Links 04/10/2023: Murena 2 with /e/OS and More
Contents
- Distributions and Operating Systems
- Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
- Leftovers
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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BSD
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[Repeat] Make Use Of ☛ OpenBSD vs. FreeBSD: What Is the Difference, Which Is Best?
OpenBSD is focused on security and is known for its commitment to code correctness. FreeBSD, on the other hand, is positioned as a general-purpose system with a history of powering dot-com infrastructure.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Education
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DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Comments on a 2008 Richard Stallman Interview and Why Some People Don’t Value Free Software.
The interviewer asked him why he felt the Free Software Movement was so strong in some countries and not in others. He said “I don’t know.”
I’d say that it’s worth speculating.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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Society for Scholarly Publshing ☛ The American Chemical Society Offers a New Twist on the Article Processing Charge: An Interview with Sarah Tegen
On 21 September, the Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) announced a new twist on the article processing charge (APC) model of funding open-access publishing. Their new program involves what they call an article development charge (ADC), which is designed to “provide authors a new option to satisfy funder requirements for zero-embargo green open access.” Sarah Tegen, PhD, Chief Publishing Officer of ACS Publications, agreed to respond to a few questions about this new program.
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Programming/Development
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Python
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Adafruit ☛ Python Developers Survey 2022 Results #Python #Community @ThePSF
The Python Software Foundation has announced the results of the sixth official annual Python Developers Survey. This work is done each year as a collaborative effort between the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains. Late last year, more than 23,000 Python developers and enthusiasts from almost 200 countries/regions participated in the survey to reveal the current state of the language and the ecosystem around it.
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Simon Willison ☛ New sqlite3 CLI tool in Python 3.12.
The newly released Python 3.12 includes a SQLite shell, which you can open using “python -m sqlite3”—handy for when you’re using a machine that has Python installed but no sqlite3 binary.
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The Register UK ☛ And now for something completely different: Python 3.12
Python has recently been ranked the most popular, second most popular, or third most popular programming language, depending on whom you ask. Whatever the case, it's the lingua franca of data science and AI, and a common entry point into programming in academic settings.
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Leftovers
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Hackaday ☛ 2023 Halloween Hackfest: Treat Trough Of Terror Is Actually Pretty Cute
Even though it seems the worst of COVID has passed, October generally kicks off cold and flu season, so why not continue to pass out Halloween treats in a socially-distanced fashion?
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Zimbabwe ☛ Detroit’s decline is a cautionary tale about overreliance on a single industry, Harare take note
Looking it up reveals that Detroit has lost over 60% of its residents since 1950. It has been losing people every decade since and the population shrunk by 25% from 2000-2010. The rate of loss decreased from 2010-2020 but the city still lost 10.5% of its residents that decade.
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Tim Bray ☛ Social-media Search Comparo
Methodology LOL · This mini-study uses a single query: "dark matter", two words enclosed in quotes, which many search engines will interpret as a search for the phrase, as distinct from the two words.
Hardly rigorous I know, and unquantitative; no numbers were abused in the construction of this essay. But I still think there are useful observations to make.
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Vintage Everyday ☛ Detroit’s I-94 Uniroyal Tire Was Once a Giant Ferris Wheel at the 1964 NY World’s Fair
The Uniroyal Giant Tire was created by the Uniroyal Tire Company for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where it functioned as a Ferris wheel. Since 1966 it has served as a static display in Allen Park, Michigan, alongside Interstate 94, between the Southfield Freeway interchange and Outer Drive overpass.
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Hackaday ☛ Peggyboard Will Have You Climbing The Walls Repeatedly
When you can’t climb actual rocks all the time, what do you do to train and keep sharp? You go to a rock-climbing gym, naturally. But what do you do when it’s 2020 and your rock-climbing gym has shuttered for the foreseeable? You build the best darn rock-climbing wall possible, and you outfit it with an LED for every hold and write an app that lets you plan your route and repeat it later.
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Hackaday ☛ Bioadhesive Polymer Semiconductors For In-Vivo Sensors
What do you do when you want to stick an electrode or even an couple of sensors to an internal organ, such as a heart? Generally you’d use some kind of special adhesive, or sutures to ensure that the item remains firmly in place and doesn’t migrate to somewhere else within the chest cavity or among the intestines. According to a new study (press release) by Nan Li and colleagues in Science there may however be a more elegant method, using bioadhesive polymers.
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Science
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Science Alert ☛ Wrinkles on Mercury's Surface Suggest The Planet Is Still Shrinking
Happens to all of us.
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DJ Bernstein ☛ The inability to count correctly: Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level.
Oops, wait, maybe not. In 2022, NIST announced plans to standardize a particular cryptosystem, Kyber-512. As justification, NIST issued claims regarding the security level of Kyber-512. In 2023, NIST issued a draft standard for Kyber-512.
NIST's underlying calculation of the security level was a severe and indefensible miscalculation. NIST's primary error is exposed in this blog post, and boils down to nonsensically multiplying two costs that should have been added.
How did such a serious error slip past NIST's review process? Do we dismiss this as an isolated incident? Or do we conclude that something is fundamentally broken in the procedures that NIST is following?
