Distributions and Operating Systems

• BSD

  • Undeadly ☛ Introduction to sysclean(8)

    Many OpenBSD sysadmins find the sysclean(8) port useful for removing obsolete files following upgrades.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Red Hat Official ☛ What new features are available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.9 and 9.3 Beta?

    Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.9 and 9.3 Beta, designed to provide organizations with the flexibility and reliability to quickly and more securely deploy applications and workloads across hybrid cloud environments. These new features and enhancements enable organizations to maximize efficiency and agility when delivering services, applications and workloads.

    Automation and Management. RHEL 8.9/9.3 Beta continues to make automation and management easier for customers with its system roles, which automate common administrative tasks and enable standardization of deployments at scale. New features such as Quadlet support in the Podman system role (for an enhanced container configuration experience), support for configuring additional kdump settings, a new role for Keylime server configuration (to provide security against tampering a host), a new role for systemd automation, enhancements to storage management, a new role for PostgreSQL installation and configuration, and enhancements to the  SQL Server role help customers save time and simplify day-to-day administration.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu ☛ Meet Canonical at MLOps World 2023

    Date: 25-26 October 2023

    Location: Renaissance Austin Hotel, Austin, Texas

    Book a meeting

    Book a meeting

    See the full list of events

    Book a meeting

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Geshan ☛ A beginner's guide to retrying failed requests with Axios Retry

    In the ever-evolving world of web development, handling HTTP requests is a fundamental task. Whether you're building a frontend application or a backend service, you'll likely find yourself dealing with APIs and remote servers. Axios, a popular JavaScript library, simplifies the process of making HTTP requests. However, what happens when those requests fail? In this beginner’s guide, you will explore how to tackle this issue by using Axios Retry, an essential plugin that can save you time and frustration. Let's get started!

• Programming/Development

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ Software is What We Learned Along the Way

    Great designers help you get you to the what, but they start by defining the why and its rationale. Unless well documented, archived, and made easily accessible to teams, these rationales are often lost over time.

  • Buttondown ☛ Formal Methods can't fix everything and that's okay

    This is the impossible problem of trusting trust: is formally verified code really provably-correct if it's compiled with an unverified compiler? What if the code's correct and it's running on an unverified OS? You could use a verified OS like seL4 but what about the hardware itself? What if the hardware design is proven but the manufacturing process adds a backdoor? Verifying the whole process is too hard for anybody but the richest countries. So why do formal verification at all?

  • Rlang ☛ Creating a nice looking Table 1 with standardized mean differences

    I’m in the middle of a perfect storm, winding down three randomized clinical trials (RCTs), with patient recruitment long finished and data collection all wrapped up. This means a lot of data analysis, presentation prep, and paper writing (and not so much blogging). One common (and not so glamorous) thread cutting across all of these RCTs is the need to generate a Table 1, the comparison of baseline characteristics that convinces readers that randomization worked its magic (i.e., that study groups are indeed “comparable”). My primary goal here is to provide some R code to automate the generation of this table, but not before highlighting some issues related to checking for balance and pointing you to a couple of really interesting papers.

  • Rust

    • Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 514

      Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!

Leftovers

• Neil Selwyn ☛ Rethinking digital technology along environmental lines – inspiration from ‘Sustainable Computing’ and ‘Green IT’

  Two emerging areas of computer science – ‘Green IT’ and ‘Sustainable Computing’ – raise some fascinating directions for thinking differently about digital technology and environmental futures.

• Niels Provos ☛ Netrunner music video in UE 5.2: Laser Light Show and Motion Blur

  As you watch the video you might notice a couple of moments when all of a sudden a lot of lasers appear. This happened because the asset creates a random configuration for every single frame. However, with time dilation, it effectively creates 8x as many laser bursts and each laser burst is very very short.

