Links 05/02/2024: Windows Harvests All Your Data and Spyware Targets More Journalists
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Greg Morris ☛ Too much you, in f^!k you
As I’ve written about before, of course hate what you hate, and embrace it, but there becomes a line when, as Matt writes about, your personality is outlined more by the things you hate than what you enjoy. You are more concerned about the external things that you should hate, than the internal, there becomes a little too much you in f^%k you.
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Connor Tumbleson ☛ The Cicada 3301 Mystery (Puzzle 3 Solve) - Part 2
We ended Part 1 on an onion after solving a transposition cipher. At this point knowing what we know - the puzzle begins to fracture into various different paths.
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[Old] Connor Tumbleson ☛ The Cicada 3301 Mystery (Puzzle 3 Solve) - Part 1
Another year struck and after two years of puzzles from Cicada (Puzzle 1 and Puzzle 2). Every new day of 2014 was anxious to see if another puzzle awaited.
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Dan Q ☛ 100 Days To Offload
Might I meet that challenge? Maybe. But it turns out it’s easier than I thought because Kev revised the rules to require only 100 posts in a calendar year (or any other 365-day period, but I’m not going to start thinking about the maths of that).
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Lee Peterson ☛ The only pressure on your blog is from yourself
This helped take the pressure off and go back to just posting when I had something to say, like this one. s
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Dan Q ☛ Reply to: Mobile writing, part 2
As I took part in Bloganuary and began what’ll hopefully become a fifth consecutive year of 100 Days To Offload, I started to hate my approach to mobile blogging and seek something better, too. My blog’s on WordPress, but it’s so highly-customised that I can’t meaningfully use any of the standard apps, and I find the mobile interface too slow and clunky to use over anything less than a great Internet connection… which – living out in the sticks – I don’t routinely have when I’m out and about. So my blogging almost-exclusively takes place at my desktop or laptop.
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Science
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Tony Finch ☛ Joining ellipses with matching tangents
What I wanted to do is swing a curve around a corner without cutting it. (I could solve the problem with Bézier curves, but they create other issues.) The purple ellipse in the following picture illustrates what I want to avoid: it snips off the corner of the inner rectangle.
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Science Alert ☛ Radical New Time Crystal Revealed That Lasts Millions of Times Longer
A semiconductor made from indium gallium arsenide has just set a duration record for a seemingly impossible material that repeats itself through time.
Lasting at least 40 minutes, the period of oscillations sustained by an experiment led by researchers from TU Dortmund University in Germany blew everything else in its class out of the water, setting a new benchmark in a field where researchers have struggled to push the phenomenon past a handful of milliseconds.
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Education
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RFERL ☛ The Azadi Briefing: The Taliban's War On Books
The Taliban confiscated at least 50,000 books from publishing houses and bookshops in the Afghan capital this week.
Publishers and bookstore owners said the extremist group has also banned the sale and publication of more than 100 books. Many of the books were written or translated by Afghan authors in Dari and Pashto and focus specifically on the Taliban.
Atiqullah Azizi, a Taliban official, said the books were banned because they violated “national and Islamic values” or promoted disunity among Afghans.
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Who Would Have Thought That We Needed Another Listserv?
Several people subsequently reached out to me privately, expressing interest in such a forum. After getting through the holidays and then spending a few weeks in brainstorming conversation with them, I decided to take the leap and I created a new listserv, called Open Café, dedicated to “the free, open, constructive, and civil discussion of issues related to open scholarship – including open access, open science, open data, and adjacent topics. Open Café is a place for people across the full spectrum of viewpoints and perspectives to ask questions, offer opinions, and share information in an environment of mutual respect and openmindedness.”
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Tim Bornholdt ☛ The Job Hunt Chronicles: Month 1: Discovering My Path
I was laid off from my job on January 2. It did come as a bit of a shock, and for the first time in my life, I've been really struggling to figure out who I am and what I'm looking for.
As a way to keep pushing myself forward and holding myself accountable, I'm going to start publicly documenting this process as a way to process my thoughts out loud, keep my friends and network aware of my activities, and start some conversations that'll help me take my next step forward.
