Leftovers

• Sarah Joy ☛ Everybody's Free (To Write Websites)

  Enbies and gentlefolk of the class of ‘24:

  Write websites.

  If I could offer you only one tip for the future, coding would be it. The long term benefits of coding websites remains unproved by scientists, however the rest of my advice has a basis in the joy of the indie web community’s experiences. I will dispense this advice now: [...]

• Robert Birming ☛ Unedited thoughts

  Am I saying that writing about technology is "bad"? No, of course not. I read blogs like MacRumors and 9to5Google every day with great interest (I used to run similar blogs myself). But that's not what I want to write about, at least not right now.

  Now I like writing mainly for the therapeutic, almost meditative effect it has on me. I write every day, and I find it very rewarding on a personal level.

• Lou Plummer ☛ Tea and Me

  In 2016 I read a book about the history of tea, and I became obsessed with it. I learned when and where tea was first cultivated (China, third century AD), the name of the tea bush (camellia sinensis), and that after water, tea is the most consumed beverage by the human race. Now, we aren't talking about big pitchers of southern sweet tea here. The beverage I became obsessed with is the hot variety, ideally made from loose tea leaves, brewed with water heated to a precise temperature depending on the type (black, green, oolong, etc.).

• Barry W Jones ☛ Story Points are Pointless, Measure Queues

  We've introduced confusion from the start. Whenever you see a story point value, does it typically include a breakdown of what it represents on each ticket? I've seen it attempted once but never consistently applied.

  In practice, Story Points are typically explained as a relative measure of complexity. Complexity is a big enough word that it can encompass a lot of details.

• University of Michigan ☛ U-M Library bringing book arts to Ann Arbor Art Fair

  Visitors to the fair will be able to create their own flora-inspired prints using two historically important book art methods: cyanotype and woodblock printing.

  “We have a large collection of wooden and metal blocks with pictorial illustrations that would have been used alongside text in letterpress printing. Everything from a sort of vintage version of clip art for newspapers or newsletters to diagrams of teeth used by dentist’s offices,” said Senior Associate Librarian Jamie Lausch Vander Broek.

• Derek Kędziora ☛ Slow news

  This all goes to say, you’re far betting off checking a high-quality news source every once in awhile than reading what’s the latest hashtags.

• Education

  • Pro Publica ☛ Arizona School Voucher Program Causes Budget Meltdown

    Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million, the Grand Canyon analysis found; another $429 million in costs is expected this year.

  • Arjen Wiersma ☛ Finding time to study

    Most students run into this problem when they start studying; I’ve seen it all too often. You start your studies with full confidence, only to realize you haven’t considered how it fits into your life and what you need to sacrifice to make it work. Many students try to do everything at once, with predictable results. Thankfully, there is a strategy you can apply. I used this strategy during my part-time Bachelor and Master’s studies, and it worked perfectly for me.

    The core of the strategy is using your calendar. To manage your time effectively, you need to know exactly when you’ll do what. This sounds simple, but most people only note important things in their calendar, like dentist appointments or Aunt Loes’s birthday.

  • [Repeat] CER ☛ Everyday Equitable Data Literacy is Best in Social Studies, far more than in STEM

    We want students to be data literate. We want them to be able to understand, critique, and argue with data, both visualizations and tables. A new book edited by Colby Tofel-Grehl and Emmanuel Schanzer (Improving Equity in Data Science: Re-Imagining the Teaching and Learning of Data in K-16 Classrooms) focuses on developing equitable data literacy — making sure that all students have these skills, and to use them in culturally responsive contexts.

• Hardware

  • AnandTech ☛ Western Digital Adds 8TB Model to Popular High-End SN850X SSD Drive Family

    Western Digital has quietly introduced an 8 TB version of its high-end SN850X SSD, doubling the top capacity of the well-regarded drive family. The new drive offers performance on par with other members of the range, but with twice as much capacity as the previous top-end model – and with a sizable price premium to go with its newfound capacity.

  • AnandTech ☛ Micron Expands Datacenter DRAM Portfolio with MR-DIMMs

    The compute market has always been hungry for memory bandwidth, particularly for high-performance applications in servers and datacenters. In recent years, the explosion in core counts per socket has further accentuated this need. Despite progress in DDR speeds, the available bandwidth per core has unfortunately not seen a corresponding scaling.