• Hackaday ☛ The Robot That Lends The Deaf-Blind Community A Hand

  The loss of one’s sense of hearing or vision is likely to be devastating in the way that it impacts daily life. Fortunately many workarounds exist using one’s remaining senses — such as sign language — but what if not only your sense of hearing is gone, but you are also blind? Fortunately here, too, a workaround exists in the form of tactile signing, which is akin to visual sign language, except that it uses one’s sense of touch. This generally requires someone who knows tactile sign language to translate from spoken or written forms to tactile signaling. Yet what if you’re deaf-blind and without human assistance? This is where a new robotic system could conceivably fill in.

• Hackaday ☛ Investigating The Fourth Passive Component

  When first learning about and building electronic circuits, the first things all of us come across are passive components such as resistors, capacitors, and inductors. These have easily-understandable properties and are used in nearly all circuits in some way or another. Eventually we’ll move on to learning about active components like transistors, but there’s a fourth passive circuit component that’s almost never encountered. Known as the memristor, this mysterious device is not quite as intuitive as the other three, so [Andrew] created an Arduino shield to investigate their properties.

• Education

  • The Atlantic ☛ So Much for ‘Learn to Code’

    If mid-career developers have to fret about what automation might soon do to their job, students are in the especially tough spot of anticipating the long-term implications before they even start their career. “The question of what it will look like for a student to go through an undergraduate program in computer science, graduate with that degree, and go on into the industry … That is something I do worry about,” Timothy Richards, a computer-science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. Not only do teachers like Richards have to wrestle with just how worthwhile learning to code is anymore, but even teaching students to code has become a tougher task. ChatGPT and other chatbots can handle some of the basic tasks in any introductory class, such as finding problems with blocks of code. Some students might habitually use ChatGPT to cheat on their assignments, eventually collecting their diploma without having learned how to do the work themselves.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Baker College Turnaround Plagued by Federal Scrutiny, Plunging Revenue

    Among the people streaming onto Baker College campuses early this fall were some new faces: federal investigators conducting an unusual review of the marketing and recruitment practices of the Michigan private college.

    The investigators looked at records and asked questions about admission interactions, including what prospective students were told about cost, financial aid and post-graduation salaries, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge who spoke anonymously because they said they could lose their jobs if they talked to the news media. Questions from the investigators focused on student experiences at Baker and whether the school lived up to promises made in the recruiting process.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ U.S. Finalizes CHIPS Funding Rules Prohibiting Chinese Investments

    U.S. Department of Commers prohibits receivers of CHIPS grants to invest in China, form R&D partnerships.

  • Brad Taunt ☛ The X220 ThinkPad is the Best Laptop in the World

    The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you're wrong if you think otherwise. No laptop hardware has since surpassed the nearly perfect build of the X220. New devices continue to get thinner and more fragile. Useful ports are constantly discarded for the sake of "design". Functionality is no longer important to manufacturers. Repairability is purposefully removed to prevent users from truly "owing" their hardware.

    It's a mess out there. But thank goodness I still have my older, second-hand X220.

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Prize 2023: An Anti-Tremor Handle, With No Electronics

    Many of us will have seen the various active assistive devices which have appeared over the last few years to help people with a hand tremor. Probably the best known was a fork with a set of servos and an accelerometer, that kept the end of the utensil steady despite the owner’s hand movements. It’s a field which has the potential to help many people, but it’s undeniable that such technology comes with a cost.

  • Hackaday ☛ You’ve Got Mail: Faster And Faster We Go

    When we last left the post office, they had implemented OCR to read even the sloppiest of handwriting. And to augment today’s 99% accuracy rate, there’s a center full of humans who can decipher the rest of those messy addresses with speed and aplomb. Before that, we took a look at many of the machines that make up the automated side of the post office’s movements. But what was being done to improve the customer experience during all of this time?

