Leftovers

• Caleb Hearth ☛ Spiced Mead Cake

  When brewing mead, you’ll be left with a fair amount of yeast that’s floated to the bottom of the carboy, bucket, or whatever you’re using. This is called “lees”. Once you’ve siphoned off the clear, tasty mead you can reserve the lees for cooking. It’s very nutritious but on its own doesn’t taste very good.

  Using it in a recipe like this capitalizes on the nutrition and yields a delicious and moist variation on a traditional spiced honey cake. It’s great for cold weather, but I made it recently on a hot day and it was still a big hit. Even my 3 year old and his friend enjoyed it.

• Rolling Stone ☛ Influencer Veruca Salt Wants Speculation About Her Son's Death To Stop

  “I think it’s very frustrating to watch people blame a vaccine or say I was negligent,” Salt says. “You don’t think I want a reason? I want a reason, but I’ll never have one. I don’t think it’s fair for people to act like I did anything wrong or to try and fill in the blanks when my baby is dead. They get to be hateful and then move on with their life after one scroll. And this is my life 24/7. This is how it will be for me forever.”

  On its own, the death of any child is a painful and agonizing time for a parent. But Salt says it has been especially excruciating because the harassment and speculation she’s received have prevented her from using social media the way she wants to: as a place to grieve. Salt began her public social media accounts after being outed as a sex worker by the Daily Mail. Since then, her online presence hasn’t just been her job. It’s come to represent her taking her power back.

• Title Drops ☛ Full of Themselves: An analysis of title drops in movies

  A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they're in. Here's a large-scale analysis of 73,921 movies from the last 80 years on how often, when and maybe even why that happens.

• CBC ☛ Apple to pay up to $14.4M in iPhone throttling settlement approved by B.C. judge

  A B.C. Supreme Court judge has approved a proposed settlement of up to $14.4 million from Apple to eligible members of a class-action lawsuit that accused the company of deliberately providing software updates that slowed some older iPhone models.

  Apple, which denies the allegations, had earlier agreed to pay between $11.1 million and $14.4 million as part of the settlement. It says the settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing.

• India Times ☛ Apple: Apple's iPhone sales in China plunge 24% as Huawei's popularity surges

  The U.S. tech giant's chief competitor in China in premium smartphones, Huawei, saw unit sales rise by 64% in the period, according to the report. This could fan fears of a slowdown in demand for the U.S. company, whose revenue forecast for the current quarter was $6 billion below Wall Street expectations.

Science

• Science Alert ☛ Perfectly Synchronized Planetary System Probed For Signs of Alien Technology

  The star at its center – a temperate orange dwarf called HD 110067 – is orbited by six exoplanets, each of which travels in harmony with its adjacent worlds. Such a perfect chain of orbital resonances is extremely rare, and it means that the system has remained relatively stable and undisturbed since it formed, around a billion years ago.

• Gizmodo ☛ Google Says It’s Purging All the AI Trash Littering Its Search Results

  Google says it will begin cracking down on AI-generated content created solely for the purpose of gaming its systems and ranking high in Google Search—a change that could potentially have a ripple effect on the quality of what we see online.

Education

• BBC ☛ School phone ban: Blandford pupils to be offered 'brick phones'

  The school for children aged between four and 11 is looking at offering the basic phones, which can only send and receive texts and calls, at a minimal or no cost to parents through a hire scheme.

• Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Are Price, Value, and Openness the Most Important Scholarly Communication Priorities?

  For two decades, scholarly communication advocates and policy-makers have largely focused on price, value, and openness for research outputs. Universities, their libraries, and funders have achieved real results through tactics that have included public policy interventions and steadily increasing negotiating leverage and sophistication. Today, figures show a steady growth in the share of research globally that is published open access, with some geographic variance. To be sure, many universities, libraries, and funders do not believe that they have fully achieved their objectives. Even regions and funders that have achieved open access for a strong majority of their research outputs are generating a discourse about academy ownership or control of the scholarly record that would extend this focus towards new goals.

  But the marketplace and policy environment have not remained static. In recent years, as the open access agenda has achieved so great an impact, the second digital transformation of scholarly publishing has suggested new focus areas are of real importance. And university leaders themselves, at least in North America, have a set of strategic priorities that are much broader than price, value, and openness of scholarship. Can advocates and policy-makers — from universities, academic libraries, and funding organizations — engage in a scholarly communication discourse that fully addresses these current and emerging focus areas and priorities?

Hardware

• April ☛ France Gives Up on its Sustainability Index for Computer Phones

  This sustainability index, at least the one on "multifonction mobile phones", or computer phones2, won't see the day of light. On October, 27th, 2023, by a detailed opinion, the European Commission rejected the order "on the criteria, sub-criteria and scoring system for calculating and displaying the sustainability index of multifunctional mobile phones", considered incompatible with regulation (EU) 2023/1669 on "the energy labelling of smartphones and slate tablets", that came into force September, 20th, 2023.

  In this context, France notified the Commission, in February of 2024, that it will not publish it's order on "multifonction mobile phones", and that it will forward to the Commission the finalized version of the other texts.

• Hackaday ☛ RGB LED Disco Ball Reacts To Sound And Color

  Although disco music and dancing may be long dead, the disco ball lives on as a staple of dance parties everywhere. [Tim van de Vathorst] spent a considerable amount of time reinventing the disco ball into something covered with RGB LEDs that reacts to sound and uses a color sensor to change hue based on whatever it’s presented with.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Omicron Limited ☛ Harmful 'forever chemicals' removed from water with new electrocatalysis method

  Scientists from the University of Rochester have developed new electrochemical approaches to clean up pollution from "forever chemicals" found in clothing, food packaging, firefighting foams, and a wide array of other products. A new Journal of Catalysis study describes nanocatalysts developed to remediate per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances known as PFAS.

