Leftovers

• Robert Birming ☛ I wish I was more dedicated

  One of the reasons I chose Bear for blogging about is the devotion the creator, Herman Martinus, has for the product. My product is my garden, as he puts it.

• Lou Plummer ☛ The Power of Online Community

  One of the words that gets used a lot on the Indy Web is community, in a good way. Whether it be people from your Mastodon instance, fellow customers of your particular blogging platform or just an ad hoc group of friendly Internet strangers bound together through a blogging challenge, common interests or any other criterion, a community is a place to call home on the Internet, to be yourself and a chance to be a part of something greater than the individual. The best part is you get to choose whether to participate or not. No one can force you to participate, but if you choose to do so, and if you follow whatever norms have formed, you get a built-in set of ears.

• Anne Sturdivant ☛ Your blog is a vulnerability.

  During May's WeblogPoMo I was so thrown off by a personal event that it had a ripple effect on my ability to get done, and post about, my planned topic. It's almost like I now have stage fright about trying to get back into my plans, things I want to do and write about here. Am I afraid of being judged? Maybe. Am I unwilling to fail? Possibly. But I rather think it has more to do with how hard I am on myself. If I am to launch into something and again get derailed and can't complete how I'd like to, I'm not sure how easy that would be to accept.

  As personal blogs are exploding again, from what I can tell in my small corner of the universe, we are opening ourselves to vulnerability. We are actually being vulnerable, but we simultaneously create vulnerability. I'm not writing about this to dissuade anyone from blogging or blogging more or starting a new blog. I'm just trying to recognize in myself how I see this set of circumstance in the current landscape. What follows is my attempt to break it down.

• Robert Birming ☛ Creative Greatness

  Is it because of her camera, or perhaps she studied photography like crazy? No, of course not.

  All it took was a different perspective. She chooses to capture the viewer instead of the viewed, and suddenly magic happens. We are thrown back in time and yet feel connected, like part of the audience.

• Nathaniel Snelgrove ☛ How to make something every day

  But if you can find the time to show up every day, and keep that appointment with yourself, the second problem solves itself. Your first drafts get better. You get blocked less often. The mere act of showing up triggers your brain’s neurological pathways into doing the work.

  The hard part is making the time to do your creative work. To do the stuff that matters. Don’t try to find the time. You won’t. You must make it for yourself.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Luke Harris

  This is the 47th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Luke Harris and his blog, www.lkhrs.com

  Kev Quirk suggested Luke as a potential guest way back in September, when this series was in its infancy. I'm quite sure I stumbled on Luke's site before that, though.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: AI art has no anti-cooption immune system

  All of this matters, and not just for aesthetic reasons. Communities – especially countercultural ones – are where our society's creative ferment starts. Getting your start in the trenches of the counterculture wars is no proof against being co-opted later (indeed, many of the designers who cut their teeth desktop publishing weird zines went on to pull their hair and roll their eyes at the incredible fuggliness of the web). But without that zone of noncommercial, antiestablishment, communitarian low weirdness, design and culture would stagnate.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Scientist Takes High Dose of Psilocybin, Clambers Into MRI Machine to Scan His Own Brain

    This was done as part of a new study, published in the journal Nature and of which Dosenbach is a coauthor, to unlock the psychedelic secrets behind the active compound in magic mushrooms. Scientists — and dedicated trippers — have long wondered: how is it that psilocybin and drugs like it, like LSD, can distort our perception of space-time, induce ego death, and also perhaps be a promising therapeutic tool?

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Apollo Astronauts Left American Flags, Boots and Even Poop on the Moon. Here's Why These Artifacts Matter | Smithsonian

    However, as human activity ramps up on the lunar surface—with more than 100 missions planned to occur by 2030—it poses another looming threat to these items. For example, individuals might go to the moon, retrieve artifacts and sell them illegally. Given the significance of the Apollo historic sites, they could become the targets of politically motivated aggression, Muir-Harmony says. Or, if tourists one day travel to the moon to explore lunar history, these futuristic vacationers could walk on top of the historic footprints. It also remains possible that a spacecraft might inadvertently destroy some of the lunar artifacts, perhaps by landing too close to the historic sites.

    “We are on this unique threshold,” Hanlon says. With missions planned in the near future, nations and industry actors can choose to consider space history as they approach these flights, rather than trying to salvage it after the fact, she adds. “We have an opportunity to actually act proactively.”

