Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ George Washington Gets Cleaned Up With A Laser

  Now, we wouldn’t necessarily call ourselves connoisseurs of fine art here at Hackaday. But we do enjoy watching [Julian Baumgartner]’s YouTube channel, where he documents the projects that he takes on as a professional conservator. Folks send in their dirty or damaged paintings, [Julian] works his magic, and the end result often looks like a completely different piece. Spoilers: if you’ve ever looked at an old painting and wondered why the artist made it so dark and dreary — it probably just needs to be cleaned.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Sorted Food questions for your dream meal

  The Sorted gents have a fun show format where they ask cryptic questions to determine how to cook someone’s dream meal. It’s all quite silly and tenuous, but that’s the whole point! Ben was the latest to be interviewed, so I thought it’d be fun to answer the same questions.

• The Age AU ☛ ‘OnlyFans saved my life’: Why Olympians are turning to the adult-only site

  Liveable though it may be, a yearly salary of £28,000 falls short of what an average 30-year-old makes. Median pay as of April 2023 for 30-39-year-olds was £37,544, according to official statistics from the House of Commons library. In that context, £28,000 per year hardly keeps pace with other workers of Laugher’s age, not least when one considers the hours worked. According to Laugher’s teammate Tom Daley, in the run-up to the Olympics, divers train for upwards of eight hours per day, six days per week.

• Logikal Solutions ☛ PayMore == Scam

  Talked with some people who have quite a bit of equipment they routinely get rid of. Everybody has a story about the bait & switch “purchase” offer. Once you take the time to pack things up then drag it there, they tell you they can’t buy it. Pause to let your anger set in, then try to set the hook with “but I can recycle it for you.”

  The goal is to get you pissed enough to just leave that pile there. No money paid. Sell it as “refurbished” on-line. Pure profit.

  Scam probably works well on most people. I didn’t want to scrounge up boxes and ship this stuff, but I can, I’ve done it many times. I certainly wasn’t going to “just dump it” because even wholesale the pile is worth over $1000. Heck, I looked before writing this and some places are trying to sell z820 models with only 8-core and under 64GB of RAM for over $1800 today. I’ll take $650 plus shipping.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Former NASA Scientist Doing Experiment to Prove We Live in a Simulation

    Now, scientists at the California State Polytechnic University (CalPoly) have gotten started on the first experiment, putting Campbell's far-fetched hypothesis to the test.

    And Campbell has set up an entire non-profit called Center for the Unification of Science and Consciousness (CUSAC) to fund these endeavors. The experiments are "expected to provide strong scientific evidence that we live in a computer-simulated virtual reality," according to a press release by the group.

  • Science Alert ☛ Genetically Enhanced Humans May Be The Future of Space Travel

    To boldly go where no one has gone before.

  • Science Alert ☛ Blue Light From Your Phone Really Can Affect Your Skin. Here's How.

    Simple steps to reduce your exposure.

  • Science Alert ☛ The Mystery of Jupiter's Shrinking Great Red Spot Might Be Solved

    It's literally starving.

  • Science Alert ☛ Your Genes May Influence Your Behavior More Than You Realize

    Something stirring under the surface.

  • Science Alert ☛ Ancient Genes of Zombie Viruses Revealed as Hidden Drivers of Cancer

    A genetic curse traced back millions of years.

  • Science Alert ☛ One Diet Choice While Pregnant May Protect Your Child's Heart For Life

    Eating for two.

  • Science Alert ☛ Worms in Chernobyl Zone Appear Mysteriously Unscathed by Radiation

• Education

  • The Straits Times ☛ Malaysia’s Chinese schools make adjustments as they continue to draw more students of other races

    Accommodating new students while maintaining the schools' identity and culture is no easy task.

  • New York Times ☛ California School Official Who Embezzled $16.7 Million Gets Nearly 6 Years in Prison

    Jorge Armando Contreras used his position at a school district in Orange County to fund a luxurious lifestyle, prosecutors said.

  • Lou Plummer ☛ Computer People

    Our database administrator and programmer at work is a woman older than me who works in a silo because there's no one else at the university with her skillset to give her any help. She told me that when she works some SQL voodoo magic to get a particularly complex query to work, she has to call a former colleague to celebrate because none of the rest of us even have the context to understand her genius. She has a great back story, where, like me, she decided she enjoyed tech and wanted to make it a career, only she chose programming which required her to get formal education. Today she has a master's degree in CS, and no one messes with her because the place would fall apart without her. Getting to work with her is a bright spot in my day.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Fintech bullies stole your kid’s lunch money

    Three companies control the market for school lunch payments. They take as much as 60 cents out of every dollar poor kids' parents put into the system to the tune of $100m/year. They're literally stealing poor kids' lunch money.

