TheChek News Flow

Delivery of weaponry to Moscow marks ‘dramatic escalation’ in war against Ukraine, warn Kyiv and western officials

Iran has sent “hundreds” of ballistic missiles to Russia in what Kyiv officials said marks a “serious escalation” of Tehran’s support for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. 

“More than 200” Fath-360 short-range ballistic missiles arrived in a Russian Caspian Sea port this week, according to senior Ukrainian officials familiar with the matter.

The surface-to-surface missiles have a range of up to 120km and are likely to be used by Russia to strike infrastructure and northern cities close to the border, such as Kharkiv and Sumy, and troop positions and military targets along the frontline, including around the strategic eastern city of Pokrovsk, according to the Ukrainian officials. 

The officials said the delivery of the Iranian short-range missiles will allow Russia to deploy its long-range hypersonic Kinzhal missiles — some of the most sophisticated weapons in the Kremlin’s arsenal — to hit targets deeper inside Ukraine. The Kinzhals are more difficult to intercept, with only US-made Patriot air defence systems capable of shooting them down.

Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister and director of the Kyiv-based Centre for Defence Strategies, said the Iranian missiles pose a “huge threat”.

“They will be sent to destroy the Ukrainian energy system, most likely in towns and cities,” he said. “That most likely means more deaths of civilians all over the country.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported the missile shipment, citing US and European officials.

Russia has escalated its attacks launching hundreds of missiles and Iranian-made “Shahed” attack drones on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in recent months, destroying 9GW of power generation capacity — half of the electricity Ukraine needs in winter — and causing widespread blackouts.

An Iranian-made Russian drone crashed in eastern Latvia on Sunday, with preliminary reports suggesting an accidental entry from Belarus, said officials in Riga.

On Saturday, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said it was deeply concerned about reports that Iran had sent the missiles to Russia and called on Tehran “to refrain from delivering any types of weapons and military equipment to Russia.” It said confirmation of the delivery would have “devastating consequences for Ukrainian-Iranian relations”.

In exchange for its drones and missiles, Tehran has received greater security co-operation from Moscow and military technology, according to Ukrainian intelligence assessments.

“The deepening of military-technical co-operation between Russia and Iran poses serious security threats not only for Ukraine, but for the whole of Europe, the Middle East and the world,” said the foreign ministry in Kyiv.

“We call on the international community to increase pressure on Tehran and Moscow to protect international peace and security.”

Ukraine’s western backers have not confirmed the delivery of Iranian missiles. But Sean Savett, a spokesperson at the US National Security Council, said on Sunday that Washington was alarmed by the reports and reiterated that together with allies, it was “prepared to deliver significant consequences”.

A transfer of ballistic missiles to Russia would “represent a dramatic escalation in Iran’s support for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine”, said Savett, echoing comment by CIA director Bill Burns a day earlier at the Financial Times’ Weekend festival in London. “This partnership threatens European security and illustrates how Iran’s destabilising influence reaches beyond the Middle East.”

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Nasser Kanaani, dismissed the allegations of missile sales as “completely baseless”, claiming they were fabricated by western states for “political purposes”.

Speaking to state news agency IRNA on Sunday, he said “Iran-Russia military co-operation predates the Ukraine war and has no connection to the Ukraine crisis”, adding: “The Islamic republic has never been involved in this military conflict and supports a political resolution to end the crisis.”

Russian officials could not immediately be reached for comment. G7 leaders warned Iran in March that sanctions would be imposed if it sent ballistic missiles to Russia.

The missile delivery is likely to fuel fresh pleas by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for western partners to permit his forces to use long-range US Atacms, British Storm Shadow and French Scalp long-range missiles to strike targets inside Russian territory.

Zelenskyy made his latest request on Friday at a meeting with western defence ministers at Germany’s Ramstein air base, as he looks to increase pressure on Moscow to bring the 31-month war to an end.

Learn how this year’s table was compiled

Top 25 schools

Here are some quick facts about the top schools in the ranking. By Sam Stephens

Rank 1

St Gallen has returned to the top spot — the 13th time the Swiss school has been number one.

Rank 3

Insead is the highest new entrant, straight into third place, with a top rank for alumni international work mobility.

Rank 5

Shanghai’s Antai is the highest ranked school outside Europe, aided by top 10 positions in the value for money, alumni network and career services categories.

Rank 6=

All recent Master in Management alumni at ESCP were employed within three months of course completion, one of 14 schools to achieve this feat.

Rank 6=

London Business School’s most recent class had the highest percentage of international students, with 99 per cent from abroad.

Rank 11

Bocconi in Milan is top in the carbon footprint metric, thanks in part to the institution being carbon neutral since 2020.

Rank 13

China’s Tongji University School of Economics and Management’s programme offers the best value for money.

Rank 15

Stockholm School of Economics is second for international course experience, based on the number of alumni studying and/or working for a month overseas.

Rank 17

Barcelona’s Iese and St Gallen in Switzerland were rated joint top by their alumni for course satisfaction, scoring 9.75 out of 10.

Rank 21 and 23

Spain’s IE and France’s Iéseg were the only schools in the top 25 to report gender parity within faculty.

Rank 25

Alumni of Luiss saw the highest salary increase at 95 per cent since course completion.

Drug dealers, scammers and white nationalists openly conduct business and spread toxic speech on the platform, according to a Times analysis of more than 3.2 million Telegram messages.

Telegram has become a global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism and racist incitement, according to a four-month investigation by The New York Times that analyzed more than 3.2 million Telegram messages from over 16,000 channels. The company, which offers features that enable criminals, terrorists and grifters to organize at scale and to sidestep scrutiny from the authorities, has looked the other way as illegal and extremist activities have flourished openly on the app.