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The Scotsman ☛ Nobel Prize for medicine: How mRNA vaccines against Covid demonstrate the need for science for science's sake – Scotsman comment
In the 1990s, two scientists working on developing new mRNA vaccines discovered the rest of the world “really didn’t care about it”. But if anyone believed they were working in a dead-end field, events 30 years later were to prove the doubters wrong. After Covid hit, the rapid creation of effective mRNA vaccines saved countless lives.
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Education
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Pro Publica ☛ VA Public Records Exemption for University Presidents’ Papers Limits Oversight
This past May, we were working on a story about how the establishment and expansion of Virginia’s Christopher Newport University dismantled a vibrant Black neighborhood. When we asked university officials for archival material, we encountered something we hadn’t heard about before. We learned that in Virginia, the papers of state university presidents are largely exempt from public records laws.
We asked for several boxes containing some of the papers of Paul Trible, the university’s president from 1996 to 2022, which pertained to real estate acquisitions, board meetings and development projects. Since the city of Newport News seized the core of the Black community for a new campus in the early 1960s, Christopher Newport has bought almost all of the remaining homes there.
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The Atlantic ☛ The College Backlash Is Going Too Far
That analysis, however, suffers from a key oversight. In estimating the lifetime earnings for people who are now in their 30s and early 40s, the researchers assumed that the college wage premium will stay constant throughout their life. In fact, it almost surely will not. For Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and older Millennials, the college wage premium has more than doubled between the ages of 25 and 50, from less than 40 percent to nearly 80 percent. Likewise, the college wealth premium for past generations was initially very small but grew rapidly after age 40. History tells us that the best is yet to come for today’s recent graduates.
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Lawrence Tratt ☛ Minor Advances in Knowledge Are Still a Worthwhile Goal
But, on another level, this made me realise anew how much progress still occurs in an age where, it is often said, progress has largely stalled. I might reasonably have guessed that, at most, one might improve guitar strings in a given metric by a handful of percent, but not by 3x — I have no idea what advances in metallurgy might have made such an improvement possible.
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International Business Times ☛ Study Shows British Youths and Women Prone To Digital Poverty
The report titled "Digital Poverty in the UK: A Socio-economic Assessment of the Implications of Digital Poverty in the UK" analysed the scale and impact of digital poverty in the country, especially in the present cost-of-living crisis scenario.
According to this report by the Digital Poverty Alliance (DPA) and Deloitte 19 million British youths have experienced digital poverty in some form.
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Hardware
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Latvia ☛ Latvia working on 'quantum communications' network
The Latvian State Radio and Television Centre (LVRTC) is collaborating with communications firm Tet, the Electronic Communications Office of Latvia and the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Latvia to begin work on the formation of a national quantum communications infrastructure system and network, reports Labs of Latvia.
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Federal News Network ☛ Trio wins Nobel Prize in physics for split-second glimpse of superfast spinning world of electrons
Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics for their work on how electrons zip around the atom during the tiniest fractions of seconds.
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Hackaday ☛ Life-Sized Rock’em Sock’em Robot Will Definitely Knock Your Block Off
He knocked his block off! That’s what [Zach] of Byte Sized Engineering is planning on saying when he completes this Rock’em Sock’em Robots replica. The twist? His replica is going to be life-sized. The original game involved two players, each controlling a robot that could punch and block with two lever-driven arms. [Zach] is looking to scale that up to human sized, but with a few interesting technical additions.
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Hackaday ☛ Bus Sniffing The Model 5150 For Better Emulation
At the risk of stating the obvious, a PC is more than just its processor. And if you want to accurately emulate what’s going on inside the CPU, you’d do well to pay attention to the rest of the machine, as [GloriousCow] shows us by bus-sniffing the original IBM Model 5150.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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University of Michigan ☛ Online screenings available for National Depression Screening Day
Oct. 5 is National Depression Screening Day, which raises awareness about the widespread impact of clinical depression, and the importance of mental and emotional health, including resources available through the university.
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New York Times ☛ How to Start Reversing Insulin Resistance
Insulin resistance can lead to a host of health problems — but it’s also reversible if you act. Here’s how.
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Hackaday ☛ ARPA-H Moonshot Project Aims To Enable 3D Printing Of Human Organs
The field of therapeutic cloning has long sought to provide a way to create replacement organs and tissues from a patient’s own cells, with the most recent boost coming from the US Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and a large federal contract awarded to Stanford University.
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Ruben Schade ☛ Difficult decisions and willpower
If you imagine a Sims-style set of bars for hunger, energy, and comfort, I reckon there’s another called willpower, or maybe “decision capacity”.
I’ve noticed two ways this plays out for me. The first is that I can only make a fixed number of decisions a day before I feel tired or irritable when I encounter another one. Even tiny decisions accumulate, which is why I’ve been on such a kick lately to automate the small fries. If the importance, urgency, and impact are all low, I really don’t want to waste time and finite willpower thinking about them.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Futurism ☛ Tom Hanks Says Someone Used AI to Make an Ad Featuring Him Without His Permission
Hanks posted a noticeably AI-manipulated screenshot that appears to be from the video, though neither Futurism nor any other news outlet have been able to find the original. As Gizmodo pointed out, however, the image it was trained on seems to be an old one of the actor that's owned by the Los Angeles Times.
