Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Standards/Consortia

  • Dhole Moments ☛ A Plan for Multicast Support in Noise-based Protocols

    If you’ve paid attention to Hacker News or various technology subreddits in recent years, you may have noticed the rise of VPN companies like Tailscale and ZeroTier. At the core of their networking products is a Noise-based Protocol (often WireGuard). If you haven’t been paying attention to Hacker News or Reddit, that’s probably healthy.

Leftovers

• Sean Conner ☛ Get thee behind me, Satan

  I did call and this time, it was escalated to the head nurse at the doctor's office. It turns out it was a transcription error, so there's at least one explanation for receiving some other Sean Conner's email (and for the record, the head nurse could neither confirm nor deny the patient's name was “Sean Conner” even though that was clearly the case).

• BBC ☛ Four British men freed after Afghanistan detention

  The second person it named as being freed - Mr Routledge - is a former Loughborough University student from Birmingham, known for travelling to dangerous countries and posting about it on social media.

• DNA Lounge ☛ Wherein Twitter delenda est

  A tale of two polls: both ran for two days and were boosted halfway through. Twitter: 22 votes from 6,949 followers. Mastodon: 83 votes from 975 followers.

• El País ☛ ‘Rotten’ shark meat that smells like ammonia is a delicacy

  Curiously, the abundance of natural wonders in Iceland hasn’t translated into a diverse culinary scene. Lamb, Arctic char, salmon, cod, and shark are among the limited fare served on the island. One of the most well-known Icelandic dishes is kæstur hákarl (fermented shark), which is often incorrectly translated as “rotten shark.” A dish that harkens back centuries, it now competes with fast-food like hamburgers and pizzas, making it more of a historical curiosity and tourist attraction than a staple of the Icelandic diet. However, it remains a delicacy worth preserving and is often enjoyed during the traditional Þorrablót festival, held in the month of Thorri. Per the Icelandic calendar, this falls somewhere between late January and early February.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Physics Revelation Could Mean We're All Living in a Simulation

    What if none of this is real?

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Contractor issues put NASA behind schedule and over budget on robotic spacecraft, OIG finds

    The OIG report noted that the project is expected to exceed its more than $2 billion price tag — and run past its December 2026 expected launch date. Much of the blame for delays and cost overruns, according to the OIG, lies with Maxar Technologies, which focuses on space manufacturing. The company holds a NASA contract for a spacecraft bus and a Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER).

  • Hackaday ☛ Could Moon Dust Help Reduce Global Temperatures?

    The impacts of climate change continue to mount on human civilization, with warning signs that worse times are yet to come. Despite the scientific community raising an early warning as to the risks of continued air pollution and greenhouse gas output, efforts to stem emissions have thus far had minimal impact. Continued inaction has led some scientists to consider alternative solutions to stave off the worst from occurring.

• Education

  • Quartz ☛ How to kill “context-switching” and finish your daily to-do list

    At its core, multitasking is essentially context switching—swiftly transitioning between tasks that are often unrelated or loosely connected. It can be prompted by external disruptions like incoming emails or calls or internal interruptions such as a sudden idea or the urge to shift to a different task.

    Unsurprisingly, context switching can lead to significantly adverse outcomes.

  • New York Times ☛ How a Radio Station Is Empowering Women in a Rural Heartland

    “Community radio gives women a platform not only as listeners to get information, but as active participants,” said Anjali Makhija, the chief executive of S.M. Sehgal Foundation, a nonprofit that started “Alfaz-e-Mewat” in 2012 with about $18,000 of government funding. The goal, initially, was to inculcate better water conservation and agricultural practices in this agrarian community.

    But because most of the actual farming, mainly of millet, was done by women, the group knew that to meet its goals it first had to empower them to make better decisions about their own lives.

  • Pro Publica ☛ TEA Commissioner Mike Morath Has Allowed Underperforming Charter Schools to Expand

    In June, Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath embarked on the largest school takeover in recent history, firing the governing board and the superintendent of the Houston Independent School District after one of its more than 270 schools failed to meet state educational standards for seven consecutive years.

    Though the state gave Houston’s Wheatley High School a passing score the last time it assigned ratings, Morath charged ahead, saying he had an obligation under the law to either close the campus or replace the board. He chose the latter.

• Hardware

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Anticipate the Cheap

    The co-founders Robert Noyce (who went on to found Intel) and Jerry Sanders (who went on to found AMD) “anticipated the cheap,” knowing that Moore’s Law (yet-to-be-named by another co-founder of Fairchild and Intel, Gordon Moore) and volume could drastically reduce the production costs over time. Instead of $100, they quoted RCA $1.05, the same price as they paid for vacuum tubes.

  • The Register UK ☛ China's top crypto-mining hardware-maker reportedly furloughs staff

    The world's largest source of hardware designed for the task of mining cryptocurrency, Beijing-based Bitmain, has reportedly furloughed staff after disappointing sales.

