Leftovers

• Robert Birming ☛ Re: Re: Equally different

  However, it's easy to get caught up in this doubt, to compare ourselves to others and see our writing as "inferior". But we are all different, and that diversity is what makes blogging an art form that is accessible to all, from both the writer's and reader's perspective.

• Nat Bennett ☛ Mere Being 014 - June - Hanging Out

  Fourth of July is upon us– one of the great American excuses for the chill hang.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ A peek into my pocket notebook

  I’m always fascinated by how people make notes and what they decide to write about. The notes themselves are often very personal, that’s also the case with my pocket notebook. So I won’t be sharing the notes themselves either but I wanted to share a bit about what and how I write to hopefully inspire someone with new ideas.

• Science

  • Dhole Moments ☛ Blowing Out the Candles on the Birthday Bound - Dhole Moments

    This observation can tell us something interesting about the collision risk in discrete uniformly random samples.

    For example, the random number (called an IV in this case) used to encrypt a message with AES-CBC, which is a 128-bit random number. This means that there are 2^{128} possible values. We can simply describe this situation for any 2^{n} distribution; in this case, n = 128.

• Education

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ Timeless Farm Wisdom | UNMITIGATED RISK

    My father grew up on a small farm in eastern Washington. They say you can take the boy out of the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the boy. As a kid, I was always hearing farm life sayings from my grandfather and father. To this day, I think they are some of the best pieces of advice I have ever received. Here are a few: [...]

  • The Conversation ☛ The science of baby babbling – and why it can take on accents

    Behind this adorable exchange, important processes of language acquisition are at work. Here is what science says about the importance of babbling and how it is linked to accents.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Cutting LSA’s budget is a bad idea

    It seems, more and more, like the value of a college degree, and the perception of that degree, is not what it once was. Universities across the country prioritize profits over education, but such actions are especially damning when they happen here. Even so, there is an ongoing discussion surrounding a proposed $20 million LSA budget cut, which would limit graduate student instructor positions and the number of class sections. We call ourselves “the leaders and best” — yet propose slashing funding for our largest college.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ People can move this bionic leg just by thinking about it

    Getting the neural interface hooked up to a prosthetic takes two steps. First, patients undergo surgery. Following a lower leg amputation, portions of shin and calf muscle still remain. The operation connects shin muscle, which contracts to make the ankle flex upward, to calf muscle, which counteracts this movement. The prosthetic can also be fitted at this point. Reattaching the remnants of these muscles can enable the prosthetic to move more dynamically. It can also reduce phantom limb pain, and patients are less likely to trip and fall.

  • Science Alert ☛ New Algorithm Can Predict And Help Prevent Sudden Cardiac Death

    Based on an analysis of 2,794 adults over an average follow-up period of 8.3 years, the team found that DFA2 a1 is a "powerful and independent predictor" of SCD. The association is strongest when the body is at rest, rather than engaging in physical activity.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • The Register UK ☛ Poyfill.io claims reveal new cracks in supply chain security

    Polyfill.io's first reaction was to accuse the media and Cloudflare of slander. Perhaps a better position to take would have been to profess innocence, say you're taking the situation seriously, and that you're working closely with Cloudflare to urgently understand the matter. Angry accusations of media conspiracy may be very 2020s, but they put you in questionable company. In any case, the very concept of supply chain attacks by the owners of a supplier is a special case that deserves inspection, one that will need its own rules of engagement to control. It's just that, right now, those rules are hard to discern.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Model Extraction from Neural Networks

    A new paper, “Polynomial Time Cryptanalytic Extraction of Neural Network Models,” by Adi Shamir and others, uses ideas from differential cryptanalysis to extract the weights inside a neural network using specific queries and their results. This is much more theoretical than practical, but it’s a really interesting result.

  • Cryptology ePrints Archive ☛ Polynomial Time Cryptanalytic Extraction of Neural Network Models

    In this paper, we improve this attack by developing several new techniques that enable us to extract with arbitrarily high precision all the real-valued parameters of a ReLU-based DNN using a polynomial number of queries and a polynomial amount of time. We demonstrate its practical efficiency by applying it to a full-sized neural network for classifying the CIFAR10 dataset, which has 3072 inputs, 8 hidden layers with 256 neurons each, and about 1.2 million neuronal parameters. An attack following the approach by Carlini et al. requires an exhaustive search over 2^256 possibilities. Our attack replaces this with our new techniques, which require only 30 minutes on a 256-core computer.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NYOB ☛ Norwegian court confirms € 5.7 million fine for Grindr

      Max Schrems: "We are very pleased with the confirmation in this case. Grindr holds very sensitive data and shares it with thousands of third parties for advertising purposes. Many other apps do the same today."