The degree to which Telegram has been inundated by such content has not been previously reported. The Times investigation found 1,500 channels operated by white supremacists who coordinate activities among almost one million people around the world. At least two dozen channels sold weapons. In at least 22 channels with more than 70,000 followers, MDMA, cocaine, heroin and other drugs were advertised for delivery to more than 20 countries.

Hamas, ISIS and other terror groups have thrived on Telegram, often amassing large audiences across dozens of channels. The Times analyzed more than 40 channels associated with Hamas, which showed that average viewership surged up to 10 times after the Oct. 7 attacks, garnering more than 400 million views in October.

Telegram is “the most popular place for ill-intentioned, violent actors to congregate,” said Rebecca Weiner, the deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism at the New York Police Department. “If you’re a bad guy, that’s where you will land.”

Operating like a stateless organization, Telegram has long behaved as if it were above the law — though that may be changing. Pavel Durov, the Russian-born founder of the platform, was arrested and charged in France last month for failure to cooperate with law enforcement and complicity in crimes committed on the service, including the distribution of child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and fraud.

In many democratic countries, patience with the app is wearing thin. The European Union is exploring new oversight of Telegram under the Digital Services Act, a law that forces large online platforms to police their services more aggressively, two people familiar with the plans said.

Telegram’s tolerance for toxic activities begins with Mr. Durov, 39, who runs the company with a devout belief that governments should not interfere in what people say or do online. This year, he wrote on his Telegram channel:

Telegram has benefited people in authoritarian countries who need ways to freely communicate, but the app has also contributed to real-world harm. Hateful discourse that spread on the platform has played a role in recent riots in Britain and arson at migrant housing centers in Ireland.

A disparate collective on Telegram known as Terrorgram, where neo-fascists share messages and videos encouraging violence, has been linked to attacks, including a shooting in 2022 at an L.G.B.T.Q. bar in Slovakia.

Even as Telegram approaches one billion users, it has prided itself on behaving differently from its tech peers. The company, based in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, operates like a start-up, with about 60 full-time employees. It has hired just a few hundred contractors to work as moderators, and it steadfastly ignores most requests for assistance from law enforcement agencies.

An email inbox used for inquiries from government agencies is rarely checked, former employees said. When a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill sought information from 15 internet platforms, only Telegram did not respond.

In contrast, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok have entire divisions dedicated to complying with law enforcement requests and thousands of moderators scouring their services for illicit and harmful material.

Only Apple and Google, which can expel Telegram from their app stores, have successfully pushed the platform to take down and restrict the spread of harmful material, said analysts, government officials and tech executives. Governments have sometimes turned to the tech giants for help getting Telegram to act.

Hours after The Times sent Telegram a detailed list of questions, Mr. Durov on Thursday posted his first comments to his 12 million-plus followers since his arrest. He said claims that Telegram was “some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue” and that the company removed “millions of harmful posts and channels everyday.”

He attributed the volume of illicit and harmful content to Telegram’s “growing pains,” adding that “that’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure that we significantly improve things in this regard.”

In a statement to The Times, Telegram said that “99.999 percent of our users” were lawful and that while there was “plenty of work to do,” the platform was making improvements to its features and moderation.

A Marketplace for Crime

In December 2022, Hayden Espinosa began serving a 33-month sentence in federal prison in Louisiana for buying and selling illegal firearms and weapon parts he made with 3-D printers. That did not stop his business.

Using cellphones that had been smuggled into prison, Mr. Espinosa continued his illicit trade on a Telegram channel, which was named after 3-D printing and the Second Amendment right to bear arms, according to an indictment in June by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg Jr.

One post in the channel’s “shop” offered a menu of prices for weapon parts, including ammunition clips and devices called auto sears, which empty a magazine with a single pull of the trigger. “DM for International Orders,” the post said.

Telegram combines the anonymity of the dark web with the ease-of-use of an online marketplace. It is easy to search and find channels selling guns, illicit narcotics, prescription drugs and fraudulent A.T.M. cards, called clone cards. Alongside photos and videos of available merchandise, dealers leave information on how to message them directly.

Often they act like salesmen, celebrating successful deliveries and touting discounted prices.

One reason Telegram has become a haven for such activity stems from its unique features, including “channels” and “supergroups,” which rivals like WhatsApp were slower to add.

Telegram began as a standard text messaging service similar to iMessage or WhatsApp, before it began evolving in 2014 by adding broadcasting features. These “channels” are now one of the platform’s best-known tools for sharing text, images, links and videos by news organizations, world leaders and government agencies.

Telegram then introduced “supergroups,” which harked back to an era of unruly AOL chat rooms. These groups attracted new users but also presented risks.

While WhatsApp kept group chat sizes in the hundreds and limited link sharing to blunt the spread of disinformation, Telegram did the opposite and steadily lifted the cap on group sizes. By 2019, a group administrator could run city-size chat groups with as many as 200,000 users.

Initially, this attracted new users interested in cryptocurrencies. In the crypto world, Telegram became a critical tool for talking about new digital coins and cultivating communities dedicated to, and often heavily invested in, particular currencies.

These tools also attracted a less savory group of users, including extremists, disinformation peddlers and sellers of illicit goods.

“I don’t want to paint with a broad brush,” said Mr. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, “but I think the combination of a number of things — the encryption, the ability to reach large numbers of people, the ability to set up subgroups and their posture toward law enforcement — creates an environment in which it’s not surprising that criminal activity is occurring.”

Nor has the platform dedicated significant resources to weed this activity out. As Telegram ballooned, its staff barely grew. Today, it has contractors and artificial intelligence tools to proactively monitor the public parts of Telegram, which does not include many groups or individual chats.

