Irina Miroshnichenko, a popular actress in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s, has died in a Moscow hospital, local media reported, citing her friends and colleagues on August 3.
A good default font should stand the test of time for decades, if not a literal lifetime. — Yes, generally speaking this is true. But we are talking about computer fonts designed mainly for display work. What worked well on computer displays from 20 or 30 years ago may not work as well on current displays, especially considering just how much their technology has evolved over the past three decades. What once was the entire screen of a Macintosh computer, it’s now as big as a postage stamp on the much bigger, much denser displays we use today. I don’t think Microsoft is “chasing fleeting fashion rather than timeless style”. They have realised that Calibri, while still being a nice font for its intended purpose, may not be the optimal choice for current displays. For me, it makes sense that, as technology evolves, certain elements that go with it have to evolve as well.
The biggest way you can participate in the social web is to start a personal website! Write about what interests you. On this blog, I have interviewed coffee professionals around the UK, written about moments that have brought me joy, and shared my thoughts on the web. The only limit is your creativity. And indeed you can design your site as you want, too! Make it yours.
Personal websites are by no means islands. With tools like social readers (of which RSS readers are a part), you can follow your favourite websites. On the average day, I see commentary on news stories from a writer whose work I appreciate, posts about coffee, random Tweet-length musings from other people, and more. I can even like and comment on posts! You can share your posts with other people on social media, too! Join the IndieWeb and tell us you made a website!
Ever since I did a research project on Smalltalk and HyperCard, I’ve been trying to figure out what my interests are when it comes to computing. It seems like there are a number of threads, but I think there are parallels. Here are some of the main threads: [...]
Nearly 20,000 Angelenos live in RVs, vans, or cars, a 55 percent increase over when the count first started, in 2016. As the housing shortage deepens, thousands more will likely be forced into this lifestyle. Many of these people do not have the mental-health or substance-abuse issues eagerly trotted out to dismiss the homelessness crisis. A significant minority have jobs—they’re people who stock shelves or install drywall but simply can’t afford a home.
Like most Angelenos, I was repulsed by the homelessness crisis, vehicular or otherwise. Early in the summer of 2021, I temporarily joined the 20,000. Amid COVID-19 lockdowns, I was paying half of my income for a bedroom in a shared student apartment furnished like a doctor's office waiting room. My lease was set to expire, and I had to travel for work, anyway. Moving into my Prius seemed like the best bad option.
The students have said the CHS library is not only a collection of history books, but also acts as a documentation centre. The library is known to have around 18,000 books, hundreds of PhD theses and journals as part of its collection. "Books preserved in the library are as old as 150 years. It is an asset for the future generation of scholars," the statement added. The students urged "the academic community to show solidarity in the fight against the appropriation of the CHS library".
They have also claimed that this is not an isolated event, and in the past, too, the university has closed down several libraries and reading rooms. "The library of School of Languages has been locked out since 2019 and an attempt to close the reading room in School of International Studies has also been made in the past," the statement pointed out.
Apple has forecast a sales slump will continue into the current quarter, as the tech giant makes a massive investment in artificial intelligence research and development.
Apple shares dropped about 2 per cent after the company predicted what could be the fourth quarter in a row of declining sales. Weaker than expected sales of Apple’s most famous device, the iPhone, underwhelmed investors. Executives said iPhone sales would improve in the fourth quarter, but did not say how much.
The most collectible items in the realm of vintage computers often weren’t the most popular of their era. Quite the opposite, in fact. Generally the more desireable systems were market failures when they first launched, and are now sought out because of a newly-appreciated quirk or simply because the fact that they weren’t widely accepted means there’s fewer of them. One of the retro computers falling into this category is the Apple III, which had fundamental hardware issues upon launch leading to a large recall and its overall commercial failure. [Ted] is trying to bring one of these devices back to life, though, by slowing its clock speed down to a crawl.
On the “hack/not-a-hack” scale, a 3D printed bracket for aluminum extrusions is — well, a little boring. Such connectors are nothing you couldn’t buy, and even if you insisted on printing them instead, Printables and Thingiverse are full of ready-to-use designs. So why would you waste your precious time and effort rolling your own?
While most photographers have moved on to digital cameras with their numerous benefits, there are a few artists out there still taking pictures with film. While film is among the more well-known analog photographic methods available, there are chemically simpler ways of taking pictures available for those willing to experiment a little bit. Cyanotype photography is one of these methods, and as [JGJMatt] shows, it only takes a few commonly available chemicals, some paper, and a slightly modified box camera to get started.
It isn't too hard to understand why Arm-based systems might be doing so well in China. Although the vast majority of servers are still running on x86 chips from AMD and Intel, these are manufactured by US companies and it is becoming more difficult for Chinese companies to obtain advanced chips because of Washington's trade restrictions.
By contrast, the Arm architecture is available for license by chipmakers around the world, including many in China such as Alibaba and Huawei, which may make it a more palatable option for companies there.
This post is going to be in two parts: first I want to talk about the netbook I got in 2010 and how it turned out to be useful in 2022. The second part is going to be a list of steps I took to set it up after re-installing OpenBSD on it.
The Cooler Master NR200 and NR200P are fun mini-ITX cases that support SFX power supplies by default. I’ve since moved to a Fractal Ridge, but I’m repurposing mine for a friend. I remembered reading it supported ATX power supplies with the removal of a top fan too, but I couldn’t figure out how.
The Russia–Africa Economic and Humanitarian Forum, held in St. Petersburg at the end of July, was by all accounts a smashing success.
Four members of a Hong Kong pro-democracy union have been fined HK$6,000 each after being found guilty of breaching Covid-19 gathering rules three years ago. Tsang Ho-yuen, Yung Ka-man, Wong Chun-yu and May Lam, of the Construction Site Workers General Union, appeared before a judge on Thursday after pleading not guilty earlier.
Another reason to keep your fingers clear from your face.
Thousands have already succumbed.
Since withdrawing from the yearlong deal in mid-July, Russia has not only resumed its blockade of the Black Sea but also attacked Ukraine’s shipping infrastructure, destroying about 180,000 metric tons of grain and helping drive up prices of wheat and other agricultural products.
I’ve fund that right now, I’m more interested in people in the real world than on the [Internet]. That’s not a dig at anyone I’ve talked to online. But it doesn’t replace talking to people in the physical world.
I think the reason why I’m preferring to write for my blog over social media, is that it’s a more biased relationship. It allows me to collect my thoughts, and then express them in whatever form I feel fits the content and context. And then if people want to reply in any way, they can do so via email, Mastodon, X, etc. But, at a slower pace, and also in any which way they feel relevant.
Zipline and OhioHealth this week announced a partnership where Zipline’s fully electric drone delivery service would integrate into OhioHealth’s network to bring prescriptions directly to patients’ homes, as well as to move lab samples and supplies between OhioHealth facilities.