  • Ken Shirriff ☛ Inside an IBM/Motorola mainframe controller chip from 1981

    IBM's vintage mainframes were extremely underpowered compared to modern computers; a System/370 mainframe ran well under 1 million instructions per second, while a modern laptop executes billions of instructions per second. But these mainframes could support rooms full of users, while my 2017 laptop can barely handle one person.2 Mainframes achieved their high capacity by offloading much of the data entry overhead so the mainframe could focus on the "important" work. The mainframe received data directly into memory in bulk over high-speed I/O channels, without needing to handle character-by-character editing. For instance, a typical data entry terminal (a "3270") let the user update fields on the screen without involving the computer. When the user had filled out the screen, pressing the "Enter" key sent the entire data record to the mainframe at once. Thus, the mainframe didn't need to process every keystroke; it only dealt with complete records. (This is also why many modern keyboards have an "Enter" key.)

  • AnandTech ☛ The AMD Zen 5 Microarchitecture: Powering Ryzen AI 300 Series For Mobile and Ryzen 9000 for Desktop

    Back at Computex 2024, AMD unveiled their highly anticipated Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture during AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su's opening keynote. AMD announced not one but two new client platforms that will utilize the latest Zen 5 cores. This includes AMD's latest AI PC-focused chip family for the laptop market, the Ryzen AI 300 series. In comparison, the Ryzen 9000 series caters to the desktop market, which uses the preexisting AM5 platform.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Latvia ☛ Pensioners also unhappy about medicine price policy plan

    The Latvian Pensioners' Federation calls for a halt to the new medicine price reform until it has been properly analyzed and discussed among the parties involved - pharmaceutical industry employees, medicine users and pharmacy customers, Latvian Rdio reported on July 15.

  • Access Consciousness: Energy medicine woo and new phrenology

    Ever since COVID-19 hit, it has seemed that 90% of what I write is about COVID-19, the antivaccine movement that was turbocharged by the pandemic, and associated quackery, such as repurposed drugs for COVID-19 that don’t work, false claims that COVID-19 vaccines cause sudden death, “turbo cancer,” and all manner of other maladies. Yet, the more “boring” health nonsense is still with us; it’s never gone away. So when I encountered something called “Access Consciousness,” I thought it would be a nice change of pace to discuss this rather odd “healing modality.” Moreover, as Dr. Jonathan Howard argues, as horrible as misinformation and quackery involving deadly diseases is, it’s nonetheless important to critically examine seemingly “benign” modalities like Access Consciousness, because (1) many of the ideas behind such “benign” treatments undergird a lot of more dangerous quackery and (2) the these “benign” treatments are often not nearly as benign as they first seem. Moreover, often these same ideas can be traced back much further back in time. They persist, reappearing in new forms over time.

  • Donald Trump and the return of the antivax “monster shot”

    On Saturday evening, the nation lived through a horrific event, when a 20-year-old man with an AR-15-style rifle came within an inch or two of assassinating former President Donald Trump. Fortunately, the would-be assassin did not succeed, although the bullet did graze Trump’s right ear. Unfortunately, the would-be assassin did kill one spectator and seriously wound two others before he was taken out by a sniper. Also unfortunately, the iconic photo of Donald Trump, face bloodied, raising his fist in defiance as his Secret Service detail tried to whisk him away to safety could be a potent image that helps him win the White House again. On the other hand, Trump being Trump, he might overplay his hand and squander the sympathy he’s gotten so far, but at this point no one knows. What I do know is that this election is going to be even more chaotic than I had thought.

  • Nathan Upchurch ☛ Poison

    Learning to cook this way has done me a tremendous disservice. The talented people who I’ve learned from over the years have inculcated into me, as gospel truth, techniques to create food that delights the palate and utterly destroys the body.

  • CBC ☛ Farmland prices are skyrocketing in Sask. How will that impact the province's family farmers?

    He has mixed feelings about the value of farmland increasing at such a rapid rate. He learned how to farm from his father — who will benefit from selling his land while prices are high — but he thinks about whether those prices will deter his kids from continuing the family tradition.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Teens aren't coping nearly as well as their parents think, study finds

    In part, those struggles can be traced to the fact that compared with their predecessors, today’s teens spend less time hanging out with their friends in person and more time communicating through smartphones and other digital devices, she said. That type of asynchronous communication can make people feel anxious as they wait for a reply.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Computer World ☛ Are AI posts on social media protected free speech?

    A recent landmark decision from the US Supreme Court has put content created by generative artificial intelligence (genAI) at the forefront of free speech rights as states grapple with how to regulate social media platforms.

    Specifically, the decision calls into question whether textural and video content created by genAI can be considered free speech because human beings were involved in crafting the algorithms that produced that content.