  • Hackaday ☛ Dial Up A Tune On The Jukephone

    What do you do when you find a nice corded phone with giant buttons out in the wild? You could pay $80/month for a landline, use a VOIP or Bluetooth solution instead, or do something a million times cooler and turn it into a jukebox.

  • Hackaday ☛ Pocket CO2 Sensor Doubles As SMD Proving Ground

    While for some of us it’s a distant memory, every serious electronics hobbyist must at some point make the leap from working with through-hole components to Surface Mount Devices (SMD). At first glance, the diminutive components can be quite intimidating — how can you possibly work with parts that are literally smaller than a grain of rice? But of course, like anything else, with practice comes proficiency.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Latvia ☛ Latvia makes some progress in battling alcohol deaths

    According to Eurostat data published October 10, Latvia has made substantial progress in reducing the number of deaths due to mental disorders related to alcohol use – but still has one of the EU's highest rates.

  • Latvia ☛ Saeima to consider ways to cut alcohol consumption in Latvia

    How to reduce alcohol consumption in Latvian society? After a long break, the Saeima will discuss this at the end of the month. Very little has been done to limit alcohol purchases recently, and the policymakers are up against a powerful industry lobby, Latvian Television reports as part of the Zeme, kur dzer (Land that drinks) series tackling Latvia's drinking issues.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Sky News chief Levy says news leaders must be more sensitive to staff mental health

    Jonathan Levy spoke for the first time of the impact covering the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami had on him.

  • Science Alert ☛ Toxic DNA Fragments May Be What Triggers Parkinson's Disease

    "Like a wildfire through the brain."

  • Science Alert ☛ What You Smell Can Change The Way You Perceive Color

    And you’ve probably never noticed.

  • New York Times ☛ Scientists Use CRISPR to Make Chickens More Resistant to Bird Flu

    A new study highlights both the promise and the limitations of gene editing, as a highly lethal form of avian influenza continues to spread around the world.

  • [Old] University of Houston ☛ Researchers Find Hidden Micro-Stressors in Routine Driving

    For the short term, these micro-stressors appear to overload the drivers who experience them, because for similar itineraries, afflicted drivers consistently report being more tired than non-afflicted drivers, he added. Collectively, the study’s long- and short-term results have potential lifestyle, safety and insurance implications, the researchers noted.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • International Business Times ☛ Elon Musk Flags Iranian Supreme Leader's X Post On Hamas

    X owner Elon Musk on Monday censored a tweet from Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei after the latter posted a tweet supporting the Hamas attack on Israel.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • [Repeat] Zimbabwe ☛ Stop lying Zimbos, there’s no way half of you carefully read cookie policies as Potraz survey shows

      There is no way half the population carefully studies cookie policies before accepting or rejecting them. I refuse to believe it.

      If you’re not sure what we are talking about, a cookie policy is a statement or document provided by a website or online service that informs users about how cookies are used on the site and how their personal data may be processed through these cookies.

      Those policies are in the same boat as terms and conditions, no one is reading them.

    • [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ Google to start prompting users to set up passkeys by default

      Passkeys are a type of authentication credential that allows users to log in to sites and services without having to enter a password. Built on the WebAuthentication standard, passkeys use public-key cryptography to provide a more secure and convenient way to authenticate logins without the inherent risk of regular passwords.

    • The Verge ☛ Google begins prompting users to create passwordless passkeys by default

      Passkeys can replace traditional passwords with your device’s own authentication methods. That way, you can sign in to Gmail, PayPal, or iCloud just by activating Face ID on your iPhone, your Android phone’s fingerprint sensor, or with Windows Hello on a PC.

      Built on WebAuthn (or Web Authentication) tech, two different keys are generated when you create a passkey: one stored by the website or service where your account is and a private key stored on the device you use to verify your identity.

    • Wired ☛ Google Steps Up Its Push to Kill the Password

      Password-based authentication is so ubiquitous in digital systems that it isn't easy to replace. But passwords have inherent security problems because they can be guessed and stolen. And since it's so difficult to keep track of dozens or hundreds of passwords, users often reuse the same passwords on multiple accounts, making it easier for attackers to unlock all of those accounts in one fell swoop. Passkeys are specifically designed to address these issues and dramatically reduce the risk of phishing attacks by instead relying on a scheme that manages cryptographic keys stored on your devices for account authentication.

    • Gizmodo ☛ Microsoft Calls Off OneDrive Photo-pocalypse

      “On August 31, 2023, we began to communicate an upcoming update to our cloud storage infrastructure that would result in a change in how OneDrive photos and photo albums data is counted against your overall cloud storage quota,” Microsoft said in an email to customers, which has also been posted to the company’s Support page. “This change was scheduled to start rolling out on October 16, 2023. Based on the feedback we received, we have adjusted our approach, we will no longer roll out this update.”