The company said it had a moderation process, which includes constantly reviewing content, fielding user complaints and publishing daily reports on child sexual abuse materials.

Even so, The Times found at least 50 channels openly selling contraband, including guns, drugs and fraudulent debit cards. One channel that evoked the Wild West with its name called successful deliveries “touchdowns,” a popular slang in such groups.

Telegram’s features — coupled with its refusal to cooperate with the police — have stymied criminal investigations, increasingly frustrating the authorities. The company can gain access to messages unless users select a secret chat option with end-to-end encryption, according to two former employees. On at least two occasions, the company has retrieved the messages of former employees, one person said.

But the company, which denied that employees had access to user data, has refused to share information with governments. France charged Mr. Durov with complicity in trafficking child sexual imagery, among other crimes, because of what the chief prosecutor called “an almost total lack of response” to requests for assistance.

Svenja Meininghaus, a state prosecutor focused on illegal hate speech in Germany, said other major social media platforms had developed practices for working with law enforcement. But “we don’t get any cooperation from Telegram at all,” she said, adding, “I can’t recall one case.”

Telegram said it was “now working hard to make sure we can process legitimate requests from democratic countries while still defending the rights of our users elsewhere.”

Mr. Espinosa’s gun market on Telegram might never have been uncovered except that one of its members was Payton Gendron, who massacred 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo in 2022.

Investigators scouring his life online for motives for the shooting discovered the channel, which also featured racist and extremist views he had shared.

Having stumbled across the channel’s illicit trade in components of untraceable “ghost guns,” an undercover police officer in New York City reached out to Mr. Espinosa, 24, and bought a handgun, an assault rifle and two silencers from him in August 2023, according to the indictment. A lawyer for Mr. Espinosa with the Legal Aid Society could not be reached for comment.

Live on Telegram, a Terrorist Attack

When Hamas attacked Israel on the morning of Oct. 7, it announced the assault on Telegram.

Within two and a half hours of the first incursions, Hamas began posting grisly videos of the carnage. In the first 72 hours of the war, channels affiliated with the group posted nearly 700 times, receiving over 54 million views, according to The Times’s analysis.

Telegram became so useful to Hamas that the group turned to the platform more than it did an official Hamas app, the Al-Qassam Brigades Android app, which it had built to communicate with supporters. Content posted to both platforms consistently saw 100 times more reach on Telegram, The Times found.

Hamas capitalized on other Telegram features. After Oct. 7, members of its groups and other supporters easily downloaded videos of the violence and posted them to other platforms with little interference. The effect was a surge of grisly clips across the internet.

After Apple and Google demanded some moderation, Telegram relented — but only a little. In late October, the company restricted access to some Hamas-related content on copies of its app distributed through the official Apple and Google app stores. It also sent some users instructions on how to download another version of the app that did not have the content removed.

“If you wish to continue reading those channels, you can do so using the direct version of Telegram for Android which has the minimum possible restrictions,” said a message sent from an official Telegram account that was reviewed by The Times. It included a link to the unfiltered version of the app.

In contrast, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube blocked accounts linked to Hamas, as well as posts that were overtly sympathetic to its cause.

In an Oct. 13 post, Mr. Durov defended the availability of Hamas-related content. In one instance, he noted, Hamas had used Telegram to alert Israelis of a coming attack.

This month, Hamas used Telegram to release videos of hostages in Gaza who were later killed. One of the videos, which was viewed more than 100,000 times, included English, Arabic and Hebrew subtitles to maximize its audience.

Basem Naim, a Hamas spokesman, declined to comment. After being contacted by The Times, Telegram blocked access to several Hamas channels on Friday.

White Nationalists Unite

Mr. Durov, who was born in 1984 in the Soviet Union, became known as Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg after he founded VKontakte, a social network similar to Facebook, in 2006.

As VKontakte took off, Mr. Durov said the Kremlin pressured him to remove content and report users, wary of the network’s power to organize anti-government sentiment. That inspired him to start Telegram as a method of keeping communications safe from the Kremlin’s prying eyes. The app was released in 2013.

In 2014, Mr. Durov left Russia. Since then he has lived itinerantly, working from Berlin, San Francisco, London and elsewhere before landing in Dubai. Worth an estimated $9 billion, he has become a sort of free speech folk hero.

So on Aug. 24, as news of Mr. Durov’s arrest in France ricocheted around the world, the events were debated by a group nearly 5,000 miles away in Montana.

They were members of a local Telegram channel for White Lives Matter, a disparate white nationalist group that adopted the name from the movement formed in 2013 to protest police killings of Black people.

The white nationalist group is inextricably linked to Telegram for communication, recruitment and coordination. On the platform, there are nearly 50 chapters of the movement around the world, in places like Florida, Alabama, New York, Italy, Russia, Germany and the Czech Republic. They share anti-immigration views and commentary and organize protests or other actions, like unfurling racist banners in public spaces, The Times found.

“Join our team, and lets make something good happen for a change!” read a recent post in the Montana channel.

The chapters, which typically have a few hundred members, have been linked to violence. One Ohio member firebombed a church that hosted a drag event in Alliance, Ohio, last year, according to court documents.

The movement takes advantage of Telegram’s features. Known as a hub and spoke model, an international channel with more than 21,000 members amplifies broader messages while smaller local groups focus on organizing and recruiting.

Tinier private channels are where activities, sometimes illegal, are planned, experts in extremist movements said. The result was a feedback loop where local actions, such as a vandalism campaign, were amplified globally, which in turn inspired more action elsewhere.