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Hardware
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iFixit ☛ Vision Pro Teardown—Why Those Fake Eyes Look So Weird
We knew it would be tough to get inside (it was). We hoped we wouldn’t break anything (we did). But we knew it would be worth it to see all the new technology Apple squeezed into this thing, from the EyeSight display to the sensor array, the external battery pack to the R1 chip. We brought in the heavy hitters for this teardown, including x-ray views of the frame and high-resolution microscope shots of the displays.
We’ve got a lot of observations, some opinions, and a couple educated guesses about why we got the Vision Pro we have today on the teardown table. There is a lot in this device, so we’re splitting our analysis into two, with more detail on the lens system and silicon coming in a few days.
Let’s go spelunking into a never-before-explored cave of glass.
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The Register UK ☛ Faraday plots a 64-core Arm chip with Intel inside • The Register
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Omicron Limited ☛ Protecting crops through nanotechnology in Southeast Asia
In a recent breakthrough, DNA sequencing technology has uncovered the culprit behind cassava witches' broom disease: the fungus genus Ceratobasidium. The cutting-edge nanopore technology used for this discovery was first developed to track the COVID-19 virus in Colombia, but is equally suited to identifying and reducing the spread of plant viruses.
The findings, published in Scientific Reports, will help plant pathologists in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand protect farmers' valued cassava harvest.
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University of Michigan ☛ UMich study finds most urban farms have greater carbon footprints than conventional agriculture
A recent study analyzed the carbon footprint of urban agricultural sites in comparison to their more conventional agricultural counterparts. The study found that while 43% of urban farms have a smaller carbon footprint than conventional farms, food from the remaining 57% of urban farms and gardens leaves a significantly greater carbon footprint — up to six times greater than conventional farms. The study was organized by researchers at universities around the world — including the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, University Paris-Saclay and University of Kent School of Architecture and Planning — and the Research Institute for Regional and Urban Development.
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The Atlantic ☛ GoFundMe Is a Health-Care Utility Now
One study found that, in 2020, the number of U.S. campaigns related to medical causes—about 200,000—was 25 times higher than the number of such campaigns on the site in 2011. More than 500 campaigns are currently dedicated to asking for financial help for treating people, mostly kids, with spinal muscular atrophy, a neurodegenerative genetic condition. The recently approved gene therapy for young children with the condition, by the drugmaker Novartis, costs about $2.1 million for the single-dose treatment.
Perhaps the most damning aspect of all this is that paying for expensive care with crowdfunding is no longer seen as unusual; instead, it is being normalized as part of the health system, like getting blood work done or waiting on hold for an appointment. Need a heart transplant? Start a GoFundMe in order to get on the waiting list. Resorting to GoFundMe when faced with bills has become so accepted that in some cases, patient advocates and hospital financial-aid officers recommend crowdfunding as an alternative to being sent to collections. My inbox and the Bill of the Month project (run by KFF Health News, where I am the senior contributing editor, and NPR) have become a kind of complaint desk for people who can’t afford their medical bills, and I’m gobsmacked every time a patient tells me they’ve been advised that GoFundMe is their best option.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Greece ☛ AI abused for online fraud
Among the countless scams recorded daily, there has been a case reported where an algorithm reproduced the voice of an overseas student asking his parents for money urgently to deal with an emergency. The voice on the other end of the phone line leaves no doubt to the parent, who, knowing his or her child’s voice intimately, hurries to respond to the emergency and get him out of the difficult situation by depositing money into the account that the scammers indicate. In that case, too, the voice was reproduced through an algorithm from social media like TikTok, which is consistently used by young people – and not only them – to upload videos.
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The Register UK ☛ Deepfake CFO tricks Hong Kong biz out of $25 million
Whether driven by the appeal of larger financial incentives, or influenced by the recent significant advancements in AI technology that facilitate their creation, it seems that the era of being unconcerned about deepfakes is fast disappearing.
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Gizmodo ☛ Deepfake Video Call Scams Finance Bro Out of $25 Million
“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,” Hong Kong Police official Baron Chan Shun-ching told media outlets on Friday.
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CNN ☛ Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’
Believing everyone else on the call was real, the worker agreed to remit a total of $200 million Hong Kong dollars – about $25.6 million, the police officer added.
The case is one of several recent episodes in which fraudsters are believed to have used deepfake technology to modify publicly available video and other footage to cheat people out of money.
At the press briefing Friday, Hong Kong police said they had made six arrests in connection with such scams.