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Meta Wants to Make Us its AI Guinea Pigs

    With the latest update of their privacy policy, Meta has stated their intention to feed all the data they hold (about you) on their Facebook and Instagram platforms for the purposes of training “AI technology”. While Meta also stated that they would only use “public posts”, their privacy policy contradicts this by including any personal data collected through these platforms, with the sole exclusion of private chats.

    There is more to that. Meta doesn’t tell us what kind of product or AI they will be developing, but they claim to have a “legitimate interest” for this purpose, which overrides your rights and legitimate expectations. In practical terms, this means that they are denying your right to consent or refuse to the use of your data for training their “AI technology”: instead, UK users would be asked to undergo a complicated 11-step procedure to object to Meta’s plan. Meta also does not tell you what this “AI technology” will look like or will be used for, but it requires you to explain how this new technology will impact you and how this overrides their “legitimate interest”, if you wish to object.

    Finally, if you do not to object, or fail to persuade Meta to honour your objection, you will never have an opportunity to reverse this choice: as Meta states, you will Lose both your right to object to the use of any of your data which has already been fed to their system, nor you will be allowed to ask your data to be erased.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ Courts Should Have Jurisdiction over Foreign Companies Collecting Data on Local Residents, EFF Tells Appeals Court

      Corporations should not be able to collect data from a state’s residents while evading the jurisdiction of that state’s courts, EFF and the UC Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice explained in a friend-of-the-court brief to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. 

      The case, Briskin v. Shopify, stems from a California resident’s privacy claims against Shopify, Inc. and its subsidiaries, out-of-state companies that process payments for third party ecommerce companies (collectively “Shopify”). The plaintiff alleged that Shopify secretly collected data on the plaintiff and other California consumers while purchasing apparel from an online California-based retailer. Shopify also allegedly tracked the users’ browsing activities across all ecommerce sites that used Shopify’s services. Shopify allegedly compiled that information into comprehensive user profiles, complete with financial “risk scores” that companies could use to block users’ future purchases.  

      The Ninth Circuit initially dismissed the lawsuit for lack of personal jurisdiction and ruled that Shopify, an out-of-state defendant, did not have enough contacts with California to be fairly sued in California. 

    • EFF ☛ Modern Cars Can Be Tracking Nightmares. Abuse Survivors Need Real Solutions.

      As a New York Times article outlined, modern cars are often connected to apps that show a user a wide range of information about a vehicle, including real-time location data, footage from cameras showing the inside and outside of the car, and sometimes the ability to control the vehicle remotely from their mobile device. These features can be useful, but abusers often turn these conveniences into tools to harass and control their victims—or even to locate or spy on them once they've fled their abusers.

      California is currently considering three bills intended to help domestic abuse survivors endangered by vehicle tracking. Unfortunately, despite the concerns of advocates who work directly on tech-enabled abuse, these proposals are moving in the wrong direction. These bills intended to protect survivors are instead being amended in ways that open them to additional risks. We call on the legislature to return to previous language that truly helps people disable location-tracking in their vehicles without giving abusers new tools.

      We know abusers are happy to lie and exploit whatever they can to further their abuse, including laws and services meant to help survivors.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Vulnerabilities in VPNs: Paper presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium 2024 - The Citizen Lab

      The annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2024 is underway in Bristol, UK and online, a gathering of privacy experts from around the world to discuss recent advances and new perspectives on research in privacy technologies.

      On July 16, former Citizen Lab Open Technology Fund (OTF) Information Controls Fellowship Program fellow Benjamin Mixon-Baca will be presenting “Attacking Connection Tracking Frameworks as used by Virtual Private Networks”, whose co-authors include Citizen Lab researcher Jeffrey Knockel. In this study, the authors explore the connection tracking frameworks used in major operating systems and identify a unique exploit technique known as port shadow, making a user less secure and vulnerable to attackers outside their normal administrative boundaries.

    • The Independent UK ☛ Trump campaign data identified Thomas Matthew Crooks’ father as a ‘strong Republican, likely gun owner, and hunter’

      The campaign’s private database analyzed 6.7 million people in the Keystone State, a crucial battleground in the race for president, listing Matthew Crooks, a registered Libertarian, as among the top 20 prospects of 19,000 residents in the Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park, Channel 4 reported. He scored highly “across a range of gun-related [data] models,” according to the outlet, and was flagged by the Trump team as a voter “who could be susceptible to political messages about gun-rights.”

• Defence/Aggression

  • New York Times ☛ Trump Rally Gunman ‘Didn’t Want Attention’ in School, Classmates Said

    Fellow students described the gunman, Thomas Crooks, as intelligent but solitary, someone who tried to avoid teasing by his classmates.