    In its latest report, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau describes this scam in eye-watering, blood-boiling detail: [...]

  • Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Organization Architecture

    The reliability of a service is directly impacted by the shape of the organization providing it. The shape, not the budget, headcount, or maturity level —as irresponsible leaders like to frame it!

    This article elaborates:

    • Why does the shape of the organization matter for reliability?

    • How does it impact communication between teams and by extension interactions between the components of the system?

    • What insight can be unlocked with consumer journeys to create a healthy organization that builds reliable systems?

    This is part 1 of a longer article about the pros and cons of different organization structures that I dubbed Smorgasbord, Kebab, and Cake! 😋

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Faulty Nvidia H100 GPUs and HBM3 memory caused half of failures during LLama 3 training — one failure every three hours for Meta's 16,384 GPU training cluster

    In a 16,384 H100 GPU cluster, something breaks down every few hours or so. In most cases, H100 GPUs are to blame, according to Meta.

  • Hackaday ☛ Need Many Thin Parts? Try Multi-material Stack Printing

    Admittedly it’s a bit of a niche application, but if you need lots of flat 3D printed objects, one way to go about it is to print them in a stack and separate them somehow. An old(er) solution is to use a non-extruding “ironing” step between each layer, which makes them easier to pull apart. But another trick is to use the fact that PLA and PETG don’t stick well to each other to your advantage. And thus is born multi-material stack printing. (Video, embedded below the break.)

  • Hackaday ☛ MIDI Controller In A Cubic Inch

    MIDI as a standard has opened up a huge world to any musician willing to use a computer to generate or enhance their playing and recording. Since the 80s, it has it has revolutionized the way music is produced and performed, allowing for seamless integration of digital instruments, automation of complex sequences, and unprecedented control over everything from production to editing. It has also resulted in a number of musical instruments that probably wouldn’t be possible without electronic help, like this MIDI instrument which might be the world’s smallest.

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ My desk setup, 2024 edition

    Since that blog post, I slimmed back down a ton when I moved to Berlin from Helsinki using public transport (yup, that was quite a ride). When I came back home last year and rented a larger apartment, I decided to start investing a bit more to setting up a home office setup with bit more functionality.

    When Joona asked (toot in Finnish) about people’s setups, it inspired me to take some photos and share how my desk setup looks like now in 2024.

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Apple wilts in China as iPhone slips to sixth place

      iPhone shipments there slid 3.1% during the period, compared with an 11% year-on-year rise among Android-powered competitors, according to market tracker IDC. That squeezed Apple out of the top five handset makers in the country for the first time in four years.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-07-19 [Older] Injectable HIV medication: What you need to know

  • Steve Kirsch had a subretinal hemmorhage. No, it wasn’t vaccines.

    Contrary to a number of antivaxxers, who fantasize about a “Nuremberg 2.0” want to so desperately want to see what they view as the forces of righteousness “hang ’em high,” complete with obsessively posting the poster to the old Clint Eastwood Movie by that title, I don’t wish ill upon antivaxxers as persons. Unlike antivaxxers such as, say, Paul Alexander, I don’t fantasize about seeing my enemies dangling from the end of a rope, although I will confess to some amusement when that same antivaxxer starts fantasizing about seeing one of his fellow antivaxxers hang along with all the public health officials and scientists, physicians, and vaccine scientists that he normally fantasizes about hanging. So, when someone like Steve Kirsch, an aging tech bro turned one of the most rabid and ridiculous antivaxxers I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot of antivaxxers over the last two decades), suffers a serious health problem, like a subretinal hemorrhage that causes a serious hit to his vision in one eye, unlike someone like Alexander, I don’t gloat or view it as some sort of deserved retribution. I simply wish him well strictly from the standpoint of his health, hoping that he recovers all or most of the vision in that eye, even as I don’t wish him success from the standpoint of spreading his antivaccine disinformation.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ Doing the work

    My issues are also compounded lately for how I’m trying to not do other things, to have a way narrower project list and life focus. When I first started working on GTD I initially was fairly focused and managed to do longer projects but as the years went by and as our lives became more digital I started spinning more and more and more and more and more plates. Sure, the occasional longer project did get finished but mostly it was shorter quicker stuff. I was living the SOFA life, involuntarily. Since last fall, I’ve been working on a new approach where I try hard to not do things that aren’t on the list and that’s hard to get used to.

  • NYPost ☛ Elderly NYC woman, 95, beaten by home health aide in chilling video: ‘Could see her begging’

    Dorothy Foye was at her home in upper Manhattan July 21 when, she said, the woman her family hired to look after her started cursing at her and throwing household objects in her direction.

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ ‘El Mayo’ Zambada: Who is the elusive Sinaloan drug trafficker arrested in Texas?