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The Standard, Hong Kong ☛ HK's first deepfake video conference scam involving HK$200 million
The victim recalled that the "CFO" spent most of the time giving investment instructions, asking him to transfer funds to different accounts, and ending the meeting in a hurry.
He found that he was cheated after he made 15 transactions totaling HK$200 million to five local accounts within a week and reported to the police. The Standard Channel
It was discovered that the speech of the "CFO" was only a virtual video generated by the scammer through deepfake. Police said other employees of the same company were also instructed to attend the meeting.
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VOA News ☛ Deepfake Scam Video Cost Company $26 Million, Hong Kong Police Says
Acting Senior Superintendent Baron Chan said the video conference call involved multiple participants, but all except the victim were impersonated.
"Scammers found publicly available video and audio of the impersonation targets via YouTube, then used deepfake technology to emulate their voices... to lure the victim to follow their instructions," Chan told reporters.
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CoryDoctorow ☛ How I got scammed
He hadn't asked for the last four digits. He'd asked for the last seven digits. At the time, I'd found that very frustrating, but now – "The first nine digits are the same for every card you issue, right?" I asked the VP.
I'd given him my entire card number.
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Licensing / Legal
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Quartz ☛ 4 times that AI 'hallucinations' showed up in court cases
A federal appeals court in New Orleans has proposed requiring lawyers to certify that they either did not rely on AI tools to draft briefs or that humans reviewed the accuracy of any text generated by AI in their court filings. Lawyers who don’t comply with the rule could have their filings being stricken or face sanctions. Some attorneys have pushed back on the proposed rule.
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Reuters ☛ Another NY lawyer faces discipline after AI chatbot invented case citation
A New York lawyer is facing possible discipline for citing a non-existent case generated by artificial intelligence, marking AI's latest disruption for attorneys and courts learning to navigate the emerging technology.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a Tuesday order, opens new tab referred lawyer Jae Lee to its attorney grievance panel after she used OpenAI's ChatGPT for research in a medical malpractice lawsuit and did not confirm that the case she cited was valid.
The conduct "falls well below the basic obligations of counsel," a three-judge panel for the Manhattan-based appeals court wrote.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The Register UK ☛ That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data
The basic story is bad enough. If users on multiple support threads are correct, every time Microsoft's flagship Edge browser starts up, it helps itself to open Chrome tab data and more besides. This goes well beyond the normal "Do you want to import bookmarks, history, etc?" that all browsers like to ask when you first install them on a system where another already lives. It also reportedly doesn't care what you answered to that question: this is a Microsoft package on a Microsoft operating system, and it's gonna Microsoft like it's 1999.
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NYOB ☛ German DPA declares data trading between credit agency and address trader illegal
Background: Secret, illegal data trading. The credit reference agency CRIF constantly buys personal data such as the names, addresses and dates of birth of millions of Germans from the address trader Acxiom and uses it to assess their creditworthiness. The trade happens secretly and without the consent or a notification of those affected. According to the GDPR principle of purpose limitation, data collected for marketing purposes may only be used for credit scoring with consent. As a result, both companies are in breach of European data protection law.
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Terence Eden ☛ Safelinks are a fragile foundation for publishing
That forces everyone who visits that link to go through Microsoft's proxy. That might protect users if a link later becomes suspicious. But, more likely, it will be used in analytics to further profile users who click on links. It also undermines a user's ability to see the final destination of a link unless they can manually URl-decode content in their head.
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Digital Music News ☛ So What Happened to Threads?
Following the trend set in 2023, many tech companies have started off this year by laying off staff en masse while investing more efforts into developing artificial intelligence. After mass layoffs throughout the year, with the last major round in November, Meta reports a strong Q4 2023, and a pretty nice 2023 overall — owed in part to its work in the advancements of AI, and the success of Threads, the company’s answer to Twitter.
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Defence/Aggression
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Science Alert ☛ We Breached The 1.5 °C Threshold Over 10 Years Ago, Study Warns
Chemical records written in sea sponge skeletons suggest we passed the critical threshold of 1.5 °C of warming as early as 2010. If true, this places us close to – or even at – about 2 °C today.
Being ahead of schedule would explain why such extreme climate consequences have been walloping us far sooner than anticipated. Last year's huge leaps in temperatures left researchers stunned and scrambling for theories to account for some mysterious missing factor to explain things.