  • Science Alert ☛ Eyelash Extensions Can Be Seriously Dangerous, Expert Warns

    Be very careful with your eyes.

  • Science Alert ☛ Mice That Eat Less Live Longer – And We May Finally Know Why

    A century-old puzzle may be solved.

  • Science Alert ☛ Astronomers Propose We Change The Definition of 'Planet' – Here's Why

    It makes a lot of sense.

  • Science Alert ☛ Antarctic Worms Have an Amazing Secret For Surviving Deadly Icy Water

    Life finds a way.

  • Science Alert ☛ Ovarian Egg Cells Live an Unusually Long Time, And We Finally Know Why

    A key to fertility?

• Education

  • The Drone Girl ☛ The best drone lesson plans for kids (or adults) in STEM programs

    These drone lesson plans come from some reputable sources including Khan Academy and NASA. So with that here are the best at-home drone lesson plans and other activities for parents to share with their kids (including free drone lesson plans, too): [...]

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ 2024 Business Card Challenge: CardTunes Bluetooth Speaker

    A business card form factor can be quite limiting, but that didn’t stop [Schwimmflugel] from creating CardTunes, an ESP32-based Bluetooth audio speaker that tried something innovative to deliver the output.

  • Hackaday ☛ Using Femtosecond Laser Pulses To Induce Metastable Hidden States In Magnetite

    Hidden states are a fascinating aspect of matter, as these can not normally be reached via natural processes (i.e. non-ergodic), but we can establish them using laser photoexcitation. Although these hidden states are generally very unstable and will often decay within a nanosecond, there is evidence for more persistent states in e.g. vanadates. As for practical uses of these states, electronics and related fields are often mentioned. This is also the focus in the press release by the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) when reporting on establishing hidden states in magnetite (Fe3O4), with the study published in PNAS (Arxiv preprint link).

  • Hackaday ☛ This Vintage Computing Device Is No Baby Food

    Today, if you want a computer for a particular task, you go shopping. But in the early days of computing, exotic applications needed custom computers. What’s more is that with the expense of computers, you likely got one made that fit exactly what you needed and no more. That led to many oddball one-off or nearly one-off computers during that time frame. Same for peripheral devices — you built what you had to and you left the rest on the drafting table. [Vintage Geek] got his hands on what appears to be one of them: the Gerber Scientific 6200.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Conversation ☛ 2024-07-19 [Older] Meditation can be harmful – and can even make mental health problems worse

  • Steve Kirsch goes off the deep end over the Moderna vaccine

    It’s been a while since I’ve paid much attention to Steve Kirsch, the tech bro turned rabid COVID-19 crank and all-around antivaxxer whose flailing efforts to “prove” that vaccines are deadly and COVID-19 is not, coupled with his love of bad Internet surveys as “proof” of how “deadly” vaccines supposedly are and his “Debate me, bro!” crank tactics, sometimes amuse me with his sheer ignorance and stupidity. For example, who can forget when he used a poorly designed Internet survey to “prove” that vaccines cause The Gay and The Trans? Or when he used another poorly designed Internet survey to “prove” that COVID-19 vaccines killed more than 3.5 times the number of people as COVID-19 itself? Or when he incompetently analyzed epidemiological data on an Excel spreadsheet to “prove” that COVID-19 vaccines kill? Sure, he tries to portray himself as “reasonable” and “scientific” by occasionally refuting even more bonkers conspiracy theorists, such as virus deniers, but that proves nothing other than that there actually do exist people more bonkers than he is with respect to antiscience conspiracy theories.

  • US News And World Report ☛ A 12-Year-Old Girl Is Accused of Smothering Her 8-Year-Old Cousin Over an IPhone

    The recording shows the older child using bedding to suffocate her cousin as the younger girl slept in the top bunk, Gibson District Attorney Frederick Agee's statement said. After the child died, “the juvenile cleaned up the victim and repositioned her body,” Agee said.

    A relative told WREG-TV in Memphis that the girls had been arguing over an iPhone after coming from out of town to stay with their grandmother.

  • El País ☛ Tobacco courts young women with covert marketing: The resurgence of cigarettes among influencers and celebrities

    According to data from this association provided by Ramírez, it has been proven that if young people see their referents smoking, it generates a normalization of consumption from an early age, in addition to decreasing the perception of risk. A recent report by the AECC notes that 57.2% of young people believe that smoking is fashionable because actors, streamers, or influencers do it. “The Cancer Observatory also points out that young people’s exposure to so-called digital smoke on social networks and video platforms is strongly correlated with consumption. Among people who have had this exposure there are more than twice as many smokers (53.1%) as among those who have not (24.5%),” says Ramírez.