Other far-right nationalist groups have also sprouted on Telegram. In a channel for the American far-right extremist group Proud Boys, acts of political intimidation were planned, including demonstrations outside election centers in 2022 and a campaign this year to steal and damage rainbow L.G.B.T.Q. flags during Pride Month. In Ireland, anti-immigration activists use Telegram to share the locations of immigration centers, some of which were later targeted by arsonists.

Some extremist groups have grown more cautious as scrutiny of Telegram has intensified. Messages pinned to local channels instruct new members on how to stay anonymous.

“Remember: This is a public channel, and not everyone who views it is friendly to people who support WLM,” read a post on one channel. “Write and converse accordingly.”

A new member to one chat was instructed by a group administrator to “please setup a non personal profile picture.” To be invited into more private chats, new recruits must first interact with an automated bot, which connects them with a local chapter after vetting their intentions and background.

“We are here simply because we like what Telegram stands for, uncensored freedom of speech,” an administrator of the channel wrote in response to questions. “Condemning ‘It’s okay to be white’ as hate speech is why we are here and will continue to speak and fight against the anti-white narrative.”

Ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, security researchers are monitoring Telegram for threats of violence. In many public channels, activists are already making claims of voter fraud, with calls to be prepared to act, said Arie Perliger, a criminology professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, whose research is partly funded by the National Institute of Justice, a research agency of the Department of Justice.

If former President Donald J. Trump loses in November, Mr. Perliger said, “we need to understand Telegram will probably be a substantial infrastructure for extremists who want to do something about it.”

Can Telegram Be Brought to Heel?

Several times a year, employees at Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters send notes to Telegram demanding it remove material that has been flagged as illegal or otherwise harmful.

Apple explains that under its guidelines, the app must have policies to filter out objectionable content and block abusive users, said three people with knowledge of the exchanges who declined to be identified discussing private talks.

Telegram often voices its objections, they said, but it almost always bends to Apple’s demands. Where governments have failed to get the app to act — or even respond — Apple and Google have had some success by using the threat of kicking the service out of their app stores.

With Telegram, the companies are trying to balance the app’s potential harms against its beneficial role as a private communications tool and a critical piece of digital infrastructure in countries like Ukraine and Russia. They must also consider differing rules about what is classified as illegal speech around the world.

In practice, the most effective way to get Telegram to act is a sort of whisper-down-the-lane approach in which users, advocacy groups, news coverage and sometimes governments draw Apple’s and Google’s attention to the app’s harmful and illegal content. The tech giants in turn notify Telegram to respond.

In addition to Apple’s regular messages to address such content, Google sends requests to Telegram almost weekly, four people with knowledge of the interactions said. Telegram responds quickly when alerted to clearly illegal material like child sexual abuse content, they said, but it is more resistant to demands to address speech-related content that is less clearly unlawful.

Telegram said it abided by Apple’s and Google’s moderation rules. Google and Apple declined to comment on Telegram and said their rules were detailed in developer guidelines.

Mr. Durov has grown increasingly antagonistic toward the tech giants. He has called Apple a “trillion-dollar monopoly” and chided the company in April for blocking Telegram on its China app store, writing that “prioritizing profits over freedom for users is not a good long-term strategy.”

“The largest pressure toward Telegram is not coming from governments, it’s coming from Apple and Google,” Mr. Durov said in an interview this year with Tucker Carlson.

Like every big tech company these days, Meta has its own flagship generative AI model, called Llama. Llama is somewhat unique among major models in that it’s “open,” meaning developers can download and use it however they please (with certain limitations). That’s in contrast to models like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPT-4o (which powers ChatGPT) and Google’s Gemini, which can only be accessed via APIs.

In the interest of giving developers choice, however, Meta has also partnered with vendors including AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to make cloud-hosted versions of Llama available. In addition, the company has released tools designed to make it easier to fine-tune and customize the model.

Here’s everything you need to know about Llama, from its capabilities and editions to where you can use it. We’ll keep this post updated as Meta releases upgrades and introduces new dev tools to support the model’s use.

Llama is a family of models — not just one:

The latest versions are Llama 3.1 8B, Llama 3.1 70B and Llama 3.1 405B, which was released in July 2024. They’re trained on web pages in a variety of languages, public code and files on the web, as well as synthetic data (i.e. data generated by other AI models).

Llama 3.1 8B and Llama 3.1 70B are small, compact models meant to run on devices ranging from laptops to servers. Llama 3.1 405B, on the other hand, is a large-scale model requiring (absent some modifications) data center hardware. Llama 3.1 8B and Llama 3.1 70B are less capable than Llama 3.1 405B, but faster. They’re “distilled” versions of 405B, in point of fact, optimized for low storage overhead and latency.

All the Llama models have 128,000-token context windows. (In data science, tokens are subdivided bits of raw data, like the syllables “fan,” “tas” and “tic” in the word “fantastic.”) A model’s context, or context window, refers to input data (e.g. text) that the model considers before generating output (e.g. additional text). Long context can prevent models from “forgetting” the content of recent docs and data, and from veering off topic and extrapolating wrongly.

Those 128,000 tokens translate to around 100,000 words or 300 pages, which for reference is around the length of “Wuthering Heights,” “Gulliver’s Travels” and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”

Like other generative AI models, Llama can perform a range of different assistive tasks, like coding and answering basic math questions, as well as summarizing documents in eight languages (English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish and Thai). Most text-based workloads — think analyzing files like PDFs and spreadsheets — are within its purview; none of the Llama models can process or generate images, although that may change in the near future.

All the latest Llama models can be configured to leverage third-party apps, tools and APIs to complete tasks. They’re trained out of the box to use Brave Search to answer questions about recent events, the Wolfram Alpha API for math- and science-related queries and a Python interpreter for validating code. In addition, Meta says the Llama 3.1 models can use certain tools they haven’t seen before (but whether they can reliably use those tools is another matter).