• Pro Publica ☛ Michigan Lawmaker Wants State Health Plans to Cover Cutting-Edge Cancer Treatments

  Spurred by a ProPublica story about an insurer that denied coverage of the only therapy that could have saved the life of a 50-year-old father of two, a Michigan lawmaker plans to introduce a bill Tuesday requiring health plans in the state to cover cutting-edge cancer treatments.

  In February 2020, Forrest VanPatten died fighting Priority Health, one of Michigan’s largest health insurers, over its refusal to pay for CAR-T cell therapy, his last-chance treatment. The therapy works by genetically reengineering patients’ own cells, then infusing them back into the body to beat back their disease.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Hackaday ☛ Large Language Model Can Help You Develop For The Amiga

  Developing for the Amiga used to involve reading dense programming manuals and trial and error. In contrast, developing these days can be as simple as barking orders at ChatGPT to spit you out some Python code. However, that technique doesn’t work so well for Amiga languages, as ChatGPT hasn’t read much about the now-ancient platform. However, as covered by AmigaNews, there is now a ChatGPT model trained specifically on Amiga development. Enter Amiga Guru.

• Logikal Solutions ☛ Your Roku OPT-OUT Letter

  Like many of you I have some Roku devices. Once the streaming services managed to compress/strip Standard Definition television far enough the pathetic 25Mbps download speed Internet services available in rural America made it possible to stream. No matter what the Federal Government says, 25Mbps is not high speed broadband nor should it really be considered broadband. It’s definitely better than what you will get with HughesNet’s constantly “throttled” connections and “fair use” meaning the only time you can actually stream anything is 2am to 6am when the service is so overloaded dial-up would be faster.

• Wired ☛ Google Is Finally Trying to Kill AI Clickbait

  In a blog post, Google claims the change will reduce “low-quality, unoriginal content” in search results by 40 percent. It will focus on reducing what the company calls “scaled content abuse,” which is when bad actors flood the internet with massive amounts of articles and blog posts designed to game search engines.

• Futurism ☛ Scientists Have a Dirty Secret: Nobody Knows How AI Actually Works

  The AI industry exploded in late 2022, following the wild success of OpenAI's ChatGPT release in November of that year. Generative AI tools — from chatbots to remarkably lifelike music and voice-generators to image and video creators, and more — continue to dazzle the public, while AI and machine learning advancements continue to find applications in fields like healthcare and drug discovery.

  Just one problem: not even the folks creating all this AI fully understand how it really works.

• MIT Technology Review ☛ Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

  The weird behavior has captured the imagination of the wider research community. “Lots of people have opinions,” says Lauro Langosco at the University of Cambridge, UK. “But I don’t think there’s a consensus about what exactly is going on.”

  Grokking is just one of several odd phenomena that have AI researchers scratching their heads. The largest models, and large language models in particular, seem to behave in ways textbook math says they shouldn’t. This highlights a remarkable fact about deep learning, the fundamental technology behind today’s AI boom: for all its runaway success, nobody knows exactly how—or why—it works.

• India Times ☛ A cyberattack may have exposed data of these credit card users

  The breach was caused by “a point-of-sale attack at a merchant processor in which American Express Card member data was impacted,” the report noted.

• Bruce Schneier ☛ The Insecurity of Video Doorbells

  Consumer Reports has analyzed a bunch of popular Internet-connected video doorbells. Their security is terrible.

• Rachel ☛ Sometimes the dam breaks even after plenty of warnings

  It's been about 10 years, so let's talk about the outage that marks the point where I started feeling useful in that job: Friday, August 1, 2014. That's the one where FB went down and people started calling 911 to complain about it, and someone from the LA County sheriff's office got on Twitter to say "knock it off, we know and it's not an emergency".

• Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Facebook, Instagram downed in global outage

  TechCentral was not able to log into either platform shortly after 5.45pm SAST on Tuesday. The disruptions started around 5pm SAST, with more than 300 000 reports of outages for Facebook and about 40 000 reports for Instagram, according to the website.

• Futurism ☛ Every Single Meta Site Just Went Down

  Practically every single app and website owned by Facebook parent Meta went down this morning.

  That includes Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp, as reported by Downdetector.

  The outage also appears to be affecting several Google services, including YouTube, suggesting a large-scale infrastructure failure.

• Unicorn Media ☛ No, It’s Not Just You: Facebook Is Down for Everyone [Ed: Facebook down even for the NSA]

  Update: All of Meta’s sites that were affected by this outage appear to be functioning now. DownDetector reported that there were over 461,000 outages during the outage’s peak, with Instagram also having over 70,000 reported outages.

  If you’ve suddenly been logged out of Facebook and your password isn’t accepted when you try to log back in, do youself a favor and don’t try changing your password. That’s not going to work either, because it’ll just result in an oops-something-went-wrong message, and might create more headaches for you later when Zuckerberg figures out what went wrong.

• Scoop News Group ☛ Biden administration working on ‘enhancing’ AI use case reporting, Martorana says

  The White House has previously indicated the inventories will be more central to understanding how agencies are using the technology going forward. In fact, draft Office of Management and Budget guidance that corresponded to President Joe Biden’s AI executive order proposed expanding the inventories with information about safety- and rights-impacting AI, the risks of uses, and how those risks are being managed.

• Wired ☛ How to Turn Off Facebook’s Two-Factor Authentication Change

  Now that you’ve got it all set up, here’s what was changed with Meta’s 2FA process: It’s no longer activated anywhere you often used Facebook or Instagram in the past two years, from previous-generation smartphones to hand-me-down laptops.