  • Science Alert ☛ Does a Shot of Olive Oil Really Prevent Hangovers? Here's The Science.

    Hard to swallow.

  • New York Times ☛ Some Seniors Readily Step Back. Some Never Will.

    Researchers are only beginning to understand why some people embrace retirement while others won’t even consider it.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Howard Oakley ☛ Managing Classic Mac OS resources in ResEdit – The Eclectic Light Company

    The Macintosh was intended to be different in many ways. One of them was its file system, which was designed for each file to consist of two forks, one a regular data fork as in normal file systems, the other a structured database of resources, the resource fork.

  • Kevin Liu ☛ Philosophy of Language Modelling

    4. Our empirical findings suggest that transformer LLMs solve compositional tasks by reducing multi-step compositional reasoning into linearized subgraph matching, without necessarily developing systematic problem-solving skills.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Straits Times ☛ North Korea floats trash balloons towards South

    Since May, North Korea has been floating thousands of balloons with bags of trash attached to South Korea.

  • JURIST ☛ Fire breaks out at Ireland asylum center in suspected arson incident

    A fire ignited Saturday night for the third day in a row at a former factory in Coolock, Ireland that was going to be set aside to house asylum seekers.

  • France24 ☛ Cyprus still starkly divided on 50-year anniversary of Turkish invasion

    Fifty years since the Turkish invasion of Cyprus split the island in two and displaced roughly 40 percent of the population, Turkish and Cypriot leaders still have radically different visions for the future of the divided island.

  • Computers Are Bad ☛ 2024-07-20 minuteman missile communications

    A programming note: I am looking at making some changes to how I host things like Computers Are Bad and wikimap that are going to involve a lot more recurring expense. For that and other reasons, I want to see if y'all would be willing to throw some money my way. If everyone reading this gave $3 a month, we could probably buy Jimbo Wales a nice lunch or something.

    I do not intend to paywall anything that I post here. Instead, I'm going to take some of the things that tend to be very long Mastodon threads (how this article originally started!) and send them out to supporters, probably about once a month. They'll be things that I wouldn't post here, usually because they're too short or don't quite have a hook to make a while article interesting.

    [...]

    The realities of ICBM operation are fascinating and incline one towards drama. Somehow the work of submarine and bomber crews seems more ordinary; they are at least "out there," in or near enemy territory. Missile crews are sealed in a very small room buried below a small building in a corner cut out of a farm field near, but not too near, to a highway for logistical convenience. They are entirely dependent on electronic communications, not only to receive their orders, but even to use their weapons. They have the original email job: since 1962, they have served primarily to send and receive messages, mostly by text.

    With the rather purple introduction complete, I am going to talk about this communications technology. But first, just a little more preface.

  • RTL ☛ Nuclear program: Iran can produce fissile material for bomb in 'one or two weeks': Blinken

    According to the IAEA, Iran is the only non-nuclear weapons state to enrich uranium to the high level of 60 percent -- just short of weapons-grade -- while it keeps accumulating large uranium stockpiles, enough to build several atomic bombs, the agency says.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Will YouTube Shorts Outpace TikTok Soon?

    With the looming TikTok ban in the United States, YouTube Shorts growth is beginning to outpace TikTok. That’s thanks to YouTube’s huge appeal in the United States—but also because the competitor is mimicking YouTube features.

  • RFERL ☛ Iran Can Produce Fissile Material For Bomb In 'One Or Two Weeks,' U.S. Says

    [...] Despite comments by Iran's new president, Masud Pezeshkian, who has said he favors reviving the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and global powers, Blinken said the United States had seen indications in recent weeks that Iran has moved forward with its nuclear program. [...]

  • India Times ☛ Digital Competition Bill update; edtech consolidates

    What's the matter: Industry executives said the consolidation is being driven by the fact that smaller companies often offer unique propositions and specialisation in niche categories at a cost which is attractive amid a prolonged funding crunch.

  • Latvia ☛ Siliņa: 'Resisting Russian evil is in all of our interests' / Article

    "As Russia continues its criminal war, we must do more together to provide military, financial and political support to Ukraine - until it wins. Resisting Russian evil is in all of our interests to increase security and prosperity in Europe. It is also an important task to strengthen our democracies, making European countries more resilient against disinformation and hybrid threats. In these matters, Latvia shares its experience and knowledge with other like-minded countries," said Siliņa.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Is Islamist radicalization returning to the Western Balkans?