If you’re looking to simply chat with Llama, it’s powering the Meta AI chatbot experience on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus and Meta.ai.

Developers building with Llama can download, use or fine-tune the model across most of the popular cloud platforms. Meta claims it has over 25 partners hosting Llama, including Nvidia, Databricks, Groq, Dell and Snowflake.

Some of these partners have built additional tools and services on top of Llama, including tools that let the models reference proprietary data and enable them to run at lower latencies.

Meta suggests using its smaller models, Llama 8B and Llama 70B, for general-purpose applications like powering chatbots and generating code. Llama 405B, the company says, is better reserved for model distillation — the process of transferring knowledge from a large model to a smaller, more efficient model — and generating synthetic data to train (or fine-tune) alternative models.

Importantly, the Llama license constrains how developers can deploy the model: App developers with more than 700 million monthly users must request a special license from Meta that the company will grant on its discretion.

Alongside Llama, Meta provides tools intended to make the model “safer” to use:

Llama Guard tries to detect potentially problematic content either fed into — or generated — by a Llama model, including content relating to criminal activity, child exploitation, copyright violations, hate, self-harm and sexual abuse. Developers can customize the categories of blocked content, and apply the blocks to all the languages Llama supports out of the box.

Like Llama Guard, Prompt Guard can block text intended for Llama, but only text meant to “attack” the model and get it to behave in undesirable ways. Meta claims that Llama Guard can defend against explicitly malicious prompts (i.e. jailbreaks that attempt to get around Llama’s built-in safety filters) in addition to prompts that contain “injected inputs.”

As for CyberSecEval, it’s less a tool than a collection of benchmarks to measure model security. CyberSecEval can assess the risk a Llama model poses (at least according to Meta’s criteria) to app developers and end users in areas like “automated social engineering” and “scaling offensive cyber operations.”

Llama comes with certain risks and limitations, like all generative AI models.

For instance, it’s unclear whether Meta trained Llama on copyrighted content. If it did, users might be liable for infringement if they end up unwittingly using a copyrighted snippet that the model regurgitated.

Meta at one point used copyrighted e-books for AI training despite its own lawyers’ warnings, according to recent reporting by Reuters. The company controversially trains its AI on Instagram and Facebook posts, photos and captions, and makes it difficult for users to opt out. What’s more, Meta, along with OpenAI, is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit brought by authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, over the companies’ alleged unauthorized use of copyrighted data for model training.

Programming is another area where it’s wise to tread lightly when using Llama. That’s because Llama might — like its generative AI counterparts — produce buggy or insecure code.

As always, it’s best to have a human expert review any AI-generated code before incorporating it into a service or software.

After weeks in political limbo, France now has a new prime minister, former EU’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier. But parliament remains bitterly divided, generating uncertainty for many economic sectors — including the country’s dynamic startup ecosystem, which had so far benefited from public support.

La French Tech isn’t just a term referring to France’s 25,000 startups; it is also an initiative supported by a public administration, the French Tech Mission, whose director, Clara Chappaz, is departing this month as her three-year contract ends, she told Les Échos. The timing is coincidental, but also noteworthy. Her replacement, she told TechCrunch in late August, should hopefully be someone who is “not afraid of change” and sees it as an opportunity.

The role is undoubtedly unique. It’s attached to the Ministry of the Economy and Finance, but with a lean team working out of Station F and with a big mission: to support the structuring and growth of the French startup ecosystem of startups, in France and abroad. It requires someone who is equally able to talk to public officials, politicians, big companies and journalists.

It is now too late to apply, but seeing how it has been described as a “dream job,” there should be enough candidates on the ranks; Chappaz, who won’t be part of the jury, said when we talked in August that she was taking several calls a day from prospective candidates. She likely told them pretty much the same as she told TechCrunch and her LinkedIn followers: That France is “incredibly lucky” to have its French Tech Mission and that her experience at its helm was “exceptional.”

But what happened in the past isn’t indicative of the future, and whoever succeeds Chappaz will operate in a scenario that’s very different from when she took charge in 2021. That’s because La French Tech itself has changed during those years, pushing new priorities for the French Tech Mission.

Chappaz experienced her fair share of change over the last three years, too, and not only because there were three different secretaries of state for digital affairs over that same period; that’s common in a lot of public administrations. The main change had to do with tech itself, and with the macro context: 2024 is quite different from 2021.

Just like elsewhere, French startups went through the ebbs and flows of the pandemic and the fundraising hype that ensued, only to come back to earth a few months later. Geopolitical unrest followed, and alongside came the realization that countries needed industrial champions to rely on.

For the French Tech Mission, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2023, this meant aligning with the strategic France 2030 agenda. There came French Tech 2030, with less focus on unicorns, and more on deep tech spinouts and economic impact. Not that it was responsible for the former: President Emmanuel Macron was the one who set out “25 French unicorns” as a goal to reach by 2025. (After reaching that milestone in 2022, he went on to call for 100 unicorns by 2030.)

That France now has scaleups like BlaBlaCar and Doctolib is no small feat, and telling the world certainly did favors to its image. But 10 years after the “unicorn” moniker was coined, global tech has moved on. It was time for France to acknowledge that its startups have changed, too, with the rise of companies like Mistral AI and Pasqal (and the fall of others, like Luko.)

The France Digitale association, which represents startups and investors from the French digital ecosystem, has been well placed to witness this evolution among its members since its creation in 2012. “There are [now] startups in all sectors, in manufacturing, in healthcare, which are also sectors that I think are strategic priorities for the competitiveness of France and for the sovereignty of France and Europe,” its CEO Maya Noël told TechCrunch.