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La Prensa Latina ☛ Global warming surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius
The planet has already passed 1.5 °C of warming, according to a new measuring technique that goes back further in time than current methods. At the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, nations agreed not to exceed 1.5 °C, a guardrail of climate change.
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Matt Birchler ☛ We turned dunking into a sport
I think one of the unexpected downsides of social media over the past couple decades is how much they have become dunk machines. Yeah, positive stuff can get some traction as well, but if you want to really get people buzzing and boost those engagement numbers, you’re way better off dunking like crazy on some sucker. People blame quote tweets for this, but I’m on Mastodon everyday and believe me I know what people there don’t like. I’d go so far as to say for a decent number of people I follow, I know more about what they don’t like than what they actually enjoy. Why? That’s what they post about; it’s the thrill of the dunk.
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The Wall Street Journal ☛ Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital: Imams and politicians in the Michigan city side with Hamas against Israel and Iran against the U.S.
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India Times ☛ ‘America’s jihad capital’: Why this Michigan city is on edge
Dearborn, Michigan boasts the largest Muslim population per capita in the United States and also houses the largest mosque in North America. The contentious opinion article in the Wall Street Journal labeled Dearborn, Michigan, as "America's Jihad capital," accusing the city of harboring strong support for Palestinian and Islamist militant factions, notably Hamas.
The article, written by Steven Stalinsky of the Middle East Media Research Institute, also suggested that southern Michigan's support for terrorism has long been a concern for US authorities.
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MEMRI ☛ Dearborn, Michigan Mayor Abdullah Hammoud In A Pro-Palestinian Rally: This Is A City Of Resistance; Biden Must Decide Whether He Listens To Us Or To Those Who Stuff His Pockets with Money; Other Speakers: Biden Is A Cancer In Our Country; White House And Congress Must Be Cleaned Of The Bloodthirsty Killers; Israel Will Be Dismantled; We Will Have Victory In Palestine And Victory In D.C.
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The Times Of Israel ☛ Detroit suburb police put on alert after op-ed calls town ‘America’s Jihad capital’
In a statement to The Times of Israel, Stalinksy said: “I would ask the mayor to point out what was incorrect” in the piece, and to view a compilation video posted by Memri of “protests in his city and speeches and sermons by extremist imams in his city.” The compilation shows “shocking anti-US and pro-jihad sermons and marches,” said Stalinksy, including at events in the center of Dearborn “at locations such as the Henry Ford Centennial Library and the Ford Performing Arts Center.”
Stalinsky charged that the mayor “has allowed support inside Dearborn for US-designated terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as for the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran and its leaders and its proxy militias – who are most recently responsible for killing three American service personnel this past week.” Asked Stalinksy: “Why hasn’t he condemned this open support in his city for America’s enemies, who are killing American soldiers?”
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[Old] Gannett ☛ Dearborn police chief apologizes for liking Facebook post supporting Israel
Dearborn, which is 47% Arab American, has a sizable population who support Palestinians. Haddad's apology illustrated how the conflict in the Middle East has played out in metro Detroit as Arab American, Jewish, Muslim and Black communities react to the war.
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The Hill ☛ History shows that no ceasefire or treaty with Russia can be trusted
These assumptions, however, are all incorrect. If Ukraine is forced to sign a ceasefire agreement with Russia, then history suggests that the Russian Federation will just wait for the international community to shift its focus elsewhere before regrouping its forces and launching another invasion. This would lead to an even greater, more devastating conflict in Europe.
This is not a farfetched scenario. Over the past few decades, Russia has repeatedly violated ceasefires and treaties, to the point that it simply cannot be trusted to honor any commitment. Nothing in Russia’s behavior suggests that it is trustworthy or would uphold agreements with Ukraine. In fact, history has shown otherwise.
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YLE ☛ Thousands may be waiting to cross Finnish-Russian frontier, border official says
Finland partially and then fully closed its border with Russia due to suspicions that the flow of migrants was being orchestrated by Moscow as part of a so-called hybrid operation. Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (NCP) told Yle at the weekend that his government may decide to extend the closure beyond the current deadline of 11 February.