New York State Senator Gustavo Rivera talks to Jacobin about his proposed state-level single-payer health care bill, why covering undocumented immigrants is crucial, and the state of progressive politics in New York.
PFAS chemicals have contaminated the groundwater throughout Michigan, affecting some 230 sites, including military bases, landfills, and airports. PFAS are polyfluorinated plastics used in products such as fire retardants, lubricants, and coatings like Scotchgard and Teflon. Scientists have linked PFAS exposure to an array of illnesses, including cancers, immune system suppression, elevated cholesterol, and decreased infant and fetal growth.
ChatGPT lies to people. This is a serious bug that has so far resisted all attempts at a fix. We need to prioritize helping people understand this, not debating the most precise terminology to use to describe it.
We accidentally invented computers that can lie to us.
Regulating AI is a cornerstone of the current administration’s agenda, but the push to figure out where the federal government was using the technology began before President Joe Biden took office. In the final weeks of the Trump administration, the White House published an executive order calling on federal agencies to report all current and planned uses of AI and publish those results. The goal, according to Executive Order 13960, was to document how the U.S. government is using AI and establish principles for the technology.
More than two years later, the process of actually developing these inventories hasn’t gone smoothly. Unlike other government AI initiatives such as the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and the National Institute for Science and Technology’s Risk Management Framework, the 2020 executive order carries the force of law and has terms that require compliance, argues Christie Lawrence, an affiliate at Stanford’s RegLab.
Early on Tuesday, Twitter added a note about the “Hide your blue tick” toggle on the platform’s verification help page. This makes it so the blue checkmark no longer appears next to accounts’ profile pages or their posts. The site still notes that using Blue features could still identify you as a paid subscriber and that some features may not be available at all while the mark is hidden. The feature is available in the users’ Profile customization tab in account settings.
Elon Musk announced he was changing Twitter’s name to X In the last week of July, reflecting the billionaire’s life-long obsession with the letter, which is a very normal thing for an adult man to have. To celebrate, CEO Linda Yaccarino, whom Musk appointed in May, changed her username from @lindayaccs to @lindayaX. An enterprising troll snatched up @lindayaccs, impersonating Yaccarino with a handle one letter off from her old one.
Artificial intelligence’s struggles with accuracy are now well documented. The list of falsehoods and fabrications produced by the technology includes fake legal decisions that disrupted a court case, a pseudo-historical image of a 20-foot-tall monster standing next to two humans, even sham scientific papers. In its first public demonstration, Google’s Bard chatbot flubbed a question about the James Webb Space Telescope.
The harm is often minimal, involving easily disproved hallucinatory hiccups. Sometimes, however, the technology creates and spreads fiction about specific people that threatens their reputations and leaves them with few options for protection or recourse. Many of the companies behind the technology have made changes in recent months to improve the accuracy of artificial intelligence, but some of the problems persist.
The OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications is a project that catalogs the most common security pitfalls so that developers, data scientists, and security experts can better understand the complexities of dealing with LLMs in their code.
Welcome to part one of our series on machine learning. In this installment, you'll learn about what ML is, the basics of how it works, and all the different types and models of ML. See real world applications of ML models and how you can get involved!
As a security expert and data scientist, we believe that people who come to rely on these AIs will have to trust them implicitly to navigate daily life. That means they will need to be sure the AIs aren’t secretly working for someone else. Across the internet, devices and services that seem to work for you already secretly work against you. Smart TVs spy on you. Phone apps collect and sell your data. Many apps and websites manipulate you through dark patterns, design elements that deliberately mislead, coerce or deceive website visitors. This is surveillance capitalism, and AI is shaping up to be part of it.
I gave a talk on Sunday at North Bay Python where I attempted to summarize the last few years of development in the space of LLMs—Large Language Models, the technology behind tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard and Llama 2.
My goal was to help people who haven’t been completely immersed in this space catch up to what’s been going on. I cover a lot of ground: What they are, what you can use them for, what you can build on them, how they’re trained and some of the many challenges involved in using them safely, effectively and ethically.
IBM says the new model is designed to help researchers identify areas in the continental U.S. that may be at risk of flooding and wildfire. According to the company, the model can analyze geospatial data up to four times faster than state-of-the-art neural networks. It also takes less data to train.
The Alphabet Workers Union has filed a complaint to the US Labor Board alleging retaliatory layoffs of staff attempting to unionise.
The Union’s Unfair Labor Practice charge was filed against Accenture and Google after they mass laid off employees who stated their intent to unionise back in early June of this year.
Both companies laid off over 80 employees who worked on Google Help and Bard whilst subcontracted through Accenture on 6 July.
According to the Union, over 70% of eligible workers had signed union authorisation cards by the time a union election with the National Labour Relations Board had been called.
Tahlia Kirk, general writer at Google and a member of the Alphabet Workers Union, has pointed out the cognitive dissonance allegedly shown by the company.
"In some cases, the actor attempts to add a device to the organization as a managed device via Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), likely an attempt to circumvent conditional access policies configured to restrict access to specific resources to managed devices only," Microsoft's threat intel team explained.
Computer systems at Delaware County’s Crozer Health were offline Thursday after a [successful] ransomware attack on the health system’s owner, Prospect Medical Holdings Inc., the company said.
Siri appears to be the last smart assistant standing as Microsoft quietly sunsets Cortana in Windows, but this may be a meaningless victory given the rise of AI-based chatbots.
Cortana's death has been a long time coming. Microsoft began removing support for Cortana on mobile in 2021 and is now killing it off on Windows as well.
Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk and Nvidia have worked with the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), an affiliate of the Linux Foundation, to now announce the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD).
Presumably pronounced Ah-Oh-You-Ess-Dee (rather than “aouzed”) this alliance seeks to promote the standardisation, development, evolution and growth of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology.
The US government's cybersecurity agency describes UEFI as "critical attack surface" that requires urgent security attention.
[...]
“UEFI is a critical attack surface. Attackers have a clear value proposition for targeting UEFI software,” the agency said in a call-to-action penned by CISA technical advisor Jonathan Spring and vulnerability management director Sandra Radesky.
Noting that UEFI code represents a compilation of several components (security and platform initializers, drivers, bootloaders, power management interface, etc.), the agency warned that security defects expose computer systems to stealthy attacks that maintain persistence.
Attackers have a clear value proposition for targeting UEFI software. UEFI is a compilation of several components (security and platform initializers, drivers, bootloaders, power management interface, etc.) so what attackers achieve depends on which phase and what element of UEFI they are able to subvert. But every attack involves some kind of persistence.
BMCs are specialized microcontrollers that have their own firmware and operating system, dedicated memory, power, and network ports. They are used for out-of-band management of servers when their primary operating systems are shut down. BMCs are essentially smaller computers that run inside servers and allow administrators to perform maintenance tasks remotely like reinstalling operating systems, restarting servers when they are no longer unresponsive, deploying firmware updates, and so on. This is also sometimes referred to as lights out management.