    • EFF ☛ Mastercard Should Stop Selling Our Data

      That's why EFF has joined a campaign, led by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG), to call on Mastercard to limit its data collection and stop selling cardholder information.

      Mastercard is just one company that profits from the sale of personal data collected from the people who trust them with their information. As consumer advocates, we’re calling on the company to honor the trust that cardholders place in them by committing to stop selling their information.

      Why make this ask of Mastercard? As U.S. PIRG explains in its report accompanying the campaign, the company’s position as a global payments technology company affords it "access to enormous amounts of information derived from the financial lives of millions, and its monetization strategies tell a broader story of the data economy that’s gone too far."

• Defence/Aggression

  • Latvia ☛ Foreign Ministry of Latvia holds talks on repatriation flights from Israel

    The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (ĀM) is currently in contact with airBaltic about possible solutions for bringing Latvians in Israel to Latvia, the Ministry told LETA October 9.

  • The Atlantic ☛ When Hamas Tells You Who They Are, Believe Them: A close read of Hamas’s founding documents shows their genocidal intentions

    Thus, as fighting rages in Israel and Gaza, and may yet escalate and spread, pleas for moderation, restraint, negotiation, and the building of pathways to peace are destined to find no purchase with Hamas. The covenant makes clear that holy war, divinely ordained and scripturally sanctioned, is in Hamas’s DNA.

  • NDTV ☛ Hamas Outmaneuvered Israel's Surveillance Prowess By Going Dark

    "I suspect they never talked about it electronically," Sanner said. "They broke it up into cells and did individual meetings. And each group was assigned to do different things. Very few people understood how each of the components came together as the whole plan."

  • Meduza ☛ Finland says damage to underwater gas pipeline and data cable likely ‘caused by external activity’

    The official statement posted by Finland’s President’s Office on Tuesday reads that the specific cause for the damage “is not yet known,” and is still being investigated. According to the statement, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the military alliance is prepared “to assist with the investigation.”

  • Mandiant ☛ Assessed Cyber Structure and Alignments of North Korea in 2023

    The DPRK’s offensive program continues to evolve, showing that the regime is determined to continue using cyber intrusions to conduct both espionage and financial crime to project power and to finance both their cyber and kinetic capabilities.

  • Site36 ☛ Middle East conflict in Germany: Palestinian organisations to be banned despite low popularity

    Pro-Israeli rallies in Germany have been small so far. Even fewer people show their solidarity with the people in Gaza. Nevertheless, Palestinian organisations are threatened with a ban.

  • RFERL ☛ Kyrgyz Authorities Shut Down 32 Mosques, 5 Religious Schools In Southern Batken Region

    [...] The commission, consisting of officials representing the regional government, the UKMK, the Interior Ministry, the Emergency Ministry, the Health Ministry, the Grand Mufti's office, along with other state bodies and institutions looked into whether radical Islamic ideology and extremist views could be present in the work of the religious institutions. [...]

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Memo to the president: A bold agenda for the Washington summit: How to advance vital US interests by helping Ukraine win and defining its path to NATO membership

    Bottom line up front: Washington will host a NATO summit next year to mark the Alliance’s seventy-fifth anniversary. It comes at a time when the international order faces an unprecedented challenge from an authoritarian alignment of China and Russia that is seeking to undermine US and global security and prosperity. The most immediate danger comes from Moscow’s nearly decade-long aggression in Ukraine. The NATO summit and the run-up to it present an opportunity for US leadership to meet this danger by taking steps to provide Ukraine the means to win the war and by setting a clear path for Ukraine’s membership in NATO.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Finland: Pipeline leak likely caused by 'external activity'

    "It is likely that damage to both the gas pipeline and the communication cable is the result of external activity," President Sauli Niinisto said on Tuesday. "The cause of the damage is not yet clear, the investigation continues in cooperation between Finland and Estonia."

  • New York Times ☛ Hamas Seeds Violent Videos on Sites With Little Moderation

    Since Hamas launched a deadly cross-border attack into Israel over the weekend, violent videos and graphic images have flooded social media. Many of the posts have been seeded by Hamas to terrorize civilians and take advantage of the lack of content moderation on some social media sites — particularly X and Telegram — according to a Hamas official and social media experts interviewed by The New York Times.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Univ. of MD Prof. Shibley Telhami to President Biden: Value Palestinian Life as Well as Israeli Life

    As we continue to cover Israel’s war on Gaza, we speak with Middle East scholar Shibley Telhami, who says this latest violence is likely to have a major impact on the wider region, especially if other actors like Lebanon’s Hezbollah fighters get involved in the conflict. He says U.S. President Joe Biden’s support for Israel following the Hamas attack on Saturday was understandable, but that focus must shift to finding a long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “This is not a military challenge,” says Telhami. “This is a political problem, and the occupation has to be addressed.”