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Daniel Ek Confirms Spotify Won’t Ban AI Music Outright, Doubles Down on Soundalike-Track Restrictions

    According to the BBC piece, Ek pinpointed three main classifications for the use of AI in the music sphere, one referring to cutting-edge tools designed to enhance and contribute to works. The Spotify CEO described the latter, which are already being utilized by commercially prominent acts, as acceptable.

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Multi-Modal AI is a UX Problem

    The next frontier in AI is combining these modalities in interesting ways. Explain what’s happening in a photo. Debug a program with your voice. Generate music from an image. There’s still technical work to be done with combining these modalities, but the greatest challenge is not a technical one but a user experience one.

  • Scheerpost ☛ The AI Conundrum: The Peace Movement’s Next Big Challenge

    The application of AI to autonomous systems represents a quantum leap from the immediate and often devastating impacts of modern weaponry. The accelerated use of drone warfare promoted by President Obama and continuing today introduced a major shift towards a kind of abstraction separating us from the immediate human consequences of military initiatives. With this “advance” in high tech weaponry, targeted individuals 6 or 7 thousand miles away have been killed by operators sitting comfortably behind computer screens, almost as if they were engaged in some sort of gaming experience– a marked departure from the very notion of how warfare is conducted. The more layers of abstraction we add to military operations, of course, the further away we get from their actual and often terrifying human consequences.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ Breyer on chat control investigative research: EU Commissioner as double agent of foreign interference

      Research published yesterday by several European media outlets has revealed that an international campaign in support of the EU’s proposed child sexual abuse regulation has been largely orchestrated and financed by a network of organisations with links to the tech industry and security services. The controversial “chat control” regulation would require providers to indiscriminately scan and automatically disclose allegedly suspicious private messages and photos. EU Parliament lawmaker Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party), negotiator for the Greens/European Free Alliance group on the proposed regulation, expresses shock:

    • Techdirt ☛ Privacy Activists Call Out UK Schools For Using An App To Monitor Students

      As we’re all too well aware, there’s plenty of money to be made in the surveillance business. The best surveillance businesses, though, are those that rely on captive markets.

  • Confidentiality

    • Idiomdrottning ☛ Finding GPG keys

      So a few days ago on Fedi I linked to a blogpost of someone talking about how to get keys from the Proton API for custom domains who don’t use WKD. But they actually also have a hkps server up, and so do Mailvelope. I was piping the export of the curl API call directly to GPG anyway and that doesn’t make any sense since it’s something GPG can do already.

• Defence/Aggression

  • teleSUR ☛ China and Syria Announce Strategic Partnership

    Syria was one of the first Arab countries that established diplomatic relations with China, President Xi recalled.

  • RFERL ☛ Mass Exodus: Thousands Of Ethnic Armenians Flee Nagorno-Karabakh

    Tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians have fled Nagorno-Karabakh for Armenia, many of them hungry and exhausted from their travels and worried about the uncertainties that lie ahead.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Nagorno-Karabakh: Nearly half of ethnic Armenians flee

    The Armenian government said at least 53,000 ethnic Armenians fled Nagorno-Karabakh since Azerbaijan's operation last week to take control of the breakaway region.

  • Meduza ☛ President of Nagorno-Karabakh Republic signs decree ending unrecognized state’s existence as of January 1, 2024 — Meduza

  • Site36 ☛ Human rights violations: German Federal Police equips Coast Guard in Tunisia

  • Site36 ☛ Italy’s Foreign Minister in Berlin: Sea rescue becomes a top priority

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • France24 ☛ Several hundred Wagner fighters return to eastern Ukraine, Kyiv says

      Several hundred members of Russia’s Wagner private mercenary group have returned to eastern Ukraine to fight but are not having a significant impact on the battlefield, a Ukrainian military spokesperson said on Wednesday. Wagner fighters played an important role in Russia’s capture of the eastern city of Bakhmut in May but left Ukraine after a brief mutiny in June.