    While his colleague El Chapo drew global attention with prison escapes and a flashy lifestyle, El Mayo avoided the spotlight — and arrest — for decades.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • OSTechNix ☛ Google’s Gemini 1.5 Flash Is Now Free For All

    Gemini 1.5 Flash is now FREE for everyone! This upgrade includes faster response times, better reasoning, image understanding capabilities and a larger context window.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • [Repeat] Hong Kong Free Press ☛ New CCTV cameras in HK to be equipped with facial recognition

      In an interview published by iCable on Friday, Secretary for Security Chris Tang said the government planned to introduce artificial intelligence to be able to identify faces in the thousands of new CCTV cameras the city is setting up.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Catholic priest Jeffrey Burrill sues Grindr and says it caused him to lose his job

      Burrill alleged that Grindr did not protect his data and inform him that vendors could access it, leading him to lose his job and suffer “significant damage” to his reputation.

    • Techdirt ☛ FTC Oversteps Authority, Demands Unconstitutional Age Verification & Moderation Rules

      But just because the app was awful, the founders behind it were awful, and it seems clear they violated some laws, does not mean any and all remedies are open and appropriate.

    • YLE ☛ Finland and US fail to reach Global Entry visa deal for quicker airport arrival

      Germany, Britain and the Netherlands have joined the Global Entry scheme as EU states, but did so before GDPR came into force.

      When Finland started negotiations with the US in 2021, officials raised certain questions about the plan. If an individual was rejected for Global Entry status due to information in Finnish law enforcement records, would that information stay with the US authorities and subsequently make their entry into the US more difficult?

      In addition, the system could allow criminal organisations the ability to check what data Finnish police held on certain individuals by applying for Global Entry status and seeing whether or not the application was successful.

    • Futurism ☛ Security Firm Alarmed to Discover Their Remote Employee Is a North Korean [Attacker]

      The company hired the software engineer after they had passed through four separate video interviews and cleared background checks.

      But shortly after the worker was sent a company-issued computer, things immediately went awry.

      "The moment it was received, it immediately started to load malware," the company's founder and CEO Stu Sjouwerman wrote in a blog post.

      As it turns out, the engineer was a "fake IT worker from North Korea."

      "This was a real person using a valid but stolen US-based identity," Sjouwerman wrote. "The picture was AI 'enhanced.'"

    • Atlantic Council ☛ The sovereignty trap

      On its face, “sovereign AI” as a concept is focused on enabling states to mitigate potential downsides of relying on foreign-made large AI models. Sovereign AI is NVIDIA’s attempt to turn this growing demand from governments into a new market, as the company seeks to offer governments computational resources that can aid them in ensuring that AI systems are tailored to local conditions. By invoking sovereignty, however, NVIDIA is weighing into a complex existing geopolitical context. The broader push from governments for AI sovereignty will have important consequences for the digital ecosystem on the whole and could undermine internet freedom. NVIDIA is seeking to respond to demand from countries that are eager for more indigenous options for developing compute capacity and AI systems. However, sovereign AI can create “sovereignty traps” that unintentionally grant momentum to authoritarian governments’ efforts to undermine multistakeholder governance of digital technologies. This piece outlines the broader geopolitical context behind digital sovereignty and identifies several potential sovereignty traps associated with sovereign AI.1

    • Futurism ☛ Man Accused of Pretending to Be Lawyer Using AI, Representing Real Clients

      A South Carolina man accused of pretending to be a lawyer has just had another allegation leveled against him: that he used AI to write his phony legal documents, local daily newspaper The Post and Courier reports.

      The accused, Nathan Chambers, is alleged to have used his father's name to pose as a real attorney — and apparently even went as far as actually representing real clients, in multiple courts, in person.

    • Futurism ☛ Investors Are Suddenly Getting Very Concerned That AI Isn't Making Any Serious Money

      An increasing number of Silicon Valley investors and Wall Street analysts are starting to ring the alarm bells over the countless billions of dollars being invested in AI, an overconfidence they warn could result in a massive bubble.

    • Howard Oakley ☛ A brief history of kernel panics

      Mac OS X brought a big change to that, with its kernel architecture to ensure that crashing apps were less likely to cause the whole system to collapse, although early versions of the kernel and its extensions often proved less stable that we’d hoped. In the first couple of versions of Mac OS X, handling of panics was fairly basic, with lines of text displayed, and the Mac left unresponsive for the user to force it to restart.

      With Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar came the well-known panic display, in which a transparent grey curtain dropped down the display to reveal a multi-language message instructing the user to restart the Mac.