  • FAIR ☛ Trump’s Shooting Should Not Silence Warnings About His Threat to Democracy

  • The Register UK ☛ TikTok's Asian e-commerce haul quadrupled in a single year

    Momentum Works's Ecommerce in Southeast Asia 2024 report listed TikTok Shop's annual gross merchandise value (GMV) as having quadrupled from $4.4 billion in 2022 to $16.3 billion in 2023. GMV is a measure of the value of goods shifted on a marketplace, but not an indicator of revenue won by operator of the marketplace.

  • Stanford University ☛ Social media and political violence – how to break the cycle

    By contrast, anyone today can “report” news online, provide what they claim is “analysis” of events, and combine fact, fiction, speculation and opinion to fit a desired narrative or political perspective.

    Then that perspective is potentially made to seem legitimate by virtue of the poster’s official office, net worth, number of social media followers, or attention from mainstream news organizations seeking to fill news cycles.

    And that’s before any mention of convincing deepfake audio and video clips, whose lies and misrepresentations can further sow confusion and distrust online and in society.

    Today’s [Internet]-based narratives also often involve personal attacks either directly or through inference and suggestion – what experts call “stochastic terrorism” that can motivate people to violence. Political violence is the inevitable result – and has been for years, including attacks on U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, the 2017 congressional baseball practice shooting, the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, and now the attempted assassination of a former president running for the White House again.

  • Site36 ☛ German government overthrows Jürgen Elsässer: Interior Minister bans far-right magazine "Compact"

    The justification for the ban also states that “Compact” is “aggressively militant”. It is therefore to be feared that “recipients of the media products” will be “incited and encouraged to act against the constitutional order”.

  • JURIST ☛ Hijab ban on France Olympic athletes breaches international human rights laws: Amnesty International

    The prohibition on wearing religious headwear exists in several French sports federations across all levels of competition, imposing barriers to participation for Muslim women and girls. The Fédération Française de Football and Fédération Française de Basketball are among those that prohibit wearing religious head coverings in their guidelines. French collectives that advocate for non-discrimination and gender equality, such as Les Hijabeuses and Basket Pour Toutes, have been campaigning for such bans to be overturned.

  • Air Force Times ☛ Remains of Bataan Death March POW returned home

    The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced in June that Powers was accounted for on May 26, 2023, after analysis of his remains, including use of DNA.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ As the Ultra-Wealthy Rally Behind Trump, the GOP Pitches Fake Populism

    That makes sense: Republicans’ messaging, the RNC platform, the entire Trump campaign is about meeting people where they are and giving them resentment politics to chew on, while actively selling government policy to the highest bidders. So far, the donor promises have included maintaining low taxes on the wealthy, further slashing the corporate tax rate, ending scrutiny of cryptocurrency companies, eliminating Biden environmental regulations, and speeding up corporate mergers.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Register UK ☛ Rite Aid says 2.2 million people’s data stolen by attackers

    Ironically, the pharmacy group didn't actually specify what these retail products were, nor did RansomHub – the group that claimed responsibility for the attack. The criminals claimed to have stolen 10 GB worth of data, though, equivalent to 45 million lines of personal information, or so they said.

• Environment

  • DeSmog ☛ As California Regulators Refuse to Enforce New Orphan Well Rules, Lawmakers and Environmental Groups Cry Foul

    “It’s pretty simple,” said state representative Wendy Carrillo, who sponsored the legislation, in emailed comments to DeSmog. “Any oil company that drills in California must also be responsible for cleaning and capping that oil well once it no longer produces, and in the event wells are sold, the new operator must provide the financial assurance via a bond to ensure the wells are not left abandoned.”

    By law, industry must shutter unused wells, a process that can cost over $100,000 per site. But specific requirements vary from state to state, and companies routinely avoid their plugging obligation in practice — either by exploiting legal loopholes that allow them to defer the task indefinitely, or by selling wells to smaller companies that then declare bankruptcy before plugging.