  • Democracy Now ☛ Mohammed El-Kurd: How Much Palestinian Blood Will It Take to End Israel’s Occupation & Apartheid?

    Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd says Western reaction to Israel’s assault on Gaza has once again highlighted the double standard when it comes to how Israeli and Palestinian lives are valued. Israel is bombarding the densely populated coastal territory in retaliation for Saturday’s Hamas attack on southern Israel, as well as tightening the existing siege even further. Israeli officials have vowed to wipe out Hamas despite warnings of massive civilian casualties inside Gaza. “One wonders how much bloodshed, how much Palestinian death is necessary for people to realize that violence begets violence and that the occupation and the colonization of Palestine, the blockade of the Gaza Strip needs to end for all of this violence to end.” El-Kurd also accuses Israeli officials and Western media outlets of using Islamophobic tropes by spreading as-yet-unverified claims of sexual violence and beheadings by Hamas fighters, while downplaying the documented death and devastation being inflicted on Gaza residents.

  • The Nation ☛ Israel-Palestine

  • Democracy Now ☛ Israeli Conscientious Objector Haggai Matar: Hamas Attack Reflects Israeli Violence in Palestine

    Israel has mobilized some 300,000 army reservists as it ramps up its war on Gaza following a devastating surprise attack by Hamas militants on Saturday that killed hundreds inside Israel, including many civilians. Journalist Haggai Matar of +972 Magazine says that while the violence shocked Israelis, the unending military occupation and apartheid set the stage for this weekend’s events. “There is no military solution. These recurring attacks on Gaza bring nothing but death and destruction, and no hope for any of us,” says Matar, a conscientious objector who refused service in the Israel Defense Forces.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Refaat Alareer in Gaza: Israel’s “Barbaric” Bombardment Is Part of Ethnic Cleansing Campaign

    As hospitals in Gaza are overwhelmed by those killed and wounded in Israel’s massive bombing campaign, we go to Gaza City to speak with Palestinian academic and writer Refaat Alareer about conditions inside the besieged territory. Israel announced Monday it was completely cutting off all food, fuel and electricity to Gaza amid airstrikes of unprecedented intensity, launched in response to Saturday’s surprise attack by Hamas militants on southern Israel. Hamas has threatened to begin killing hostages if civilians inside Gaza are targeted without warning. “No one is safe. No place is safe. Israel is bombing everywhere,” says Alareer, who describes his own children as “shaking out of fear” amid the assault. “Why is this happening? Because we refuse to live under occupation. We refuse to live in total submission. We want freedom.”

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Site36 ☛ EU Council wants to cut off national parliaments: Access to legislative portal to be blocked over leaks

    The Secretariat of the EU Council plans to restrict the access of national parliaments to its legislative database. The aim is to prevent the unauthorised disclosure of documents, especially to the media. This was reported last week by the Brussels-based news agency Agence Europe, which specialises in EU activities. According to the report, several member states, including Germany, have spoken out against these plans.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Janes ☛ Autonomous vehicles co-ordinate in de-mining exercise

      A de-mining exercise involving an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and two unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) was held in Belgium in September to assess the application of artificial intelligence (AI) for improvised explosive device (IED) detection.

      The exercise, supported by the European Defence Agency (EDA) and announced on 2 October, involved a quadcopter and two UGVs co-ordinating together autonomously to detect mock IEDs, including unexploded ordnance in rural and urban environments.

    • India Times ☛ Cryptocurrency stolen from Delhi lands in Hamas wallets

      Many of the wallet addresses on the list were being operated by the al Qassam brigades of Hamas, the Palestinian terror group, and had been 'seized' by Israel's National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing

      A breakthrough arrived when the Special Cell's Intelligence Fusion & Strategic Ops (IFSO) unit ran a match on the wallets: several wallets that had received the Bitcoin and Ethereum assets from Delhi were operated by the cyber terrorism wing of Hamas.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Not "Suffficiently Decentralized"

      Perhaps the most consequential result of the tsunami of Blockchain Gaslighting ocurred on 14th June 2018 when William Hinman, the Director of the SEC's Division of Corporate Finance gave a speech to the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit: Crypto entitled Digital Asset Transactions: When Howey Met Gary (Plastic). In it he hamstrung his own agency's ability to regulate the two most important cryptocurrencies by saying (my emphasis): [...]

    • Quartz ☛ Cryptocurrency fueled Hamas' war machine

      In August 2020, the US government seized million of dollars from terror groups using cryptocurrency to raise money. But Elliptic, a firm that helps [cryptocurrency] businesses comply with financial regulations, told the Wall Street Journal that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militant group that seized hostages in the recent attack on Israel, still collected another $93 million worth of cryptocurrency between June 2021 and August 2023. Hamas itself collected some $41 million in digital payments.