    Before the Bosnian War (1992–1995), there were no Salafis or Wahhabis in the Balkans, says Vedran Dzihic of the Austrian Institute for International Affairs in Vienna. "Their roots are not in the Balkans," he said.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • New York Times ☛ The Buried Book That Helped Ukraine’s Literary Revival

      To keep it from Russian forces, a writer hid his last manuscript under a cherry tree. Its rediscovery became part of a flowering of interest in Ukrainian literature.

    • New York Times ☛ Divisive Far-Right Politician in Ukraine Is Fatally Shot

      Iryna Farion, a former lawmaker, was known for controversial campaigns to discredit Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

    • RFERL ☛ Former Ukrainian Deputy Known For Promoting Language Shot Dead In Lviv

      A gunman on July 19 shot and killed a nationalist former member of Ukraine's parliament known for vociferous campaigns to defend the Ukrainian language.

    • RFERL ☛ Zelenskiy Congratulates Trump In Call, Agrees To 'Personal Meeting'

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he spoke with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and agreed to a face-to-face meeting to discuss steps to a lasting peace with Russia.

    • RFERL ☛ 2 Dead After Ukrainian Energy Facilities Hit By Russian Drones, Missiles

      Russia has continued its assault on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, with drones targeting facilities throughout the country early on July 20.

    • RFERL ☛ Spain Detains 3 Over Cyberattacks On Pro-Ukrainian Nations

      Spanish police said on July 20 that they had arrested three people accused of taking part in cyberattacks by a pro-Russian group targeting public institutions and strategic sectors in Spain and other NATO countries.

    • RFERL ☛ Slovakia's Prime Minister Blasts Ukraine's Decision To Put LUKoil On Sanctions List

      Slovakia will not be a "hostage" to Ukraine-Russia relations, Prime Minister Robert Fico told his Ukrainian counterpart in a call on July 20 after Kyiv placed Russia’s LUKoil on a sanctions list.

    • LRT ☛ 18-year-old Lithuanian volunteer in Ukraine: ‘I’ve always wanted to go there’

      “It’s up to us to decide how we spend our time, and I think it’s best to spend it on meaningful things,” says Agnė Židelevičiūtė from Kaunas as she travels to volunteer in a Ukrainian hospital. The future school graduate talks about her decision in an interview with LRT.lt.

    • RFERL ☛ Rare Public Protest Held In Krasnodar Over Electricity Blackouts

      Residents of the Russian city of Krasnodar on July 20 staged a rare public protest to vent their anger over recent power cuts in southern Russia.

    • The Straits Times ☛ North Korea’s closer ties with Russia risk China’s ire

      A series of perceived tit-for-tat incidents is pointing to signs of strain in Beijing-Pyongyang ties.

    • New York Times ☛ [Windows] Issue, Not Russia or China, Caused Tech Outage

      With each cascade of digital disaster, new vulnerabilities emerge. The latest chaos wasn’t caused by an adversary, but it provided a road map of American vulnerabilities at a critical moment.

    • JURIST ☛ Belarus court sentences German national to death on mercenary activity charges

      Human rights organization Viasna reported Friday that a German man was sentenced to death by firing squad by the Minsk Regional Court in Belarus and “charged with six serious offences” under the Criminal Code.

    • LRT ☛ Story of Kamal sheds light on brutal reality of migrant pushbacks at Belarus-EU borders

      By now, the story is familiar. In the summer of 2021, the Belarusian regime directed thousands of migrants to the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, dubbed the “hybrid attack” by the affected countries. They soon responded by introducing the so-called pushback policies, turning the migrants away and sending them back to Belarus.

    • RFERL ☛ Belarus In Talks With Berlin Over German Man Sentenced To Death

      Belarus and Germany are holding "consultations" over the fate of a German man reportedly sentenced to death by a court in Minsk last month, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry said on July 20.

    • France24 ☛ Trump speaks to Zelensky, pledges to 'end the war' with Russia

      A week after surviving an assassination attempt, US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Friday said he spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by telephone, and pledged to end Ukraine's war with Russia.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Truthdig ☛ The Rolling Stone UVA Hoax Turns 10: A Time Capsule of the 2010s - Truthdig

    And then famously, spectacularly and eventually legally, the story was proven to be an utter fabrication. Erdely had failed to do the most basic due diligence required of journalism, and the fantastical narrative told to her by a young woman she should never have believed fell apart in profoundly public fashion. As many, many people said at the time, the controversy badly hindered the national conversation on campus rape, and, oh by the way, it probably wasn’t very chill for the young men who had been falsely accused of the most unspeakable crime imaginable or for the administrators who had been portrayed as indifferent monsters.