    • The Atlantic ☛ OpenAI’s search tool has already made a mistake

      AI tools are supposed to refashion the web, the physical world, and our lives—in the context of internet search, by providing instant, straightforward, personalized answers to the most complex queries. In contrast with a traditional Google search, which surfaces a list of links, a searchbot will directly answer your question for you. For that reason, websites and media publishers are afraid that AI searchbots will eat away at their traffic. But first, these programs need to work. SearchGPT is only the latest in a long line of AI search tools that exhibit all sorts of errors: inventing things whole cloth, misattributing information, mixing up key details, apparent plagiarism. As I wrote, today’s AI “can’t properly copy-paste from a music festival’s website.”

    • Venture Beat ☛ From unions to strikes, this has been a busy week | Kaser Focus

      If there’s a hot word for this week, it’s undoubtedly “union.” If you’d asked me at the beginning of the week what stories I thought I was going to see — I don’t know what answer I would have given, but “unionization efforts from within the industry’s top studios” probably wouldn’t have been the first or second response. But I’m pleased to see these developments in the industry nonetheless, especially after months and months and months of nothing but layoffs stories.

      First we have the formation of the OneBGSUSA union at Bethesda Game Studios (which technically happened last week, but I didn’t talk about it in the last KF). 241 workers formed the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft studio. Then, this week, the World of Warcraft team formed the World of Warcraft Game Makers Guild, another wall-to-wall union that consists of over 500 members. In both cases, the unions formed following Microsoft’s 2022 labor neutrality agreement with the Communication Workers of America (the parent union). Microsoft has said it will engage in good faith negotiations with both unions.

    • The Rise of Game Industry Unions and What to Play This Week

      The gaming industry has seen a surprising development this week with the rise of unionization efforts within some of the top studios. This comes as a refreshing change from the constant news of layoffs that have plagued the industry for months. One notable example is the formation of the OneBGSUSA union at Bethesda Game Studios, which is the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft studio. With 241 workers joining the union, it highlights a growing trend towards workers seeking better conditions and representation within the industry.

      In addition to the OneBGSUSA union, the World of Warcraft team also formed the World of Warcraft Game Makers Guild, a wall-to-wall union consisting of over 500 members. These unions have emerged following Microsoft’s labor neutrality agreement with the Communication Workers of America, the parent union. Microsoft has committed to engaging in good faith negotiations with both unions, showing a willingness to address the concerns of their workers.

  • Confidentiality

    • Unmitigated Risk ☛ HSMs Largely Protect Keys from Theft Rather Than Abuse

      In short, beyond a simplistic access control model HSMs usually do not protect keys in use; they protect them from theft. To make things worse, since they have no concept of the workload, resulting in the auditing mechanisms they have lacking adequate detail to even usefully monitor the use of keys.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Straits Times ☛ North Korea vows 'total destruction' of enemy on Korean War anniversary

    SEOUL - North Korea vowed to \"totally destroy\" its enemies in case of war when leader Kim Jong Un gives an order, state media KCNA reported on Sunday.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Seoul military investigates information leak of agents spying on North Korea

    It comes after a joint warning with the US and Britain that North Korean hackers carried out a global campaign to steal military secrets.

  • New York Times ☛ South Korea Reports Leak From a Top Intelligence Agency

    It’s highly unusual for the nation’s authorities to publicly acknowledge a leak from the command​, which is one of South Korea’s top two spy agencies.

  • Defence Web ☛ Korean War participants honoured

    27 July 2024 marks the 71st Anniversary of the Korean War Armistice, a war many refer to as “a forgotten war”. The South Korean Embassy hosted a memorial event on Friday 26 July 2024, honouring those who answered the United Nations’ call to aid South Korea.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-07-20 [Older] Germany's Scholz commemorates 'Valkyrie' plot against Hitler

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-07-20 [Older] Operation Valkyrie: 80 years since the failed plot to kill Adolf Hitler

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-07-20 [Older] Middle East updates: Israel strikes Houthi-held port

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-07-20 [Older] Divided Cyprus marks 50th anniversary of Turkish invasion

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-07-20 [Older] Greek Border Guard Injured by Shots Near Northern Border With Turkey, Police Say

  • ANF News ☛ 2024-07-23 [Older] Several organizations in Izmir protest attacks by Turkey against South Kurdistan

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-07-23 [Older] Iraq Bans a Kurdish Separatist Group and Strengthens Its Cooperation With Turkey

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Trump Invites Reporters to Start Demanding His Medical Records

    Much higher in the story, though, NYT reveals something funny: after not subpoenaing Trump in the Mueller inquiry, blowing off Trump’s efforts to extort campaign help from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after needing a search of his home to retrieve some subset of the classified documents Trump stole, the FBI has finally asked Donald Trump for an interview.