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Vice Media Group ☛ 'It's Ludicrous': Those $17K Gold Apple Watches Are Now Obsolete
Eight years after Apple released its $17,000 luxury gold edition of the original Apple Watch, MacRumors is reporting that it’s being marked as obsolete. According to an internal memo obtained by the outlet, the initial run of Apple Watches, which launched in 2015, was added to Apple’s list of obsolete products on September 30. That includes all of the base first-edition models, but also the ultra-luxury 18-karat gold editions that became a fad for celebrities and the super-wealthy to flaunt. The list at the time included the artist then known as Kanye West, Drake, Beyoncé, and Karl Lagerfield. An obsolete product can no longer be repaired at Apple Stores or authorized repair centers.
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The Register UK ☛ $17k solid gold Apple Watch goes from Beyoncé's wrist to the obsolete list
If you're still wearing an original Apple Watch, we have bad news: the Series 0 is being moved to Apple's "obsolete" category, meaning owners will no longer be able to get service of any kind for their eight-year-old wrist computers.
That includes the $17,000 solid gold Edition release that appeared on the wrists of celebrities like Beyoncé, Drake, and fashion mogul Karl Lagerfeld. That version only made a single appearance in Series 0, and by Series 2 (there was no Apple Watch Edition model in Series 1) was replaced with a fully ceramic body that costs $1,299 – still expensive, but not "solid 18-karat gold" expensive. The cheaper aluminum, steel, and Hermès versions of Series 0 are also obsolete.
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Gizmodo ☛ Zoom Is Launching Its Own Google Docs Competitor
The company said in a press release that its new feature will be integrated into the meetings feature, and says it will make it “easy for teams and individuals to create, collaborate, manage projects, and stay organized.” It will also reportedly include the option to include tables, charts, and images in the Zoom Doc function, according to the press release.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Zoom adds collaborative document feature and folds generative AI into its entire product line
The highlight for most users is Zoom Docs (pictured), a modular workspace for documentation, project and data management that can also be used to create tables, wikis, tasks and other content. It’s integrated with Zoom conferencing to enable meeting organizers to create new documents and attach existing assets to meeting invitations as well as to collaborate during meetings. Users can populate documents with content from live meetings and chat sessions and also create new content using the Zoom AI Companion, the no-cost generative AI-based assistant it introduced last spring.
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Gizmodo ☛ Onewheel E-Skateboards Face Global Recall Following Four Deaths and Multiple Injuries
All Onewheel self-balancing electric skateboard models are being recalled following reports of at least four deaths and multiple injuries between 2019 and 2021. The recall was issued on Friday and includes 300,000 of the skateboards sold worldwide and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is warning consumers to stop using the skateboard immediately.
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Bruce Schneier ☛ Hacking Gas Pumps via Bluetooth
It’s a complicated crime to monetize, though. You need to sell access to the gas pump to others.
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Business Insider ☛ A thief stole gas worth $3,000 from a filling station by hacking the pump with his phone's Bluetooth, report says
A large car can hold about 15 gallons of gas, per the data analytics company JD Power. That means the thief got away with enough gas to potentially fill the tanks of more than 50 vehicles.
The owner said they eventually had to shut off all the pumps using emergency stops.
Police are now investigating the incident but could not confirm how the pumps were [cracked].
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Meduza ☛ Russia’s FSB requests online services be required to collect and provide users’ geolocation and payment information — Meduza
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EFF ☛ GAO Report Shows the Government Uses Face Recognition with No Accountability, Transparency, or Training
The government watchdog issued yet another report this month about the dangerously inadequate and nonexistent rules for how federal agencies use face recognition, underlining what we’ve already known: the government cannot be trusted with this flawed and dangerous technology.
The GAO review covered seven agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice (DOJ), which together account for more than 80 percent of all federal officers and a majority of face recognition searches conducted by federal agents.
Across each of the agencies, GAO found that most law enforcement officers using face recognition have no training before being given access to the powerful surveillance tool. No federal laws or regulations mandate specific face recognition training for DHS or DOJ employees, and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Marshals Service were the only agencies reviewed to now require training specific to face recognition. Though each agency has their own general policies on handling personally identifiable information (PII), like facial images used for face recognition, none of the seven agencies included in the GAO review fully complied with them.
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EFF ☛ Is Your State’s Child Safety Law Unconstitutional? Try Comprehensive Data Privacy Instead
Courts have issued preliminary injunctions blocking laws in Arkansas, California, and Texas because they likely violate the First Amendment rights of all internet users. EFF has warned that such laws were bad policy and would not withstand court challenges. Nonetheless, different iterations of these child safety proposals continue to be pushed at the state and federal level.
The answer is to re-focus attention on comprehensive data privacy legislation, which would address the massive collection and processing of personal data that is the root cause of many problems online. Just as important, it is far easier to write data privacy laws that are constitutional. Laws that lock online content behind age gates can almost never withstand First Amendment scrutiny because they frustrate all internet users’ rights to access information and often impinge on people’s right to anonymity.
EFF has long pushed for strong comprehensive commercial data privacy legislation and continues to do so. Data privacy legislation has many components. But at its core, it should minimize the amount of personal data that companies process, give users certain rights to control their personal data, and allow consumers to sue when the law is violated.
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EFF ☛ The State of Chihuahua Is Building a 20-Story Tower in Ciudad Juarez to Surveil 13 Cities–and Texas Will Also Be Watching
Chihuahua state officials and a notorious Mexican security contractor broke ground last summer on the Torre Centinela (Sentinel Tower), an ominous, 20-story high-rise in downtown Ciudad Juarez that will serve as the central node of a new AI-enhanced surveillance regime. With tentacles reaching into 13 Mexican cities and a data pipeline that will channel intelligence all the way to Austin, Texas, the monstrous project will be unlike anything seen before along the U.S.-Mexico border.