    • GO Media ☛ How to Quit Google, According to a Privacy Expert

      She'd know. Vertesi researches NASA's robotic spacecraft teams and also publishes work on human computer interaction. In March 2012, after Google significantly changed its privacy policies, she decided to stop using Google entirely. Vertesi also runs The Opt Out Project, a website full of recommendations and tutorials for replacing "Big Tech" services with community-driven and DIY alternatives. She is, in other words, someone who has done the work, so I wanted to ask her for some advice about how someone should approach quitting Google.

      Lifehacker has already published a comprehensive guide to quitting Google and a list of the best competitors to every Google product years ago, and that information stands up for the most part. But not using Google anymore isn't just a technical process—it's a massive project. Here's some advice on how to tackle it.

    • The Hill ☛ EU finds Meta's 'pay or consent' advertising model violates tech rules

      Meta launched the new ad model — which requires users to pay for ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram or consent to the use of their personal data for targeted advertising — in response to regulatory changes last year.

      The European Commission found that the ad model violates the DMA because it doesn’t allow users to opt in to a service that uses less of their personal data and doesn’t allow them to “exercise their right to freely consent” to the use of their data.

    • India Times ☛ EU accuses Meta of breaking digital rules with paid ad-free option

      Meta's model also doesn't give users the option of a service that's less personalized but still equivalent to its social networks.

    • VOA News ☛ Meta risks fines over 'pay for privacy' model breaking EU rules

      The European Commission said it informed Meta of its "preliminary view" that the model the company launched last year "fails to comply" with the DMA.

      "This binary choice forces users to consent to the combination of their personal data and fails to provide them a less personalized but equivalent version of Meta's social networks," the EU's powerful antitrust regulator said in a statement.

    • The Register UK ☛ EU regulators charge Meta with pay-or-consent DMA violations

      European Union antitrust regulators have accused Meta of violating the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA) with its "pay or consent" advertising model, a source of complaints since it was announced last year.

      The European Commission said on Monday that Meta's policy, enacted in October in an attempt to comply with the DMA by giving Facebook and Instagram users the option to go ad-free for a fee, is a choice that doesn't address specific requirements of the Act.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ EU probe tentatively finds that Meta breached DMA with ad-free subscription

      The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, published its findings today. A final decision will be made in the probe by March 25, 2025. Meta could face steep fines if that decision reaffirms it breached the DMA.

      The DMA is a piece of legislation that EU lawmakers passed in 2022 to regulate the tech industry. The law applies to operators of large online platforms that are designated as “gatekeepers” by competition officials. Meta is one of the six companies that have been designated as gatekeepers to date.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ US bases in Europe urge vigilance and security due to present threats

    Force protection Charlie is the second-highest security level for service members and is instituted “when an incident occurs or intelligence is received indicating that some form of terrorist action or targeting against personnel or facilities is likely.”

  • US News And World Report ☛ US Signs Deal to Help Panama Remove Migrants Who May Be Heading North

    The United States is going to pay for flights and offer other help to Panama to remove migrants under an agreement signed Monday, as the Central American country's new president has vowed to shut down the treacherous Darien Gap used by people traveling north to the United States.

  • RFERL ☛ Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa On Democracy's 'Death By A Thousand Cuts' And How To Fight Back

    She spoke to RFE/RL's Georgian Service last week at the ZEG Tbilisi Storytelling Festival, of which RFE/RL is a media partner. Ressa talked about defending democracy and the connection between digital platforms and autocracy, and her 2022 book How To Stand Up To A Dictator: The Fight For Our Future.

  • EFF ☛ The SFPD’s Intended Purchase of a Robot Dog Triggers Board of Supervisors’ Oversight Obligations

    The SFPD recently proposed the acquisition of a new robot dog in a report about the department’s existing military arsenal and its proposed future expansion. The particular model that SFPD claims they are exploring, Boston Dynamics’s Spot, is capable of intrusion and surveillance in a manner similar to drones and other unmanned vehicles and is able to hold “payloads” like cameras.