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Neritam ☛ MI6 plots with Islamists to overthrow democracy
Declassified British files highlight a little known aspect of the joint MI6/CIA coup against Iran’s democratically elected government in August 1953 – UK covert action in support of leading radical Shia Islamists, the predecessors of Ayatollah Khomeini.
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Janes ☛ Finland to deploy fighters for first time to NATO's air policing missions
Finland is to send combat aircraft to NATO's Southern Air Policing mission, marking the first out-of-area operational deployment for the Nordic country since joining the alliance.
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CBS ☛ Plans for U.S. strikes on Iranian personnel and facilities in Iraq, Syria approved after Jordan drone attack
Iran is a vital backer of Hamas, and the many other groups it supports across the region, including the Houthi rebels in Yemen who have attacked ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has engaged in regular cross-border fire with Israeli forces, say they are attacking Western interests in support of the Palestinian people.
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Site36 ☛ “Eurodrone” in turbulences: German Ministry of Defence irritates with huge cost increase
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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New York Times ☛ Fake and Explicit Images of Taylor Swift Started on 4chan, Study Says
Graphika, a research firm that studies disinformation, traced the images back to one community on 4chan, a message board known for sharing hate speech, conspiracy theories and, increasingly, racist and offensive content created using A.I.
The people on 4chan who created the images of the singer did so in a sort of game, the researchers said — a test to see whether they could create lewd (and sometimes violent) images of famous female figures.
The synthetic Swift images spilled out onto other platforms and were viewed millions of times. Fans rallied to Ms. Swift’s defense, and lawmakers demanded stronger protections against A.I.-created images.
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Environment
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The Atlantic ☛ Hurricanes Are Too Fast for Category 5
Right now, every hurricane with maximum sustained wind speeds above 156 miles an hour is considered a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale—whether it’s blowing 160 mph, like Hurricane Ian, or roughly 215 mph, like Hurricane Patricia, which struck Mexico in 2015. To distinguish between extreme storms and, well, extremely extreme storms, James Kossin, a distinguished science adviser at the climate nonprofit First Street Foundation, and Michael Wehner, a senior scientist studying extreme weather events at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, explored adding a hypothetical sixth step to the scale. Category 6 hurricanes, they write, would encompass winds above 192 miles an hour. By their definition, five hurricanes—all of which occurred in about the previous decade—would have been classified as Category 6.
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The Verge ☛ Paris votes to crack down on SUVs
Parisians have voted to triple parking charges for out-of-town SUV drivers as part of the city’s efforts to address road safety, air pollution, and climate change. The proposals were narrowly approved in a referendum vote on Sunday, with The Washington Post reporting that 54.6 percent of participants voted in favor of measures aiming to reduce the presence of “heavy, bulky, and polluting” vehicles in the city center.
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The Hill ☛ Scientists propose a Category 6 as hurricanes gain in intensity with climate change
The scale, developed in the early 1970s, may not reflect the true intensity of some storms, argued study co-authors Michael F. Wehner — a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab — and James P. Kossin — a former NOAA climate and hurricane researcher.
A Category 6 designation would apply to storms with winds that exceed 192 miles per hour under their proposal.
Storms with winds of 157 mph or higher are currently ranked Category 5, an open-ended approach that fails to adequately warn people of the dangers of higher wind speeds, the study contended.
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PNAS ☛ The growing inadequacy of an open-ended Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale in a warming world
Global warming increases available sensible and latent heat energy, increasing the thermodynamic potential wind intensity of tropical cyclones (TCs). Supported by theory, observations, and modeling, this causes a shift in mean TC intensity, which tends to manifest most clearly at the greatest intensities. The Saffir–Simpson scale for categorizing damage based on the wind intensity of TCs was introduced in the early 1970s and remains the most commonly used metric for public communication of the level of wind hazard that a TC poses. Because the scale is open-ended and does not extend beyond category 5 (70 m/s windspeed or greater), the level of wind hazard conveyed by the scale remains constant regardless of how far the intensity extends beyond 70 m/s. This may be considered a weakness of the scale, particularly considering that the destructive potential of the wind increases exponentially. Here, we consider how this weakness becomes amplified in a warming world by elucidating the past and future increases of peak wind speeds in the most intense TCs. A simple extrapolation of the Saffir–Simpson scale is used to define a hypothetical category 6, and we describe the frequency of TCs, both past and projected under global warming, that would fall under this category. We find that a number of recent storms have already achieved this hypothetical category 6 intensity and based on multiple independent lines of evidence examining the highest simulated and potential peak wind speeds, more such storms are projected as the climate continues to warm.