And that's saying a lot, considering the last 30-plus years of surging technology on the U.S side of the border.
The Torre Centinela will stand in a former parking lot next to the city's famous bullring, a mere half-mile south of where migrants and asylum seekers have camped and protested at the Paso del Norte International Bridge leading to El Paso. But its reach goes much further: the Torre Centinela is just one piece of the Plataforma Centinela (Sentinel Platform), an aggressive new technology strategy developed by Chihuahua's Secretaria de Seguridad Pública Estatal (Secretary of State Public Security or SSPE) in collaboration with the company Seguritech.
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Confidentiality
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Chris Ferris ☛ The Consistently Inconsistence response to Access Key Leaks
So I did it again. Proving I’m the most incompetent Security Hero EVER, I committed eight different access keys to a public GitHub repository for eight different AWS Accounts.
What is fascinating is the consistently inconsistent response of AWS support. Behold a tale of seven cities and a professor.
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Defence/Aggression
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Meduza ☛ Russia’s Investigative Committee charges top Ukrainian military officials with ‘terrorism’ over drone attacks — Meduza
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Democracy Now ☛ Gunman Wearing MAGA Hat Shoots Indigenous Activist at New Mexico Protest over Conquistador Statue
In New Mexico, a 23-year-old gunman wearing a red MAGA hat opened fire last week on Jacob Johns and other Indigenous activists opposing plans to reinstall a statue honoring the 16th century conquistador Juan de Oñate, New Mexico’s first colonial governor. Johns, the prominent climate activist, was airlifted from Española to an Albuquerque hospital and required emergency surgery. We speak with Malaya Peixinho, who participated in Thursday’s gathering, about how the statue of the colonial leader has divided the local community. “It is a really controversial thing to talk about Oñate,” says Peixinho, who believes funds for the statue could go to social programs instead. “That feels more important than funding a statue being resurrected.” The shooter, Ryan Martinez, was arrested and charged with attempted murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for shooting Johns and aiming the gun at Peixinho, who calls the charges “fair” and blames police for not intervening. “They didn’t show up for us,” says Peixinho.
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Democracy Now ☛ “Crime Against Humanity”: Exiled from Diego Garcia for U.S. Military Base, Residents Demand to Return
Over 50 years since the United States forced them out in order to build a military base on the island of Diego Garcia, exiled residents of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean continue to pressure Britain and the U.S. to pay reparations and apologize for expelling residents. We speak with prominent Chagossian activist Olivier Bancoult, who is visiting the United States to meet with lawmakers and State Department officials. The U.S. is “fully responsible for what happened to our people,” says Bacoult. “We want the Biden administration to apologize and to make reparation for what they did wrong to our people.” Located halfway between Africa and Indonesia and about 1,000 miles south of India, the military base on Diego Garcia played a key role in the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. “This is a crime against humanity,” says author of Base Nation David Vine, who adds that there are more than 20 cases of the U.S. displacing local populations for military bases. “The Chagossians are not alone.”
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Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Testing Ad-free Subscription Service Outside U.S. as European Privacy Laws Loom
Next year the Digital Markets Act will take effect, which will have wide-ranging impacts for hardware manufacturers like Apple. For the first time, Apple will be required to provide an avenue to install apps outside the App Store—helping to bring an end to its monopolistic 30% tax.
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India Times ☛ US senators examine TikTok hiring of ByteDance executives
Two US senators said they were investigating short video sharing app TikTok's reported decision recently to hire several high-level executives from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
Senators Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, and Republican Marsha Blackburn said in a letter on Tuesday to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew that the personnel moves further call "into question the independence of TikTok's operations and the security of its U.S. users' information."
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India Times ☛ TikTok to halt transactions on its app in Indonesia from Wednesday
TikTok, which is owned by China's ByteDance, said in a statement on Tuesday that it would coordinate with Indonesia's government regarding its future plans.
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France24 ☛ Boat crammed with 280 migrants reaches Spain's Canary Islands
The migrants [sic], who consisted of 278 men including 10 boys plus two women, are of "sub-Saharan" origin, according to rescuers who aided them on their arrival.
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New York Times ☛ With Surge in Attacks, Militants Begin New Era of Bloodshed in Pakistan
But since the Taliban seized power in neighboring Afghanistan in August 2021, offering some groups safe haven on Afghan soil and starting a crackdown on others that pushed their fighters into neighboring Pakistan, the violence has roared back. The number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan rose by around 50 percent during the Taliban’s first year in power, compared with the year before, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, which monitors extremist violence and is based in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.
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Meduza ☛ After the exodus Ethnic Armenians have fled Nagorno-Karabakh. Here’s what the region’s capital looks like now. — Meduza
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ ‘Shut his mouth, or you’ll all be shot’: How Russian occupation forces transformed the Ukrainian city of Melitopol into ‘Europe’s largest prison’ — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Politico: E.U. on track to announce Ukraine accession talks by end of year — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Ukraine removes Hungarian bank OTP from list of ‘war sponsors’ — Meduza
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Environment
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Overpopulation ☛ How environmental professionals acknowledge overpopulation – and then ignore it
Veteran population campaigners like me have long lamented the fact that at both the national and international scales, the environmental establishment (Big Green) and climate activists alike have for decades either avoided or disparaged the population issue out of some combination of cowardice, calculation, apathy, ignorance, inconvenience, ideology, political expedience, or hypocrisy.