    "The bureau has asked to interview Mr. Trump as part of its broader investigation, hoping to provide insights into the shooting and possibly a more complete record of his injury, the official said,"

    This is going to be like the Feds getting Al Capone on taxes, isn’t it?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ US government says TikTok poses threat to national security

    On Friday, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that Byte Dance, which is TikTok's parent company, might obey orders from the Chinese government and give it access to US users' data. They said that Chinese officials could also order TikTok to manipulate the app's algorithm and thus expand Beijing's "existing malign influence operations" and boost its efforts "to undermine trust in our democracy and exacerbate social divisions."

    "The serious national-security threat posed by TikTok is real," the department said in the filing.

  • RTL ☛ Security concerns: US defends law forcing sale of TikTok app

    The US response counters that the law addresses national security concerns, not speech, and that TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance is not able to claim First Amendment rights here.

    The filing details concerns that ByteDance could, and would, comply with Chinese government demands for data about US users or yield to pressure to censor or promote content on the platform, senior justice department officials said in a briefing.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Justice Department: TikTok collected U.S. user views on abortion, religion

    Government lawyers wrote in documents filed to the federal appeals court in Washington late Friday that TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, used an internal web-suite system called Lark to enable TikTok employees to speak directly with ByteDance engineers in China.

    TikTok employees used Lark to send sensitive data about U.S. users, information that has wound up being stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees in China, federal officials said.

  • New York Times ☛ Justice Dept. Defends TikTok Law That Forces App’s Sale or Ban

    In its first detailed response to a legal challenge, the agency said TikTok’s proposed changes wouldn’t prevent China from using it to collect U.S. users’ data or spread propaganda.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Space Force mulling nuclear protection for missile-tracking satellites

    The Space Force has launched a study to consider what capabilities to host on future satellites that detect and track advanced, high-speed weapons.

  • The Hill ☛ Trump urges Christians to vote: ‘You won’t have to do it’ in four years

    “I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote,” Trump said.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Trump tells Christians they ‘won’t have to’ vote again after election as ex-president slams FBI: Live updates

    “You won’t have to do it anymore, four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore,” Trump said. “You’ve got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

  • NPR ☛ Trump tells Christian voters they 'won't have to vote anymore' if he's elected

    Trump also urged Christians to turn out for him ahead of Election Day, calling it the "most important election ever." He added that if elected, Christian-related concerns will be "fixed" so much so that they would no longer need to be politically engaged.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Trump Says Americans ‘Won’t Have to Vote Anymore’ If He Wins

    Trump’s remarks represent an extraordinary departure from democratic norms in the United States—rarely if ever has a major party’s presidential candidate directly stated his aim to make elections meaningless, a notorious hallmark of autocracy.

  • VOA News ☛ US claims TikTok collected user views on issues like abortion, gun control

    "By directing ByteDance or TikTok to covertly manipulate that algorithm; China could for example further its existing malign influence operations and amplify its efforts to undermine trust in our democracy and exacerbate social divisions," the brief states.

  • NPR ☛ Justice Dept. claims TikTok collected views on issues like abortion and gun control

    The concern, they said, is more than theoretical, alleging that TikTok and ByteDance employees are known to engage in a practice called "heating" in which certain videos are promoted in order to receive a certain number of views. While this capability enables TikTok to curate popular content and disseminate it more widely, U.S. officials posit it can also be used for nefarious purposes.

  • BoingBoing ☛ New 9/11 WTC collapse footage emerges after 23 years

    He wrote in the YouTube description: "Footage I filmed of the World Trade Center Collapsing on 9/11/2001. Filmed from the roof of 64 St Marks Place in NYC on a Sony VX2000 with teleconverter. For historical archival purposes only."

  • RFERL ☛ In Speech To Romanian Town, Hungary's Orban Again Rails Against The West

    Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban again ripped into the European Union, using a speech in a Romanian spa town to trumpet his nationalist-tinged agenda, including a full-throated embrace of former U.S. President Donald Trump.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ ‘Maybe you’ll even come back’: Two Russian men recount how their own families tried to make them go to war — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • India Times ☛ Microsoft's LinkedIn settles advertisers' lawsuit over alleged overcharges

    LinkedIn agreed to pay $6.625 million to settle a proposed class action accusing the Microsoft unit of overcharging advertisers by inflating how many people watched video ads on its platform.

  • Futurism ☛ “JD Vance Couch” Searches Outpace “Trump Shooting” Queries on Google

    As with all the best (and worst) memes, the Vance couch story took on a life of its own soon after it dropped. After Snopes debunked the rumor — or at least verified that no such passage exists in "Hillbilly Elegy" — the Associated Press took it on for size. Being a fundamentally different news outlet from Snopes, however, the AP tried to do the impossible: verify that the Ohio senator has never had sex with a couch. Soon after, it retracted the story, jettisoning the meme into supernova status.