  • Hakai Magazine ☛ The Social Cost of Carbon Credits

    But carbon trading is under increasing scrutiny. With little government regulation, the task of ensuring that carbon offsets actually keep carbon out of the atmosphere often falls to third-party companies. A 2023 Guardian investigation, however, revealed that 90 percent of rainforest carbon offsets approved by the world’s largest third-party certifier, Verra (which validated the Saloum delta project), did not represent real reductions in emissions. Critics say that offsets allow corporations—including oil and gas producers—to justify emissions rather than actually reduce them. Credits that overestimate how much carbon they stock away could even raise the overall concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases by giving companies rein to release more carbon than they’d otherwise be allowed.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Irish peat soils are far more vast than previously known, suggests study

    Dr. Terry Morley, University of Galway, is one of the co-authors of the research article. He said, "Peat soils are important because they help the country meet national and international targets to reduce GHG emissions and also play a major role in regulating stream flow, water quality, or providing habitat for ecologically sensitive species."

    Dr. Raymond Flynn, Queen's University Belfast, another co-author, said, "This map changes our approach to mapping peat soils from the traditional approach concerned with agronomy to one where we can now more reliably focus on the role of peat and peat soils in environmental processes."

  • teleSUR ☛ UN Warns of Factors That Will Increase Climate Crisis Facing the Planet

    “The rapid pace of change, uncertainty and technological advances we are witnessing, against a backdrop of geopolitical turbulence, means that any country can be diverted from its course more easily and frequently,” he added.

    Thus, UNEP experts used a new trend forecasting system which found that, in this new global context, the speed of change is “surprising”.

  • NPR ☛ Copenhagen begins offering free perks to tourists who make sustainable choices

    The city announced earlier this month that it was rolling out a new initiative, called CopenPay, in an effort to incentivize more sustainable behaviors among visitors, such as walking, biking, taking public transit and picking up litter.

    [...]

    Copenhagen officials say they are not trying to increase tourism, but rather to reduce the environmental impact that tourism currently has on the city of more than 600,000 people.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Chris ☛ Washing Machine Energy Estimations

      What draws power in a washing machine is probably (a) heating water, and (b) running a motor. So to figure out a better estimation method, we can include configured temperature and centrifuge speed in the table, as well as how long the machine thinks the configuration will run for.

    • DeSmog ☛ The Polluters of Paris

    • TechRadar ☛ Google and Abusive Monopolist Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

      Tech giants Google and Microsoft each consumed 24 TWh each of electricity during 2023, surpassing the consumption of more than 100 countries, new research has claimed.

• Finance

  • David Rosenthal ☛ Accelerated Computing

    Below the fold I continue the "Old man yells at cloud" theme of recent posts by trying to clarify an aspect of the current Jensen Huang hagiography.

    Ed Zitron's must-read The Shareholder Supremacy traces the idea of the super-hero CEO revealed by a soaring stock price to: [...]

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Democrats Now Openly Admit They Pushed Biden to Block Bernie

    These are stunning admissions. Three years ago, reviewing Aimie Parnes and Jonathan Allen’s memoir of the chaotic Biden 2020 campaign, Lucky, I wrote that, for a host of reasons, the Democratic Party that year “saw its biggest priority not as beating [Trump] but as stopping Bernie Sanders.” And though the party’s leading lights reportedly privately doubted Biden’s ability to actually win and publicly observed that he had significantly declined, they were forced to rally around him as the only stop-Sanders candidate because none of the others had much of any support from nonwhite voters. (Incidentally, Democrats are now explicitly saying they’re ready to accept a second Trump term, and that they don’t actually think his reelection is as existential as they’ve been saying). These were not novel observations, but for many years, they were unspeakable in mainstream circles.

  • Security Week ☛ NATO to Establish New Cyber Center in Belgium

    The coming NATO Integrated Cyber Defense Center (NICC) will “enhance the protection of NATO and Allied networks and the use of cyberspace as an operational domain,” the organization announced on July 10th.

    Based at NATO’s strategic military headquarters at SHAPE in Belgium, NATO says the new center will bring together civilian and military personnel from across the NATO Enterprise, Allied countries and experts from industry.

  • IT Wire ☛ SoftBank acquires Graphcore

    Bloomberg reported last 8 May that SoftBank was in talks to buy troubled AI chip firm Graphcore. While SoftBank’s announcement confirms its interest in acquiring the chip firm, both companies are mum about the details of their negotiation.

  • India Times ☛ Stripe valuation hits $70 billion in Sequoia deal

    Stripe, one of the most valuable private tech companies, was most recently valued at $65 billion after striking a deal that allowed current and former employees to cash out some of their shares, Bloomberg News reported in February. That was up from a $50 billion valuation last March but below the $95 billion it was worth in a 2021 funding.

