Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 09/09/2023: Google Antitrust Case and Windows TCO Stories



  • Environment

    • FuturismThe Environmental Warriors at Burning Man Left a Disgusting Mess Behind

      Despite those efforts, many environmental groups have long pointed out the event's considerable carbon footprint. According to estimates, Burning Man releases some 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of the emissions created to power 19,000 homes for a year.

    • NBCBurning Man begins massive cleanup after heavy rain muddied campgrounds

      “After exodus, the Burning Man team has three weeks where they grid out the entire event area and pick up all items and trash,” spokesperson Rita Henderson said in a statement. “In addition, they clean along the side of the county highways leading to and from the event.”

      During the first week of October, the bureau and organizers will inspect points around the area to determine whether the cleanup efforts were acceptable, she said, adding that if the bureau finds the cleanup isn’t acceptable, it will schedule time with the organizers to address the issues.

    • Omicron LimitedHow trees influence cloud formation

      According to the latest projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global climate will be 1.5 to 4.4 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels by 2100. This figure is based on various scenarios describing how anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions may develop in the future. So in the best case, if we manage to curb emissions quickly and radically, we can still meet the 1.5 degree target of the Paris Agreement.

    • Omicron LimitedWorld falling dangerously short of climate goals: UN

      "The world is not on track to meet the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement," including capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above mid-19th century levels, the report said.

    • New YorkerWill the Rains Extinguish Burning Man?

      As those road-blockaders saw, Burning Man is not only a victim of environmental change but also a perpetrator of it. A friend—the one engaged to the ultramarathoner—recently described the festival as “the ultimate expression of a capitalist economy that throws off so much surplus wealth” that “tens of thousands of people can gather to create self-destructing artifacts.” In 2019, when the Burning Man Project last sought to renew its permit with the Bureau of Land Management, it faced environmental-impact requirements that it argued “would forever negatively change the fabric of the Burning Man event, if not outright kill it.” (At least some of the requirements were dropped, and the permit was renewed.)

    • Breach MediaMining companies are abusing a little-known loophole to avoid cleanup

      According to a number of academic researchers and environmental organizations across Canada, this status is a gaping loophole by which mining companies maximize profits and avoid reclamation costs, foisting billions of dollars of liabilities onto the public.

      The Breach spoke to academics, campaigners and regulators to expose for the first time how companies are abusing this loophole—and how it can be fixed.

    • Common DreamsUrgent Call to Phase Out Fossil Fuels Ahead of G20 Summit

      “Global leaders must do more than talk. They must act. To make a livable future possible, President Biden and fellow G20 leaders must commit to a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and an ambitious commitment to a just renewable energy transition. They must stop promoting dangerous distractions like Carbon Capture and Storage that benefit no one but the fossil fuel industry. They must end public finance for fossil fuels and shift this to renewable energy. Agreeing to this now will provide momentum for commitments to be made at the UN Climate Negotiations in Dubai later this year. The global pressure is building, exemplified by marches around the world culminating in a March to End Fossil Fuels in NYC September 17th, where thousands will gather to demand Biden phase out fossil fuels and declare a climate emergency. It’s time for world leaders to step up and lead the way towards a just and thriving future.”

    • Overpopulation

      • Science AlertChina's Qing Dynasty Collapsed For Reasons That Feel Eerily Familiar

        "We argue that the four-fold population explosion peaking in the 19th century, the growing competition for a stagnant number of elite positions, and increasing state fiscal stress combined to produce an increasingly disgruntled populace and elite, leading to significant internal rebellions," write the researchers in their published paper.

        Population growth led to overcrowding, poverty, and an overflow of qualified bureaucrats unable to rise up the ranks, the researchers say. The cost of keeping order, adding to burdens associated with depleting silver reserves and opium imports, exacerbated the problems even further.

  • Finance

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • GizmodoWhat You Need to Know About the New FCC Commissioner

      Though this is Gomez’s first sting as commissioner, she knows her way around the building. Gomez spent 12 years in a variety of corporate communications roles before joining the commission, including a stint as Deputy Chief of the International Bureau as well as Senior Legal Advisor to former FCC Chairman William Kennard. Most recently, Gomez served as a senior advisor in Biden’s State Department’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy.

    • ScheerpostDaniel Duggan is facing the same extreme tactics applied to Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale and others caught in Washington’s “national security” dragnet.

      Julian deserves unwavering support, at the very least because he alerted the world to crimes being committed by the U.S. government. His bravery has been well-documented, even if the government says that he is a danger to American national security.