    What’s remarkable about all of this is that this scenario wasn’t the end of the era of social justice yelling, but a preview of things to come. The culture of fear in media, the groupthink that that culture inspired, the ongoing collapse of a distinction between Twitter diktats and professional requirements in media, the abandonment of any sense that a writer’s job was to do anything other than advance identitarian causes — “A Rape on Campus” was not the sad culmination of all of those things, but a preview of what was to come.

  • Security Week ☛ Judge Dismisses Major SEC Charges Against SolarWinds and CISO 

    A U.S. District Court judge on Thursday dismissed major parts of an SEC lawsuit charging SolarWinds and its CISO Timothy Brown with covering up software security vulnerabilities before and after a major supply chain attack in 2020.

    In a 107-page ruling, New York Judge Paul Engelmayer upheld parts of the SEC claims after Solarwinds but threw out controversial claims that the company’s security chief misled investors about its cybersecurity practices and known risks.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Will Peter Baker Exhibit the Same Tenacity about Medical Records on the Trump Shooting as He Did a Parkinson's Conspiracy Theory?

    But his complaint is useful illustration of something larger.

    Given replays, I have no reason to doubt that the teleprompters were not hit by any bullets Thomas Crooks shot; I accept that early reports that Trump was hit by glass from his teleprompter were wrong.

    I have no preconception about what we would learn from a medical report on the treatment Trump got. It might be something as banal as the news that plastic surgeons had to do some quick reconstruction to replace cartilage in Trump’s ear. Though Eric Trump has already revealed that Trump did not require stitches, which is the most detailed report we’ve gotten.

    What I do know is there once used to be a norm in the United States that presidents and presidential candidates were expected to offer some transparency, however feigned, about two subjects: their finances and their health.

  • NDTV ☛ Microsoft Outage, CrowdStrike: Vincent Flibustier, The Fake CrowdStrike Worker Who Took Credit For Biggest-Ever IT Outage

    He also said that the post was shared by those who knew it was a joke, but the amplification sent it into a zone where people took every word of the tweet literally.

• Environment

  • Axios ☛ There’s too much tourism

    "Local markets become souvenir shops. You're left with tourist towns, not communities.

  • Wired ☛ Enough With the Arrogant Attitudes Towards Extreme Heat

    It’s odd then that in so many aspects of our culture, we view severe heat as something that should be willingly embraced, bravely endured, blithely ignored, or in the case of some marginalized communities, entirely deserved.

    Our books, movies, TV shows, common tropes, idioms, and social media often reinforce the idea that heat is something that—with enough mental acuity—we can overcome. But because of climate change, “pushing through” the heat is something we can no longer physically do. It’s just simply not possible in some parts of the world as temperatures rise past the point of practical survival.

  • NPR ☛ Soda cans are exploding on Southwest flights due to sky-high temperatures

    Some 20 flight attendants have been injured by exploding cans this summer, including one who required stitches, according to CBS News. The union that represents Southwest flight attendants, TWU Local 556, has not responded to NPR’s request for comment.

  • CBS ☛ Summer heat is causing soda cans to burst on Southwest Airlines flights, injuring flight attendants

    But the email adds that the airline has come to "recognize that additional immediate solutions are necessary." The airline is now halting the onboarding of cans with a temperature of 98 degrees or more. Beverages at 98 degrees or over will be returned to the warehouse to cool down.

    The airline is also considering positioning refrigerated trailers at its warehouses to keep cans cool before they are loaded onto provisioning trucks to be brought to the flight line.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Straits Times ☛ South Korea edges ahead of rivals to build Europe’s nuclear reactors

      The South Korean firm is paving the way for Korean companies to potentially score a string of deals in Europe.

    • Tim Bray ☛ Terse Directions

      This post describes a service I want from my online-map provider. I’d use it all the time. Summary: When I’m navigating an area I already know about, don’t give me turn-by-turn, just give me a short list of the streets to take.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Trump to end EV mandate immediately if elected

      Trump has made no secret his disdain for electric cars, claiming they don’t work and will benefit China and Mexico while hurting American workers. Biden, in contrast, has made the shift to battery-powered cars one of his top climate and industrial policies and has set a goal of having 50% of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2030.