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University of Michigan ☛ Legacy in land: Protecting rare fens, century farms and other natural habitats in Michigan
Past the meadow, gentle hills slope around an extremely rare ecosystem known as a prairie fen. These fens, which take thousands of years to develop, exist predominantly in southern lower Michigan and occur where cold, alkaline groundwater bubbles to the surface. The springs feed rivers and lakes with clean water.
“Ours is one of the few fens left in Michigan,” Michael Arnold said. “It’s a special ecosystem and it has some rare animals and plants in it.”
To protect these rare animals and plants—white lady-slipper orchid, southern wild rice, eastern massasauga rattlesnake, gray ratsnake, Blanding’s turtle, monarch butterfly, bald eagle and mussels like the slippershell—the Arnolds turned to Legacy Land Conservancy to permanently protect 89 acres of their eastern Jackson County farm that includes the fen through a conservation easement.
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Finance
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Snapchat parent company to cut roughly 10% of global workforce
The parent company of Snapchat is cutting roughly 10% of its global workforce — that's over 500 employees worldwide.
The California-based Snap Inc. is the latest among several tech companies to announce layoffs, as Google, Amazon, eBay, Spotify, TikTok and Microsoft announced they would lay off thousands of employees in the past month.
This isn't the first time in recent years that Snap Inc. has eliminated jobs. In August 2022, Snap announced that it would plan to cut about 20% of all jobs worldwide, and last year, it announced a 3% cut after starting to wind down its AR Enterprise business.
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Johnny Decimal ☛ Pricing is hard
When we released the Workbook I had no idea what it was worth. How could I? What baseline could I possibly have? It’s a PDF that we’d written.
It’s simultaneously worth nothing (it’s a digital good with zero marginal cost) and everything (it’s how we pay our rent).
So it’s an equation. Basic maths. Price × sales. Higher price, fewer sales, and vice versa. Where’s the sweet spot?
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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RFERL ☛ Yandex, A Bellwether For Russia's Tech Industry, Leaves In Cut-Rate Deal
Yandex, once dubbed Russia’s Google for becoming the country’s dominant online search engine, will exit Russia entirely, selling its assets there in a deeply discounted $5.2 billion deal that marks the end of an era.
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El País ☛ The Taylor Swift red herring
“The Democrats don’t matter,” said Bannon. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” The strategy, taken directly from the Goebbels guidebook and updated by all authoritarian populists, from Duterte to Bolsonaro, is not to lie, but to disorient and suffocate. The media’s main job this year will not be to verify everything the machine produces, but to decide once again what news is really news and dodge everything else.
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Meduza ☛ Independent journalists say campaign workers for Boris Nadezhdin, Russia’s only anti-war candidate, may have sabotaged his ballot registration, but supporters say the report is a hired hit job
Volunteers for Nadezhdin’s public campaign told Novaya Gazeta that they were supposed to come to the cabin on January 30 and photograph each signature sheet individually as part of a quality check for the paperwork being prepared for the election commission. When they arrived, however, they allegedly learned that large numbers of signatures collected in Russia’s more remote regions by campaign workers from Civic Initiative were falsified. When this revelation led to a disagreement about using unverified signatures, Alexander Nazarenko (one of the “political technologists” whom Nadezhdin personally hired to the campaign, sources told Novaya Gazeta) forced the volunteer workers out of the cabin and into the street, shouting that he would “bury them in the woods.”
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India Times ☛ Why is Big Tech still cutting jobs?
Google started the year with layoffs of several hundred employees and a promise of more cuts to come. Amazon followed by trimming hundreds of jobs in its Prime Video department. Meta quietly thinned out middle management. Microsoft also cut 1,900 jobs in its video game division.
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Michigan News ☛ Dr. Cornel West is running to become President of the United States. What are his views on climate change and the environment?
West, a Harvard and Princeton-educated philosopher, has long been outspoken on issues ranging from race to militarism to the climate crisis. Following his visit to Birmingham to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, West spoke to Inside Climate News about his vision for Alabama, the climate, and beyond.