      The U.S. Justice Department has made something of a sport of attacking people on “national security” grounds. Just look at what has happened in recent years to Tom Drake, Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Daniel Hale and this writer.

    • QuartzElon Musk's social media site X sues California over the state's content moderation law

      Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter has sued the state of California over a law requiring social media companies to publish their policies for removing offending material such as hate speech, misinformation and harassment.

      The first-of-its-kind legislation was signed into law a year ago by California Gov. Gavin Newsom. In a lawsuit filed Friday against state Attorney General Robert Bonta, X Corp. challenges the “constitutionality and legal validity” of the law, saying it violates the First Amendment.

    • Hindustan TimesElon Musk's X sues California over content moderation law

      Assembly bill 587 requires social media platforms to post their content moderation policies — which they already do — and twice a year submit a report to the state on how they address hate speech, racism, misinformation, foreign political interference and other issues.

      The law, “compels companies to engage in speech against their will, impermissibly interferes with the constitutionally-protected editorial judgments of companies such as X Corp.” and has pressures companies to remove or demonetize “constitutionally-protected speech,” says the lawsuit, filed in the Eastern District Court of California.

    • Pro PublicaHe Fled a Traffic Stop in Louisiana. Now He’s in Prison for Life.

      Markus Lanieux thought his prayers had been answered when, in the summer of 2021, his attorney informed him that she had struck a tentative deal with the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office that would secure his freedom after 12 years in prison.

      The 46-year-old son of a sugarcane farmer had been dreaming of this day since he stood in court in stunned silence as the judge sentenced him to life without parole for a crime that ordinarily carried a maximum sentence of two years.

    • Insight HungaryEU was wrong to appoint von der Leyen as Commission President, Hungarian FM says

      On Monday, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó confirmed Balázs Orbán's (no relation to the PM) statement that the Hungarian government would not support Ursula von der Leyen to lead the European Commission for another five years. In 2019, Hungary's far-right prime minister Viktor Orban welcomed that a German mother of seven had been appointed to replace Manfred Weber.

    • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

      • Deutsche Welle2023-09-03 [Older] Fact check: 'DW' video on anti-Ukrainian sentiments is fake
      • El PaísEthical dilemmas, extremism and great personal risk: a documentary filmmaker embedded with the Taliban

        “Of course, I was haunted by the futility of the process. If we fail to show who they really are, you can throw what we shot in the trash. But if it works, it can help open the eyes of the world to the daily suffering of Afghans and the trauma caused by past and present warlords,” the Egyptian filmmaker says via email. In reality, the idea was almost doomed to be a failed attempt. Accustomed to filming world leaders as a journalist, Nash’at believes that you only get access through a mediator. And he thought he had succeeded in this case too, until his call stopped being answered, just as he was about to travel to Kabul. He went anyway and searched for other contacts. By the time he had run out of money, however, he still hadn’t filmed anything.

      • New StatesmanPutin’s darkest conspiracy theory yet

        Now, 18 months into the conflict, the Russian president seems to believe he has finally arrived at a convincing explanation that will resolve this logical fallacy: Zelensky’s Jewish heritage is part of a Western plot to disguise the true character of his regime. As Putin explained in an interview with Russian state media on 5 September, “Western managers put an ethnic Jew in charge of Ukraine” in order to “cover up the anti-human nature” of the Ukrainian government.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • CPJ2023-09-07 [Older] Russian court sentences journalist Mikhail Afanasyev to 5.5 years in prison for ‘fake news’ about army
    • CPJKyrgyz authorities threaten to block website of investigative outlet Kloop

      On Thursday, September 7, Kloop received a letter from Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Culture, Information, Sport and Youth Policy warning that if the outlet didn’t remove a September 1 article within 48 hours its website would be blocked under the country’s false information law. The letter did not specify which information was false and followed a complaint against the outlet by the State Committee for National Security.

      The article cited a jailed opposition politician’s allegations of ill-treatment—which he had posted on his personal Facebook page and was widely reported by Kyrgyz media—and included a rebuttal of the politician’s claims by the country’s penitentiary service.

    • RFERLIranian Protester Dies After Being Told 'You'll Never Leave Prison Alive'

      Ruhi was arrested by Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps officers in Nowshahr, in the northern Mazandaran Province, on September 22, 2022 after being spotted in a video showing him dancing during protests in the city the day before.

      The protests were among the first of the wave of street demonstrations that took place nationwide following the death in police custody just days earlier of Mahsa Amini, who had been detained in Tehran by the morality police for allegedly violating Iran’s controversial hijab law.