    • Latvia ☛ Latvian golfers raise 14,000 euros for Ukraine

      Golfers in Latvia raised more than 14,000 euros for Ukraine at a charity tournament this month, with the proceeds due to be used to purchase an off-road vehicle and drone.

    • Meduza ☛ Parliament of Bulgaria approves giving Ukraine long-range missiles that need refurbishing — Meduza

    • Federal News Network ☛ North Korean leader urges greater nuclear weapons production in response to a ‘new Cold War’

      North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has called for an exponential increase in production of nuclear weapons and for his country to play a larger role in a coalition of nations confronting the United States in what he described as a “new Cold War.” State media say Kim made the comments during a two-day session of the North’s rubber-stamp parliament which amended the constitution to include his policy of expanding the country’s military nuclear program. The Supreme People’s Assembly meetings came after Kim traveled to Russia this month on a trip that sparked Western concerns about a possible arms alliance in which North Korea would provide Russia with munitions for its war on Ukraine in exchange for advanced weapons technologies.

    • AntiWar ☛ Washington’s Strategic Overextension

      The Biden administration seems determined to pursue highly confrontational policies toward both Moscow and Beijing.  The United States, through its leadership of NATO, is pursuing a full-blown proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.  Indeed, that initiative appears to be only part of a larger plan to fatally weaken Russia as a major power.

    • NYPost ☛ Russian murderer who put lover’s body through meat grinder pardoned for fighting in Ukraine

      Dmitry Zelensky was pardoned in June, after fighting for 6 months in Ukraine.

    • NYPost ☛ Poland wants to extradite ex-Nazi who got ‘scandalous’ standing ovation from Canada’s government

      Education Minister Przemyslaw Czarnek announced on Tuesday he made a request to extradite 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, who received a standing ovation in Canada’s House of Commons, where he was touted as a “hero” who fought for the First Ukrainian Division in World War II on Friday.

    • France24 ☛ 🔴 Live: NATO’s Stoltenberg says Ukraine ‘gradually gaining ground’ in counteroffensive

      NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that Ukrainian forces are “gradually gaining ground” in their counteroffensive against Russia during an unannounced visit to Kyiv on Thursday. The Western alliance chief also said that Ukraine is “closer to NATO than ever before”.

    • France24 ☛ Canadian PM Trudeau offers 'unreserved’ apology for invite to Nazi veteran

      Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday offered an "unreserved" apology in parliament after the legislature publicly -- if unwittingly -- celebrated a Ukrainian World War II veteran who'd fought alongside the Nazis.

    • RFERL ☛ Britain's Shapps Meets Zelenskiy On First Visit To Kyiv As Defense Minister

      British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps discussed how to bolster Ukraine's air defenses during talks in Kyiv with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the president's office said on September 28.

    • RFERL ☛ NATO Chief Says Ukraine 'Gradually Gaining Ground' As Kyiv Repels Massive Russian Drone Barrage

      Ukrainian forces were "gradually gaining ground" in their counteroffensive against Russian invaders, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said during a visit to Kyiv on September 28, hours after the Ukrainian military said it had repelled a massive wave of Russian drone attacks.

    • The Straits Times ☛ German cartel office clears Rheinmetall, Ukrainian defence firm JV in Kyiv

      Germany's cartel office on Thursday cleared the formation of a joint venture between German defence contractor Rheinmetall and the state-owned Ukrainian Defense Industry (UDI).

    • New York Times ☛ Russia-Ukraine War: Defense Officials Meet Zelensky in Kyiv to Discuss Military Support

      The visits by the NATO secretary general and the French and British defense ministers come ahead of a planned forum in Kyiv billed as a place to discuss weapons technology and how to increase production inside Ukraine.

    • Security Week ☛ Russian Zero-Day Acquisition Firm Offers $20 Million for Android, iOS Exploits

      Russian zero-day acquisition firm Operation Zero is now offering $20 million for full Android and iOS exploit chains.