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India Times ☛ Snap to lay off 10% of its workforce as spate of job cuts continue
The Snapchat parent expects pre-tax charges in the range of $55 million to $75 million, primarily consisting of severance and related costs, and other charges, of which $45 million to $55 million are expected to be future cash expenditures.
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El País ☛ Snap, the owner of Snapchat, is laying off about 10% of its global workforce
Snap Inc. said in a regulatory filing that it currently estimates $55 million to $75 million in charges, mostly for severance and related costs. It expects the majority of the costs to be incurred in the first quarter.
This isn’t the first time Snap has eliminated jobs. The Santa Monica, California-based company announced in August 2022 that it planned to cut about 20% of its global workforce. In the third quarter of 2023, it began winding down its AR Enterprise business, which included reducing its global employee headcount by approximately 3%, according to a regulatory filing.
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The Hill ☛ Snap laying off more than 500 employees
The social media company will cut its global workforce by about 10 percent, it said in the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This translates to about 540 employees, based on Snap’s most recent headcount of 5,367 full-time workers.
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Frontpage Magazine ☛ Hamas-Linked CAIR Gets Sued by One of its Own
The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), aided by a sympathetic establishment media, has never been known for its transparency. For years, this Muslim Brotherhood-linked organization has successfully maintained near-total silence about its inner workings. A few years ago, when a non-Muslim posed as a convert to Islam, got a job as a CAIR intern, and revealed some of this sinister and unsavory organization’s private goings on, CAIR went to court to silence him. But now, this notoriously sealed-off organization is being sued by one of its own former employees, and in the course of a bitter, protracted dispute, its toxic institutional subculture has been revealed.
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Andrew Kelley ☛ Why We Can't Have Nice Software
The problem with software is that it's too powerful. It creates so much wealth so fast that it's virtually impossible to not distribute it.
Think about it: sure, it takes a while to make useful software. But then you make it, and then it's done. It keeps working with no maintenance whatsoever, and just a trickle of electricity to run it.
Immediately, this poses a problem: how can a small number of people keep all that wealth for themselves, and not let it escape in the dirty, dirty fingers of the general populace?
This is a question that the music industry faced head-on, and they came up with EULAs, enforced via the state's monopoly on violence, and DRM, a way for software to act antagonistically against its own users. Software can do useful things like encode media into bits, and then copy those bits. That's dangerously useful, and it had to be stopped.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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VOA News ☛ Iran’s Denial of Backing ‘Any’ Militias in ‘Iraq, Syria or Elsewhere’ is Patently False
That is false.
The British defense and security think tank Royal United Services Institute estimates that there are at least 40 militia groups “closely funded and essentially operated by Iran's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” CBS News reported on February 1.
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DeSmog ☛ Jordan Peterson’s New Online School Will Be Rife with Climate Crisis Deniers
Over a dozen instructors associated with a new online school called Peterson Academy, created by Canadian conservative influencer Jordan Peterson, have disputed the existence of a climate emergency, or opposed solutions that could address dangerous levels of warming. Their taped two-hour lectures for the venture will be part of its offerings if and when it launches in February after several months of delay.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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RFERL ☛ Dissident Iranian Filmmaker Says He Has Been Handed Additional 61 Months In Prison
"When I see a major theft, I cannot remain silent. Nearly 900 billion rials ($1.5 million) were stolen from the total funds of Iranian prisoners.... Everyone else chose to remain silent, but I protested and took action," he said.
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RFERL ☛ Siberian Activist Forcibly Placed In Psychiatric Clinic Again
Authorities in the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk forcibly placed noted activist and blogger Igor Gorlanov in a psychiatric clinic on unspecified grounds for a third time since 2019, lawyer Aleksei Pryanishnikov said on February 5. [...]
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RTL ☛ Yang Jun: dissident Chinese-Australian writer handed suspended death sentence
Yang -- who also goes by the pen name Yang Hengjun -- was born in China in 1965 and became an Australian citizen in the early 2000s.
He grew a readership in exile as the author of novels that drew on his experiences in his homeland.
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RFA ☛ Australian writer given suspended death sentence in China
Yang, a pro-democracy blogger, is an Australian citizen of Chinese descent who was working in New York before his arrest at Guangzhou airport in 2019. He was accused of espionage on behalf of a nation that China has not disclosed nor made public the details of the case against him.