Security researchers have warned about security issues in BMC implementations and the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) specification they used for at least a decade. Vulnerabilities included hardcoded credentials and users, misconfigurations, weak or absent encryption, as well as code bugs like buffer overflows. Even though these management interfaces should operate on isolated network segments, hundreds of thousands have been found exposed to the internet over the years.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (linux-5.10), Red Hat (.NET 6.0 and iperf3), Slackware (openssl), SUSE (kernel, mariadb, poppler, and python-Django), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-base1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, maradns, openjdk-20, and vim).
Megan Hickey reports that there is finally a notification letter, of sorts, to parents about a network breach in November. In April, Indiana media had been reporting that the parents and community still had not been told what had happened.
Following up on the recent release by the New York Department of Financial Services (“NYDFS”) of an updated proposed second amendment to its “first-in-the-nation” Cybersecurity Regulation, 23 NYCRR Part 500 (proposed second amendment released June 28, 2023), it is not too late for companies to submit comments on the most recent version of the proposed changes from NYDFS. Comments are due by 5:00 p.m. ET on August 14.
A cyberattack is suspected to have caused a systemwide IT problem that is forcing the Eastern Connecticut Health Network (ECHN) to divert patients from its hospital emergency rooms, according to ECHN.
[...]
The issue is affecting the ERs at both Manchester Memorial Hospital and Rockville General Hospital.
There’s an update to the case involving the arrest of a married couple charged with laundering $4.5 billion in cryptocurrency stolen from Bitifinex in 2016.
Ilya Lichtenstein, 35, and Heather Morgan, 33, from New York City pleaded guilty today to money laundering conspiracies arising from the hack and theft of approximately 120,000 bitcoin from Bitfinex, a global cryptocurrency exchange.
I got an email yesterday morning from the administrator of the Class Action Lawsuit against Veriff saying that my settlement check should arrive tomorrow.
The Illinois Biometric Privacy Information Act has been scoring some large settlements.
After 14 years using a subdomain of boum.org, we finally found a new home that will be easier for everybody to remember and type. Tails will become easier to find by the people who need it the most.
One single app to rent a hotel room, prove your age, your educational, financial or health certificates, or to access digital public and private services? Sounds convenient? Well, it is. But if done wrong, it will be equally easy for corporations, authorities or even bad actors to create highly detailed profiles about yourself – spanning a vast area of your everyday life – or abuse this treasure of sensitive personal information in other ways.
We therefore urge policy makers in an open letter with 24 civil rights orgs, academics and research institutions to include the essential privacy and non-discrimination safeguards as well as proper protection against malicious actors.
Will the decision makers take care of their citizens and protect their sensitive data or will we end up with one of the biggest panopticons ever? The final decision is just about to be made in the crucial trilogue negotiations (between European Parliament, Council/Member States and Commission).
There was one big obstacle: to deploy HTTPS and protect a website, the people running that website needed to buy and install a certificate from a certificate authority. Price was a big barrier to getting more websites on HTTPS, but the complexity of installing certificates was an even bigger one.€ €
In 2013, the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) was founded, which would soon become the home of Let’s Encrypt, a certificate authority founded to help encrypt the Web. Let’s Encrypt was radical in that it provided certificates for free to anyone with a website. Let’s Encrypt also introduced a way to automate away the risk and drudgery of manually issuing and installing certificates. With the new ACME protocol, anyone with a website could run software (like EFF’s Certbot) that combined the steps of getting a certificate and correctly installing it.€
In the time since, Let’s Encrypt and Certbot have been a huge success, with over 250 million active certificates protecting hundreds of millions of websites.
As information started to leak out from the… everywhere about NSO Group’s secondhand contribution to surveillance abuses all over the world, the world (except for the worst of NSO’s customers) began taking action. Even the government that facilitated many of NSO’s sales to human rights violators decided it might be time to toss a few restrictions on the Israel-based malware merchant founded by former Israeli intelligence officers.
According to Cult members, Veilid is “an open-source, peer-to-peer, mobile-first networked application framework, with a flagship secure messaging application named VeilidChat.” Application frameworks of this sort are flexible software packages that can be iterated on and changed by infusing new code into them. Developers who want to create new programs with the same privacy protections will be able to build off of Veilid’s open source structures.
We built Veilid because when the Internet was young and new, we viewed it as an endless open realm of possibility. Instead, the Internet we know now has been heavily commercialized, with users and their data being the most sought-after commodity. The only ways to opt-out of becoming the product for billionaires to exploit are either too technical for the average user, or to simply not go online. We don’t believe that is fair, we still haven’t given up our dream for the entire Internet to be free and accessible to everyone without trading privacy to use it. We believe that people should be able to build relationships, learn, create, and build online without being monetized. With Veilid, the user is in control, in a way that is approachable and friendly to everyone, regardless of technical ability. We want to give the world the Internet we should have had all along.
Rao moves to NIST from another Department of Commerce division, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), where he was chief information officer.
The Manufacturing Extension Partnership is a public-private partnership that acts as an intermediary between the standards bureau and small and medium-sized manufacturers. It has centers in all 50 states and Puerto Rico.
We live in a deranged and deranging time, and Trump is a symptom, not the cause, but he’s certainly making everything worse. That’s why I’ve found it hard to be jubilant over Trump’s four indictments, at long last, relating to his role in the January 6 insurrection. Even as Trump is set to appear for his staggering third criminal arraignment Thursday afternoon, this time in Washington, D.C., I’m not readying the champagne.
Sea state Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced that the Russian Navy will receive 30 new combat ships of various classes later this year.
Here, in abbreviated form, is what the elements of the offense are for the four charged crimes, which is what the jury will be given to judge the former President’s crimes. DOJ will need to prove that Trump entered into three parallel conspiracies with his alleged co-conspirators, then show that they attempted to:
Use deceit to undermine the Electoral College Act
Prevent the certification of the Electoral votes on January 6
Prevent the Biden voters votes in swing states from being counted
Two Navy sailors in Southern California were arrested and accused of providing military secrets and sensitive information to Chinese intelligence officers, according to a pair of federal indictments unsealed on Thursday.
In two separate cases announced together, the Department of Justice said 22-year-old sailor Jinchao Wei, also known as Patrick Wei, was charged with espionage and arrested on Wednesday. And 26-year-old Petty Officer Wenheng Zhao, also known as Thomas Zhao, was charged with receiving bribes in exchange for transmitting information to a Chinese intelligence officer.
“These individuals stand accused of violating the commitments they made to protect the United States and betraying the public trust, to the benefit of the (People's Republic of China) government,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said in a news release Thursday.
The Navy servicemembers are accused of providing Chinese intelligence with sensitive information, including detailed technical manuals for warships and their weapons systems.
A failed state attorney general candidate endorsed by Donald Trump and a former Republican Michigan state representative have been criminally charged with attempting to tamper with voting machines, according to charging documents first spotted by The Detroit News. The criminal charges against the two Trump allies follow a nearly year-long investigation into voting machine tampering and dropped just hours after the former president himself was indicted on felony charges for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. All in all, August 1 was a rough day for the Trump-aligned right wing.