    The SFPD’s disclosure came about as a result of a California law, A.B. 481, which requires police departments to make publicly available information about “military equipment,” including weapons and surveillance tools such as drones, firearms, tanks, and robots. Some of this equipment may come through the federal government’s military surplus program.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ ‘We really are fucking orcs’: How a Russian soldier decided to desert his post after fighting pro-Ukraine battalions in the Belgorod region — Meduza

    • France24 ☛ Hungary's eurosceptic Orban takes helm of rotating EU presidency

      Hungary's nationalist government takes over the European Union's rotating presidency on Monday, which is causing concern among EU lawmakers due to Prime Minister Viktor Orban's Trump-like call to "Make Europe Great Again", perceived authoritarian tendencies, and his maintenance of ties to Russia despite the war in Ukraine.

    • JURIST ☛ Russia reports capture of two rural settlements in Donetsk

      The Russian Ministry of Defense announced on Sunday that it took control of two settlements located in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. In a brief daily update on Telegram, the Ministry announced the capture of Spirne and Novoaleksandrovka, which the Russian government recognizes as part of the Donetsk People’s Republic.

    • RFERL ☛ UN Body Condemns Russian Satellite Interference In Europe

      A UN body condemned a series of incidents of what it said was Russian interference in the satellite systems of European countries and asked it to stop, according to a document published on July 1.

    • RFERL ☛ Ukraine Faces Electricity Cuts Due To Summer Demand, Effects Of Russian Strikes

      Ukrainian electricity provider Ukrenerho warned of blackouts and other restrictions on July 1 because of the effects of Russia's ongoing campaign of attacks targeting energy infrastructure combined with increased demand due to high summer temperatures.

    • New York Times ☛ Ukraine Says It Foiled Russian Plot Echoing String of Coup Bids

      While the viability of the plan was not immediately clear, officials said it was a reminder that the Kremlin remained determined to bring down President Volodymyr Zelensky.

    • New York Times ☛ Alert Level Raised at U.S. Bases in Europe Over Russian Threats

      Officials said there was no specific intelligence about possible Russian attacks on American bases, but Moscow has made vague threats over Ukraine’s use of long-range weapons on its territory.

    • RFERL ☛ Two Kazakhs Convicted In Russia Of Railway Sabotage

      The Moscow City Court announced a guilty verdict on July 1 against two Kazakhs living in Moscow who were charged with railway sabotage.

    • LRT ☛ EU hikes import duties on Russian, Belarusian grain

      Significantly higher import duties on some of Russian and Belarusian agricultural products, including grain, enter into force in the European Union from Monday.

    • RFERL ☛ Navalnaya Elected Head Of Human Rights Foundation, Succeeding Kasparov

      Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, has been appointed to head the Human Rights Foundation (HRF).

    • RFERL ☛ Russian Journalist Fined In Absentia For Violating 'Foreign Agent' Law

      A court in the western Russian city of Pskov on July 1 fined Denis Kamalyagin, the editor in chief of the Pskovskaya Guberniya newspaper, for purportedly failing to comply with legal requirements stemming from his designation as a “foreign agent.

    • RFERL ☛ Orban-Led Hungary Assumes EU Presidency Amid Concerns Of Far-Right Rise

      Hungary, led by right-wing nationalist and Russia-friendly Prime Minister Viktor Orban, takes over the EU's rotating presidency on July 1, raising concerns in much of the West amid signs of the rising strength of the far right throughout the continent.

    • Latvia ☛ Electronic line system on Latvian border still waiting its turn

      The closure of several Belarusian border crossing points in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland has doubled the pressure on the remaining crossing points. Trucks queue for more than a week. Electronic queuing could help reduce the lines, but its introduction, although promised by politicians for years, is still delayed, Latvian Radio reported on July 1.

    • RFERL ☛ Belarus Sentences 'Tsikhanouskaya's Analysts' To Lengthy Terms In Absentia

      The Prosecutor-General's Office of Belarus has announced the sentencing of 20 people associated with the "extremist formation of Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya's analysts."