  • Techdirt ☛ 1st Circuit: No Immunity For School Officials Who Abused Wiretap Law To Hassle Someone For Recording Them

    Not only was this a misreading of the state law, it demonstrated inexcusable incomprehension of basic First Amendment principles. Even if the law might have been able to be bent to fit this set of circumstances, it still wouldn’t have applied to Berge, whose recording dealt with issues of public interest, namely recently enacted policies in response to the pandemic.

  • VOA News ☛ Mysterious bones could hold evidence of Japanese war crimes, activists say 

    Kazuyuki Kawamura, a former Shinjuku district assembly member who has devoted most of his career to resolving the bone mystery, recently obtained 400 pages of research materials from the 2001 report using freedom of information requests, and said it shows that the government "tactfully excluded" key information from witness accounts.

  • BoingBoing ☛ NYT's pro-Trump Democratic voter turns out to be famed fraudster

    The name, though, rang bells. It turns out that Ayala has her own Wikipedia article. Why would that be? Because she is the famed criminal who put a human finger in a Wendy's chili among various other escapades.

  • [Old] Paste Media Group ☛ Turns Out Rep. Tricia Cotham, North Carolina Abortion Traitor, Was a GOP Plant All Along

    The saga of North Carolina state Rep. Tricia Cotham (R) is a strange one: She was a vocally pro-choice Democrat who revealed in 2015 that she’d had a medically necessary abortion, then won her old seat in November 2022 only to defect to the Republican party in April and give the GOP a supermajority that they used to pass an abortion ban. Now, new reporting shows that local Republicans urged her to run as a Democrat—fooling voters in her very blue Charlotte-area district into thinking she strongly supported abortion rights—and were planting the seeds for her party switch for months.

• Environment

  • Wired ☛ Project 2025 Wants to Propel America Into Environmental Catastrophe

    Dozens of conservative groups contributed to Project 2025, which recommends changes that would touch every aspect of American life and transform federal agencies—from the Department of Defense to the Department of Interior to the Federal Reserve. Although it has largely garnered attention for its proposed crackdowns on human rights and individual liberties, the blueprint would also undermine the country’s extensive network of environmental and climate policies and alter the future of American fossil fuel production, climate action, and environmental justice.

  • Science Alert ☛ Artificial Sweetener May Be Wreaking Havoc on Microorganisms

    Sample measurements of cyanobacteria and diatoms were taken across a five-day period, revealing the artificial sweetener clearly had an impact. Compared to control groups, cyanobacteria concentrations increased in freshwater when exposed to sucralose, and spiked and then crashed in brackish water.

    As for diatoms, the broad trend across freshwater and brackish water was a reduction in populations after sucralose was added. The impact was more noticeable in the freshwater experiments, the researchers found.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-07-19 [Older] Hungarian heatwave puts F1 driver safety in focus

  • Energy/Transportation

    • New York Times ☛ Memecoins, Cryptocurrencies Based on Internet Memes, Roar Back

      One of the wildest, most scam-ridden corners of the cryptocurrency industry — memecoins, which are rooted in internet memes — has roared back.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-07-20 [Older] China: Highway bridge collapses, killing several

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-07-19 [Older] Turkey to Send Navy to Somalia After Agreeing Oil and Gas Search

    • Wired ☛ Donald Trump Backs 'Strategic Bitcoin Stockpile' in Speech to [Cryptocurrency] Faithful

      Right now, the US government owns more than 210,000 bitcoins that were seized via illegal operations like the online dark market Silk Road and the ponzi scheme BitConnect. It’s worth approximately $14 billion at time of writing.

      This move confirmed rumors spread by bitcoin enthusiasts who are hopeful that endorsement of a reserve from Trump could bolster the price of the cryptocurrency.

    • H2 View ☛ EU approves €1.2bn Spanish hydrogen funding scheme for 100MW of electrolysers

      The European Commission has approved a €1.2bn ($1.3bn) Spanish scheme set to explore the production of green hydrogen with an installed capacity of at least 100MW.

      Approved under the State aid Temporary Crisis and Transition Framework (TCTF), the project aims to develop clusters or valleys that will foster the transition to Net Zero. This will include production of hydrogen and its derivatives, hydrogen storage and the production of renewable electricity.

    • Michigan News ☛ Cyclists, pedestrians play dead at die-in protest outside Ann Arbor’s city hall - mlive.com

      The July 26 demonstration was intended to call attention to 2023 being the most dangerous year for pedestrians on Ann Arbor streets in nearly decade and remember victims injured or killed by drivers as they were walking or biking.

    • The North Lines IN ☛ Centre’s major push for rooftop solar plants

      The new initiative has the potential to generate an additional 270 MW of solar energy in the union territory by December 2025. It would cover 20,000 households and at least 22,494 government structures.