Unfortunately this domain of deniers is not alone. I hate to say it, but most of my fellow environmental professionals – those who have the formal education and technical training to make a career out of managing or protecting the environment, in the public or the private sector – are pretty much in the same denialist or apathetic camp as the activists.
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Omicron Limited ☛ 'Climate vulnerability index' shows where action, resources are needed to address climate change threats
The Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) is the most comprehensive screening tool of its type, showing how, why, and where climate risks threaten the stability of communities throughout the U.S.
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ADF ☛ Chinese Mining ‘Wrecking Lives’ in DRC
China owns most of the industrial mines in the DRC and is responsible for child labor, horrific working and living conditions as well as systematic evictions of residents who live on its vast concessions.
A new report from the DRC-based Initiative for Good Governance and Human Rights, known by its French acronym, IBGDH, along with international rights group Amnesty International, shows how Chinese copper and cobalt mining is “wrecking lives” in the DRC.
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Energy/Transportation
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DeSmog ☛ Is Venture Global’s Louisiana LNG Plant Profiting from Pollution?
Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass liquid natural gas (LNG) export terminal is in the longest ever commissioning period for a plant of its kind. The 19-month duration has enabled the company to sell LNG on the spot market at a much higher price than if the plant was fully operational.
Now, experts say the unprecedented delay raises the possibility that Venture Global is purposefully slow walking the commissioning process and keeping the plant unfit and unclean to make more money. Four companies — including BP and Shell — who say Venture Global hasn’t delivered on its long-term contracts have filed for arbitration, and critics are asking if the firm is profiting from the polluting plant.
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The Nation ☛ Frontline Water Protectors
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Vice Media Group ☛ 'Satoshi Nakamoto' Just Posted. WTF Is Going On?
The tweet was the @Satoshi account’s first since 2018—at that time, it posted the entire Bitcoin white paper—and instantly gained wide attention. At the time of writing, it has over 8,000 retweets and over 18,000 likes. But as with most things involving [cryptoxcurrency] and its pseudonymous creator, the situation is anything but clear-cut. In fact, there’s virtually no chance that the tweet came from the real Satoshi Nakamoto, and the possible identity of the person who did post it is a rabbit hole in its own right.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Omicron Limited ☛ Unique voice prints in parrots could help birds be recognized in a flock, no matter what they say
A study on monk parakeets conducted by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona might have the answer: individuals have a unique tone of voice, known as a voice print, similar to that in humans. This finding in a wild parrot raises the possibility that a voice print might also be present in other vocally flexible species, such as dolphins and bats.
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The Scotsman ☛ After Dutch elm disease and ash dieback, will oaks be next? – Dr Ruth Mitchell
At the James Hutton Institute, our work on ash has shown that 955 species are associated with this tree in the UK. Of these, 45 species were identified as being obligate on ash – unknown from other tree species – and a further 62 species as being highly associated, rarely using other species. This means that not only are we seeing a decline in one of our most common trees, but that ash dieback could drive declines in a whole range of other species. So, it’s not just a question of what trees we are losing but what other species too. Our baseline for biodiversity is getting lower and lower.
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Overpopulation
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Omicron Limited ☛ Report: Ten billion mouths to feed by 2050
Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 will be a formidable challenge. Especially considering that 10% of the world's population is already hungry today and that around 30% is malnourished. And to achieve zero hunger—as set out in United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2—that same year, we'll have to be able to feed an additional 3 billion people and provide better nutrition for 2 billion more. All that while conflicts and climate change are threatening the viability of vast areas of arable land.
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Neil Selwyn ☛ On technology and degrowth (notes on Hickel 2023)
Jason Hickel is one of the leading voices in the degrowth/postgrowth movement, and recently laid out his thoughts on the relationship between degrowth and technology. He raises a number of important arguments to take forward into our own arguments around digital degrowth: [...]
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Meduza ☛ Armenian parliament ratifies Rome Statute — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Putin may announce 2024 presidential run in November, sources tell Kommersant — Meduza
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FSF ☛ The third round of FSF board candidate discussions has begun
All eligible associate members are invited to participate in the final round of this cycle's FSF board candidate discussions, as part of its board process.
We finished two successful rounds of discussions and started the third and last round in this candidate cycle on September 19. We were pleased to see many of you participate in the first two rounds, and we thank you for your valuable feedback.
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Axios ☛ Scoop: Meta news leader Campbell Brown exits company, marking end of era
Under Brown's leadership, Facebook made a massive push into news, committing hundreds of millions of dollars to publishing partners on its platform.
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New York Times ☛ Campbell Brown, Who Led Facebook News, Leaves Meta
Ms. Brown, 54, a former TV anchor and education advocate who for years was Meta’s most prominent representative to the media industry, said in an internal announcement on Tuesday that she would step down this year to pursue other opportunities. She will remain an adviser to the company, and her team will be folded into other teams focused on media and sports partnerships development.