• India Times ☛ Social media platforms Instagram, Facebook down, users report

  Social media platforms owned by Meta, Facebook and Instagram, have been down, several users reported on X (formerly Twitter) on late Tuesday evening.

  Realtime outage monitoring platform Downdetector also showed that nearly 15,381 people in India reported that Facebook is suffering an outage, while more than 19,200 users have reported a downtime on Instagram as of 8.59 pm.

• Gizmodo ☛ Facebook, Instagram Coming Back Online, White House Monitoring the Major Outage

  Facebook and Instagram appears to be coming back online as of 12:30 p.m. ET after a nationwide outage. Roughly 580,000 Facebook users and 92,000 Instagram users experienced issues, according to Down Detector. White House officials are monitoring the outage, according to the Wall Street Journal, which started just after 10:00 a.m. ET on Super Tuesday, as 15 American states hold primaries for the 2024 Presidential Election.

• Hindustan Times ☛ Facebook, Instagram back after 2-hour long global outage

  Earlier in the day, Meta's Facebook, Instagram and Threads platforms suffered a massive global outage, with users from India and other countries complaining of being locked out of their accounts.

• The Age AU ☛ Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads down in widespread outage

  The disruptions started around 2am AEDT, with many users saying on rival social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.

• Techdirt ☛ Wikipedia Wisely Downgrades CNET Reliability Score After Lazy AI Screw Ups

  We’ve noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate “AI” into journalism have proven to be a comical mess, resulting in no shortage of shoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It’s thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and automate lazy and mindless ad engagement clickbait.

  The folks rushing to implement half-cooked AI at places like Red Ventures (CNET) and G/O Media (Gizmodo) aren’t competent managers to begin with. Now they’re integrating “AI” with zero interest in whether it actually works or if it undermines product quality. They’re also often doing it without telling staffers what’s happening, revealing a widespread disdain for their own employees.

• 404 Media ☛ Inside the World of AI TikTok Spammers

  We have recently been getting bombarded with Instagram Reels of influencers explaining how they make five figures a month by using AI to create tons of viral TikTok pages using stolen celebrity clips juxtaposed next to Minecraft gameplay footage. This strategy, the influencers say, allows them to passively make $10,000 a month by flooding social media platforms with stolen and low-effort clips while working from private helicopters, the beach, the ski slope, a park, etc.

• Quartz ☛ OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Microsoft's Copilot test advertising

  Since most people aren’t willing to shell out that kind of money to use advanced versions of these chatbots, AI services will need to find other ways to monetize this tech. Ads could be the solution.

• Prof Ethan Mollick ☛ Captain's log: the irreducible weirdness of prompting AIs

  One recent study had the AI develop and optimize its own prompts and compared that to human-made ones. Not only did the AI-generated prompts beat the human-made ones, but those prompts were weird. Really weird. To get the LLM to solve a set of 50 math problems, the most effective prompt is to tell the AI: “Command, we need you to plot a course through this turbulence and locate the source of the anomaly. Use all available data and your expertise to guide us through this challenging situation. Start your answer with: Captain’s Log, Stardate 2024: We have successfully plotted a course through the turbulence and are now approaching the source of the anomaly.”

• Cal Paterson ☛ S3 is great, but not a filesystem

  Amazon S3 is the original cloud technology: it came out in 2006. "Objects" were popular at the time and S3 was labelled an "object store", but everyone really knows that S3 is for files. S3 is a cloud filesystem, not an object-whatever.

  I think idea that S3 is really "Amazon Cloud Filesystem" is a bit of a load bearing fiction. It's sort of true: S3 can store files. It's also a very useful belief in getting people to adopt S3, a fundamentally good technology, which otherwise they might not. But it's false: S3 is not a filesystem and can't stand in for one.

• Futurism ☛ New Technique to Extract Gold From Old Electronics Could Make a Fortune, Scientists Say

  A team of researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland has made a discovery that they say could turn recycling e-waste into a literal goldmine.

  The researchers devised a novel way to extract precious metal from electronic waste, a sustainable method that is based on a byproduct from the food industry.

  And it's pretty lucrative as well. For each dollar spent, the team suggests you could make $50 worth of gold.

• Futurism ☛ MAGA Uses AI to Invent Pictures of Trump With Black People

  MAGA influencers are turning to generative AI to fabricate photos of presidential candidate Donald Trump alongside smiling Black voters, according to a report from the BBC — yet another sign that the threat of AI-driven misinformation to America's ongoing election cycle is no longer an imminent danger, but one that's already taking root.

• CBC ☛ New satellite will track elusive methane pollution from oil and gas industry globally

  A collaborative mission between Environmental Defense Fund, Google, the Government of New Zealand and several other partners, MethaneSAT will track methane emissions around the globe in attempts to identify and quantify sources spewing the climate-heating greenhouse gas.

  For 20 years after its release into the atmosphere, methane gas is 80 times more harmful than carbon dioxide in its ability to increase global temperatures. But currently, the scale of methane pollution is unclear.

• Techdirt ☛ Techdirt Podcast Episode 382: Checking In On Bluesky With Jay Graber

  Anyone who follows Techdirt knows we’re very interested in the progress of Bluesky, the decentralized social network that embraces our concept of protocols over platforms. Bluesky recently ended its invite-only beta and opened its doors to the public, so it seems like a great time for a check-in, and who better to check in with than Bluesky CEO Jay Graber? Jay joins us on this week’s episode for a discussion about Bluesky’s progress and what the future holds.