    • The Register UK ☛ Swedish tech biz aims to sail past traffic woes on electric hydrofoils

      A Swedish technology company thinks it has a solution to the misery of urban commutes, at least for those in cities with good access to waterways: 30-seat, all-electric hydrofoil shuttles that can reach speeds of up to 30 knots, or just shy of 35mph (55kph).

    • DeSmog ☛ Gas Executive ‘Lobbying to Slow Climate Action’ At Labour Party Conference

      A senior executive at the UK’s largest gas distributor has been accused of lobbying to slow down climate action after pushing for the use of hydrogen in heating at a Labour Party conference panel on net zero.

      Tony Ballance, Cadent’s chief strategy and regulation officer, told a packed event on Monday to ignore a growing body of scientific evidence that finds the fuel to be expensive, resource intensive and inefficient at heating homes.

    • Hackaday ☛ Wiring Up 100 Car Batteries So You Don’t Have To

      We’re willing to bet most Hackaday readers have accidentally spot welded a few electrical contacts together over the years, complete with the surge of adrenaline that comes with the unexpected pops and sparks. It’s a mistake you’ll usually only make once or twice. But where most of us would look back at such mishaps as cautionary experiences, [Styropyro] sees an opportunity.

    • Hackaday ☛ How The 2022 CEZ Event Shows The Fragility Of Environmental Sensors In High-Risk Areas

      In what reads somewhat like a convoluted detective story, the events unfolding at the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) in Ukraine during late February had the media channels lighting up with chatter about ‘elevated gamma radiation levels’, which showed up on the public CEZ radiation monitoring dashboard for a handful of gamma radiation sensors. This happened right before this reporting system went off-line, leaving outside observers guessing at what was going on. By the time occupying forces had been driven out of the CEZ, the gamma radiation levels were reported as being similar to before the invasion, yet the computer hardware which was part of the monitoring system had vanished along with the occupying forces. After considering many explanations, this left security researchers like [Ruben Santamarta] to consider that the high values had been spoofed.

  • Overpopulation

    • [Repeat] Overpopulation ☛ How to Fix the Planet, the Easy Way

      Scientists are reporting that there is an existential threat to life on Earth. 8 billion people on a planet with depleting resources and increasing CO2 is entering into an epic slow-motion disaster. Climate-related disasters are coming to a town near you, but as far as solutions go we are only looking at one side of the coin while ignoring the other, because it starts with the letter ‘p’.

      We are making token gestures to try to fix the climate, but we are not doing nearly enough at the pace needed to make any real difference. This year is set to be the hottest on record, unprecedented fires are burning, and Antarctic ice is at lows never seen before. We need to expect the unexpected as new disasters will take us by surprise in the future. The complacency in the media reporting is staggering, but not surprising. Our mind-numbing ignorance, daydreaming and complacency is pushing us quickly towards disaster, it seems.

• Finance

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Financial regulators have work to do on developing and tracking fintech skills of staff, watchdog says

    The GAO found that these agencies have not collected data on the fintech skills of oversight and policymaking staff with any regularity, nor have they fully identified the requisite skills. Knowledge of machine learning and artificial intelligence were cited as skills that aren’t currently tracked in a comprehensive, data-driven way.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Mashable ☛ X rolls out new ad format that can’t be reported, blocked | Mashable

    Elon Musk's X is now serving users clickbait advertisements that can't be blocked or reported.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Rep. Clyburn Will Be Key Figure in SCOTUS Redistricting Case

    Democratic Rep. James Clyburn’s role in South Carolina’s 2022 redistricting has emerged as a central point of contention between Democrats and Republicans in a racial gerrymandering case to be argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

    The case revolves around whether Republicans, who control the Legislature, illegally disenfranchised Black voters when they created new election maps or whether the process was simply partisan politics. A key question is whether the role that the powerful Black Democrat played in the process was enough to inoculate the entire effort.

  • Digital Music News ☛ That Was Fast: WMG Fills Chief Digital Officer Vacancy With Carletta Higginson—Another Former YouTube Exec

    Higginson comes aboard with media executive and music rights expertise, joining the WMG team after serving as the Global Head of Music Publishing at YouTube and Google Play. She previously worked as a litigator advocating for record labels, music publishers, artists, and songwriters. Higginson will be based in New York and will report directly to WMG CEO Robert Kyncl — who himself is a storied YouTube alum.

    As Global Head of Publishing at YouTube, Higginson is credited with spearheading the platform’s licensing strategy, as well as building and maintaining relationships with publishers, collection societies, and PROs. Her role included negotiating digital licensing and partnership agreements, managing existing partnerships, launching new relationships, and driving new business opportunities. In addition, she oversaw the development of various initiatives to help creatively support artists, songwriters, and producers on the platform.