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Silicon Angle ☛ Anthropic seeks huge investment from Google just days after Amazon invested billions
The comapny has reportedly told investors that it’s seeking to reach a valuation of between $20 billion and $30 billion following the conclusion of the proposed round. Such a figure is far in excess of the $4 billion valuation that was slapped on the startup back in March, following a previous round. Notably, it would mean Anthropic’s shares are more expensive relative to revenue than OpenAI’s, The Information added.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Axios ☛ Social media traffic to top news sites craters
Efforts to reach voters with trusted information are becoming more difficult as tech platforms lean into viral trends, instead of quality news.
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International Business Times ☛ China's Artificial Intelligence Programs Pose A Threat to U.S. National Security
"Nation-states seeking to undermine trust in our government institutions, social cohesion and democratic processes are using AI to create more believable mis-, dis- and malinformation campaigns, while cyber actors use AI to develop new tools and accesses that allow them to compromise more victims and enable larger-scale, faster, efficient and more evasive cyber attacks," the assessment continued.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The Gray Zone ☛ British govt funded plan for censorship of factual NATO criticism
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Project Censored ☛ More Draconian Than You Thought: A Look at Georgia RICO Then and Now
The Official Project Censored Show More Draconian Than You Thought: A Look at Georgia RICO Then and NowPlay EpisodePause EpisodeMute/Unmute EpisodeRewind 10 Seconds1xFast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 /SubscribeShareThe Official Project Censored Show More Draconian Than You Thought: A Look at Georgia RICO Then and NowPlay EpisodePause EpisodeMute/Unmute EpisodeRewind 10 Seconds1xFast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 /SubscribeShare
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RFERL ☛ Hundreds Of Iranian Protesters Detained After Marking Anniversary Of Bloody Crackdown
Iranian security forces have detained hundreds of people as protesters in the country’s southeast marked the first anniversary of the killing of scores of demonstrators in the region, according to a human rights group.
Haalvsh, a group that monitors rights violations in Iran's Sistan-Baluchistan Province, said on October 2 that at least 216 people, including minors, had been arrested across the region since September 30.
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RFA ☛ China deletes photo of embracing runners evoking '6/4'Tiananmen
China's internet censors have deleted a photo of two embracing runners displaying the taboo combination of "6” and “4," an inadvertent reference to the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre that authorities have tried to cover up.
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Techdirt ☛ Senator Elizabeth Warren Supports Bill To Silence LGBTQ+ Voices
At this point, any Senator signing on to support KOSA cannot deny that the bill has been written explicitly to suppress LGBTQ+ voices. The Heritage Foundation said so directly earlier this year. And Senator Marsha Blackburn flat out said that KOSA was important in order to “protect minor children from the transgender [sic] in our culture.”
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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The Dissenter ☛ In Hunting WikiLeaks, How Wide Was The National Security State’s Net?
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Truthdig ☛ Five Years After Khashoggi’s Murder, MBS Is Laughing
Little did we know that rather than find safety in Washington D.C., Mohamed bin Salman and his henchmen would trick him into visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where they brutally tortured and murdered him. Little did we expect that five years after his shocking murder, the Biden administration would be potentially rewarding MBS with an unprecedented security guarantee for his monarchical dictatorship.
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CPJ ☛ Two Nigerian journalists charged with cybercrime over corruption reports
On September 11, police officers detained AbdulRazaq and Bolakale, publishers of the independent news websites Just Event Online and The Satcom Media respectively, over their critical reporting about a local politician, according to the two journalists and their lawyer Taofiq Olateju, all of whom spoke with CPJ.
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ANF News ☛ MEPs tighten rules to protect journalists and media outlets
In its position on the European Media Freedom Act, adopted by 448 votes in favour, 102 against and 75 abstentions on Tuesday, the European Parliament wants to oblige member states to ensure media plurality and protect media independence from governmental, political, economic or private interference.
MEPs want to ban all forms of interference in the editorial decisions of media outlets and prevent external pressure being exerted on journalists, such as forcing them to disclose their sources, accessing encrypted content on their devices, or targeting them with spyware.
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Axios ☛ Kansas police chief who led raid of local newspaper office has resigned
The newspaper has said it had obtained the information legally from a tip and used public online records to verify details.
A prosecutor in Marion County later determined that there had been insufficient evidence to justify a raid and withdrew the search warrant, ordering the items seized to be returned.
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Patrick Breyer ☛ Media freedom: Pirates call for protection of journalists from spyware without exceptions
“The media freedom law is a milestone in the protection of journalists in Europe and I am proud that Pirates have contributed to the success of the text. With the new rules, not only media representatives but also their sources, such as whistleblowers, will be better protected. However, it is now necessary to eliminate loopholes that would justify spyware attacks. That is why we Pirates, via our parliamentary group, have tabled amendments to ban spyware attacks without loopholes. Freedom of press is one of the highest values in liberal democracies and requires special protection. We must not allow politically motivated autocratic surveillance attacks to undermine it.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Pro Publica ☛ Idaho Banned Abortion. Then It Turned Down Supports for Pregnancies and Births.
When the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade, it greenlighted the kind of near-universal abortion restrictions that Idaho lawmakers had spent the previous two years crafting. Gov. Brad Little said the state should turn to helping women who might otherwise have terminated pregnancies.
“We absolutely must come together like never before to support women and teens facing unexpected or unwanted pregnancies,” said Little, a Republican who supports the abortion ban. About 1,700 to 2,000 people a year in Idaho had abortions before the court ruling. “Families, churches, charities, and local and state government must stand ready to lift them up and help them and their families with access to adoption services, health care, financial and food assistance, counseling and treatment, and family planning.”