There are at least two reasons Trump’s alleged actions are not protected speech. One is that Smith repeatedly accuses Trump of pressuring other government officials to commit criminal acts of election fraud, and it is well established that soliciting another individual to commit a crime is not protected by the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court held in United States v. Williams (2008), “offers to engage in illegal transactions are categorically excluded from First Amendment protection.”
But Trump’s rhetoric is not just the revenge fantasy of someone under multiple indictments, nor is it merely a cynical harnessing of right-wing bloodthirst. As president, Trump didn’t have a problem with the existence of a so-called deep state; his problem was a deep state he didn’t control.
Consider the case of Rudy Giuliani, his two goons, and Ukraine.
Michigan is not the only state to investigate suspected election interference. In March 2022, a Colorado county clerk was indicted for tampering with election information. In January 2022, Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis requested the impanelment of a special grant jury to investigate attempts to disrupt the administration of the 2020 election in that state. It is expected that Willis will soon announce an indictment against Trump related to this investigation.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) – an independent, non-departmental statutory body formed to advise the government on these matters – recognised that the impact of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine meant it was reasonable for Britain to extract maximum gas in the short term. Price volatility brought about by the invasion wreaked havoc on household’s and businesses’ bills. But the CCC also warned against long-term expansion of North Sea oil extraction and urged that the UK’s present production must be carried out with the lowest emissions possible.
The statement read by TAJÃÅ member Kinê Xidir said: "Our people were massacred 9 years ago by ISIS and with the cooperation of the Barzani family. They wanted to destroy the Yazidi people and empty Shengal. Our people resisted and did not allow the enemy to achieve their aim. We call on all our people not to forget this dark day for us and to protect our martyrs. There is the blood of our martyrs in every inch of this land. We promise that we will not give up on the cause of our martyrs who died on this road."
The village parishioners’ decision to oust their priest reflects a broader push within Ukraine to reduce the influence of an Orthodox church that answers to Moscow.
In its recommendations, AI calls on “regional and international powers, notably members of the UN Security Council and UN Human Rights Council as well as state parties to the ICC, to take concrete measures to respond to the scale and urgency of the Sudan conflict.”
The report mirrors previous warnings from international organizations regarding widespread sexual violence, massive population displacement and rampant human rights abuses.
Moscow called for “dialogue” to avoid “a deterioration of the situation” in Niger following the coup d'état. “We think it is urgent to organize a national dialogue to restore civil peace and ensure law and order,” said the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
A federal jury has sentenced to death the gunman who killed 11 worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the deadliest act of antisemitism in U.S. history. Robert Bowers was found guilty of federal hate crimes for the 2018 massacre. This is the first time federal prosecutors have successfully sought the death penalty under the Biden administration, which has imposed a moratorium on executions. We are joined by Cantor Michael Zoosman, co-founder of L’Chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty. “For 'never again' to have any meaning, it must also mean never again to state-sponsored murder of defenseless prisoners who are otherwise no longer a threat, safely behind bars,” says Zoosman. “This is a lesson that 21st century Judaism should share with the world.”
During a live TV broadcast, Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, acknowledged the role of Ukraine’s secret services in the October 2022 and July 2023 explosions on the Russian-built Crimean Bridge.
Writing on Telegram, the governor of Russia’s Kaluga region Vladislav Shapsha reported that six UAVs had been shot down by air defense systems in his region overnight. According to the official, no damage or casualties resulted from the alleged drone attack.
Although there have been disputes between the peoples of Israel and Palestine for decades, this particular attack led to the death of twelve Palestinians, including five civilian children. It also caused injury to more than 120 others. By using armed drones and helicopter gunships, IOF destroyed much of the infrastructure in the area, displacing nearly 4,000 Palestinians. Though many Palestinians needed assistance in the aftermath, the Israeli government denied ambulances access to the wounded. The IOF likely violated the Fourth Geneva Convention by firing teargas into the Khalil Suleiman hospital. Attacking civilian hospitals is a distinct war crime.
While the world focuses on the trials and travails of the scientists who invented the atomic bomb, little attention is paid to the hard positions taken by the nuclear executioners, the men called u…
Israel broadened a racist law that allows communities to exclude non-Jews based on “social and cultural cohesion.” Whereas judicial overhaul laws have caused an uproar, this passed with…
Attorneys for the man accused of stabbing four University of Idaho students to death last year say he was on a long drive by himself around the time of the slayings. His attorneys said in documents filed Wednesday that witnesses may be able to testify he wasn't at the scene of the crime. Bryan Kohberger is charged with four counts of murder in connection with the deaths at a rental house near the Moscow, Idaho, campus last November. His attorneys say it's too soon to reveal details about witnesses because they're still reviewing evidence. State law requires defendants to declare if they will present an alibi.
Russia’s efforts to gain control in the Black Sea need to be challenged. Here’s how Ukraine and Turkey can push back with the West’s help.
Russia's Unholy War: Russian Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Kirill has provided the ideological justification for Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and Russian efforts to eliminate Ukrainian national identity.
Aleksei A. Navalny, who is already in prison, is facing charges of supporting “extremism” that could extend his sentence by two decades.
“Moscow House” (Maskavas nams) sign has been removed from the front of the building on Marijas Street 7, LETA reported on August 3.
Drone strikes hit central Moscow this week killing none but damaging a skyscraper. Meanwhile, TGStat has restricted access to a Telegram channel that tracks Russian casualties.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was hoping for a record turnout of African leaders at the second Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg last week to show the West he wasn’t isolated after all. He didn’t quite pull that off.
Chief of the South African Navy, Vice Admiral Monde Lobese, has visited Russia for the country’s annual Navy Day event in St Petersburg.
South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa will, his spokesman has it, “consume” the report of the judicial commission of inquiry into Russian cargo vessel Lady R before deciding on “actions to be followed”. This is as per a Presidency statement attributed to Vincent Magwenya.
Up to 6,000 of Russian citizens in Latvia are expected to receive official notices next month asking them to leave the country, according to Ingmārs Līdaka, head of the parliament’s Commission on Citizenship, Migration and Public Mobilisation.
On Thursday, the European Commission welcomed the three Baltic countries' agreement to synchronise their electricity grids with the continental European system by February 2025.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a record number of secret decrees last month.
A verdict is expected on August 4 in the extremism trial of jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, who is already serving a nine-year prison sentence on embezzlement charges that he and his allies say are politically motivated.
Georgia's Finance Ministry on August 2 said the exporting and reexporting of U.S. cars to Russia and Belarus was banned as of August 1.
Kyrgyzstan's Foreign Ministry says its embassy in Moscow has sent a note to Russia's Foreign Ministry over the beating of a Kyrgyz citizen working there as a taxi driver.