  • New York Times ☛ Elon Musk Enters Uncharted Territory With Trump Endorsement

    With those moves, Mr. Musk, 53, entered uncharted territory. He broke with tradition set by the leaders of other major social media firms, none of whom have endorsed a presidential candidate. By using X as a megaphone for his politics — posting to his nearly 190 million followers — Mr. Musk also erased any air of neutrality for the platform.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • VOA News ☛ Russia falsely denies ties with AI-operated disinformation bot farm on X

      The operation, orchestrated by two Russian government agencies — the Federal Security Service and the RT news network — utilized two domain names, “mlrtr.com” and “otanmail.com,” registered with a U.S.-based provider, along with 968 X accounts.

      The Russians used artificial intelligence to create and operate the bot farm of fictitious social media profiles, many impersonating U.S. citizens. AI also generated and spread the Kremlin propaganda through that bot farm.

    • US News And World Report ☛ FACT FOCUS: Trump Falsely Claims Babies Can Be Seen to Change 'Radically' After Vaccination

      In an excerpt of a recent conversation between former President Donald Trump and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted online, Trump suggested vaccines given to children to protect them from disease are harmful. He also exaggerated the number of vaccines given to children and he falsely claimed they lead to sudden, visible changes. Neither campaign has responded to requests for comment.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ 'She Was An Inconvenience': Remembering Rights Activist Natalya Estemirova 15 Years After Her Death

    Politkovskaya was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building on October 7, 2006. In 2014, five Chechen men were convicted of carrying out the killing, but it was never established who ordered or paid for it.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ ‘Do You Still Need This War?’: The Anti-War Russian Teenagers Facing Long Prison Sentences - The Moscow Times

    But Balazeikin, who was initially charged with hooliganism, was eventually sentenced to six years in prison last year by a military court, as his actions were reclassified as “an attempted terrorist attack.”

    His case is just one of several recent incidents where teenagers in Russia have been sentenced for their anti-war views.

    The Moscow Times has collected some of their stories.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • RFERL ☛ Trial Date Of U.S. Journalist Gershkovich Brought Forward To July 18

    The Sverdlovsk regional court in Russia's Urals city of Yekaterinburg said on July 16 that it has moved forward the resumption of the trial of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been in Russian detention for more than a year on espionage charges that he, his employer, and the U.S. government have rejected as politically motivated.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Evan Gershkovich’s Trial to Resume on July 18

    The Wall Street Journal correspondent and former reporter for The Moscow Times became the first Western journalist to be arrested in Russia on spying charges since the Cold War after he was detained during a reporting trip in March 2023.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Russian American journalist sentenced to 8 years in absentia

    Although Masha Gessen is based in the United States, such a criminal case still brings some inconvenience into her life. For example, when booking plane tickets - Gessen must avoid any travel or even transfer via countries that have extradition treaties with Russia.

  • VOA News ☛ Court appearance of American journalist Gershkovich moved forward in Russian 'sham trial'

    “This is a sham trial that should never have taken place, just as Evan never should have been arrested. The sooner it’s over, the better. Journalism is not a crime, and Evan should be released now,” The Journal told VOA in a statement on Tuesday.

    The Russian government has not publicly provided any evidence to substantiate the charges against Gershkovich.

  • CPJ ☛ Malik Hassan Zaib becomes 7th journalist slain in Pakistan this year

    “Authorities in Pakistan must immediately end this horrifying wave of violence and hold the perpetrators of the killing of journalist Malik Hassan Zaib to account,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna. “The continued impunity for those who attack journalists is creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in Pakistan, which prevents the practice of free and independent journalism.”

    Information Minister Attaullah Tarar did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment sent via text message.

  • CPJ ☛ Burkina Faso columnist Alain Traoré taken by armed men in masks

    Three other journalists—Serge Atiana Oulon, Kalifara Séré, and Adama Bayala—have been missing since late June after separately disappearing under suspicious circumstances.

  • CPJ ☛ Kenyan journalist Catherine Wanjeri wa Kariuki shot in leg covering protests

    “The shooting of journalist Catherine Wanjeri wa Kariuki as she covered protests in Kenya is a deeply alarming development in a pattern of violence faced by the press covering recent demonstrations,” said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ’s Africa program, in New York. “Kenyan police should be focused on ensuring the safety of journalists, not targeting them with violence or detention, and authorities should act swiftly to hold accountable those responsible.”

    Thousands of Kenyans have repeatedly taken to the streets since June 18 to protest a proposed law that would significantly increase taxes and express broader concerns about governance in the country. Security personnel have violently engaged and briefly detained journalists covering the demonstrations.