    • RFERLIranian Teachers' Activist Handed Stiff Sentence After Attending Memorial For Slain Protester

      The Iranian Teachers' Union's Coordination Council revealed on September 7 that Khoran, who was being tried in a joint case with several other activists, received a sentence of six years and eight months in prison, 72 lashes, a two-year ban from using social media platforms, and two years of exile to the remote city of Delfan.

    • TechdirtElon Musk Files Really Strong 1st Amendment Challenge To California’s Terrible Social Media ‘Transparency’ Law

      Hey, Techdirt haters: hold onto your hats, because I’m going to praise Elon Musk for doing the right thing, even though many of you insist that my complaints about him are motivated by personal dislike. But, as I’ve noted repeatedly, I’m happy to highlight when he does the right thing, such as here where he is (perhaps surprisingly) challenging a terrible internet law that the bigger internet companies refuse to challenge (because it helps them), and bringing in a big time 1st Amendment lawyer to do so. And, importantly, the challenge seems really well done.

    • EFFEFF Urges Appeals Court to Re-hear Case over Trump’s X Account

      The amicus brief filed Friday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit supports X’s request for an en banc rehearing by all of the circuit’s judges; a three-judge panel ruled against X in July and its decision was unsealed in August.€ 

      Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed and got a search warrant for the data from the former president’s X account, and both a trial judge and the appeals court ordered Twitter to comply. But the Justice Department also got a nondisclosure order to prevent X from discussing the existence or contents of the search warrant with anyone, including Trump. € 

      That’s a prior restraint of speech, and the July ruling that upheld it made two critical mistakes. First, the three-judge panel wrote that the judicial review standard of “strict scrutiny” applied, requiring a finding that the government acted to further a compelling governmental interest, and that the action was narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. But instead of taking the Supreme Court’s admonition that prior restraint scrutiny is “the most exacting” First Amendment test, the panel claimed X’s speech on information “obtained only by virtue of its involvement in the government’s investigation” was not entitled to that highest level of protection. € € 

  • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • The DissenterUnauthorized Disclosure: Subscriber Show For September 8
    • Deutsche WelleSaudi Arabia on 'relentless killing spree,' NGO says

      Authorities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have executed at least 100 people in 2023, according to human rights watchdog Amnesty International.

      In a statement on Friday, the activists said they documented several cases in which people had been sentenced to death for social media posts or drug-related offenses in "grossly unfair trials that fell far short of international human rights standards."

      "The authorities' relentless killing spree raises serious fears for the lives of young men on death row who were under 18 at the time of the crimes," Amnesty said.

    • Vice Media GroupGrindr ‘Unlawfully’ Purged Staff at LGBTQ Dating App, Union Says

      The charge alleges that this policy was retaliatory against unionizing workers, and that the company also unlawfully silenced workers who asked questions about it.

      “The Employer eliminated a normal channel of communication used by employees to talk about workplace matters for the purpose of preventing them from engaging in Section 7 activity,” the charge states, referring to the section in the National Labor Relations Act that protects union organizing. “The Employer also unlawfully proffered a severance agreement with provisions that restrict employees exercise of their rights under the Act. This severance agreement is unlawful as drafted and is also unlawful because it was presented to workers in retaliation for having engaged in section 7 and/or Union activity.”

    • FuturismAlmost Half of Grindr’s Employees Quit When They Were Forced Back to the Office

      A bunch of those employees weren't having it, and as representatives from the Grindr union told Wired, 82 out of the company's 178 employees — or a staggering 46 percent of its total staff — decided to quit in response to the policy that would have required relocation for many. Many more who did not sign the pledge will face termination next year during the second phase of the policy's rollout, employees said.

      In other words, the fracas is a perfect illustration of post-pandemic workplace dynamics in tech and beyond, as bosses are lobbing increasingly draconian return to office demands at workers who've been accustomed to a more flexible arrangement.

    • JURISTHRW: Taliban continues to commit gender-based crimes against humanity in Afghanistan

      Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Friday that Taliban authorities are perpetrating gender persecution against women and girls in Afghanistan. Following the conclusion of the report, international justice director at HRW Elizabeth Evenson called for coordinated support by from the international community to ensure that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has the resources and needed cooperation to investigate this crime and provide accountability for gender persecution.

    • RFERLHRW Says Taliban's Denial Of Basic Women's Rights Is A Crime Against Humanity

      HRW said in a report issued on September 8 that while men in Afghanistan have also been subject to "serious violations" of their human rights, the underlying discrimination against women is evident from the "all-encompassing restrictions targeting women."