Russia has addded Norway to its list of countries that have committed "unfriendly" acts against Russian diplomatic and consular missions abroad.
Residents of Kazakhstan have noticed Russian army recruitment ads appearing online, writes Reuters. The ads offer those who sign a contract with the Russian army an immediate payment of $5300, a monthly payment of at least 190,000 rubles ($2018), and extra benefits that were not disclosed.
Nearly a year and a half after the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, why hasn’t diplomacy managed to stop the bloodshed? Journalists from BBC News Russia sought to answer this question by talking to analysts and former government employees from both Russia and the U.S. What emerged was a story of Russian diplomats increasingly seeking to please Putin as the Russian leader himself became ever more convinced of the power of brute force and the irrelevance of diplomacy. Meduza shares an English-language summary of the report.
A man detonated a training grenade near the Russian capital’s Moscow City commercial district on Thursday, multiple Telegram channels reported.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian refugees and Russians living along the border have relocated to the Russian city of Belgorod and the surrounding areas. Both groups have found it challenging to find temporary shelters, receive payments from the government, and start new lives. Independent outlet Verstka spoke to those who chose to resettle in Belgorod to understand the similarities and differences in their experiences. Meduza in English is sharing an abridged translation of the story.
Alexey Navalny, a key figure of the anti-Putin opposition in Russia, is awaiting a new court sentence, due to be announced on Friday, August 4. The new charges of extremist activity threaten the politician with a 20-year sentence, in addition to the nine-year prison term he is currently serving in a penal colony outside of the city of Vladimir. Instead of bringing Navalny to a courthouse, the Russian authorities arranged to try him right at the penitentiary. Although the trial has been closed to the press, Navalny has published an extended blog post, anticipating the sentence and its intended chilling effect on the Russian opposition. Ahead of the verdict, Navalny urges his supporters not to give in to fear in the face of Putin’s calculus of intimidation. Meduza has translated the main part of Navalny’s letter to the opposition, abridging the final part containing the politician’s acknowledgements.
European Commission Press release Brussels, 04 Aug 2023 The European Commission welcomes today's adoption by the Council of further targeted restrictive measures arising from Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, and in response to Belarus's involvement in the aggression.
The attack on Novorossiysk is the first time a commercial Russian port has been targeted in the 18-month war.
Ukraine continues to pursue EU integration even as the country defends itself against Russian invasion, but there are signs that some EU member states are not yet ready to integrate Ukraine's powerful agricultural sector.
The Russian bombing of Odesa's main Orthodox church in July was the latest in long line of attacks on Ukrainian heritage sites that indicate a deliberate campaign to erase Ukrainian cultural identity, writes Mercedes Sapuppo.
Russia's defence ministry said early on Friday that it had thwarted an overnight drone attack by Ukraine on€ Novorossiysk, a Russian naval base on the Black Sea. This incident did not result in any casualties or damage, reported the RIA news agency, citing regional governor€ Veniamin Kondratyev.
From Ukraine to artificial intelligence, the second half of 2023 poses major tests that will reveal the realities of the EU’s geopolitical aspirations. €
After two days of demonstrations, protesters in Georgia forced out the Russian cruise ship Astoria Grande, which had been docked at a Black Sea port in the southwest of the country. Police responded by using force on protesters, who cited their disapproval of the cruise ship’s passengers’ views on Russian policies in Ukraine and Georgia. According to our Observer, the clashes highlight a disparity between the Georgian government and the population’s stance on Russia.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was positive about moving customs checks for Ukrainian grain from the Polish border to ports in the Baltic states, according to Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda who is currently on a visit to Poland.
Drone attacks on Russia's largest naval base in the Black Sea and on illegally annexed Crimea were repelled overnight, but prompted a temporary halt of ship movement in one of Russia's major commercial ports, the military and Moscow-installed authorities said on August 4.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on August 3 took aim at Russia in a speech to the UN Security Council in New York, accusing Moscow of "blackmail" over its recent withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative.
The European Union announced on August 3 the extension of sanctions against Belarus due to its support for Russia's aggression against Ukraine.
A court in Moscow has fined Apple for failing to remove information related to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Interfax reported.
The six drones, which were shot down less than 125 miles from Moscow, were presumably targeting civilian targets in the Russian capital.
The lawyer for the arrested ex-leader of Kremlin-backed separatists in Ukraine, Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov), says the materials of his client’s case have been classified as "top secret."
Poland has warned that a growing presence of mercenaries from Russia's Wagner private military firm in Belarus is aimed at destabilizing NATO's eastern flank amid the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine.
In the best of circumstances, advancing through minefields while minimizing losses is time-consuming for armies. As Ukraine struggles to expel Russia, it hopes not to exhaust its allies’ patience.
The country’s embrace of its cultural qualities helps deny a victory to Russia, which has attempted to claim that a unique culture and national dignity don’t even exist.
After the Kakhovka dam was blown up in June, the reservoir above it quickly drained, revealing a bonanza of artifacts that has electrified Ukrainian archaeologists.
Moscow said Ukraine used drones to strike Novorossiysk, a Black Sea naval and shipping hub, and a port in occupied Crimea.
A new tone has set in among the uninhibited military bloggers, whose support for the invasion has given them unusual powers to speak out.
The files of Dingell, the longest-serving member of Congress, were donated to the University of Michigan but remained off-limits for nearly eight years. They were made available in May, five months after the Times began pressing for their release.
In Panama’s healthy rainforest, rainwater saturates the soil, then feeds the streams supplying Gatún Lake. In the last few decades, however, logging and slash-and-burn agriculture have claimed half of the surrounding rainforest. Deforested land cannot absorb the region’s heavy tropical rains; the excess water floods Gatún Dam and flows out to sea. The floodwaters also fill the lake with sediment. Dredging the lake bottom has restored its storage capacity, but also forced local residents to filter the lake water or rely on bottled drinking water.
The drought of 1990-91 gave Panamanians a taste of what can happen without adequate water in Gatún Lake. Canal operators had to limit trips through the canal to just 30 a day. A growing number of Panamanians have expressed concern over the canal’s viability if deforestation continues.
The watershed also supplies freshwater to Panama City, home to about half the country’s population of 4 million.
Research in the International Journal of Environmental Engineering reveals details of the first successful, large-scale landfill mining project in Andalusia, Spain.
Landfill mining is an emerging approach for the remediation of old waste sites. It allows for the reuse of valuable materials, such as plastics and metals that may have been dumped before recycling facilities were widely available. The process might also allow an entire brownfield site to be remediated sufficiently for development or even rewilding.
Children’s ongoing development from the fetal period through adolescence is one reason that they are particularly vulnerable to health harms from climate-related effects on the environment, says environmental health scientist Frederica Perera of Columbia University. She founded the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health in 1998. Science News talked with Perera about climate change and children’s health and well-being, the disparities in terms of who is at highest risk and why these early harms endanger health throughout life. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Yet by the time Aug. 1 rolled around, the critics had gone quiet, possibly because companies and consumers have already started voting for better lighting efficiency with their wallets.