    • Meduza ☛ Navalny transferred to single cell-type room for year in what amounts to harshest punishment prison colony can give — Meduza

    • LRT ☛ NATO deploys surveillance jets to Lithuania to monitor Russia

      NATO will temporarily deploy Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) surveillance planes to Lithuania’s Šiauliai. The first of two aircraft will arrive on Thursday and will fly missions to monitor Russian military activity near the alliance’s borders.

    • The Straits Times ☛ Mystery Russian plane in Pyongyang stokes concerns of North Korea arms deals

      Observers say the silence around the flight may indicate talks on weapons or technology transfers.

    • The Gray Zone ☛ Nazigate: Canada’s top general won’t apologize for applauding Ukrainian Waffen-SS vet

• Environment

  • Lusaka ZM ☛ Company backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos Aims to Start Copper and Cobalt Production in Zambia Within a Decade

    KoBold Metals also collaborates with industry giants BHP Group and Rio Tinto on projects in Australia. Stakes in the Mingomba project are held by commodity investor EMR Capital and Zambia’s ZCCM-IH.

  • DeSmog ☛ Youth Challenge 32 European Nations in ‘Truly Historic’ Climate Trial

    After Portugal experienced massive wildfires and extreme heat waves this summer, six children and youth from the nation appeared in the European Court of Human Rights Wednesday for a landmark lawsuit against 32 European nations charged with violating their human rights due to the impacts of climate change.

    At the hearing in Strasbourg, France, lawyers representing six Portuguese young people said the youth were being discriminated against by state inaction in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the effects of which have been “foreseeable for decades.” 

  • DeSmog ☛ A System of Secret Arbitration Tribunals Is Undercutting Climate Action Worldwide

    Investors in foreign development projects have “weaponized” a system of secretive tribunals, delaying progress on climate change and other environmental crises and having “enormous impacts on human rights,” according to a  new report by a United Nations expert.

    David R. Boyd, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, concludes in the report that these controversial arbitration mechanisms, which are contained in thousands of investment treaties, have led to “exorbitant damages awards against states, permits granted for environmentally destructive activities and the rollback of vital rules addressing climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.” 

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Traveling Europe on land: Turku to Prague

      As someone who doesn’t fly, living in Finland makes traveling in Europe a bit challenging. While I lived in Berlin, I truly enjoyed the privilege of being able to jump on a train and be in a different country later the same day. Now that I’m back in Finland, there are a few extra hoops.

      This month I traveled from Turku, Finland to Prague, Czechia by the sea and the land and here’s my diary of the journey.

    • Kansas Reflector ☛ Battery storage seen as ‘backbone’ of reliable electric grid but adoption uneven across US

      The Searcy Solar Energy Center, a 100-megawatt solar and storage center, is unique. It’s the only “hybrid asset” in the territory managed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which coordinates the electric grid in all or part of 15 states, said Nick Howell, solar asset team leader at Entergy Services, part of a bigger company that also runs utilities in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The batteries, housed in six containers across the site, can store up to 30 megawatts and are charged by power that’s curtailed from the panels, meaning juice that the grid can’t use at any given time that would have otherwise been wasted. (One megawatt of solar on average can power about 173 homes, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.)

• Finance

  • RFA ☛ China's ill-defined spy law dampens foreign investor confidence

    European and American Chambers of Commerce call for greater transparency as companies shift money elsewhere.

  • The Straits Times ☛ China, Germany resume high-level financial talks after COVID-19

    China and Germany will co-host a third financial dialogue in Germany on Oct. 1, the Chinese foreign ministry said on Thursday, resuming high-level talks that had stalled for several years due to COVID-19.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Press Gazette ☛ Podcast 57: What is the Murdoch Factor?

    Peter Jukes talks about Rupert Murdoch's unique qualities.

  • New Yorker ☛ The Myth-Making of Elon Musk

    The New Yorker’s critics discuss a new biography of Elon Musk, how the archetype of the tech entrepreneur has shifted over time, and how we might move beyond it.