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Techdirt ☛ Court Tells Cop They Need More Than ‘It’s A Vehicle’ And ‘Guy Looked Nervous’ To Engage In Warrantless Searches
Adding to the case law of small, but significant, Fourth Amendment law is this decision [PDF] handed down by a Maine federal court. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)
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Techdirt ☛ Yelp Asks Court To Stop Texas AG Ken Paxton From Suing Them For Warning Users That Crisis Pregnancy Centers Are Scams
To hear Texas legislators (and the 5th Circuit) view the world, it is apparently wholly unconstitutional to share information from the government with websites in any manner that might pressure them in how they moderate, yet at the same time, the government is absolutely free to compel companies to post messages that they want on websites… and, apparently, now to force companies NOT to post messages that they don’t want.
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Techdirt ☛ Google Is Still The Search Engine Of Choice For Law Enforcement
Dominating a field is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it gives you extensive reach, immensely profitable products, and — if you’re just too good at it — the horrific realization your brand name has been commodified to the point that hundreds of millions of people now use your proper noun as a verb. (It also gets you targeted by the DOJ.)
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Democracy Now ☛ Police Killings of Black & Brown People May Be Double Previous Estimates: La Raza Database Project
The newly released Raza Database Project reveals the number of Brown and Black people killed by police in the United States may be more than double the amount that is widely reported. Statistician and demographer Jesus Garcia explains how the team merged data sets from independent research projects on police violence to more accurately determine the ethnicities of victims. These are “terrible numbers to look at,” says Garcia. “The results are stark and bare.” Project manager Ivette Xochiyotl Boyzo calls the research “groundbreaking” because of the lack of federal data collection on police violence. “It’s so unfortunate that there’s not any type of actual collection of information against these types of violences,” says Boyzo, who calls for accountability. “What’s the most disturbing out of all of this, it’s the impunity rate.”
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Common Dreams ☛ Electrocution Every Single Time: Guy Who Keeps Going To Court Keeps Making Less Sense
The wheels of justice grind on, the awful guy keeps babbling. In New York, Trump spewed rage, hate, lies on the first day of a fraud trial that, thanks to a "mind-blowing" screw-up by his lawyers, will be decided solely by the judge he's been savaging for days. Awkward. But given the current, erratic state of his mind - he beat Obama, Jeb Bush went to war in Iraq, windmills are killing whales, he'll dampen California homes, everything he's done was "perfect" - he may not have noticed.
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ Rich People Marry Rich People, and That’s How They Stay Rich
A new book makes the supposedly brave claim that two-parent families are good, and that unmarried poor people are miring themselves in poverty. But what upper-class people practice is not just “marriage” — it’s “marriage to upper-class people.”
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Largest Health Care Strike in US History Is Set to Begin Tomorrow
Tomorrow, 75,000 health care workers are set to strike at hundreds of Kaiser facilities across several states in the largest such strike in US history. Their primary grievance is low staffing levels, which unions say are hurting patients and workers alike.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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APNIC ☛ Analysis of AFRINIC’s IPv4 Soft Landing policy
In May 2022, I wrote a note on what I called the ‘AFRINIC service region IPv4 conundrum‘. It discusses how AFRINIC has been managing its remaining IPv4 and the effects of its Soft Landing Policy.
This post will analyse the distribution of IPv4 during Soft Landing Phase 2 based on indicators from unique prefix statistics from 2019 to 2022. It covers how it ended in Phase 1 and is ongoing in Phase 2.
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Monopolies
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New York Times ☛ Arnold Schwarzenegger Is Here to Pump You Up (Emotionally)
The box office is driven by I.P. [sic] and by franchises now. There are very few movie stars left who can, on their own name, reliably open a movie the way you used to. Do you think the era of the movie star is gone and not coming back?
I don’t know. I’m not a fortuneteller. I was just talking the other day with someone from Mattel. This company changed from a toy company to an intellectual-property company. But who was he sitting with to do one of his franchises? Me.
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[Old] The Independent UK ☛ Thomas Jackson: Judge who tried to split up Microsoft
In 2000, ruling in an antitrust lawsuit brought by the US government, Jackson ordered Microsoft to be split in two after ruling that the company had stifled competition and used illegal methods to protect its monopoly in computer operating systems. The decision rocked the software industry, and after the ruling Jackson compared the Microsoft founder Bill Gates to Napoleon and likened the company to a drug-dealing street gang: "I think he has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses,"
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[Old] New York Times ☛ Thomas Penfield Jackson, Outspoken Judge, Dies at 76
The comments were worth waiting for. He told reporters that Bill Gates had “a Napoleonic concept of himself,” and compared Microsoft’s declaration of innocence to the protestations of gangland killers. Explaining how he got the company’s attention during the trial, he compared himself to a mule trainer who handled the animal by taking a two-by-four and “whopping him upside the head.”
On June 7, 2000, Judge Jackson ordered that Microsoft be split into two companies, one owning the Windows operating system and the other owning Microsoft’s many software products.