In line with this evolution, Nöel said it might be interesting for Chappaz’s replacement to come from one of these strategic sectors, but that’s no jab at her background (Chappaz joined from Vestiaire Collective, a second-hand fashion marketplace) or at her predecessors. From our conversation with Noël, it transpired that the two structures are “fairly aligned” and have been in “constant dialogue.”

Several initiatives adopted under Chappaz’s leadership reflect what the sector has been lobbying for. One example is “Je Choisis La French Tech,” an initiative that saw 300 companies and 80 institutional players commit to helping double the number of public contracts and purchases from startups. “We have been asking for this for 10 years,” Noël said.

If anything, France Digitale wished things could go faster, for instance on the hot topic of exits (or dearth thereof). Someone with first-hand knowledge of scaleups and international expansion could add value at its helm, but a new director with a public service background might be able to pull strings on the administration side if La French Tech were to lack governmental support, Noël said.

La French Tech Mission has arguments that could play well with different sides of the political support: that startups are directly and indirectly responsible for 1.1 million jobs, and for helping reindustrialize France. Many people also committed to the Parity Pact promoted by Chappaz and her team to foster gender equality in the tech industry. Her successor will have to play these cards well, and we wish them “bonne chance.” That also goes for Chappaz, too, who is expecting her second child and says she hasn’t decided yet what she will do next, but that it’ll have to do with tech innovation.

ENTRETIEN - Selon l’ex-gouverneur de la Banque de France, il est possible de réduire la dette sans toucher aux dépenses sociales. Il appelle à un sursaut pour en finir avec les politiques du déni et de la facilité monétaire et budgétaire.

Alors que le nouveau gouvernement va devoir boucler le budget 2025 de l’État dans les deux semaines qui viennent, le sage de la finance Jacques de Larosière, 94 ans, lance une nouvelle fois un cri d’alarme sur les finances calamiteuses de la France. Après En finir avec le règne de l’illusion financière, l’ex-directeur général du Fonds monétaire international, membre de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques, publie Le déclin français est-il réversible? Renverser la table et sortir de la servitude, aux Éditions Odile Jacob. De façon très pédagogique, l’auteur décrypte le mythe de l’argent facile et propose surtout des pistes concrètes pour réduire l’endettement public élevé afin de retrouver des marges de manœuvre pour diriger le pays.

LE FIGARO. - Quels sont les signes du déclin français?

Jacques de LAROSIÈRE. - J’en citerai quatre. Le premier est notre perte de compétitivité économique. En près de trente ans, notre capacité industrielle a fondu d’à peu près 30 % tandis que celle de nos voisins allemands se maintenait. La raison? Le choix de la France pour une politique de la stimulation continue de la demande intérieure et non pas de l’investissement productif. Il en est résulté que nous fabriquons surtout des produits bas de gamme qui n’ont pu résister, lors de l’ouverture des frontières, à la concurrence des pays à faibles coûts de main-d’œuvre. Notre industrie française s’est délocalisée massivement à l’étranger. Et ceci, de façon beaucoup plus prononcée qu’en Allemagne, où les syndicats ont souvent accepté de réduire leurs salaires pour renforcer les entreprises en difficulté.

Le second symptôme est la permanence et l’importance depuis vingt ans du déficit de la balance commerciale, liées à la hausse de produits importés en raison du phénomène précédent.

Troisième indice, auquel j’accorde beaucoup d’importance, c’est l’éducation. Les statistiques de l’OCDE montrent le déclin, de manière extrêmement dangereuse, de notre système éducatif depuis une vingtaine d’années. Par rapport à la France, l’Allemagne a des professeurs mieux rémunérés et plus nombreux.

Enfin, quatrième manifestation: l’état déplorable de nos finances publiques. La dette publique française a plus que doublé depuis vingt ans, passant de 50 % de la production nationale (PIB) à 112 % aujourd’hui. Si elle est voisine de celle de l’Italie ou de la Belgique, elle est près du double de celle de l’Allemagne (près de 60 %). N’oublions pas que le budget, c’est d’une certaine manière la synthèse stratégique d’une nation.

Comment en est-on arrivé là?

La doxa pensait, dans une période encore récente de très bas taux d’intérêt liée à la politique de la Banque centrale européenne, qu’emprunter favoriserait la croissance. État, comme entreprises privées, s’en sont ainsi donné à cœur joie. Le problème est que l’on ne peut emprunter indéfiniment parce que le montant de la dette, par définition, s’accroît. Aujourd’hui, les taux d’intérêt sont plus hauts qu’au temps de l’argent facile. Entre le niveau élevé de l’endettement public, qui pourrait dépasser à l’avenir 120 %, et la hausse ces dernières années des taux d’intérêt, le coût de la charge de la dette est déjà supérieur au budget de la Défense nationale!

Cette politique a comme conséquence que l’on s’est détourné de l’investissement productif au profit de placements spéculatifs dans l’immobilier et en Bourse. La hausse des bilans de la nation est due davantage à l’augmentation des valorisations du capital qu’à la valeur réelle de l’économie. C’est ce que Keynes décrivait sous le vocable de la «trappe à liquidité»: étant donné que la rémunération de l’épargne est nulle, les ménages privilégient les placements à court terme aux investissements productifs et ceux plus risqués à long terme, comme les projets industriels.

Résultat: aujourd’hui, la France souffre d’une économie qui s’affaisse et de comptes publics à vau-l’eau.

Faut-il, comme certains, imputer cette situation à l’Europe, l’entrée de la France dans la zone euro en 2002 empêchant toute dévaluation?