  • Michael Geist ☛ The Need for Truthful Accountability: What ATIP Records Tell Us About Pablo Rodriguez and Canadian Heritage Funding an Anti-Semite

    The past few days have been painful to watch as Canadian politicians grapple with the aftermath of recognizing and applauding a Nazi in the House of Commons. The episode and its response brings back memories from last year’s discouraging response to revelations that Canadian Heritage's anti-hate program had provided funding to Laith Marouf, a known anti-semite.

  • India Times ☛ Digital India Bill set to add myriad online offence laws under ‘user harm’

    The Digital India Bill is likely to define and encode in law various online offences such as cryptojacking, astroturfing, dogpiling or cyber-mob attacks, dogwhistling, swatting, gaslighting and catfishing, people in know of the development told ET.

  • India Times ☛ Flipkart merges tech and product ops of travel and epharmacy biz

    The integration has come ahead of Flipkart's flagship festive season sale of BigBillionDays, which may kick off on October 7 or 8 – two to three days ahead of rival Amazon’s festive sale that is set to start on October 10, these people said. Flipkart has, however, yet to finalise the dates.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Amazon Announces $4 Billion Investment in Anthropic, An AI Startup

    Amazon says it will initially invest $1.25 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic, which operates an AI-powered chatbot capable of analyzing text speech. Amazon has the option to increase the full investment into Anthropic to $4 billion. Anthropic says it plans to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to build out its chatbot Claude Next—supposed to be ten times more capable than today’s AI.

    Anthropic warns meeting this challenge will require billions of dollars in spending over the next 18 months. Microsoft has thrown over $13 billion in funding at OpenAI over the course of the last few years, so that should come as no surprise.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Strategist ☛ Spotting misinformation and disinformation in Australia’s Voice to Parliament referendum

      Misinformation and disinformation have come to curse all national issues involving major political decisions. This was true of the Covid-19 pandemic with its mask mandates and lockdowns, and of recent elections.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Kids Are Smart: Teach Them To Be Safe Online

    Last April, Utah Governor Spencer Cox noted that “Kids are smart, they’ll find ways around” Utah’s new social media bans. But that’s not the reason why these laws will fail teens in Utah, Arkansas, and Texas. These laws will fail teens because state leaders don’t believe kids are smart enough to learn to use social media appropriately.

  • Project Censored ☛ The Rising Political Battle Over Censorship...

  • Project Censored ☛ The Project Censored Newsletter—September 2023

    Be sure to check out past BBW episodes of the Project Censored Show on our website, including the 40th-anniversary show from last year. More recently, BBW’s 2022 Youth Honorary Chair, Cameron Samuels, was a guest on the Show in June 2023 and authored a related Dispatch about the dangerous consequences of recent book ban bills in Texas. Stay tuned for a new Project Censored Show and Dispatch for Banned Books Week by the 2023 Youth Honorary Chair, Da’Taeveyon Daniels.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RFA ☛ Transiting Taiwan airport, Chinese activist seeks political asylum

    Saying he would be jailed if sent back to China, Chen Siming refuses to board a connecting flight.

  • The Verge ☛ The new WGA contract will change how Hollywood works

    The WGA dropped [sic] a summary of the contract tonight and it's historic. The flashiest wins for the WGA are around pay increases and artificial intelligence. The pay increases are significant across the board, with notable increases for "high budget subscription video on demand" (think Netflix) and streaming films.

    The WGA says writers of streaming features should see a minimum compensation increase of 18 percent, provided that film was budgeted at least $30 million, plus a 26 percent increase in residual base.

  • Futurism ☛ Strike Ends With Writers Guild Forcing Concessions on AI

    As per a summary of the new bargaining agreement published by the WGA, "AI can’t write or rewrite literary material, and AI-generated material will not be considered source material."