  • India Times ☛ EU sends these questions to Microsoft and Apple customers and rivals

    European Union antitrust regulators have reportedly sent questions for Microsoft and Apple's users and rivals. According to a report in news agency Reuters, To gather crucial data, the EU has reportedly sent questionnaires to business rivals and users of the two technology giants with the aim to gauge the significance of Bing, iMessage, and related services compared to alternatives. As to what the big question is: EU has asked whether Microsoft Bing should comply with new tough tech rules and also whether that should be the case for Apple's iMessage, people familiar with the matter said on Monday.

  • Meduza ☛ Russia’s likely ‘YouTube killer’ The young man tapped to develop VK’s video platforms owes his powerful position to family connections and tireless lobbying, a new investigation shows

    In September 2023, the Russian technology company VK announced that it was creating two business groups within its corporate structure: one to house the Mail.ru email service, the Rustore app store, VK ID, and VK Pay, while the other division would be home to the social networks Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki and the platforms Zen, VK Video, VK Music, VK Clips, and VK Messenger. The latter group housing all the company’s “content projects” has been placed under the supervision of 29-year-old Stepan Kovalchuk, who is the grandson of Kurchatov Institute President Mikhail Kovalchuk and the grandnephew of banking oligarch Yuri Kovalchuk. A new investigation from The Bell reveals how Stepan rose so quickly at VK to find himself developing what could be Russia’s domestic replacement for YouTube.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • NPR ☛ Video game clips and old videos are flooding social media about Israel and Gaza

      In the wake of Hamas's surprise attack on Israel and the escalation into war over the weekend, social media platforms and messaging apps are awash in viral rumors, misleading images and videos, and outright falsehoods, making it hard for people in Israel, Gaza and around the world seeking information and facts about the conflict.

    • Techdirt ☛ Whoops: Sinclair Broadcasting Airs Sponcon Featuring White Nationalist Who Wants Travis Kelce Executed For Vaccine Advocacy

      Generally, when you talk about disinformation or propaganda, “big tech” companies like Facebook, or media giants like Fox News get the lion’s share of the attention. But as I’ve often noted, local news outlets in the U.S. were hollowed out years ago by mindless consolidation, and were ultimately replaced with something that looks like news, but is generally just gibberish and propaganda.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ ‘I remember how she bragged’: Intervention by federal lawmaker leads to firing of long-time medical professor in St. Petersburg over anti-war comments

    After 42 years working at Pavlov First St. Petersburg State Medical University, Associate Professor Viktor Kornienko is out. He told journalists at RFE/RL that the school fired him based on a complaint from an old classmate who’s now friends with State Duma deputy Yana Lantratova. The former classmate accused Kornienko of discrediting Russia’s military and providing assistance to Ukraine’s Armed Forces. The conflict between the two former classmates began unexpectedly while Kornienko was trying to help his colleague leave Russia.

  • Gizmodo ☛ X/Twitter Users Can Now Restrict Replies to People Who Pay Elon Musk

    Instead of restricting replies to “everyone,” “accounts you follow,” and “only accounts you mention,” X users will see the added “verified accounts” option, meaning that if you didn’t cough up the dough for the blue checkmark, your reach could be further limited. It comes 11 months after Musk replaced blue checkmarks for the existing verification system with a $4.99 per month subscription to Twitter Blue. He later increased the price to $8 per month for the Premium subscription fee.

  • The Register UK ☛ Twitter further restricts free tier with option to limit replies to verified accounts

    The announcement triggered a near-instant stream of responses from netizens noting that, rather than addressing the spam, scam, and bot problems Musk has long said is the reason paid verification is needed, it's likely to just make things worse since so many scammers have bought into X Premium, the platform’s subscription service.

    "Verified. [You] mean blue tick? Most scammers and bots," one respondent said, while another noted Musk's "online town square" is increasingly a closed members-only community. Some replies to X’s announcement asked for an option to instead block verified users from responding to their posts, so low is the quality of some verified accounts.

  • RFERL ☛ Uzbek Blogger Placed In Solitary Confinement In Tashkent Detention Center, Mother Says

    Imprisoned Uzbek investigative journalist and blogger Abduqodir Mominov was placed in solitary confinement for 10 days in a Tashkent detention center on October 9, less than two months after he complained that he was tortured in the facility by three law enforcement officials, his mother told RFE/RL [...]

  • RFA ☛ YouTube deletes another satirical channel that targeted Xi Jinping

    YouTube has once more deleted a channel that produced satirical spoof videos featuring ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, sparking further concerns over whether the Chinese government is exploiting the social media giant’s copyright rules.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Free speech: Is Gambia sliding back into dictatorship?

    Gambian President Adama Barrow was celebrated in 2016 after defeating his predecessor, Yahya Jammeh, in a presidential election, effectively ending 22 years of dictatorship and paving a return to democracy.