Certainement pas. Ce sont justement les dévaluations répétées du passé du franc qui ont appauvri le pays et ont été le résultat de politique inflationniste. Il est temps que les dépenses de consommation, de fait subventionnées, laissent la place à l’augmentation de crédits pour la recherche, l’Éducation nationale…

L’Europe est toutefois fautive. Elle n’a pas été capable de faire respecter le plafond de la dette fixé à 60 % du PIB de la part des pays indisciplinés, comme la France et même l’Allemagne en 2003. Depuis plus de vingt ans, pas une seule fois la règle n’a été honorée par l’ensemble des États membres. Avec un commissaire par pays, la Commission européenne est devenue une collection de représentants nationaux, soucieux de promouvoir la politique de son pays, plus qu’un exécutif véritable.

Réduire les dépenses publiques est pour vous une mission possible…

Bien sûr. Je crois réaliste de trouver 200 milliards d’économies sur une période de dix ans. Et cela, j’insiste particulièrement face aux inepties entendues, sans toucher aux dépenses sociales et sans provoquer une déflagration politique. Ces économies passent par le maintien de l’allongement - modéré - de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite de 62 à 64 ans décidé en 2023, une révision de notre «millefeuille territorial», une réduction du coût exorbitant de l’apprentissage (12 milliards d’euros) via une participation des entreprises. Elles nécessitent, surtout, de s’attaquer au sureffectif de la fonction publique. Rappelons que la France compte 85 fonctionnaires pour 1000 habitants, contre 56 en Allemagne. Une réduction graduelle des effectifs, via le non-remplacement de tous les départs à la retraite, permettrait de réduire le surcoût estimé à 75 milliards d’euros.

Comment préconiser le maintien de la réforme de la retraite voulue par Emmanuel Macron quand les Français ne cessent de la contester?

Ce n’est pas parce que les gens sont prêts à descendre dans la rue que les recommandations des experts ne sont pas valables. N’oublions pas que l’espérance de vie croît et que la moyenne européenne de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite est de 67 ans. L’idée de mon livre est d’avoir une vue à long terme et d’insister sur la nécessité pour la France de restaurer sa capacité à produire et ce que j’appelle sa «compétitivité budgétaire européenne».

Oui, les Français ne sont pas friands de réformes, mais on leur a seriné pendant des années que l’argent était facile. Et, encore récemment, avec le fameux «quoi qu’il en coûte». Je demande juste aux hommes politiques de raisonner juste. Sans en appeler à un de Gaulle, qui avait compris qu’une nation ne tient pas debout sans un budget raisonnable, cela ne doit pas être difficile à trouver.

Quelles sont, selon vous, les mesures politiques de ces dernières années qui ont été les plus néfastes aux finances publiques?

J’évoquerai l’abaissement de l’âge de la retraite de 65 à 60 ans ainsi que la nationalisation - détricotée à grands frais par la suite - d’une grande partie de l’économie par François Mitterrand. Si je reconnais à Emmanuel Macron l’augmentation de l’âge de la retraite, comme l’avait déjà fait Nicolas Sarkozy avant lui, et la baisse de la pression fiscale sur le capital, je regrette la suppression de la taxe d’habitation, du coup financée par l’État, et, surtout, l’absence totale de mesures pour réduire les dépenses publiques.

À Michel Barnier, qui vient d’être nommé premier ministre, quelle première recommandation feriez-vous?

Puisque Michel Barnier juge important de réduire la dette publique, je recommanderais deux choses. Premièrement, d’arrêter de faire croire aux Français que tout peut se régler par de l’endettement supplémentaire. Deuxièmement, je me tournerais vers la Cour des comptes pour lui demander une analyse systématique de tous les budgets publics. Et de s’interroger, comme le font les pays scandinaves, si les budgets doivent être automatiquement reportés d’une année sur l’autre.

Il est très regrettable que les rapports, perspicaces, de la Cour des comptes ne soient pas suivis par les politiques. Si ses recommandations avaient été entendues, sans doute la France se porterait-elle mieux.

Crypto Plan Creates Potential Conflicts for Trump

Digital-currency efforts bring campaign closer to industry that is spending to limit regulations

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been stepping up his efforts to court the money and votes of the crypto industry. His latest attempt: a digital-currency project called World Liberty Financial.

While details about the project are scant, the team behind it said this week that it will focus on “spreading U.S.-pegged stablecoins around the world” and ensuring the dominance of the U.S. dollar.

Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency that aims to maintain a 1:1 exchange ratio with government-issued currencies such as the U.S. dollar. The most popular stablecoin is tether, which traders have widely used to stash their cash, invest in other tokens and swap for traditional currencies. It has also been heavily used for illicit activities, including terrorism financing and drug trafficking.

Trump and his children’s potential involvement in a digital currency would create a new swath of conflicts of interest for the former president if he is re-elected in November. It would raise concerns over whether Trump might be inclined to push crypto-friendly regulations that benefit his own business—or whether businesses seeking to influence Washington would be inclined to buy Trump’s financial products.

Running a digital currency pegged to the dollar would create even knottier problems. While the president doesn’t control the value of the dollar, actions such as running budget deficits could affect its value.

During Trump’s first presidency, his business interests caused repeated concerns among government ethics experts. Foreign dignitaries, lobbyists and political groups that have interests in Washington opted to stay at Trump hotels or otherwise spend money at Trump businesses. That created the possibility they were trying to purchase influence with the president.

Presidents are excluded from federal conflict-of-interest rules, and critics during Trump’s first presidency found few lines of recourse when it came to the millions of dollars spent at Trump’s hotels during that time.

It isn’t the first time the former president has promoted products while on the campaign trail: Trump has also sold $399 gold sneakers and $59.99 bibles during his 2024 presidential campaign. Trump also launched crypto’s version of trading cards, called nonfungible tokens.