Here’s what you need to know.
Data: FactSet; Chart: Axios Visuals
Oil prices are moving up — they surged 17% in July, and analysts are now seriously talking about $100 oil again.
Why it matters: It's a sign the market is feeling more optimistic about the economy — with recession fears abating.
- It also means more upward pressure at the pump, and on inflation more generally: A little summer agita for U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
Zoom in: The dynamics are simple. Oil prices are rising because demand forecasts are growing, thanks to the improving economic outlook — while supply is shrinking.
This is what city planners are referring to when discussing induced demand, and it’s proof that building car infrastructure in a growing city never solves traffic, it only contributes to it. What’s that line about the angry motorist who doesn’t realise they are traffic?
Cars will always have a place in urban areas, but fancier car allocation, regardless of fuel source or operator, won’t drive us out of our current problems.
"Had Tesla honestly advertised its electric vehicle ranges, consumers either would not have purchased Tesla model vehicles, or else would have paid substantially less for them," the lawsuit states.
While it's still unclear if the proposed suit will ever get class action status, it could be a considerable legal battle for the Elon Musk-led company, considering it would cover all Tesla drivers in California who bought a Model 3, S, X, or Y.
Reuters also reported that about a decade ago Tesla had decided to write algorithms for its in-dash range meter that would show drivers "rosy" projections for the distance the car could travel on a full battery, according to a source.
The directive to present the optimistic range estimates came from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, this person said. Reuters could not determine whether Tesla still uses algorithms that boost range estimates.
Policy Exchange, one of Westminster’s most prominent think tanks, engaged in a high-level influencing campaign over the UK’s North Sea oil and gas policies while being funded by fossil fuel interests, DeSmog can reveal.
The North Sea Transition Deal announced by the government in March 2021 set a net zero target for the basin but allowed for the continued exploration of oil and gas.
The 24th World Petroleum Congress is taking place this year in Calgary, Alberta, from Sept. 17 to 21. In response to looming questions about decarbonization, this year’s event is titled “Energy Transition: The Path to Net Zero.”
In the 21st century, the global transportation landscape is in shift. Politicians, engineers, and planners all want to move more people, more quickly, more cleanly. Amid the frenzy of innovative harebrained ideas, high-speed rail travel has surged to the forefront. It’s a quiet achiever, and a reliable solution for efficient, sustainable, and swift intercity and intercountry transit.
Indigenous peoples, smallholder farmers and academics have claimed that a UN summit focused on the future of agriculture helped to entrench corporate control over the global food system.
The UN’s Food Systems Summit “Stocktaking Moment” (“FSS+2”), held last week, came as countries look to slash agriculture’s climate footprint in the runup to the COP28 summit in December.
Today marks Earth Overshoot Day, the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year. However, the UK’s overshoot day has already passed - it fell on19th May [1]. In a week when the government has made a series of measures which will make the overshoot even worse, the Green Party has launched an ‘Earth Overshoot Day action plan’ to help move the UK date as late as possible.
The recent layoffs affected sales and customer success employees in Ireland, with about 50 roles impacted, Bloomberg reports. The company stated that this move was part of an ongoing effort to ensure appropriate resource allocation.
During the great layoff of 2023 where throngs of tech workers employed by massive corporations like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others, it seemed like it was the norm for folks to find out they were fired in inhumane ways.
And by “inhumane,” we mean a complete lack of initial human interaction: Folks would try to boot up their laptop, or would be working diligently on their employer-issued device only to be logged out and have difficulty gaining access to their workplace resources.
Much has been written about the “cold” and “impersonal” ways in which tech workers have been laid off, but it would appear that folks who work in brick-and-mortar retail locations are experiencing the similar log-in-issue fears that remote employees are.
Varanasi: The Archeological Survey of India (ASI) has resumed its survey of the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi to determine if it was built over a Hindu temple. The mosque committee has challenged the survey in the Supreme Court.
Here are 10 points on this big story: [...]
Notwithstanding the redundancies, DICE, which expanded into Germany 14 months ago and brought on former Hulu social media and digital strategy exec Katie Soo as chief business officer in February of 2023, indicated in remarks to TheTicketingBusinessNews that it intends to keep on making “’strategic hires that will drive forward’” company-wide growth.
Needless to say, DICE is hardly alone in announcing layoffs, which have reached music industry companies including Spotify, Utopia, Sonos, Downtown, Universal Music’s Motown Records, Warner Music, and a number of others to this point in 2023.
A study reveals that 28 per cent of UK small businesses are now making more money through social media than from any other channel, while 21 per cent worry about lacking digital skills.
The central government on Thursday imposed restrictions on import of laptops, tablets, all-in-one personal computers and ultra-small computers and servers with immediate effect. Any entity or company planning to bring laptops and computers for sale in India will now have to seek permission or license from the government for their inbound shipments. The notification in this regard was issued by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT). The restrictions have been imposed under HSN Code 8471 on seven categories of electronic gadgets.
India's electronics imports, which include laptops, tablets and personal computers, stood at $19.7 billion in the April to June period, up 6.25% year-on-year.
Research firm Counterpoint estimates India's laptop and personal computer market to be worth $8 billion annually, with two third of those imported.
No explanation has been offered for the change, but there’s on obvious candidate: the nation's "Make In India" push, and accompanying subsidy programs, reflect policy to turn the nation into a tech manufacturing powerhouse. The argument goes that a local presence helps system builders to serve the burgeoning local market better and at the same time diversify their operations to reduce concentration of activities in China.
In discussing government proposals to effectively enforce a mass public switch to heat pumps for home heating rather than gas boilers, I venture into an area where I have no expertise. I therefore intend to set out a series of numbered propositions which appear to me incontrovertible.
America enters an unprecedented political unknown, and our leaders appear helpless to find a way out.
Many of Lujan’s posts are sensual videos that downplay her actual responsibilities as a soldier. Truth in recruitment activist Rosa del Duca, a veteran, told MintPress she was surprised that the military was letting Lujan post ‘unprofessional’ content in uniform. Lujan’s social media recruitment campaign takes place as Army enlistment numbers have dipped 25 percent below target.
At a meeting with manufacturing executives on Thursday, Vladimir Putin said that “all of the country’s officials should drive domestic vehicles.” A recording of the statement was published on Telegram.
There are many different ways to represent the same text in Unicode. We’ve previously exploited this encoding-visualization gap to craft imperceptible adversarial examples against text-based machine learning systems and invisible vulnerabilities in source code.
In our latest paper, we demonstrate another attack that exploits the same technique to target Google Search, Bing’s GPT-4-powered chatbot, and other text-based information retrieval systems.
Co-founder of Wikipedia Larry Sanger describes the downfall of the once community-ran, neutral, encyclopedia, Wikipedia, into a mouthpiece for the establishment.