    • New York Times ☛ Dozens Dead or Missing After China Highway Collapse

      It was the second such rain-related disaster in less than three months, as extreme weather challenges the country’s extensive network of newly built expressways.

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ At least 11 dead, more than 30 missing after bridge collapses in northern China amid downpours, floods

      By Sébastien Ricci A bridge collapse caused by torrential rains in northern China killed 11 people and left more than 30 missing, state media said Saturday. Large parts of northern and central China have been battered in recent days by rains that have caused flooding and significant damage.

• Finance

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ ‘Happiness is most important’: Young Chinese turn their backs on white-collar jobs in favour of fulfilment

    Braving loneliness, tough auditions and an unfamiliarly hot and humid climate, aspiring actor Guo Ting is determined to make it in China’s answer to Hollywood. The 27-year-old from northern China quit her white-collar job in Beijing this year to move to subtropical Hengdian, home to major movie studios and casting agencies.

  • Tech Layoffs Continue: What's Next?

    In a year that has been nothing short of dramatic for the tech industry, significant job cuts continue to reverberate across some of the biggest names in technology. From giant corporations like Tesla, Amazon, and Microsoft, to smaller fintech startups and app developers, the wave of layoffs in 2024 is reshaping the landscape of innovation and employment. The impact is not just numerical, but deeply human, touching the lives of hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide.

    According to Layoffs.fyi, an independent tracker, over 60,000 job cuts have already occurred across 254 companies in the tech sector just in the first half of the year. This phenomenon, while alarming in its scale, reflects broader trends and challenges within the industry. A critical factor driving these layoffs is the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, which are rendering certain roles obsolete. This transition towards more automated operations, while heralding greater efficiencies, also comes with the cost of significant human displacement.

  • Conneticut Post ☛ Stop & Shop's CT store closing plans leave workers with unanswered questions on future employment

    More than a week after supermarket giant Stop & Shop announced it plans to close five Connecticut stores as part of a larger shutdown of under performing locations, several key questions about what will happen to staff at those stores remain unanswered.

  • Magic Leap Layoffs Follow Recent Google Partnership

    Magic Leap is undergoing layoffs just a few months after announcing a partnership with Google.

  • Fortescue cuts 700 jobs, slows down green hydrogen plans

    Fortescue (ASX: FMG) plans to cut about 700 jobs, or 4.5% of its global workforce, as part of a new restructuring push that will see the Australian iron ore miner scale back its ambitions to turn into a green hydrogen giant.

    The fresh reorganization would ensure the Perth-based mining company remains “lean, impactful and agile,” it said in the statement. Fortescue said its acting chief financial officer, Apple Paget, will assume as permanent CFO to ensure the company’s balance sheet’s health. Sign Up for the Energy Digest

    Billionaire Andrew Forrest, Fortescue’s founder and executive chairman, has been working to transition the business away from iron ore, which stills generates most of the miner’s revenue.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Xi’s answer to critics: Persist!

    China’s Third Plenum this past week doubled down on Chinese leader Pooh-tin Jinping’s determination to put party and state control ahead of economic growth and consumers.

  • RFA ☛ Podcast: Master of Deceit, Episode 1 - The Secret Life of Mr. Wang

  • International Business Times ☛ Nvidia Likely To Announce Surprise Positive Earnings Next Month, Says Goldman Sachs After Meeting Top Company Exec

    During its most recent earnings call, Nvidia said that for each dollar spent on the HGX H200 servers, an API provider serving Meta's Llama 3 tokens could bring in revenues of $7 in four years.

  • Wired ☛ Silicon Valley's Soulless Plutocrats Flip for Donald Trump—to Save Their Billions

    There’s a problem with this argument: No one has seemed to inform founders. This year, 50,000 companies are applying to the startup incubator Y Combinator to fill around 500 slots. And while the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank made 2023 a down year for investment, VCs still managed to invest $170 billion in over 15,000 deals. Andreessen Horowitz raised a $7.2 billion fund just this April. Where’s the crisis?

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ IRS reports collecting $1 billion from rich households' back taxes

    If you're wondering why the billionaire owners of the New York Times, Washington Post, et. al. are trying to sabotage the Democrats in general and Biden specifically, it's because of tangible accomplishments like this.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Part of (computer) security is convincing people that it works

    One of the ways that security is people, not math is that as part of security being ultimately about people, part of the work of computer security is convincing people that your security measures actually work. I don't mean this in a narrow technical sense of specific technical features working as designed; I mean this in the broader sense that they achieve the general goals of security, which is really about safety. People want to know that their data and what they do on the computer is safe, in the full sense of the confidentiality, integrity, and availability triad.