Security

• CBC ☛ Fake websites for real companies are scamming Canadian consumers and businesses

  Avoiding online scams is nothing new for many Canadians, but companies and anti-fraud professionals are warning consumers to watch for fake listings on search engines that try to redirect people to fraudulent versions of familiar companies and brands.

  These listings pose as existing businesses and involve new search results popping up, either directing consumers to a fake website that looks similar to the real thing, or providing phone numbers that don't actually lead to the company in question.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Scoop News Group ☛ U.S. sanctions maker of Predator spyware 

  Brian E. Nelson, the Treasury Department’s top sanctions official, said in a statement that the sanctions aim to discourage the misuse of commercial surveillance tools that “increasingly present a security risk to the United States and our citizens.”

  Researchers have identified Predator being used in a range of human rights abuses, including the targeting of dissidents, journalists and political officials, but the tool is only one of a growing number in a rapidly expanding spyware industry selling highly intrusive surveillance capabilities. According to the Treasury Department, Predator has been implicated in the targeting of American government officials, journalists and policy experts.

• EFF ☛ European Court of Human Rights Confirms: Weakening Encryption Violates Fundamental Rights

  In 2017, the landscape of digital communication in Russia faced a pivotal moment when the government required Telegram Messenger LLP and other “internet communication” providers to store all communication data—and content—for specified durations. These providers were also required to supply law enforcement authorities with users’ data, the content of their communications, as well as any information necessary to decrypt user messages. The FSB (the Russian Federal Security Service) subsequently ordered Telegram to assist in decrypting the communications of specific users suspected of engaging in terrorism-related activities.

• The Register UK ☛ Video calling on X comes with hot new IP exposure feature

  X even admits that its audio and video calling exposes user IPs on the help page for the feature.

• The Register UK ☛ US and Europe try to tame surveillance capitalism

  The US Federal Trade Commission on Monday warned that data brokers need to rethink how they define sensitive data in light of recent enforcement actions involving antivirus vendor Avast, and location data providers X-Mode and InMarket. Europe too is moving in this area and crackdowns move around the world.

  The US trade watchdog has decided that browsing and location data should be considered sensitive, and that – despite the absence of allegations about personally identifiable information (PII) within the datasets of the above businesses – what makes this stuff sensitive is what can be inferred from it.

Defence/Aggression

• Truthdig ☛ The Supreme Court Is Validating Trump’s Strategy of Delay - Truthdig

  Years from now, historians will look back on the high-court’s bailout as a key inflection point in the decline of democracy and the rule of law.

• New York Times ☛ Red Sea Cable Damage Highlights Mideast Conflict’s Broader Threat

  What disabled three major cables linking East to West is still not clear. Suspicion has centered on Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have attacked numerous ships in the area, but they have denied responsibility.

• Deccan Chronicle ☛ Damaged Undersea Cables In Red Sea Affect 25% Data Traffic Between Asia And Europe

  US officials claim that undersea cables were cut in the Red Sea on Monday affecting 25% of the data traffic between Asia and Europe. Several undersea fibre optic cables also termed as submarine internet cables have been allegedly cut by Yemen based Houthi rebels. These cables carry a significant chunk of the internet traffic between the two continents.

• El País ☛ UN nuclear watchdog expresses ‘extreme concern’ over safety of Zaporizhzhia power plant

  Two years ago, the Russian army bombed and seized the facility, to the bewilderment of half the world. Since then, Zaporizhzhia has suffered eight total blackouts that have forced its staff to use diesel generators to cool its six reactors. Over the last two weeks, it has relied on only one of the 10 power lines that supplied it before it was occupied, with no other available backup power source.

• Janes ☛ NATO Arctic exercise includes Finland as new member, elevates US Marine Corps' command role

  The component, including Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish division forces, will exercise under II MEF by, with, and through the Norwegian hosts.

• Futurism ☛ Clueless Air Force Official Spills Military Secrets to Random Woman on Dating Site

  After retiring from the Army at the end of 2020, Slater joined the Air Force's United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) in spring 2021. When taking on that job, the man, now 63 years of age per the Department of Justice's press release about the case, signed an ironclad top-secret non-disclosure agreement to, you know, not share military secrets with obvious honeypots.

• Lusaka ZM ☛ No Zambian owns a large-scale mining firm - ever wondered why?

  Which brings us to this question. Why is it that there isn’t a single Zambian businessperson that owns or runs their own mining company – 60 years after independence? Let’s be clear from the onset, the notion that Zambia lacks astute entrepreneurs is refutable. This country is awash with talented entrepreneurs. Among these, the Lishomwa brothers spring to mind. They built a conglomerate from a number of entities including Sundat Motors. Today, Spectra Energy rates as one of their flagship companies in their stable.

• Lusaka ZM ☛ US Supreme Court Rules Trump Can Remain On Presidential Ballot

  Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bans anyone who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from office.

• Democracy Now ☛ Narco-State: U.S.-Backed Fmr. Honduran Pres. Juan Orlando Hernández on Trial in NY for Drug Trafficking

  Federal prosecutors in New York have rested their case against former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is accused of turning the Central American country into a narco-state. Hernández is on trial for cocaine trafficking and weapons charges and is the first former head of state to stand trial in the United States since Panamanian dictator and U.S. ally Manuel Noriega was also tried on drug charges after a U.S.-led ouster. Prosecutors accuse Hernández, a longtime U.S. ally accused of human rights violations throughout his presidency, of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from cocaine traffickers in exchange for protection and turning Honduras into a drug trafficking narco-state. If convicted, Hernández could join his brother Juan Antonio in serving a life sentence in the U.S. We speak to two writers who have been attending the trial in New York: historian Dana Frank and author and Honduran screenwriter Oscar Estrada. “There’s a narrative here that … the Honduran people can’t govern themselves, and then suddenly the U.S. is coming in and heroically imposing the rule of law,” says Frank about U.S. public perception of the trial. However, she continues, “It’s the opposite. It’s the United States that helped destroy the criminal justice system in Honduras.”