    However, critics now argue that Barrow is slowly eroding the democratic gains made during the early days of his presidency. Civil rights groups and media organizations want Barrow to uphold democracy in Gambia and allow freedom of speech for all Gambians.

    The recent arrest of journalists and critics has diminished press freedom in Gambia and drawn criticism from both the public and civil society organizations.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza conflict

    CPJ is documenting those journalists killed, injured, detained or missing in the conflict. In the first three days of fighting, at least seven journalists were killed, two were missing and two injured. In the same period, Israeli TV channels reported the deaths of 900 Israelis, with at least 2,600 injured, and Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 687 Palestinians had been killed and 3,726 had been injured in Israeli air strikes.

  • Techdirt ☛ Journalists Ask DOJ To Stop Treating URL Alterations As A Federal Crime

    The DOJ — following a period of questionable leadership under Donald Trump — said it has little interest in prosecuting journalists. It has also made it clear it will not abuse the CFAA to punish people who did nothing more than access sites in ways not intended by the sites’ creators.

  • Techdirt ☛ Not In Kansas Anymore? Police Chief Suspended Following Raid Of Small Town Newspaper

    There’s no reason to make fascist small talk a reality, but sometimes folks just do what they do. Six weeks ago, a small town police department raided a small town newspaper in a vicious demonstration of boots-on-a-human-face-forever thuggery. The supposed crime? Digging up public records showing a local business owner in search of a liquor license had her own problems with handling liquor, including DUI and driving without a license charges.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Reason ☛ Performing Charity Is a First Amendment Right

    Houston officials say they'll keep fining activists for feeding homeless people, calling it "a health and safety issue."

  • Truthdig ☛ Honoring the Indigenous Cultures of the United States

    Indigenous Peoples’ Day began as a movement in 1992 to honor the more than 1,000 Indigenous cultures within the United States. It is estimated prior to 1491 the Indigenous population of the Americas was twice the size of Europe.

  • DeSmog ☛ A Secretive Network Is Fighting Indigenous Rights in Australia and Canada, Expert Says

    That’s no coincidence, according to the paper’s author Jeremy Walker, because think tanks linked to these efforts in Canada and Australia belong to a secretive U.S. organization called the Atlas Network that’s received support from oil, gas and coal companies and operates in nearly 100 countries.

  • Research Gate ☛ Silencing the Voice: the fossil-fuelled Atlas Network’s campaign against constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australia [PDF]

    Australians will soon vote in a referendum to recognise Indigenous Australia in its 1901 Constitution and establish a First Nations Voice to Parliament. A year ago, polling suggested the referendum proposal of the 2017 National Constitutional Convention and its Uluru Statement from the Heart enjoyed 60% support. Since lead anti-Voice campaign organisation Advance Australia began its media offensive, the Yes vote has declined to 40%. This article argues the No campaign is being conducted on behalf of fossil-fuel corporations and their allies, whose efforts to mislead the public on life-and-death matters reach back over half a century. Coordinated across the Australian branches of the little-known Atlas Network, a global infrastructure of 500+ ‘think-tanks’ including the Centre for Independent Studies, the Institute of Public Affairs and LibertyWorks, I demonstrate that the No campaign shares the aims and methods of the longstanding Atlas disinformation campaign against climate policy. Opposition to long-overdue constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians can be traced to fears the Voice might strengthen the capacity of Indigenous communities and Australia’s parliamentary democracy to rein in the polluting industries driving us toward climate and ecological collapse.

  • CBC ☛ 4,000 Mack Truck workers in U.S. walk off the job, joining UAW fight

    Union workers at Mack Trucks went on strike Monday after voting down a tentative five-year contract agreement that negotiators had reached with the company.

    The United Auto Workers said 4,000 unionized workers walked out at 7 a.m., adding to labour turmoil in the industry that has ensnared all three big Detroit automakers.

  • Pro Publica ☛ St. Louis Cop Sabotaged His Own Cases to Undermine a Prosecutor

    The voicemail left on St. Louis police detective Roger Murphey’s cellphone carried a clear sense of urgency.

    A prosecutor in the St. Louis circuit attorney’s office was pleading with Murphey to testify in a murder trial, the sort of thing the lead detective on a case would routinely do to see an arrest through to conviction. The prosecutor told Murphey that, without his testimony, the suspect could walk free.

  • The Nation ☛ Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

    A long-awaited memorial for the victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire will open on October 11 at the site of the disaster in Greenwich Village, New York City. The tragic deaths of 146 people, almost all of them young immigrant women, reverberated in the American consciousness, and led to the transformation of labor law during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ Three Guarantees In Life: Taxes, Death, And Politicians Trying To Destroy The Internet

    Two years ago we wrote about Rep. Jerry Nadler’s SHOP SAFE Act, which we noted would basically cement into place Amazon’s position as a dominant online marketplace, because no one else would be able to afford the associated liability. The bill is based on the massively exaggerated claims that online marketplaces are full of “counterfeit” goods. The default position under SHOP SAFE is that the marketplace is liable for anything that goes wrong with any sale on a platform, meaning that it becomes vastly more expensive to run a marketplace where people and companies can sell stuff, cutting off important access to buyers for most smaller sellers.