Indonesia accounted for nearly US$52 billion (S$69.8 billion) worth of e-commerce transactions in 2022.
The app’s livestreaming section has turned into a huge business as users pay for quick hits of cheap, personalized (and frequently bizarre) entertainment.
After the Center for Countering Digital Hate reported that hate speech has soared on the website formerly known as Twitter, now rebranded as “X,” Elon Musk responded by filing a lawsuit against the center over the research, calling the group “evil” and its CEO Imran Ahmed a “rat.” X accuses the watchdog group of unlawfully accessing data to “falsely claim it had statistical support showing the platform is overwhelmed with harmful content.” This comes as Musk has laid off about 80% of the workforce at X, including a large number of content moderators, and shut down its Trust and Safety Council. “When there is hate and disinformation being algorithmically amplified into billions of timelines, it’s perfectly right that people that oppose the spread, the production and distribution of hate seek to research it and seek to put that out into the public sphere,” says Ahmed. While Musk calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” silencing critics is his “go-to tactic to avoid accountability,” says Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights at Free Press.
This incident follows previous cases of censorship faced by RFI and FRANCE 24 in Mali and Burkina Faso in recent months. The group reaffirms its steadfast commitment to the freedom of information, and the safety of its journalists.
In Niger, RFI operates through 7 FM relay stations, in addition to shortwave broadcasts of its programs in French, Hausa, and Fulfulde, as well as several satellites (free-to-air on SES 5, Eutelsat 16 A, and SES 4 satellites). A network of 44 partner radios also broadcasts their programs in French, Hausa, and Fulfulde.
The blocking of RFI and France 24, which are subsidiaries of the French government-owned France Médias Monde, began Thursday, August 3, according to Mariama Soumana, a journalist based in Niger who spoke to CPJ via messaging app, and a report by the privately owned Jeune Afrique news site.
[...] The Telegram channel of the political association Novosibirsk 2020 reported the sentencing on August 2. [...]
Over the last few years, as we’ve seen state legislatures and governors focusing on culture war legislating, rather than sensible policy legislating, one thing that’s become popular — kicked off by Texas’s anti-abortion law, but gladly embraced by Democrats as well — is the idea of trying to avoid judicial scrutiny by taking enforcement out of the government’s hands, but creating a “bounty” program with a private right of action.
A justice of the peace in a magistrate's court, which handles administrative violations and low-level criminal cases, fined the Wikimedia Foundation 3 million rubles ($33,000) for retaining material on Russian-language Wikipedia pages that violated a law against discrediting Russia's military and spreading false[sic] information about the Ukraine conflict, the Interfax news agency reported.
This is the first time Apple has been fined for this offense, Russian media reported, while Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, has been fined numerous times. In April, the company was reportedly fined for the seventh time for not deleting what it said was “banned content” related to the Russian military.
[...] Berdyugin took part in anti-war rallies and signed several petitions in Novosibirsk demanding an end to Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine launched in February 2022.
Buri went missing on July 31 after visiting the IRGC Intelligence Office in Abadan to retrieve his mobile phone after it was confiscated during a raid on his home by plainclothes officers, according to social-media reports. Since his disappearance, he has reportedly been unable to contact his family.
Several prominent public figures have been summoned by the police or arrested in recent months, with officials warning women to respect the hijab law.
Russian anarchist Azat Miftakhov is spending his fifth year in jail for “hooliganism” — and now faces being framed on fake terrorism charges. His persecution is part of the Russian state’s campaign to intimidate the Left and silence opposition to the war.
Taliban authorities must stop their relentless crackdown on the media in Afghanistan and allow private broadcaster Hamisha Bahar Radio and TV to continue its work, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.
Last week, the Senate Commerce Committee advanced the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bipartisan bill that lawmakers say is intended to stop online platforms from targeting and recommending harmful content to minors. On paper, the bill sounds like a necessary pushback against big tech platforms like Facebook and TikTok, which use algorithmic recommendation to show content users are most likely to engage with.
Central Wisconsin’s Clark County is home to more dairy farms than any other county in the state, which bills itself as America’s Dairyland. Its identity is so tied to the dairy industry that a 16-foot-tall, black-and-white talking Holstein stands outside downtown Neillsville, the county seat.
To corral the cows, milk them and clear their manure at these dairy farms — the dirty, dangerous work that makes this multibillion-dollar industry go — farm owners here and across Wisconsin rely on a labor force that they know is largely undocumented.
We Believe in Israel launched a campaign earlier in 2023 for Spotify to remove several Arabic songs that allegedly targeted Israel. The campaign was the first step in a larger plan. € Luke Akehurst, director of We Believe in Israel, has cited Spotify’s ability respond to complaints of€ “public disgust,” and has called on Spotify to do the same regarding Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices hosted on the service. We Believe in Israel has also been accused of acting to remove one of pop artist Mohammad Assaf’s songs in part of its ongoing attempt to ‘cleanse’ the platform. The group complains that Spotify is promoting violence by allowing these artists to post their music using the service.
The best Streisanding is the Streisanding you give yourself, as the adage goes. The adage is even enshrined at Wikipedia, where it points to the creator of the term: Mike Masnick. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.
A court in Russia’s Leningrad region has sentenced activist Dmitry Skurikhin to 1.5 years in prison for repeatedly “discrediting” the Russian army, the Telegram channel Sota reported on Thursday. The case was launched in response to a sign he made that read “Forgive us, Ukraine.”
A Moscow judge has fined Apple 400,000 rubles ($4,250) for failing to delete apps and podcasts containing “false information” about Russia’s “special military operation” as well as materials “aimed at engaging minors in illegal activities for the purpose of destabilizing the political situation in Russia.”
During the demonstration, the journalists aimed to voice their support for their fellow journalists who had been detained in two separate investigations targeting Kurdish-focused media outlets. However, before the protest could even begin, the journalists were taken into custody.
The graduate student workers are asking for "a livable wage," better health and child care benefits, and more protections against sexual harassment. The minimum full-time equivalent salary for graduate student instructors on the Ann Arbor campus was $24,055 per term in the 2022-23 academic year, but only one was actually employed full-time as an instructor. Most graduate student instructors work half of the full-time equivalent and spend the rest of the time doing research and service work, the union says.