    In many ways, that's a big win for the union, making it impossible for any writing generated by an AI to be considered literary material, since an AI can't be considered a "writer." After all, that's what the WGA had been demanding from the start.

    Interestingly, writers still reserve the right to access these tools, with the caveat that employers such as movie or TV studios allow this kind of use. Studios will also have to tell writers if any materials they're working with were AI-generated.

  • Summary of the 2023 WGA MBA

    The following is a summary of the deal terms for the 2023 MBA. It is a simplified version of the Memorandum of Agreement (“MOA”), which contains the full text of the new provisions. The language of the MOA controls in the case of any inconsistency with this summary. Unless amended in the 2023 negotiations, the provisions of the 2020 MBA remain unchanged.

  • Scheerpost ☛ I Was the Only U.S. Official Imprisoned Over the Torture Program — Because I Opposed It

    The only person associated with the CIA's global torture program who was prosecuted and imprisoned was the man who blew the whistle on it — John Kiriakou.

  • Axios ☛ Writers strike officially over, ending second-longest walkout in WGA history

    Key takeaways: The three-year deal, published by the WGA alongside the update Tuesday night, gives WGA members most of what they had been fighting for, including wage increases, better residual payouts, staffing minimums and guidelines around the use of artificial intelligence.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 'White Torture' documents Iran's notorious prison methods

    After other spells in prison, in May 2016, she was sentenced in Tehran to 16 years behind bars for establishing "a human rights movement that campaigns for the abolition of the death penalty."

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Joe Biden’s Trip to Michigan Shows Why You Push Democrats, Not Capitulate to Them

    There is a clear lesson here with implications beyond the current strike action. It was worker militancy, after all — not acquiescence toward political elites — that brought a Democratic president to the picket lines. Ahead of next year’s presidential election, unions and progressive groups alike should take note and wield whatever leverage they have at their disposal. By doing just that, the UAW has demonstrated the radical potential that comes from challenging political power instead of genuflecting to it — and, in the process, has achieved something remarkable on behalf of America’s entire working class.

  • Techdirt ☛ 5th Circuit Does It Again: Puts Yet Another Law Already Deemed Unconstitutional Into Effect With No Explanation

    What the fuck is going on with the 5th Circuit? Last week we wrote about it putting a law into effect just after a district court had laid out why it was unconstitutional (this was about mandatory made up “health warnings” and age verification on adult content websites). This followed on the 5th Circuit doing something similar last year, that caused the Supreme Court to give the 5th a gentle wrist slap (which apparently has ignored the message). In both cases, we highlighted how crazy it is for the appeals court to say “put this law into effect immediately” with zero explanation, especially after the district court judges went into great detail to explain why the law is unconstitutional.

• Monopolies

  • Techdirt ☛ The New FTC Amazon Antitrust Case Is Better Than The Last One, But Still Weird

    It’s no secret that I think this FTC has been pretty disappointing and has missed a ton of opportunities to actually make things better for the public. For reasons I really don’t understand, it has filed a lot of antitrust cases against tech companies that have almost always seemed half-baked, resulting in a losing streak in court. I have no doubt that some of the big tech companies are doing some terrible things, but it’s been… weird at how little the FTC has actually been able to show in their main shots on goal.

  • India Times ☛ Epic Games asks US Supreme Court to review Apple antitrust case

    "Fortnite" owner Epic has waged a multi-year legal battle against Apple alleging its App Store, where developers pay commissions of up to 30% on in-app purchases, violates U.S. antitrust laws. In 2021, a trial court ruled Apple's App Store does not break antitrust laws.

  • Patents

    • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Seeking Comment on Standards, SEPs, and Competitiveness [Ed: Standards ought not have any patents on them; none whatsoever]

      The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), International Trade Administration (ITA), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have extended the deadline for public comments on their request for information on standards and intellectual property. The new deadline is November 6, 2023.