  • Techdirt ☛ Elon Musk Seems Really, Deeply Committed To Making Sure The FTC Has More To Investigate

    From very early on in Elon Musk’s ownership of exTwitter a few things became clear regarding his understanding of the FTC. First, he clearly had no idea that the company has a consent decree with the FTC (the kind of thing you learn about during due diligence, which he waived in the purchasing process) and once he learned about it, he assumed he could just ignore it.

  • Hackaday ☛ Antennas Can Be A Total Mystery

    The real action in the world of ham radio is generally in the high frequency bands. Despite the name, these are relatively low-frequency bands by modern standards and the antenna sizes can get a little extreme. After all, not everyone can put up an 80-meter dipole, but ham radio operators have come up with a number of interesting ways of getting on the air anyway. The only problem is that a lot of these antennas don’t seem as though they should work half as well as they do, and [MIKROWAVE1] takes a look back on some of the more exotic radiators.

• Monopolies

  • Gizmodo ☛ The Best Anti-Amazon Deals To Shop From

    Other retailers always compete against that with their own deals for the same days. So, if you’re Anti-Prime, this is a good opportunity to save some bucks while making sure you’re not giving in to buying on Amazon.

  • Trademarks

    • Techdirt ☛ Apples And Oranges: The US Patent And Trademark Office Combined Copyright And Trademark And Nothing Good Will Come Of That

      Last week I found myself assigned to speak on a “streaming piracy” panel that had gotten bolted onto an event otherwise focused on trademark counterfeiting, despite the latter being a completely separate legal issue connected with a completely separate legal doctrine.

    • Techdirt ☛ Confused City Council Candidate Trademarks Local School’s Logo And Demands Licensing Fees

      There is so much nuance to trademark law that it’s not surprising when some in the public don’t understand how it all works. This leads to all kinds of mistakes in terms of people thinking trademark law works in ways it does not. But the worst of these aren’t mistakes, but instead when opportunists think that they can use trademark law as a “gotcha” money-generating scheme.

  • Copyrights

    • Walled Culture ☛ New French copyright law for AI creations would just mean more money for collecting societies

      This blog has written a number of times about the reaction of creators to generative AI. Legal academic and copyright expert Andres Guadamuz has spotted what may be the first attempt to draw up a new law to regulate generative AI. It comes from French politicians, who have developed something of a habit of bringing in new laws attempting to control digital technology that they rarely understand but definitely dislike.

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Libraries, Archives, Choice and Red Envelopes: The Growth of Streaming, the Decline of Choice, and the Death of the Red Envelope

      What is interesting is that the DVD-by-mail era, which followed on the heels of the three decades of video rental stores, was centered around the notion of convenience and choice. “Have you ever watched a movie the moment you wanted to?”, it was promised. “You will,” according to ATT — though many of these things are available, ATT isn’t the source in most cases. When Netflix announced its streaming service in 2007, its DVD by mail service had a catalog of more than 70,000 discs. At the time of the streaming launch announcement, the expected catalog of the video-on-demand service was described as “fairly thin, with only 1,000 titles available.” People mused whether people would be satisfied with the limited availability of the service.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ RIAA Reports AI Vocal Cloning Site 'Voicify' to the U.S. Government

      Artificial intelligence is now a mainstream topic but while most people focus on the positive implications, the music industry is concerned about potential threats. In its latest overview of notorious copyright-infringing markets, the RIAA lists 'AI vocal cloning' services as an emerging threat, with Voicify.ai as a prime example.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Genshin Impact: Major Private Server Dev Faces DMCA Subpoenas

      The developer of Genshin Impact has filed DMCA subpoena applications against GitHub, YouTube, and Spartan Host, hoping to unmask an individual connected to the largest private server provider in China. Since player progress gained unofficially upsets Cognosphere's business model, a crackdown isn't unexpected. The fact that the developer could be identified over five allegedly infringing screenshots comes as much more of a surprise.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • Programming

    • Are C and C++ easier to learn than the Ada programming language?

      I often read people on the Internet opining that the Ada programming language is harder to learn that C and C++. I do not think that is true. I think learning to write incorrect programs in C and C++ is easier than learning Ada in general, but it is much easier to learn to write a correct program in Ada than in C and C++!

      Ada is a much more carefully designed and specified language and its design makes it a much safer programming language to learn to use correctly. An Ada programming writing a program will encounter more compile time errors, and need to think more about types, but in return will end up with a safer and easier to understand program.