      Currently, 3,800 residential and 3,825 government buildings in J&K have been solarised, with a total capacity of 60 MW. The Jammu and Kashmir Energy Development Agency (JAKEDA) is the primary executing department.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-07-19 [Older] EU countries offering tax relief to foreign skilled workers

  • Cohere faces backlash after surprising layoff post funding success

    As someone who’s spent a significant part of my career tracking the roller-coaster that is the tech industry, I’ve seen my share of exciting highs and disappointing lows. I’m sure many of you have, as well. Today, we turn our attention to the unexpected turn of events at Cohere, a tech startup that recently laid off a number of employees not long after securing hefty funding.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Wired ☛ A North Korean Hacker Tricked a US Security Vendor Into Hiring Him—and Immediately Tried to [Breach] Them

    KnowBe4 said it was looking for a software engineer for its internal IT AI team. The firm hired a person who, it turns out, was from North Korea and was "using a valid but stolen US-based identity" and a photo that was "enhanced" by artificial intelligence. There is now an active FBI investigation amid suspicion that the worker is what KnowBe4's blog post called "an Insider Threat/Nation State Actor."

  • Wired ☛ Open Source AI Has Founders—and the FTC—Buzzing

    On Thursday, the enthusiasm for open source extended beyond just YC-backed founders who stand to benefit from a less expensive way to harness generative AI’s power. Lina Khan, the chairperson of the Federal Trade Commission, was one of the most prominent advocates for open source AI at the event.

    Speaking to a crowd of approximately 200 entrepreneurs, Khan said it’s not an exaggeration to suggest that nearly all of Y Combinator's most successful companies wouldn’t exist without open source software and the community behind it. The FTC has been focused on defining and exploring open-weights AI models, which are slightly less “open” than fully open source AI models. With open-weights models available to them, “smaller players can bring their ideas to market,” Khan suggested.

  • Techdirt ☛ The Messy Reality Behind Trying To Protect The Internet From Terrible Laws

    Gone are the days when tech companies stood united for the good of the industry and the underlying [Internet]. Recall over a decade ago when some of the biggest tech companies in the world darkened their home pages in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). These bills posed a serious threat not just to individual companies, but to the entire tech industry and everyday [Internet] users. Other notable examples of collective industry protest include the battles over net neutrality, SESTA-FOSTA, and the EARN IT Act. But despite a recent influx in legislative threats, tech companies are noticeably absent.

    There are several reasons for the silence. First, the sheer volume of bad bills threatening the tech sector has outpaced the resources available to fight them. California alone has introduced a flurry of legislation targeting social media companies and AI in recent years. When you add in efforts from other states, fighting these laws becomes an internal numbers game. Each bill requires a dedicated team to analyze its impact, meet with lawmakers, organize grassroots campaigns, and, as a last resort, litigate. As a result, companies must make tough decisions about where to invest their resources, often prioritizing bills that directly impact their own products, services, and users.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Beware of Fake Gurus Spreading Misinformation on Social Media

      Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are witnessing a surge in misinformation spread by self-proclaimed gurus. These individuals often exploit religious beliefs and myths to share misleading information, which can be harmful to their followers.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-07-18 [Older] Giorgia Meloni height jibe costs Italian journalist €5,000

  • RFERL ☛ Prosecutors Seek 9 Years In Prison For Siberian Journalist Over Ukraine War Coverage

    [...] The charge stems from coverage by LIStok in 2022 of alleged atrocities by Russian troops against Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha. [...]

  • VOA News ☛ Cambodia's media sees $7 million boost

    The United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, in July announced a grant designed to help “strengthen and expand the diversity of trustworthy news” in Cambodia.

    Details of the funding emerged as the Cambodian Journalists Alliance Association, known as CamboJA, released its quarterly assessment of conditions for media.

  • VOA News ☛ Russia pushes to expand law on ‘undesirable' organizations

    Russia passed the original undesirable-organization law in 2015, providing for fines on a first offense and up to six years in prison for subsequent offenses in the case of leaders of organizations.

    However, when an outlet is labeled undesirable, all of its employees and sources are at risk of fines, criminal charges and jail time of as much as four years.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-07-20 [Older] French police, protesters clash over La Rochelle reservoirs

  • France24 ☛ Why Chinese TikTok is being accused of deleting Tibetan content

    Douyin isn’t the first platform to ban Tibetan. Talkmate, a language-learning application, deleted its content in Tibetan, as did the video streaming platform Bilibili. In 2022, a video sharing app called Kuaishou, which is very similar to Douyin, started deleting videos in Tibetan.

  • India Times ☛ US union and Apple reach tentative labour agreement

    The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (IAM CORE) reached a tentative agreement with tech giant Apple on Friday over improvement in work-life balance, pay raises and job security.