  • NL Times ☛ Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike promises full transparency over Windows outage

    As a result, many Dutch airports had to deal with frustrated travelers and chaotic logistics. About 200 flights at Schiphol Airport were canceled on Friday due to the global outage. In addition, Dutch vacationers had to deal with long queues at check-in or delayed flights. Furthermore, KLM canceled a large part of its operations on Friday because of the computer [sic] failure.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Should you give up social media?

    The quality and usefulness of a social platform are a by-product of three factors: my inputs, other people’s inputs, and the platform creator’s intentions. The first two are quite obvious since social media is the product of what people decide to put into it. The third is what really shapes a platform. Not all platforms are created equal and as a result of that the mixture of inputs and outputs can differ widely from one digital place to another. Fame and money are terrible incentives when it comes to digital spaces because people are willing to do pretty much everything to get a following if that can help them earn money. So every time a platform gets big enough you just know things are doomed to turn to shit. That’s an inescapable reality of social platforms. So if you’re looking for a decent social media space you probably want to stay on one that’s designed to either stay small in size or one that’s designed to stay small in scope.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • VOA News ☛ In South Asia, Trump shooting is used to push political narratives

      Using these and other keywords, CCDH searched top posts on X, finding that conspiracies surrounding the shooting had received 215 million views in the days following the incident. Ahmed noted that media is "borderless," suggesting millions of social media users in South Asia were exposed to the same conspiracy theories as Americans.

      “The reality is that people were seeing this everywhere that they were in the world,” Ahmed said in an interview with VOA.

      Yet the flood of disinformation seeping across South Asia presents a unique challenge for the region. The subcontinent enjoys relatively high internet and social media penetration but low media literacy. That combination can be dangerous, said Colin Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Group.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • New York Times ☛ Bangladesh Orders Curfew to Quell Deadly Protests

    Earlier this week, the government shut down [Internet] connectivity in the name of public safety, saying that such a move was necessary to stop the spread of rumors and disinformation. But it also had the effect of stopping protesters from sharing information and making plans on social media, and choked the flow of information in and out of the country.

    As reports of deaths have mounted, human rights groups condemned the security forces’ crackdown and the [Internet] shutdown.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Le Monde ☛ A prison sentence in Russia and a glimmer of hope for US journalist Evan Gershkovich

    Investigators never publicly presented a shred of evidence against 32-year-old Gershkovich, the Russia correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, who was arrested on March 29, 2023, in a Yekaterinburg restaurant. As is customary in the Russian legal system, the court reiterated the conclusions of the Federal Security Service (FSB, one of the heirs to the KGB). From the outset, they accused Gershkovich of "collecting information on a Russian defense enterprise," a crime punishable by 20 years in prison. The prosecutor had asked for 18. By giving a sentence of 16 years, the judge has made a show of being lenient.

  • VOA News ☛ Espionage trial of US journalist Evan Gershkovich in Russia reaches closing arguments

    Gershkovich, 32, was arrested March 29, 2023, while on a reporting trip to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. Authorities claimed, without offering any evidence, that he was gathering secret information for the United States. The American-born son of immigrants from the USSR, Gershkovich is the first Western journalist arrested on espionage charges in post-Soviet Russia.

    “Evan’s wrongful detention has been an outrage since his unjust arrest 477 days ago, and it must end now,” the Wall Street Journal said Thursday in a statement. “Even as Russia orchestrates its shameful sham trial, we continue to do everything we can to push for Evan’s immediate release and to state unequivocally: Evan was doing his job as a journalist, and journalism is not a crime. Bring him home now.”

  • VOA News ☛ Mongolia sentences prominent journalist to nearly 5 years in prison

    “This event shows that there is a real risk that journalists will be convicted again and again if the provisions of the Criminal Code, which are characterized by undue restrictions on the professional activities of journalists and the stifling of critical voices, are still in force,” Galbaatar said. “As a result, journalists have the consequences of fear and self-censorship.”

  • The Barents Observer ☛ “It shows that the emperor has no clothes,” interview with The Moscow Times editor

    The “undesirable” label means that a criminal case can be opened against anyone who is associated with The Moscow Times now. Many other Russian media outlets, such as Meduza, TV Rain, and Radio Liberty, have also been labeled “undesirable” by Russian authorities.