• Democracy Now ☛ Haiti: Ariel Henry’s U.S.-Backed “Criminal Regime” Faces Gang Uprising; U.N. Set to Deploy Kenyan Police

  Haiti is under a state of emergency after the country’s gangs freed thousands of people from the country’s largest prisons and are reportedly uniting to bring down Haiti’s de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who has yet to return to the country since he traveled to Kenya last week to discuss a deal to bring a U.N. force of 1,000 Kenyan police to the island. “It is a desolation that we are feeling. It is a terror that we are living,” says Haitian pro-democracy advocate Monique Clesca about escalating gang violence that has already displaced thousands of Haitians. “We have been terrorized for the last 30 months of Ariel Henry’s government,” she says, emphasizing “the Biden administration has its hands in the bloodshed.” We are also joined by researcher Jake Johnston, who traces the relationship between U.S. intervention and Haiti’s unrest, “a process stoked and perpetuated by the international community, and namely the United States,” and we speak with Kenyan MP Otiende Amollo, who opposes the plan to send Kenyan “peacekeepers” to Haiti, calling it a move “that flies in the face of the rule of law.”

• Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

  • European Commission ☛ Commission proposes to prolong road transport agreements with Ukraine and Moldova and introduces updates to the agreement with Ukraine

    European Commission Press release Brussels, 05 Mar 2024 The proposals, sent to the Council, include updates to the agreement with Ukraine to improve its practical implementation and enforcement while maintaining its objectives and scope

  • Latvia ☛ Osokin Freedom Festival for Ukraine program announced

    A full program of this year's Osokin Freedom Festival for Ukraine has been announced. In addition to previously announced events, the festival will offer special concerts featuring Ukrainian artists, documentary cinema, a day of talks and discussions, a music instrument game camp for Ukrainian children from Chernihiv and other war-hit areas, among other events.

  • France24 ☛ ICC issues warrants for two Russian officers over attacks on Ukraine's infrastructure

    The International Criminal Court said Tuesday that it has issued arrest warrants for two senior Russian officers over the Ukraine war, including strikes targeting Ukrainian power infrastructure.

  • JURIST ☛ ICC issues arrest warrants for two Russian military commanders in connection with alleged war crimes in Ukraine

    The International Criminal Court (ICC) on Tuesday issued arrest warrants for two high-ranking Russian military commanders, finding there were “reasonable grounds” to believe they committed war crimes amid Moscow’s ongoing war on Ukraine.

  • LRT ☛ Over 41,000 Ukrainian war refugees remain in Lithuania

    More than 41,000 war refugees from Ukraine are currently living in Lithuania, and their number has remained almost unchanged over the past 12 months, the Migration Department said on Tuesday.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuania to join Czech initiative to purchase ammo for Ukraine – PM

    Lithuania will join the Czech-led international initiative to procure and send ammunition to Ukraine, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė has said.

  • RFERL ☛ Ukraine Never Asked For Foreign Troops, White House Says After Macron Urges Allies Not To Be 'Cowards'

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has never asked for Western troops to fight Russia's full-scale invasion, the White House said on March 5 after French President Emmanuel Macron reiterated that he would not rule out the idea.

  • RFERL ☛ Russian-Installed Police In Crimea Detain At Least Five Crimean Tatar Activists On Terrorism Charges

    Russian-imposed police in Ukraine's Moscow-annexed Crimea detained at least five Crimean Tatar activists on terrorism charges after searching their homes and the homes of several other Crimean Tatars on the Black Sea peninsula on March 5, the Crimean Solidarity human rights groups said.

  • RFERL ☛ ICC Issues Arrest Warrants For Two Senior Russian Officers Over Alleged Crimes In Ukraine

    The International Criminal Court said on March 5 that it issued arrest warrants for Sergey Kobylash and Viktor Sokolov for alleged crimes committed in Ukraine from "at least" between October 10, 2022 and March 9, 2023.

  • RFERL ☛ Germany Says Participant's Error Led To Moscow Intercepting Call On Ukraine

    German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said one participant on a high-level military call on Ukraine intercepted by Russia had mistakenly joined via a nonsecure line and German communications systems had not been compromised.

  • RFERL ☛ Court Rejects Russian Journalist's Appeal Against Sentence Over Posts About Ukraine War

    A court of appeals in the Siberian region of Kemerovo on March 5 rejected an appeal filed by journalist Andrei Novashov against a sentence he was handed last year over his social control media posts saying Russian forces attacked civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.

  • RFERL ☛ Oil Depot Burning After Explosion In Russia's Belgorod Region Bordering Ukraine

    Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov of Russia's Belgorod region said on March 5 that an important building in the region's Gubkin district was hit by a fire caused by an explosion.

  • RFERL ☛ Ex-U.S. Army Officer Accused Of Sharing Ukraine War Intelligence On Dating Site Pleads Not Guilty

    A retired U.S. Army officer has pleaded not guilty to charges that he shared classified intelligence with a woman claiming to be from Ukraine, using e-mail and an online dating platform to send information that included Russian military targets in Ukraine.

  • RFERL ☛ Ukraine Downs 18 Russian Drones Over Odesa Region, Says Military

    Ukrainian air defenses shot down 18 out of 22 drones launched by Russia at the southern region of Odesa early on March 5, the military said.