Trump and his two elder sons have been teasing about the so-called DeFi project on social media for weeks. DeFi stands for decentralized finance, an umbrella term that refers to financial services such as borrowing, lending and trading automated by software and without a human intermediary.

DeFi users borrow and lend to each other without a middleman such as a bank, with terms written directly into the software code. Crypto enthusiasts have long touted it as a way to democratize finance and improve financial inclusion.

“For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites. It’s time we take a stand—together,” Trump said in a recent post on his social-media platform Truth Social. The post included a link to the Telegram channel for the project.

The cryptocurrency sector is hoping to make headway in Washington if Trump is re-elected. Cryptocurrency interests have poured nearly $170 million into PACs that have been giving generously to pro-crypto candidates, making cryptocurrency one of the biggest industries spending on the 2024 election cycle.

The promotion of Trump’s crypto effort has attracted scammers who have tried to trick Trump followers by creating fake ads that offer tokens claiming to be associated with the project. Hackers targeted the X accounts of Trump’s daughter and daughter-in-law late Tuesday to promote a fake token claiming to be associated with the official project. The posts were deleted soon after.

The Trump family’s foray into DeFi adds to the crypto agenda he laid out at the annual Bitcoin Conference in July. The former president made a series of promises to the crypto industry, including the creation of a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” and the establishment of a bitcoin and crypto presidential advisory council. In his Thursday speech at the Economic Club of New York, Trump reaffirmed his desire to make America the “world capital for crypto and bitcoin.”

Trump hasn’t always liked crypto, calling it a “scam against the dollar” just a few years ago. His position shifted by 2022, when he saw an opportunity to make money off NFTs.

Greece cracks down on excessive tourism

Curbs on short-term rentals and cruise ship traffic could damage crucial sector, warns hospitality industry

Greece has said it will crack down on short-term holiday rentals and cruise ship traffic as part of a set of measures to curb excessive tourism in the Mediterranean country.

But industry leaders warned the restrictions could harm a crucial economic sector at a time when Greece is on track to report a record number of visitors for the year.

“Tourism supports the economy with resources and jobs, but it must also pay its special share of social returns,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in announcing the measures late on Saturday at a trade fair in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-biggest city.

Concerns have grown in Mediterranean countries such as Spain, Italy and Greece about the damage to local communities and the environment caused by surging visitor numbers and light regulation.

But tourism minister Olga Kefalogianni told the Financial Times: “There is no overtourism in Greece. What we’re seeing is overconcentration in specific areas during peak periods.”

Kefalogianni said the country must now look to balance tourism-fuelled growth while protecting its cultural and natural heritage and ensuring local wellbeing.

Economists estimate that tourism contributes more than 25 per cent to Greek gross domestic product, and Mitsotakis insisted it would continue to play a driving role in the country’s economy.

“It is very dangerous to present Greece as a place that is not welcoming to tourists,” he said on Sunday.

Mitsotakis announced the introduction of a fee of up to €20 for cruise ship passengers to the most popular islands such as Santorini and Mykonos. During the summer months multiple ships, some carrying thousands of visitors, dock every day at the most popular destinations.

George Koubenas, chair of Greece’s Union of Cruise Ship Owners, said the move unfairly targeted cruise ship passengers. “Cruise visitors don’t use local infrastructure like water and electricity to the same extent as other tourists,” Koubenas said, suggesting that a flat fee for all tourists, like that levied in Italian cities such as Venice, would be fairer.

Koubenas suggested that local communities should set clear limits on arrivals, with a well-defined allocation system for cruise ships to manage flows at small island ports.

Following similar limits imposed in Spain, Greece is also taking steps to regulate short-term rentals via online platforms such as Airbnb. Mitsotakis announced a one-year ban on new short-term rentals in three areas of Athens. Tourists often start or finish their holiday in the historic Greek capital before moving on to an island destination.

Andreas Chiou, president of the Greek Property Managers Association, said the ban was driven by pressure from hotel owners who viewed short-term rentals as a competitive threat. “There is no oversaturation of the market due to short-term leases,” he said.

He also criticised another new measure incentivising property owners to switch to long-term rentals that includes a three-year exemption.

“How can property owners, who renovated their homes for short-term rentals, make a profit on long-term leases?” Chiou asked, warning that owners could stop using official platforms to promote their properties, as has happened in cities such as New York.

A report by Grant Thornton for Greece’s Chamber of Hotels showed holiday rentals increased 28 per cent between 2019 and 2023, with available properties doubling in that period. Hotel bed availability, by contrast, increased just 3.5 per cent. Chiou said short-term rentals accounted for only 2 per cent of the overall rental market in Athens, citing his own association’s data.

Mitsotakis also announced that a climate crisis tax would be levied on hotel stays and short-term rentals from April to October, with revenues directed towards improving infrastructure in tourist areas.

“A significant portion of the revenue will go back to local communities, allowing them to better prepare for the burden they face each summer,” Mitsotakis said.

Italy recently proposed increasing tourist taxes to promote responsible travel. Its new proposals could see tourists pay a fee of up to €25 a night for luxury accommodation.

Yiannis Paraschis, president of the Greek Tourism Confederation, said imposing fees could make Greece less competitive as its tourism industry is still recovering from the economic crisis a decade ago and the coronavirus pandemic.

“We must be more cautious than our Mediterranean rivals,” Paraschis warned. “In Greece, tourism is vital to our economy in a way it isn’t for other countries.”

In 2023, the country welcomed a record 36.1mn visitors, and in the first half of 2024, tourist arrivals surged by 16 per cent to 11.6mn, according to the Bank of Greece, putting it on course for a record number of visitors this year.