services" with a term of four years, which includes a dissolution fee of 60% of the not yet due monthly payments. The retailer is instructed to prove that, at the time of entering the agreement, the company promised him that he could terminate the agreement without any further obligations if he terminated his business. The retailer is considered to have succeeded in the burden of proof, and the company's claim for payment of the dissolution fee is rejected.
HTK Limited
HTK Limited is a software-as-a-service company that provides mobile phone messaging and IVR services. Founded in 1996, HTK is headquartered in Ipswich, Suffolk, UK. HTK provide mass notification services. Specifically, the "Police Direct" messaging service to Suffolk and Norfolk Constabularies. In 2010 the HTK Horizon SaaS platform was selected by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) for their Floodline Warnings Direct service. == History == HTK was founded in 1996 by Marlon Bowser and Adrian Gregory and from the outset focused on what has now become commonly known as Software-as-a-Service. in 2004, according to the Deloitte Fast 50 (UK), HTK was the 17th fastest growing company in the East of England. In 2005 The Times listed HTK 65th nationally and 4th in the East of England in the Sunday Times & Microsoft "Tech Track 100" awards. In 2009 the company was approved as a supplier to UK Government under a new framework agreement. In 2010 HTK launched version 2.2 of its Horizon platform, with a feature set that signals a shift from mass notification into the customer service automation market.
Randomized benchmarking
Randomized benchmarking is an experimental method for measuring the average error rates of quantum computing hardware platforms. The protocol estimates the average error rates by implementing long sequences of randomly sampled quantum gate operations. Randomized benchmarking is the industry-standard protocol used by quantum hardware developers such as IBM and Google to test the performance of the quantum operations. The original theory of randomized benchmarking, proposed by Joseph Emerson and collaborators, considered the implementation of sequences of Haar-random operations, but this had several practical limitations. The now-standard protocol for randomized benchmarking (RB) relies on uniformly random Clifford operations, as proposed in 2006 by Dankert et al. as an application of the theory of unitary t-designs. In current usage randomized benchmarking sometimes refers to the broader family of generalizations of the 2005 protocol involving different random gate sets that can identify various features of the strength and type of errors affecting the elementary quantum gate operations. Randomized benchmarking protocols are an important means of verifying and validating quantum operations and are also routinely used for the optimization of quantum control procedures. == Overview == Randomized benchmarking offers several key advantages over alternative approaches to error characterization. For example, the number of experimental procedures required for full characterization of errors (called tomography) grows exponentially with the number of quantum bits (called qubits). This makes tomographic methods impractical for even small systems of just 3 or 4 qubits. In contrast, randomized benchmarking protocols are the only known approaches to error characterization that scale efficiently as number of qubits in the system increases. Thus RB can be applied in practice to characterize errors in arbitrarily large quantum processors. Additionally, in experimental quantum computing, procedures for state preparation and measurement (SPAM) are also error-prone, and thus quantum process tomography is unable to distinguish errors associated with gate operations from errors associated with SPAM. In contrast, RB protocols are robust to state-preparation and measurement errors Randomized benchmarking protocols estimate key features of the errors that affect a set of quantum operations by examining how the observed fidelity of the final quantum state decreases as the length of the random sequence increases. If the set of operations satisfies certain mathematical properties, such as comprising a sequence of twirls with unitary two-designs, then the measured decay can be shown to be an invariant exponential with a rate fixed uniquely by features of the error model. == History == Randomized benchmarking was proposed in Scalable noise estimation with random unitary operators, where it was shown that long sequences of quantum gates sampled uniformly at random from the Haar measure on the group SU(d) would lead to an exponential decay at a rate that was uniquely fixed by the error model. Emerson, Alicki and Zyczkowski also showed, under the assumption of gate-independent errors, that the measured decay rate is directly related to an important figure of merit, the average gate fidelity and independent of the choice of initial state and any errors in the initial state, as well as the specific random sequences of quantum gates. This protocol applied for arbitrary dimension d and an arbitrary number n of qubits, where d=2n. The SU(d) RB protocol had two important limitations that were overcome in a modified protocol proposed by Dankert et al., who proposed sampling the gate operations uniformly at random from any unitary two-design, such as the Clifford group. They proved that this would produce the same exponential decay rate as the random SU(d) version of the protocol proposed in Emerson et al.. This follows from the observation that a random sequence of gates is equivalent to an independent sequence of twirls under that group, as conjectured in and later proven in. This Clifford-group approach to Randomized Benchmarking is the now standard method for assessing error rates in quantum computers. A variation of this protocol was proposed by NIST in 2008 for the first experimental implementation of an RB-type for single qubit gates. However, the sampling of random gates in the NIST protocol was later proven not to reproduce any unitary two-design. The NIST RB protocol was later shown to also produce an exponential fidelity decay, albeit with a rate that depends on non-invariant features of the error model In recent years a rigorous theoretical framework has been developed for Clifford-group RB protocols to show that they work reliably under very broad experimental conditions. In 2011 and 2012, Magesan et al. proved that the exponential decay rate is fully robust to arbitrary state preparation and measurement errors (SPAM). They also proved a connection between the average gate fidelity and diamond norm metric of error that is relevant to the fault-tolerant threshold. They also provided evidence that the observed decay was exponential and related to the average gate fidelity even if the error model varied across the gate operations, so-called gate-dependent errors, which is the experimentally realistic situation. In 2018, Wallman and Dugas et al., showed that, despite concerns raised in, even under very strong gate-dependence errors the standard RB protocols produces an exponential decay at a rate that precisely measures the average gate-fidelity of the experimentally relevant errors. The results of Wallman. in particular proved that the RB error rate is so robust to gate-dependent errors models that it provides an extremely sensitive tool for detecting non-Markovian errors. This follows because under a standard RB experiment only non-Markovian errors (including time-dependent Markovian errors) can produce a statistically significant deviation from an exponential decay The standard RB protocol was first implemented for single qubit gate operations in 2012 at Yale on a superconducting qubit. A variation of this standard protocol that is only defined for single qubit operations was implemented by NIST in 2008 on a trapped ion. The first implementation of the standard RB protocol for two-qubit gates was performed in 2012 at NIST for a system of two trapped ions