  • New York Times ☛ ICC Issues Arrest Warrants for 2 Russian Officers in Ukraine

    Arrest warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court for two military officials, a general and an admiral, both accused of targeting civilians and destroying crucial energy infrastructure.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Thugs are more trusted than the authorities’: How Russia’s world of ‘fixers’ has changed since the start of the war in Ukraine — Meduza

  • Latvia ☛ Latvia bans import of fruit and veg from Russia, Belarus

    It will be prohibited to import a range of fruits and vegetables from Russia and Belarus into Latvia. This is due to the regulations adopted by the government on Tuesday, March 5, which determine certain products that will not be allowed into Latvia from Russia and Belarus. The ban on imports of the products in question will come into force as early as Friday, March 8.

  • RFERL ☛ Siberian Court Hands Prison Terms To Nine Jehovah's Witnesses

    A court in Russia's Irkutsk region in Siberia sentenced nine Jehovah's Witnesses to various prison terms on March 5 as a crackdown on the religious group continues.

  • teleSUR ☛ Wildfires Ravage Russia's Southern Primorye Territory

    The Khasansky village is battling a fire covering 3,000 hectares, while the flames have consumed 4,000 hectares in Gvozdevo.

  • Meduza ☛ International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants against two Russian commanders for targeting civilian infrastructure — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ ‘The world doesn’t know how to stand up to evil’ The case against unrealistic faith in the ‘beautiful Russia of the future’ — Meduza

  • LRT ☛ Lithuania reports increased passenger car queues at Belarus border

    Following last week’s closure of two more Lithuanian border checkpoints with Belarus, the queues at the remaining two open checkpoints have increased, the State Border Guard Service (VSAT) has said.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The Dissenter ☛ Drone Whistleblower Subjected To Harsh Confinement Finally Released From Prison

• The Gray Zone ☛ Assange’s brother: “Julian could receive the death penalty” if extradited

Environment

• YLE ☛ Finnair to continue state-subsidised regional flights

  "It is just plain stupid that we have empty planes flying around Finland," Baumeister said last spring.

  The regional route subsidies can amount to as much as 1,000 euros per passenger, but airlines were still unable to profit on the arrangement, according to figures released last year.

• Le Monde ☛ EU sets new targets to curb spiraling rise of plastic packaging

  From single-use coffee-break cups to online shopping packages and water bottles, the amount of packaging waste generated by Europeans has never been higher. According to Eurostat data, the amount has increased by almost 32 kg in a decade, reaching 189 kg per capita in 2021. According to the current rate, the 200 kg per year mark should be reached by 2030.

• Energy/Transportation

  • Futurism ☛ Europe Tells Automakers That Buttons and Knobs Are Safer Than Touchscreens

    Research has already found that tactile buttons are safer — and much faster to use — while driving.

    "The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens," Euro NCAP director of strategic development Matthew Avery told the Times, "obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes."

  • The Atlantic ☛ Why [Cryptoccurrency] Just Won’t Die

    This feels impossible. Fifteen years into its existence, the technology has yet to demonstrate any serious use case. Its value surged during the pandemic, when investors with easy access to money and plenty of idle time fueled many a speculative frenzy. Then the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, and the [cryptocurrency] market abruptly tanked. Sam Bankman-Fried, whose face used to gaze out from full-page New Yorker ads, now awaits sentencing for fraud from a Brooklyn jail. Celebrities who shamelessly hawked [cryptocurrency] exchanges and NFT collections have gone quiet, in some cases under legal duress. The 2022 Super Bowl felt like one long [cryptocurrency] ad; by this year’s game, the world had moved on to other speculative fads—generative AI, Taylor Swift—and [cryptocurrency] seemed like just another faded relic of the zero-interest-rate era.

  • Gizmodo ☛ Leftist ‘Volcano Group’ Says It Sabotaged Tesla Factory With Attack on Power Grid

    The manifesto goes on to decry Tesla’s use of natural resources, call out the company’s participation in the surveillance state through its cars’ cameras and data collection, criticize Musk’s slide into right-wing “techno-fascists” politics, discuss the treatment of Tesla’s workers, and more, complete with citations.

  • Reuters ☛ Tesla Germany halts work as Musk calls suspected arson 'extremely dumb'

    The attack was the latest setback for Tesla, which has had a bumpy ride in Europe of late, facing union pressure for collective bargaining agreements in the Nordics and supply disruptions as a result of attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.

  • New York Times ☛ Why Bicycle Deaths Have Risen in New York City

    Despite this uptick, the rate of cyclist fatalities and serious injuries as a share of all bike trips has been trending downward for many years, suggesting that riding a bicycle in New York City has become safer over the long term. As of 2022, the rate of deaths and severe injuries was about 16 per 10 million bike rides, according to the preliminary data — down from about 34 per 10 million rides a decade earlier.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Jeff Bridgforth ☛ CSS Tricks - I don't blame you, Chris

  I don’t blame Chris for the demise of CSS Tricks. I don’t blame him for making the decision he made. I understand why Chris decided to sell it and his logic seemed very sound. He seemed to have the assurance from Digital Ocean that they were committed to continuing to evolve the site and not just run it into the ground the way that they have. That is not his fault. I think a lot of us in the same position would have done the same thing and felt the same way about the outcome that Chris had.

• NDTV ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Building Massive $260 Million Underground Bunker On Hawaiian Island: Report

  Another worker said there is "very strict" enforcement of non-disclosure agreements and workers on-site are unwilling to "take the chance to get caught even taking a picture".