    The Moscow Times had been based in Russia for 30 years before it had to relocate its staff to Amsterdam, Netherlands, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Over the years, The Moscow Times has been the starting point for many prominent reporters from around the world who have set out to cover Russia. For example, the American journalist Evan Gershkovich, who was sentenced to 16 years imprisonment in Russia today, also began his career in The Moscow Times.

  • ANF News ☛ Journalist Topaloğlu deported to Marmara Prison

    The statement continued: "Topaloğlu has been a journalist for more than 15 years. We condemn the media that targeted him while the trial process is ongoing and the presumption of innocence is violated. We emphasize once again that we will defend journalists and journalism in an environment where the law is disregarded, the presumption of innocence is erased and all opposition groups are criminalized by the government with 'terrorist' rhetoric. Journalist Topaloğlu, who is at risk of losing his eyes if not treated, should be released immediately."

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK foreign press club 'concerned' after HKJA head Selina Cheng fired by WSJ

    “We urge The Wall Street Journal and all news organisations to respect reporters’ rights to join press clubs and to advocate for press freedom without the fear of punitive action from their own newsrooms,” the statement read. It added that press freedom and Hongkongers’ right to join and form trade unions were enshrined in Article 27 of Hong Kong’s mini-constitution the Basic Law.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • New York Times ☛ Psychologist Who Waterboarded C.I.A. Prisoners Defends Method’s Use in 9/11 Case

    The man accused of planning the attacks was waterboarded 183 times. The now outlawed “enhanced interrogation” technique is considered a form of torture.

  • Off Guardian ☛ The Turn of the Screw

    Remember when you were a kid and saw “thumbscrew torture” for the first time in some late-night horror film? It was the coolest. To inflict so much pain with so little effort—just a tiny turn of the screw and intense wailing would ensue. How cool was that?—horrifying as well.

  WSJ union urges paper to reinstate fired HKJA head Selina Cheng

  On Wednesday, Cheng hosted a press conference after being fired, saying she had been dismissed for taking up the position of HKJA chairperson. The city’s largest media union, founded in 1968, has seen increasing pressure from authorities.

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Black Sailors Exonerated 80 Years After Deadly World War II Disaster

  Black sailors had previously raised concerns about the safety of loading operations at the port. However, not long after the deadly blast, they were ordered to return to work. Worried about the working conditions, some of the men refused, arguing that they needed more training and protective equipment.

  Initially, 258 Black sailors declined to return to work. But after being threatened with punishment, 208 resumed their posts. The Navy still convicted the 208 men for disobeying orders and sentenced them to bad conduct discharges. They did not get paid for three months.

• [Repeat] AccessNow ☛ A pathway forward for digital rights

  As I prepare to leave Access Now after serving 15 years as its Executive Director and co-founder, I have taken this moment to reflect on my personal learnings and observations on the evolving fight to defend and extend human rights in the digital age for people and communities most at risk. This fight, shared by so many both within Access Now and across all facets of the human rights movement around the world, has only grown more pressing over the years.

• Hindustan Times ☛ Tibetan govt-in-exile takes on Chinese embassy, says Tibet not ‘internal affair’

  Rejecting the Chinese embassy’s description of the Tibetan government-in-exile as a “separatist” organisation, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) on Friday said the passage of a new law by the US administration made it clear that Tibet is not an “internal affair” of China.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Matt Birchler ☛ I’m glad iPhones are getting RCS

    In my view, RCS is the next evolution of SMS and MMS. Whether it technically may be something new, that doesn’t matter, it’s good that there is a baseline messaging service that anyone can use that is cross-platform and not owned by any one company (despite seemingly many people thinking Google invented and owns RCS). Improving the baseline messaging option is valuable, and people who hate RCS with a passion can choose not to use it.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Press Gazette ☛ Casual payments for news: Toronto star launches new subs model

  The title is using technology from UK-based Axate which has worked with UK titles including Popbitch and Cornwall Reports.

  Axate works by setting up a secure digital wallet for readers, which they can use to pay for individual articles.

• Wired ☛ Spotify, Stop Trying to Become a Social Media App

  This suggests that Spotify wants to be more like YouTube, which, since the aughts, has allowed largely unregulated comment sections to live below its videos.

• NPR ☛ Netflix ends its cheapest ad-free subscription

  The basic plan was the only tier that didn’t allow multiple users to stream simultaneously.