• Environment

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Protect This Place: The Andean Forests of Northeast Peru

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • VOA News ☛ US Supreme Court orders lower courts to reexamine social media laws

    The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ordered lower courts to take another look at Republican-backed laws in Florida and Texas intended to limit social media companies from blocking content they find objectionable.

  • EDRI ☛ Joint statement on the future of the CSA Regulation

    For two years, Member States have been unable to agree on a common position for the CSA Regulation. It is time to withdraw the current proposal and consider a new approach for making online platforms safer for children that does not lead to generalised monitoring or breaks encryption.

  • Security Week ☛ PortSwigger Scores Hefty $112 Million Investment

    This is PortSwigger’s first-ever external investment since its 2008 launch with software in the web application and penetration testing categories.

  • Wired ☛ The US Supreme Court Has Handed Big Tech a Big Gift

    On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that enforcement decisions by the Securities and Exchange Commission in fraud cases should be litigated in court, a decision that could carry over to other agencies. The next day, the court voted to overturn a key precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which emerged from the 1984 ruling on Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The doctrine gave federal agencies the power to interpret laws when rulemaking and ensured that lower courts deferred to them. Now, courts will get to decide how much deference to give regulators’ decisions—and the same conservative legal movement that led to the Supreme Court’s decisions over the past week has infiltrated lower courts as well.

  • JURIST ☛ Panama court acquits all defendants in "Panama Papers" and "Car wash" cases

    The Second Liquidator Court for Criminal Cases of Panama’s First Judicial Circuit acquitted Friday all defendants in the “Panama Papers” and “Operation Car Wash” cases. This landmark legal process involved 28 individuals in the “Panama Papers” case, stemming from the leaked documents of the now-defunct Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca & Co., and 31 people in the “Car Wash” case, which implicated various global figures in money laundering schemes. Due to similarities in the accused parties and the facts under investigation, the Brazilian “Car Wash” scandal was consolidated with the “Panama Papers” case in a single file by the Prosecutor’s Office.

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ The number of job openings has declined sharply in every state

    Nationally, for the first time since before the pandemic, the number of job openings and unemployed people is roughly in balance: a little more than one opening per person looking for work, according to a Stateline analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. At the height of the labor shortage in 2022, there were two job openings per job seeker. As of April, the ratio was down to 1.2 openings per person.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Pakistani Christian Sentenced To Death For Blasphemy

    [...] Eshan Shan was accused of reposting defaced pages of the Koran on his TikTok account. [...]

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Woman on security law bail taken away by police on Handover Day - report

    Dentist Lee Ying-chi, one of the first people arrested for alleged sedition under Hong Kong’s homegrown security law, was reportedly taken away by the police on the 27th anniversary of the city’s return to Chinese rule.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Indigenous ritual practiced for 12,000 years, study shows

    Miniature fireplaces with protruding trimmed wooden artifacts smeared in fat were found in a series of caves in Australia's Victorian Alps that match the description of Gunaikurnai healing rituals written down in the 19th century.

    The findings are believed to be 12,000 years old, dating them to the end of the last ice age.

    "Determining the longevity of oral traditions and ‘intangible heritage' has important implications for understanding information exchange through social networks down the generations," the authors said in their report.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Solving homelessness demands a human response, not crime and punishment

    To be homeless in our society means that not only were your needs out of reach, but also that your network of family and friends, and whatever “safety net” of social programs were available have been exhausted. Being unhoused means that you are at the mercy of the weather, of law enforcement, and of your community – it creates vulnerability in so many ways that it can be difficult to imagine for those who have always been housed. To be unhoused means you don’t even have the dignity and privacy to engage in essential activities, like sleeping or using the bathroom, things that would be considered a crime if done in public.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Stanford University ☛ It’s Groundhog Day at the European Commission

    It’s time for yet another proposal from the European Commission to require websites and applications to pay so-called “network fees” to the largest ISPs in Europe. Network fee proposals would force websites and applications to pay broadband companies like Telefonica, Orange, and Deutsche Telekom, so the largest ISPs can get paid twice for delivering the traffic the ISPs’ customers requested – once by their own internet service customers, and once by the sites and apps these customers are using.