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Quartz ☛ Microsoft is pressuring the DoJ to punish Google
The DoJ and the attorneys-general of 38 US states have accused Google of engaging in monopolistic business practices to hold onto its huge search traffic. They allege that the company pays at least $10 billion every year to smartphone manufacturers, rival web browser makers, and mobile network operators to make its search engine the default option. Alphabet has denied any wrongdoing, but Nadella said Google’s 91.6% global market dominance makes it “a hard game to make any breakthroughs.”
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India Times ☛ Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testifies that Google's power in search is ubiquitous
In more than three hours of testimony in federal court in Washington, Nadella was often direct and sometimes combative as he laid out how Microsoft could not overcome Google's use of multibillion-dollar deals to be the default search engine on smartphones and web browsers.
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The Register UK ☛ Microsoft CEO whinges about Google's default search deals
The crux of Nadella's testimony, given in a DC Federal Court, was that Google's search engine being the default on Apple or Android smartphones ensures competitors, including Microsoft's Bing, are locked out.
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Vox ☛ What Google’s trial means for the company — and your web browsing
This is the first antitrust trial that goes after a Big Tech company’s business practices since the DOJ took on Microsoft in the late ’90s, and it’s the first in a set of antitrust lawsuits against dominant tech platforms from federal and state antitrust enforcers that will play out in the next few months. Those include the DOJ and state attorneys general’s lawsuits against Google over its ad tech business, the FTC’s case against Meta over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, and the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon over its marketplace platform. Apple might even catch a lawsuit, too. The outcomes of these cases, starting with this one, will tell us if our antitrust laws, written decades before the internet existed and tried before an increasingly business-friendly justice system, can be applied to dominant digital platforms’ business practices now.
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Vox ☛ The government’s case to break up Amazon, explained
In its lawsuit filed on September 26, the antitrust agency, joined by 17 states, accuses Amazon of interlocking anti-competitive actions that, it says, have inflated prices for consumers, harmed third-party sellers in Amazon’s marketplace, and made it nearly impossible for other e-commerce platforms and retailers to compete. The complaint includes 20 charges, including monopoly maintenance of the online superstore market and the online marketplace services market, unfair methods of competition, and violations of various state antitrust laws.
It’s a significant milestone in the antitrust reform movement led by FTC Chair Lina Khan, which has zeroed in on Big Tech and the business practices of some of the biggest companies in the world. This is the first case filed under her leadership that takes on those practices and one of those companies. It just so happens that it’s the company she built her career on criticizing.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Google's enshittification memos
"Shared success" is code for, "If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too." This is bullshit. It's like saying, "We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale." Or "Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak."
And note that they're not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, "If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we're on the hook for ten percent of your losses." This isn't partnership, it's extortion.
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India Times ☛ UK regulator to push for probe into Amazon, Microsoft cloud dominance
British media regulator Ofcom will this week push for an antitrust investigation into Amazon and Microsoft's dominance of the UK's cloud computing market, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The recommendation, first issued by Ofcom in April, will remain in the body's final report on the matter, set to be published on Thursday, one of the sources said.
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Trademarks
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Techdirt ☛ Court Dismisses Medieval Times’ Trademark Suit Against Its Own Employee’s Union
Roughly a year ago, we discussed one of a few instances of a company filing a trademark infringement lawsuit against its own employees as a retaliation tactic for those employees forming a union. In this specific case, it was the company behind Medieval Times, an organization that builds fake castles and sells food and drink while customers watch fake jousting matches. The suit was fairly laughable by my estimation, with the complaint for some reason listing claims of the union having confusing symbols and iconography in its branding, alongside pictorial evidence of the exact opposite. There was little that was similar in any of this and the claims that the public would somehow be confused by branding and a website that was directly hostile to the corporation was absolutely silly. In other words, it seemed very clear that this was a bullying tactic, in retribution for the forming of the labor union in the first place.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ Russia Prepares RuStore VPN Ban After Declaring RuStore Installation Mandatory
Russia's incremental moves to eliminate online privacy regularly target VPNs. To 'free' itself from Google and Apple, in 2022 Russia launched its very own app store, which ironically offers dozens of VPNs. After the government recently announced the mandatory pre-installation of RuStore on tech gadgets, a draft law will outlaw censorship-circumventing VPNs on RuStore.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Anna's Archive Scraped WorldCat to Help Preserve 'All' Books in the World
Anna's Archive scraped WorldCat, the world's largest library catalog, in an effort to help preserve digital copies of every book in the world. The meta search engine is well aware of the legal risks but believes that these are well worth taking to preserve the written legacy of humanity. In addition, the archive's database has gained interest from AI developers and LLM teams too.
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Torrent Freak ☛ BeStreamWise: New IPTV Anti-Piracy Campaign Begins With Fake Site 'Scam'
A new awareness campaign to deter use of pirate IPTV services has launched with curiously little fanfare. The BeStreamWise portal opens with the statement “Illegal Streams Let Criminals In" and even has its own fake IPTV service called MalStreams. The campaign is being orchestrated by Sky, Premier League, FACT, ITV, CrimeStoppers, and the UK Intellectual Property Office, among others.
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Walled Culture ☛ Famous writers sue OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement, missing the point again
The letter also correctly places human creativity, not technology, at the heart of this new kind of art: [...]
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Axios ☛ News execs lobby lawmakers on AI protections
Why it matters: Newspaper leaders can be hesitant to lobby directly, given that many of their outlets give political endorsements. But the threat of AI, combined with competition concerns around Big Tech, is pushing executives to band together and speak out.
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