  • 404 Media ☛ You're Invited: 404 Media's First Anniversary Party

    It’s almost been a whole year since we launched 404 Media. In that time, we’ve done so much with your support.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • JURIST ☛ Report finds Australia’s response to elder abuse a success

    An independent report released Sunday by the Australian Institute of family Studies (AIFS) determined that the Australian government’s plan to address elder abuse has been “valuable.” The report examined the appropriateness, efficiency and effectiveness of the National Plan to Respond to the Abuse of Older Australians through an array of case studies, surveys and interviews.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Safer skies and seas: Fresh support for disabled travelers and climate-changed oceans

    Progress roundup: An international tribunal links ocean health to climate change. In the U.S., new laws address the well-being of disabled travelers.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ UK Immigrant Workers May Win Europe’s First Amazon Union

    The watershed vote comes after a long, bruising battle; Amazon tried US-style stalling and union-busting tactics. Meanwhile the workers have taken thirty-seven days of strike action in two years. They’ve grown their union to fourteen hundred members, established a stewards network, and built multiethnic solidarity. In the UK, workers can become dues-paying members before union recognition is attained.

  • Techdirt ☛ No Immunity For Cops Who Handcuffed A 10-Year-Old Girl Because She Drew Some ‘Violent’ Pictures

    Putting cops in schools is never a good idea. The most likely result of bringing a cop indoors to police schools is that the officer(s) will, indeed, “police” the school. Things that used to be handled with detention, meetings with parents, or suspensions instead become “incidents” where officers will do the worst thing they can in these situations: act like cops.

  • International Business Times ☛ Burger King Fires Manager And 4 Employees After Their Facebook Post Goes Viral - What Did They Post?

    In the United States, nepotism in the workplace is generally not illegal, as noted by PeopleSpheres. However, if an employee benefits from a family member or friend's position within an organisation, it could potentially fall under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits workplace discrimination. Such favouritism can lead to unlawful workplace discrimination.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Female genital mutilation ban upheld in Gambia

    In the end, however, their intensive campaigning paid off. Legislators voted 34 to 19 to keep the ban, an abrupt about-face from when the bill was first introduced in March and 42 voted to overturn it.

    “Culture is not static,” says Isatou Touray, former Gambian vice president and health minister, and executive director of Gamcotrap, an organization that works to end FGM and child marriage.

  • CBC ☛ Federal government apologizes to Dakota, Lakota nations for historical mistreatment

    "I could never erase the pain you have endured, [but] this is the right thing to do," federal Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree said during the event.

    "We seek to mend this injustice with three simple words: we are sorry."

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ Appeals Court Temporarily Stays FCC Net Neutrality Rules - Inside Towers

    UPDATE A federal appeals court in Ohio on Friday blocked the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules from taking effect this month.

    A coalition of national and regional trade associations representing ISPs such as Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA), Charter (NASDAQ: CHTR), AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) challenged the rules in court, Inside Towers reported. Coalition members included USTelecom, NCTA, CTIA, ACA Connects and several state broadband associations. That court challenge came after the agency voted 3-2 in April to reinstate the competition rules that reclassified broadband ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Meta news ban in Australia would be 'potentially catastrophic'

    Broadsheet Media, which publishes the culture and community news website Broadsheet and has 65 full-time employees, said it estimated it would lose up to 52% of its revenue if Meta no longer distributed news.

    This would “make it nearly impossible for the business to survive,” it told the Australian Parliament’s Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society.

  • The Register UK ☛ GoDaddy accused of antitrust violations over DNS tool ban • The Register

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Hill ☛ YouTube earned nearly 10 percent of all TV viewing in June: Nielsen

    YouTube took the largest haul of audience of any single platform during the month of June amid a record month for streamers, according to new data from Nielsen Media Research.

    The video platform earned 9.9 percent of all TV viewing audience last month, edging out Netflix which netted 8.4 percent. Other streamers, like Hulu and Disney+, ranked well behind taking in less than 4 percent of total audience share each.

  • Greece ☛ GNTO secures support of Netflix

    The collaboration between Netflix and GNTO includes the production of a video by Netflix which GNTO will use for its promotional activities.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Register UK ☛ Microsoft, Inflection AI deal earns UK merger investigation

  The Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA) concern stems from the hiring of Inflection AI cofounders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, along with "several members" of the Inflection team, who left for Microsoft in March.

• Silicon Angle ☛ UK antitrust watchdog launches probe into Microsoft’s Inflection AI partnership

  The Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, announced the move today. The development comes about three months after CMA officials began looking into Microsoft’s deal with Inflection AI. On April 24, the regulator invited members of the public to provide input on the partnership’s potential market impact.