The United States is praising Kenya's interest in leading a multinational force in Haiti. But weeks ago, the U.S. openly warned Kenyan police officers against violent abuses. Now 1,000 of those police officers might head to Haiti to take on gang warfare. Kenya's police have long been accused by rights groups of killings and torture. That includes gunning down civilians during Kenya’s COVID-19 curfew and fatally shooting more than 30 people during protests in July. A Human Rights Watch researcher says local watchdogs are concerned about Kenya “exporting its abusive police to other parts of the world.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has sued the FBI, the Colorado Springs Police Department and local officers for illegally spying on local activist Jacqueline “Jax” Armendariz Unzueta and the Chinook Center, a community organizing hub in Colorado Springs. “This was one of the worst moments of my life,” says Unzueta, who describes the investigation by law enforcement as “incredibly invasive.” The lawsuit accuses the agencies of “unconstitutional and invasive search and seizure of the phones, computers, devices, and private chats of people and groups whose message the Colorado Springs Police Department dislikes.” This comes after revelations the FBI had infiltrated the Chinook Center by sending an undercover police detective named April Rogers to volunteer at the center in 2020, first exposed by the investigative reporter Trevor Aaronson, who writes for The Intercept and created the Alphabet Boys podcast. “For more than a year, she was undercover for the FBI,” says Aaronson, who reports the officer, who used the name Chelsie, surveilled the Chinook Center and unsuccessfully attempted to entrap local activists in gun-running conspiracies. This was part of a broader FBI effort to infiltrate racial justice and left-wing groups in Colorado after the police killing of George Floyd.
The Republican-controlled Florida Board of Education on Thursday effectively banned Advanced Placement Psychology by notifying school district superintendents that teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity—key subjects in college-level psychology curricula—is prohibited under the state's so-called "Don't Say Gay or Trans" law.
Maya Binyam’s Hangman is one of those rare things in contemporary literature—a novel of ideas, in which the exploration of ethical and political questions animates and shapes the story itself. The novel’s narrative is deceptively simple on its surface: A man returns to an unnamed country after two decades in America to reconnect with his sickly brother; shenanigans ensue. But as it unfurls, it becomes clear that Binyam’s elliptical story and style are stretching language in an attempt to depict refuge and safety for Black diasporic peoples as something that is made impossible by settler colonialism, enslavement, the international-aid industrial complex, and the drive to accumulate and hoard inordinate amounts of wealth.
Russia’s Economic Development Ministry will require its employees to work remotely until September 1, the newspaper Kommersant reported on Thursday, citing a copy of an order issued by Economic Minister Maxim Reshetnikov.
Andrew was feeling crushed by the cultural expectation to get married.
Twenty-two years old, he had just returned from a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was attending a singles’ ward in Provo, Utah — a local congregation of unmarried college students.
“The lack of accountability is so widespread that it helps cement in place a culture that enables human rights violations. The abuses keep coming because impunity is so likely.”
Shutting Down Gitmo Is Hardly the Last Step.
Incorporating newer research about post-adolescent brain development would help those sentenced under outdated, racist policies.
Data from Internet telescopes that monitor routed but unused IP address space has been the basis for myriad insights on malicious, unwanted, and unexpected behavior. However, service migration to cloud infrastructure and the increasing scarcity of IPv4 address space present serious challenges to traditional Internet telescopes. [...]
For the better part of the decade, the generally feckless FCC has been trying to require that broadband ISPs be a€ little€ more honest about broadband fees and limits at the point of sale. So they cooked up the idea of a “nutrition label for broadband,” detailing all of the little caveats and restrictions (real world speeds, caps, bizarre fees) ISPs now impose on your broadband line. Kind of like this:
Moderna filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Pfizer and BioNTech in August 2022, alleging that the defendants COVID-19 vaccine infringes three patents related to Moderna’s mRNA vaccine technology.€ € United States Patent Nos. 10,898,574, 10,702,600, and 10,933,127. The lawsuit centers around two key components of Moderna’s mRNA platform that it claims Pfizer copied – the use of modified nucleosides like 1-methylpseudouridine and the encoding of a full-length coronavirus spike protein. Moderna asserts that it pioneered these innovations years before the COVID-19 pandemic and patented them between 2011-2016. The complaint alleges Pfizer and BioNTech initially tested different vaccine designs but ultimately chose to copy Moderna’s approach, despite being aware of Moderna’s patents. In the lawsuit, Moderna is seeking monetary damages for patent infringement but not injunctive relief taht would remove the Pfizer vaccine from the market. Although Moderna pledged not to enforce its COVID-19 patents during the pandemic, it signaled in March 2022 that expected companies to respect its intellectual [sic] property [sic] rights [sic] going forward.
Here are three recent likelihood of confusion cases: one opposition and two ex parte appeals. Keeping in mind that the strength of the cited (or pleaded) mark is an important factor in the Board's Section 2(d) determination, how do you think they came out? Answers will be found in the first comment.
In re Bushnell Inc., Serial No. 90501168 (July 28, 2023) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Marc A. Bergsman). [Section 2(d) refusal of WINGMAN for "portable audio speakers, excluding cases; wireless speakers, excluding cases" in view of the identical mark registered for "cell phone cases"].
Arguably, video games have become the most important entertainment medium. 2022 US video game revenue topped $85B, compared with global movie industry revenue of $76.7B. Game history is thus an essential resource for scholars of culture, but the industry's copyright paranoia means they have little access to it.
The legal action, for which AFP seeking an urgent injunction before the Judicial Court of Paris, stems from X’s alleged non-compliance with a law France enacted in July 2019, called “neighbouring rights,” which compels large online platforms to open talks with publishers seeking remuneration for news.
In an extraordinary filing at an Illinois court this week, a pirate IPTV-related lawsuit filed by DISH Network last year was slammed by hosting company defendant, DataCamp. After informing the court DISH has no standing to sue in a copyright case, DataCamp claimed that DISH tried to force the company into an agreement to create a 'False Public Judgment' for tens of millions of dollars. That document would be used to "terrorize" other hosting companies, DataCamp said.
Sony Music's legal efforts have produced a major breakthrough. As the result of a German blocking order, DNS provider Quad9 now blocks global access to music piracy site CannaPower. The operator of the site doesn't appear to be impressed so far, noting that it doesn't really hurt traffic. "They will never get us down," the operator says, adding that moving to the Tor network remains an option as well.
The lawsuits against Elon Musk’s ex-Twitter continue to pile up, but here’s one where the law itself is ridiculous and unjust. As you’ll recall, the EU Copyright Directive included a link or snippet tax for news (which they call a “neighboring right”) similar to the link taxes we’ve discussed in Australia and Canada. The main difference here was that the “tax” was for including snippets (the short summaries or clips) of news. Of course, since the EU’s was a directive, it was left to the member countries to implement their own version, which has mostly been a mess.
And here we go again. we’ve been talking about how copyright has gotten in the way of cultural preservation generally for a while, and more specifically lately when it comes to the video game industry. The way this problem manifests itself is quite simple: video game publishers support the games they release for some period of time and then they stop. When they stop, depending on the type of game, it can make that game unavailable for legitimate purchase or use, either because the game is disappeared from retail and online stores, or because the servers needed to make them operational are taken offline. Meanwhile, copyright law prevents individuals and, in some cases, institutions from preserving and making those games available to the public, a la a library or museum would.
Back in April, a court ordered Triller to pay Sony Music Entertainment (SME) about $4.6 million over the allegedly unauthorized use of the major label’s music.
A passenger has gone to extreme lengths to create a VIP section in economy — and while many have labelled it “genius” others have concerns about it.