  • Trademarks

    • Techdirt ☛ Court Declines To Grant New Trial To Molson Coors And Stone Brewing Over Trademark Suit Result

      As you may recall, starting a little over 3 years ago we discussed Stone Brewing’s transformation from one-time icon of the craft brewing scene into a trademark bully. What kicked this whole thing off was Stone’s win in a trademark lawsuit against macro-brewer Molson Coors (then Miller Coors, but I will be using the company’s current name throughout the rest of this post). That suit was filed over Molson Coors changing the branding for its Keystone line of beers such that the word “STONE” became the focal point of the branding by way of font size and its prominence on the packaging. Stone Brewing argued this amounted to trademark infringement, something with which I absolutely disagree is the case, but also something for which a jury found in favor of Stone Brewing to the tune of $56 million. As someone who is quite familiar with both products and beer in general, the idea that anyone was mistakenly buying Keystone thinking it was a Stone Brewery product, well, just no. But that, I suppose, is why juries are made up of 12 peers and not 1 Timothy Geigner.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Under Hollywood Pressure, Vietnam Cracks Down On....Live Sports Piracy

      As the world's largest pirate sites operate freely in Vietnam, the MPA has left no stone unturned in its quest for local cooperation. This week the Vietnamese government reported progress; 1,000 pirate sites blocked in the last 12 months. Most offered live football streams, so not exactly great news for Hollywood, but factors other than copyright may have played a role.

    • Walled Culture ☛ Interview | Fred von Lohmann: Copyright Battles, the US DMCA and EU Copyright Directive, Filters, and Interfaces

      In this final bonus Walled Culture podcast episode – recorded mid-2022 and kept under wraps as a special 1st anniversary episode, we welcome Fred von Lohmann, former Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Google copyright counsel. Our conversation starts with recalling how he got intrigued by copyright, crediting John Perry Barlow, and explaining how he was at the right juncture to become a tech enthusiast.

    • MWL ☛ Yes, I Know I’m In the AI Scraping Search Engine

      I awakened today ready to make words on Run Your Own Mail Server only to discover that half the world wanted to be sure I knew about the search engine for Meta’s Books3 LLM training data, aka “AI.”

      Yes, I know.

    • The Atlantic ☛ These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech

      It may be beyond the scope of copyright law to address the harms being done to authors by generative AI, and the point remains that AI-training practices are secretive and fundamentally nonconsensual. Very few people understand exactly how these programs are developed, even as such initiatives threaten to upend the world as we know it. Books are stored in Books3 as large, unlabeled blocks of text. To identify their authors and titles, I extracted ISBNs from these blocks of text and looked them up in a book database. Of the 191,000 titles I identified, 183,000 have associated author information. You can use the search tool below to look up authors in this subset and see which of their titles are included.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Streaming Now Accounts for 98% of US-Based Latin Music Recorded Revenues

      Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) released a general US music mid-year revenue report. Today, the RIAA followed it up with genre-specific data, revealing that US-based Latin music revenues increased 15% to a record high of $627 million — with streaming once again providing the lion’s share of growth, accounting for 98% of recorded revenues. Setting the pace for this week’s genre-specific data, the RIAA celebrated Latin music legends and leaders at the annual RIAA Honors celebration last week.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The Quiet Decade

    This is a tough, very personal entry. It's the anniversary of my move to the capital and I've had a bad day. I discuss self harm, suicide and acts of emotional abuse.

    The past decade, from 2013 to 2023, has been the most prominent time period of my life, and it has passed in two halves: The first, full of growth and changes to myself that I did not realized were happening at the time. The second, full of grief and inaction, every skill and desire covered in dust.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Things Are Chugging Along

    Me and the boys are going to the local geek store for a miniature painting night today. It's becoming a Thursday night tradition that we all enjoy. One of them will be painting another Chaos Space Marine and the other has a nice Tau drone to paint. I don't know what I'll paint; we'll see.