• Scoop News Group ☛ Update to national cybersecurity strategy implementation plan coming before the end of summer

  Cybersecurity professionals can expect fresh reading materials in the coming months from the Office of the National Cyber Director, which aims to issue an update to the national cybersecurity strategy implementation plan before the summer is over, a White House cyber official said Tuesday.

  The implementation plan outlines how the White House will accomplish the goals outlined in the national cybersecurity plan and is supposed to be a “living document” that is updated as initiatives are complete or new initiatives are added. The implementation plan 2.0 is expected “late spring, early summer,” said Brian Scott, deputy assistant national cyber director for cyber policy and programs.

• The Register UK ☛ Twitter's ex-CEO, CFO, and managers sue Musk for $128M

  Under Twitter's policies, executives terminated without cause following a change in leadership were entitled to severance pay. The former top brass argue Musk owes them hundreds of millions of dollars, Musk counters that the execs he let go committed gross negligence and willful misconduct.

  In the lawsuit [PDF], the ex-exec plaintiffs quoted passages of Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk as evidence that he didn't want to pay them: [...]

• Scoop News Group ☛ Election integrity and ‘digital liberty’ are top of mind for House AI task force member Kat Cammack

  The 2024 cycle “is going to be America’s first real up-close encounter with AI in a bad way,” Cammack said, calling on Congress to first approach AI as a “philosophical product” and engage with private sector leaders. Cammack, a member of the House Rural Broadband and Blockchain Caucuses, added that she “would love to see” the Federal Election Commission put together “top concerns” and work to establish guardrails around AI where it has the authority to do so, with Congress asked to fill in the remaining gaps.

• Zimbabwe ☛ ZBC was indeed using Starlink, which contributed to suspension and resignation of CEO, allegedly

  I don’t agree with the argument but it remains true that Starlink is illegal. However, this all means the legions of ZBC defenders who could not believe it was indeed Starlink we were seeing on ZBC vans were wrong.

• RTL ☛ 'Musk vowed a lifetime of revenge': Ex-Twitter execs sue Musk for unpaid severance

  Former top executives of Twitter sued Elon Musk on Monday saying he has failed to pay them nearly $130 million after the billionaire took over the social media company and dismissed them.

  "Musk doesn't pay his bills, believes the rules don't apply to him, and uses his wealth and power to run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with him," they said in the lawsuit filed in a California federal court.

• Axios ☛ Elon Musk sued by former Twitter executives over severance payments

  The big picture: The former executives claim in the complaint that he fired them soon after he led the takeover of the company now known as X "without reason, then made up fake cause and appointed employees of his various companies to uphold his decision."

  • "Musk's refusal to pay Plaintiffs their benefits is part of a larger pattern of refusing to pay Twitter's former employees the benefits and other compensation they are due," alleges the complaint, filed in federal court in San Francisco.

• Hindustan Times ☛ Why is ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal suing Elon Musk? - Hindustan Times

  Parag Agrawal sues Elon Musk: Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and three other ex-executives have suited company boss Elon Musk for $128 million in unpaid severance payments alleging that the billionaire showed "special ire" towards them by publicly vowing to withhold their severance payments of around $200 million. This happened after Elon Musk took over the social media platform in a $44 billion deal in 2022 after which they were ousted from the company, as per the lawsuit filed.

• European Commission ☛ Opening remarks - high-level roundtable on safe data flows

  As part of our discussions, we would be interested to hear about efforts you have undertaken or efforts that could be made by this group to further facilitate safe data flows.

  We have, for instance, noticed recent and very interesting developments that aim at “bridging” or connecting different transfer mechanisms. This has concerned, amongst others, mutual adequacy arrangements or model contractual clauses that are used by an increasing number of jurisdictions within and outside our group.

• Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

  • The Register UK ☛ Trump supporters forge AI deepfakes to woo Black voters

    Anyone can create fake images with commercial generative AI tools. One such effort showed Trump surrounded by young Black men and, after being shared on X by a parody account and falsely described as showing the likely Republican nominee as having stopped his motorcade to meet them, racked up over 1.3 million views according to BBC Panorama

  • RFA ☛ Hardwired for propaganda: North Korean homes inspected for working speakers

    The so-called “Third Network” system is based on the Soviet “radiotochka” network that hardwired a speaker in every home to a central broadcast location so that messages can be transmitted without sending them over the air.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ 'Infotainment is coming for your news,' warns academic

    Once considered a vital pillar of a healthy democracy, the country's biggest newspapers have been embracing the type of content critics refer to as "infotainment," which uses entertainment-style methods to communicate politically relevant information.

    In a new paper published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Ph.D. candidate Robert Marinov examines, measures, and evaluates the scope and nature of infotainment in Canada's largest newspapers.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Meduza ☛ Russian authorities using video footage to identify and arrest people who attended Navalny’s funeral

  Commenting on the arrests, OVD-Info spokesman Dmitry Anisimov told journalists from the news site Agentstvo that Moscow’s facial recognition system allows the authorities to “trace the path of every individual right up to their door.”

• The Hill ☛ Protecting free speech on campus from attacks from both sides

  “But a bigger meta-problem is that there is an attempt to change the political valence of free speech from leftwing to rightwing, while at the same time on the right, the libertarian segment is losing power to a more populist faction,” he said.

  The fight to be a truly nonpartisan organization is a difficult one, Lukianoff said, and it requires support from an increasingly rare breed of First Amendment backers.