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VOA News ☛ Canberra Criticizes Death Penalty Handed to Chinese Australian Blogger in Beijing
Yang, who blogged about Chinese affairs, has always denied allegations of espionage. The specific charges against him have not been made public.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Senegal restricts mobile [Internet] amid opposition protests
Senegal's Ministry of Communication, Telecommunications and Digital Economy said on Monday that [Internet] was cut "due to the dissemination of several hateful and subversive messages relayed on social networks in the context of threats and disturbances to public order."
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US News And World Report ☛ Senegal Cuts Internet Access as Lawmakers Debate a Bill to Possibly Extend the President's Tenure
The Ministry of Communication, Telecommunications and Digital Economy said the [Internet] was cut “due to the dissemination of several hateful and subversive messages relayed on social networks in the context of threats and disturbances to public order.”
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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US News And World Report ☛ Journalists Say Ukrainian Security Service Spied on Them
In a post on the Telegram messaging app, bihus.info, which regularly publishes investigative stories about officials and wealthy private individuals, said an SBU unit had 30 people spying on its journalists during a corporate event at a hotel in December.
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JURIST ☛ UN expert urges Philippines to better protect safety of journalists
Khan emphasized that the murder of journalists constitutes the “most egregious form of censorship.” Despite global efforts to promote press freedom, the Philippines remains a perilous environment for journalists, with 81 unresolved cases of journalist killings, according to data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
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Security Week ☛ US to Roll Out Visa Restrictions on People Who Misuse Spyware to Target Journalists, Activists
“The United States remains concerned with the growing misuse of commercial spyware around the world to facilitate repression, restrict the free flow of information, and enable human rights abuses,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement announcing the new policy. “The misuse of commercial spyware threatens privacy and freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly, and association. Such targeting has been linked to arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings in the most egregious of cases.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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ICC ☛ Armenian Christian Prisoner Hakop Gochumyan Trial Result Still Unknown
While Hakop and Elisa live in Armenia and only were visiting family in Iran, Elisa’s father, Rafi Shahverdian, was a well-known pastor in Yerevan after fleeing Iran in the 1990s. It is reported that Christian literature was found with them when they were arrested in Iran.
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Pete Brown ☛ No one should have to be selling themselves all the time. It’s a miserable way to live.
So I am glad this piece calls that out and goes into the degree of detail it does. No one should have to constantly be hustling and commoditizing every last bit of themselves to make a living. And we should especially not have to commoditize the creativity and art and personal expression that makes us who we are. We should have a society that protects that stuff from commoditization, that gives us the space and time and energy we need to be able to do more of it.
BUT… It was not “[The Internet]” that did this.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Zimbabwe ☛ WiFi networks that span over 3km are on the way, that’s cell tower kind of range that
Long range WiFi is coming. There’s a company called Morse Micro that has been experimenting with a new WiFi standard that allows for long range WiFi – the 900MHz Wi-Fi HaLow standard.
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The Register UK ☛ IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS
Even with just those six million addresses, that's $262.8 million AWS will earn from charging for IPv4 in a year.
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Pete Brown ☛ Meta will only interoperate if they have to, so we should make them.
Personally, I would prefer to see Meta as a company burned to the ground. I would like to see significant and meaningful personal data privacy regulations that would make their entire business model impossible. And I would like to see Mark Zuckerberg and a bunch of other executives called to account and face real consequences for the harm caused by the companies they lead.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ DataCamp & DISH Settle Massive IPTV Piracy Lawsuit, Still Completely Disagree
A DISH copyright lawsuit against UK-based CDN company DataCamp has ended with a settlement. The original complaint alleged that DataCamp failed to terminate 'repeat infringer' customers, identified by DISH as the operators of several IPTV services. The $3m settlement subjects DataCamp to an enhanced notice-and-takedown regime with financial penalties for noncompliance. Outside the agreement, the parties still disagree on almost everything.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Rightsholders Brand Vietnam an Online Piracy Haven & Demand Action
The IIPA, which represents the MPA, RIAA, and other entertainment industry groups, views Vietnam as a haven for online piracy. The Southeast Asian country is considered the leading global exporter of piracy services, 'home' to popular brands such as Fmovies, AniWave, 123movies, and 2embed. To tackle this problem, the country should pursue criminal convictions, IIPA says.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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