  • India Times ☛ Law against child marriage applies to all, faith no bar: High court

    KOCHI: In a significant judgment, Kerala high court has held that Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, applies to all Indian citizens irrespective of religion. A bench of Justice PV Kunhikrishnan also made it clear that the Act supersedes Muslim personal law that allows marriage of a girl at puberty, pointing out that citizenship was primary and religion secondary.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Study warns of rise of 'new chauvinism' fueled by right-wing populism

    The study focused on language and attitudes in software development, a profession known for perpetuating chauvinistic language. It warns organizations that what it called 'new chauvinism' may open doors to neo-conservatism and foment discriminatory practices at odds with companies' stated values.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Why these Apache Catholics felt faced with a 'false choice' after priest removed church's icons

    The focus of this tense, unresolved episode is the 8-foot Apache Christ painting. For this close-knit community, it is a revered icon created by Franciscan friar Robert Lentz in 1989. It depicts Christ as a Mescalero medicine man, and has hung behind the church’s altar for 35 years under a crucifix as a reminder of the holy union of their culture and faith.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Billionaire Donor Wants Kamala Harris to Fire the FTC Chair

    Hoffman sits on the board of Microsoft after selling LinkedIn to the company in 2016 for more than $26 billion, then the largest acquisition in company history. Microsoft is currently facing scrutiny from Khan’s FTC for acquiring Inflection AI, a company that Hoffman cofounded in 2022 while sitting on Microsoft’s board. Hoffman’s venture capital firm Greylock invested $225 million in Inflection AI.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Judge in Washington state dismisses safety violation allegations at Amazon

    The judge threw out four serious safety violations Amazon had been charged with by state workplace safety officials in recent years, according to court documents shared with The Washington Post by Amazon.

  • Cory Doctorow ☛ No, Uber’s (still) not profitable | by Cory Doctorow | Medium

    One person Uber has never fooled is Hubert Horan, a transportation analyst with decades of experience who’s had Uber’s number since the very start, and who has done yeoman service puncturing every one of these financial “disclosures,” methodically sifting through the pile of shit to prove that there is no pony hiding in it.

    In 2021, Horan showed how Uber had burned through nearly all of its cash reserves, signaling an end to its subsidy for drivers and rides, which would also inevitably end the bezzle: [...]

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Chris ☛ Launching a Much-Requested Newsletter

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Mere Civilian ☛ I slept with the Oura Ring for 8 months

    Because I wasn’t sure how well this experiment will work, I bought a secondhand v2 of the Oura Ring. The benefits were that I paid significantly less and unlike v3, the second generation Oura ring does not require a subscription. Luckily, the ring was in excellent condition because the previous owner bought the wrong size. Even more lucky that the ring was a good fit for me on my wedding finger (fourth finger on the left hand).

  • Unix Men ☛ Unlock Your Digital Content Management System Using DeDRM

    What is DeDRM? So what exactly is DeDRM? It is short for “De-Digital Rights Management,” and refers to the process of removing digital rights management (DRM) protection from electronic files.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• India Times ☛ Microsoft now wants to keep away the access of Windows Kernel from these companies

  John Cable, Microsoft's vice president of program management for Windows servicing and delivery, outlined the company's stance in a blog post titled "Windows resiliency: Best practices and the path forward." Cable emphasised the need for "end-to-end resilience" and hinted at potential changes that could restrict kernel access for security software. The CrowdStrike update bug, which resulted in widespread system crashes, has highlighted the risks associated with allowing third-party applications to operate at the kernel level. This privileged access, while beneficial for threat detection, can lead to catastrophic failures if errors occur.

• The Register UK ☛ Reid Hoffman to Kamala Harris: How about $7M to fire Khan?

  Word of Hoffman's support came almost immediately after Biden endorsed Harris, with other Silicon Valley leaders also expressing support for the presumptive Democratic party nominee. But in a CNN interview on Thursday, Hoffman said he hoped his support - and a $7 million donation to a pro-Harris political action committee - would be enough to tip Khan out of her seat as the nation's top antitrust enforcer.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • RTL ☛ Not standing for it: Video game makers see actors as AI 'data,' says union on strike

      And while many demands are the same -- consent and compensation for actors, whose voices and movements are used by AI to build game characters -- the latest talks are posing unique challenges, union negotiators told AFP.

      Technology companies, by their nature, tend to view actors simply "as data," said Ray Rodriguez, lead negotiator for the video game contract.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ South Africa Rejects Copyright Lobby Critique, Defends Broad 'Fair Use' Exceptions

    South Africa has been trying to update its copyright law for several years now. President Ramaphosa previously sent two bills back to the drawing broad, after U.S. copyright groups described the broad fair use exceptions as dangerous. While critique persists, the South African Government is now taking a firm stand, openly stating that broad fair use exceptions are a feature, not a bug.