  • APNIC ☛ IPv6 Anywhere

    The problem with the state of IPv6 deployment in Indonesia is multifaceted, with several complicated issues arising from limited implementation. While technically, IPv6 had been successfully established at the level of BGP peering and core routers, it needs to be delivered effectively to end users. Many of the existing deployments only served as proof that IPv6 worked within core networks, but they did not extend to end user devices.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Patrick Breyer ☛ StopKillingTrains? MEP calls for rules against the arbitrary disabling of devices by manufacturers

    “The practice by some manufacturers to prevent independent companies from repairing and servicing products is unacceptable. The EU should put clear rules in place to prevent such abuses and protect the rights of users, as well as the competitiveness of independent repair services. The right to repair should also apply to business customers.

    However, a mere right to repair falls short of what is needed in the digital era. Users must be given full control over the technology they use in their daily lives. We need a right to modify, customise and improve our legally acquired devices. The fact that copyright law currently prohibits this is disempowering and invites abuse, as the Polish case shows.”

  • University of Michigan ☛ From the Daily: UMich’s climate report card

    Additionally, updated teaching strategies from professors could begin to make a difference. Even after the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shift online, some classes still require the printing of hundreds of pages of documents or hard-copy books. Completely phasing out physical copies of assignments and books wouldn’t solve the University’s problems, but it’s low-hanging fruit that we should grab nonetheless.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Wired ☛ Meta’s Pay-for-Privacy Model Is Illegal, Says EU

  “Our preliminary view is that Meta’s Pay or Consent business model is in breach of the DMA,” Thierry Breton, commissioner for the EU’s Internal Market, said in a statement. “The DMA is there to give back to the users the power to decide how their data is used and ensure innovative companies can compete on equal footing with tech giants on data access.”

• JURIST ☛ European Commission accuses Meta of digital competition violation over paid ad-free option

  The Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into force in March, is an EU law designed to make markets in the digital sector fairer and more competitive, which establishes a set of clearly defined objective criteria for determining gatekeepers, i.e. large digital platforms providing so-called essential platform services, such as online search engines, app stores, messaging services, and others. It sets guidelines to ensure that companies behave fairly and allow for competition online, as mandated by the EU.

• Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Nvidia set to face French antitrust charges, sources say

  The French so-called statement of objections or charge sheet would follow dawn raids in the graphics cards sector in September last year, which sources said targeted Nvidia. The raids were the result of a broader inquiry into cloud computing.

• The Register UK ☛ France poised to bring 'charges against Nvidia'

  Nvidia has become the foremost supplier of GPUs and high-speed networking required to build the training clusters necessary to develop and serve top-tier AI models. Some estimates put Nvidia's share of the AI infrastructure market at somewhere north of 80 percent — a fact that seems to have ruffled French antitrust cops' feathers.

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Nvidia could receive French ban hammer — antitrust charges may follow government raids of Nvidia's offices in France

  The Authority also outlines potential risks from chip providers, including price fixing, production restrictions, and unfair contract conditions/behaviors. While Nvidia is not expressly accused of these potential offenses, Nvidia is the only chip provider named in the report. The AI market's overwhelming dependency on Nvidia hardware was not a major concern point for the Authority, which seems to have found alternative sources like Google's TPU AI accelerators to be sufficient competition.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Digital Music News ☛ Morgan Freeman Joins Chorus of Celebs Speaking Out on Voice AI

      Morgan Freeman has joined the chorus of celebrity voices speaking out against the use of unauthorized voice cloning. Scarlett Johansson has helped lead the charge, asking OpenAI to disclose how it created its AI voice assistant, Sky.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Nintendo Sues 'Modded Hardware' and r/SwitchPirates Moderator 'Archbox'

    Nintendo has filed two lawsuits at a Washington federal court, targeting individuals who allegedly facilitated Nintendo Switch piracy. The first lawsuit accuses Modded Hardware of violating the DMCA by selling mod-chips and MIG devices, as well as shipping modded consoles with pirated games. The second complaint accuses 'Archbox', a moderator of r/SwitchPirates on Reddit, of facilitating piracy and operating various 'pirate shops'.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ UK ISPs Blocked 7,000+ Piracy Domains in the First Six Months of 2024

    During the first six months of 2024, the UK's leading internet service providers were required to block at least 7,000 domains and subdomains to prevent subscribers accessing pirate sites. The majority of blocking activity was aimed at disrupting pirate IPTV services offering live sports and other live broadcasts. In common with previous years, the music, movie, and publishing industries continued with their blocking programs.