      According to the rights group, the Taliban's "widespread and systematic attack against women" constitutes "a crime against humanity of persecution targeting women and girls." An International Criminal Court investigation is needed as it "could provide a path toward accountability for the crime against humanity of gender persecution," it added.

    • HRWAfghanistan: Taliban’s Gender Crimes Against Humanity

      “The Taliban’s cruel and methodical denial of the basic rights of women and girls to remove them from public life has received global attention,” said Elizabeth Evenson, international justice director at Human Rights Watch. “Coordinated support by concerned governments is needed to bring the Taliban leaders responsible to justice.”

      The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) defines crimes against humanity as a range of prohibited acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population, with knowledge of the attack. The crime of persecution is the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group based on grounds international law recognizes as impermissible. Persecution committed against people because of sex characteristics, or the social constructs and criteria used to define gender, amounts to gender persecution.

    • The AtlanticThe Man Who Became Uncle Tom

      Proslavery newspaper columnists and southern planters had responded to the huge success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by accusing Stowe of hyperbole and outright falsehood. Benevolent masters, they said, took great care of the enslaved people who worked for them; in some cases, they treated them like family. The violent, inhumane conditions Stowe described, they contended, were fictitious. By naming her sources, and outlining how they had influenced her story, Stowe hoped to prove that her novel was rooted in fact.

      A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an immediate success; its publisher reported selling 90,000 copies by the end of 1854. Abraham Lincoln himself may have read the book, at a crucial turning point in the Civil War: Records indicate that the 16th president checked it out from the Library of Congress on June 16, 1862, and returned it on July 29. Those 43 days correspond with the period during which Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation.

    • Pro Publica“Silver Dollar Road” Director Raoul Peck Discusses New Documentary

      In 2019, I wrote a story for ProPublica, co-published with The New Yorker, about the dispossession of Black landowners in the South. The story looked at the legal obstacles that families face when they pass their land down without a will, a form of ownership known as heirs’ property. Laws and loopholes allow speculators and developers, among others, to acquire the property out from under families, often at below-market rates. Black Americans lost 90% of their farmland between 1910 and 1997, and the heirs’ property system is one of the primary causes.

      I focused on the Reels family of North Carolina, chronicling how they had lost their land to developers but refused to leave it. This land was their home, their freedom, their livelihood, their history and their legacy. They believed so deeply in their moral claim to the land that they would not accept a ruling that it no longer belonged to them. Their story of losing heirs’ property is common in the South, but their determination to protest was unlike anything I had seen. Two of the brothers, Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, ended up spending eight years in a county jail for refusing to obey a court order to stay off the land. Their sister, Mamie Reels, and their niece, Kim Duhon, dedicated their lives to protecting the property and freeing Melvin and Licurtis.

    • TechdirtJudge Blocks Prosecutor From Using Unconstitutional Anti-Drag Law To Arrest People During Pride Festival

      It’s great to see hateful people being shut down by little things like, you know, the Constitution. Would that it happened more frequently. Or, more hopefully, would that the mere existence of the Constitution prevent hateful legislators from passing hateful laws that have zero chance of surviving a constitutional challenge.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • TechdirtFCC Proposes Voluntary Security Labels For ‘Internet Of Things’ Devices Most Companies Will Probably Ignore

      While government leaders spent the last three years hyperventilating about TikTok, less talked about has been the dodgy “internet of things” (IOT) space; a broad assortment of mostly overseas-made techno doodads with paper-grade security and privacy standards that Americans connect to home and business networks with reckless abandon.

    • EFFCalifornia’s Middle Mile Network Must Bridge the Digital Divide, Not Reinforce It

      Last month, without public input or notice, the California Department of Technology changed its map outlining which communities get "middle mile" infrastructure, which we'll explain in more detail below. The department reduced its plan from building 10,000 miles of fiber to 8,300 miles. In many cases, this entirely cuts off many communities with the greatest need for access.€  These uninformed cuts to critical infrastructure will drastically raise the cost of building high-speed, high-capacity internet networks in unserved and underserved neighborhoods. It also jeopardizes the funds these communities need to build these networks. These changes run counter to the purpose of S.B. 156 and all efforts to close the digital divide.

      What is the middle mile? To understand, it helps to think of broadband infrastructure like a public road system. Local streets connect residential areas to the main streets and highways. These main streets and highways, built for higher speeds and capacity, connect people, goods, and services to one another over long distances.

      In broadband, those main streets and highways are what is considered the “middle mile.” The local roads connecting to each individual home and business are the “last mile.”

  • Monopolies



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