• New York Times ☛ Google Close to Its Biggest Acquisition Ever, Despite Antitrust Scrutiny

  Google is in talks to buy Wiz, a New York-based cybersecurity start-up, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions, who were not authorized to discuss them. Wiz was last valued at $12 billion.

• Patents

  • JUVE ☛ Ericsson and Oppo sign global cross-licence agreement without meeting in court

    The multi-year cross-licence agreement between Ericsson and Oppo covers standard essential patents for cellular technologies, including 5G. According to a press release, Oppo will pay royalties to Ericsson and the two companies will also cooperate on 5G-related projects, such as device testing, customer engagements and marketing activities.

  • Software Patents

    • EFF ☛ Victory! EFF Supporters Beat USPTO Proposal To Wreck Patent Reviews

      In 2012, recognizing the entrenched problem of a patent office that spewed out tens of thousands of ridiculous patents every year, Congress created a new system to review patents called “inter partes reviews,” or IPRs. While far from perfect, IPRs have resulted in cancellation of thousands of patent claims that never should have been issued in the first place. 

      At EFF, we used the IPR process to crowd-fund a challenge to the Personal Audio “podcasting patent” that tried to extract patent royalty payments from U.S. podcasters. We won that proceeding and our victory was confirmed on appeal.

      It’s no surprise that big patent owners and patent trolls have been trying to wreck the IPR system for years. They’ve tried, and failed, to get federal courts to dismantle IPRs. They’ve tried, and failed, to push legislation that would break the IPR system. And last year, they found a new way to attack IPRs—by convincing the USPTO to propose a set of rules that would have sharply limited the public’s right to challenge bad patents. 

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ Astroworld Fallout Continues As Sony Music-Powered Ceremony of Roses Sues Live Nation for ‘Negligence and Willful Misconduct’

    Nearly three years later, Live Nation is still grappling with fallout from the Astroworld tragedy, as Sony Music-powered merch and events business Ceremony of Roses is suing for negligence and more. Ceremony of Roses, which began operating under the Sony Music banner in early 2022, just recently fired off the firmly worded complaint [...]

  • Torrent Freak ☛ German State Moves $3 Billion in Bitcoin Seized From Pirate Site Operators

    The German state of Saxony has moved the Bitcoin it seized from the alleged operator of long-defunct pirate site Movie2k. The haul of almost 50,000 bitcoins is worth over $3 billion at today’s exchange rate. The cryptocurrency was sent to exchanges and market makers, including Coinbase, Kraken, and Flow Traders, presumably to be sold.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Vietnam Convicts Pirate Site Operators; a Rare Case Completed in Record Time

    The apparent complexity of Vietnam's legal system has hindered Hollywood's enforcement efforts for years; investigations have been known to move at glacial pace before simply melting away. When three local men were arrested in January for running illegal streaming sites, few expected a rapid conclusion. Yet after facing trial last week, all three were found guilty of copyright crimes, at a court where a copyright case had never been heard before.

  • The Register UK ☛ Probe reveals 174K YouTube vids' subtitles used for AI

    The dataset is a 5.7GB slice of Pile, a larger 825GB silo created by nonprofit outfit EleutherAI. The Pile includes data pulled from GitHub, Wikipedia, Ubuntu IRC, Stack Exchange, bio-medical and other scientific papers, internal Enron emails, and many other sources. Overall, the YouTube Subtitles dataset is one of the smallest collections in the Pile.

    Big names such as Apple, Salesforce, and Nvidia have incorporated the Pile, including the video transcripts, into their AI models during training. We're told the makers of those YouTube videos weren't aware this was happening. (There's also nothing stopping tech giants from using YouTube data in other dataset collections; the Pile is just one possible source.)

  • The Register UK ☛ Music labels sue over copyright theft by BitTorrent

    Over 20 record labels – among them giants such as Sony Music, Universal Music Group – last week lodged a complaint [PDF] that contents "Verizon is one of the largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country and knowingly provides its high-speed service to a massive community of online pirates, who it knows repeatedly use that service to infringe Plaintiffs' copyrights."

  • Techdirt ☛ RIAA’s Copyright Suit Against Verizon Just The Latest Move By The RIAA To Kick People Off The Internet

    The RIAA just won’t quit in attacking users on the [Internet] and trying to get them banned from using the [Internet] entirely. The latest news is that all the major record labels have sued Verizon for not kicking users the RIAA accuses (but has not litigated) of being infringers off the [Internet].

    But, there’s a long history here that needs to be understood to see why this case is so stupid and so dangerous to the [Internet].