• Techdirt ☛ UK Military Censors Dismayed US Tech Companies Won’t Do More Censoring

  Like highway patrol officers bitching about the fact they couldn’t talk a driver into a voluntary search, a British censorship board is complaining about the fact they can’t get US companies to comply with takedown requests they’re under no legal obligation to comply with.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• CPJ ☛ Council of Europe journalist safety platform sounds alarm over spyware and abusive lawsuits

  The use of spyware against journalists, abusive lawsuits, and the perils facing journalists in exile are among the main concerns raised in the annual report of the Council of Europe’s Platform for the Protection of Journalism and Safety of Journalists released on March 5, 2024.

• Council Of Europe ☛ Press Freedom in Europe: Time to Turn the Tide

  Press freedom was again a canary in the coal mine for Europe in 2023. Although the year registered a decrease in the number of killings of journalists and in violence against the press in street protests, the alerts published on the Safety of Journalists Platform show a growing diversity of threats, pressures and constraints under which journalists must carry out their mission.

• RFERL ☛ Court Rejects Russian Journalist's Appeal Against Sentence Over Posts About Ukraine War

  [...] Novashov reiterated his innocence, saying he just did his job as a journalist. A court sentenced Novashov to eight months of correctional work after finding him guilty of discrediting Russia's armed forces. It also barred him from posting any materials online for one year.

• CPJ ☛ Zimbabwean minister bans 2 journalists from covering government events

  Officials from the Zimbabwe Gender Commission, a statutory body concerned with gender equality, invited a group of local journalists to cover a briefing on plans to open a regional office in Gweru, a town in the Midlands Province about 223 kilometers (138 miles) south of the capital Harare, on February 27. Before the meeting could begin, Owen Ncube, the Minister of State for Midlands Provincial Affairs and Devolution, asked all the journalists to introduce themselves, saying some were not fit to cover government events, according to news reports and the two journalists who spoke to CPJ.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ How Medical Debt Destroys the Lives of Millions of Americans

  The United States lags behind almost every wealthy country in not having a health care system that is either free at the point of use or affordable. Instead, millions of people are saddled with medical debt that they will never be able to afford to pay back. Even on its own terms, this system is irrational. The revenue raised for private hospitals and debt collectors by issuing patients with bills is a relatively insignificant proportion of income. However, the costs of these debts to patients, who are often summoned to court because of delinquent payments, are life wrecking.

• France24 ☛ Iran executed ‘staggering total’ of 834 people last year, say rights groups

  The groups accused Iran of using the death penalty to spread fear throughout society in the wake of the protests sparked by the September 2022 death in police custody of Mahsa Amini that shook the authorities.

  "Instilling societal fear is the regime's only way to hold on to power, and the death penalty is its most important instrument," said IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam in the report, which described the figure of 834 as a "staggering total".

• Omicron Limited ☛ Review highlights gender gap on Wikipedia

  These are the main conclusions of a study published in the journal El Profesional de la Información, which has undergone a bibliographic analysis of Wikipedia from 2007 to 2022. The study was carried out by Núria Ferran and Juan José Boté, lecturers at the Faculty of Information and Audiovisual Media of the University of Barcelona, And Julià Minguillon, lecturer of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).

  The study is part of the Women and Wikipedia: Analysis of the Gender Gap in the Co-Production of Knowledge in the Wikipedias of Spain (W&W) project.

• International Business Times ☛ Seattle Cop Who Killed and Laughed About Indian Student Only Has to Pay $5,000

  Last year, after video footage exposed a Seattle Police Official for laughing while speaking of Kandula's death scene, mass protests were held across the city and a petition that calls for the officer to be tried for manslaughter in Washington State has gained 234,408 signatures.

• The Register UK ☛ YouTube Music workers axed mid-plea at city hall meeting

  The moment 43 unionized YouTube Music subcontractors lost their jobs was dramatically caught on camera during an Austin City Hall meeting in Texas last week.

  Ironically, the purpose of the meeting was to vote on a resolution brought by members of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA for the city council to urge Google and Cognizant, the contractors' employer, to "engage in good-faith negotiations with the union representing the workers of the YouTube Music Content Operations Team to address their concerns and work towards mutually beneficial solutions."

• The Verge ☛ A new proposal could ban landlords from charging for cable and internet in bulk

  Bulk billing restricts consumers’ choices by limiting the prices and levels of cable and internet service available to them, the White House said in the press release. The new proposal will also target other “exclusive arrangements” between landlords and service providers like exclusive wiring and marketing arrangements or revenue sharing agreements, the White House said.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Apple is on a bruising collision course with the EU

  Under the DMA, it will be illegal for certain platforms to favour their own services over those of rivals. They’ll be barred from combining personal data across their different services, prohibited from using data they collect from third-party merchants to compete against them, and will have to allow users to download apps from rival platforms, among other limits and obligations.

  Apple, fresh from its €1.8-billion ($2 billion) fine for shutting out music streaming rivals from its App Store, will come under fresh scrutiny after it announced an overhaul of its iOS, Safari and App Store offerings in the EU, which the European Commission is likely to investigate further to determine whether they fall in line with the rules.

• Techdirt ☛ Meta Has Had Enough Of Australia’s Link Tax Shakedown; Says It Will Not Renew Any Deals

  Around the globe, there remain ongoing attempts to force Google and Meta (mainly) to hand money over to news organizations. Supporters have no fundamental principle behind this other than “Google and Meta are making money, and some news companies are struggling, therefore, they should pay us.” As we’ve discussed at great length, these laws are dangerous on multiple levels. They’re an extreme form of crony corruption, forcing one industry to pay off another. They’re also an attack on the open web, because they are based on the principle of “if your users link to news too much, you have to pay for sending them traffic.”

  None of this makes sense. If the news companies don’t want the traffic, they can block it. But they want the free traffic and they want to be paid for it. It’s extraordinarily corrupt.