Links 16/08/2024: UK Skills Deficit and Kim Dotcom to be Extradited to the US (for Doing the Same Stuff GAFAM Does)
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Remkus de Vries ☛ Rebuilding and Documenting My Site Reboot
Yup. You’ve read that title correctly. I’ve started the process of rebuilding my personal site here. The site as it currently sits was built off one of the very first Full Site Editing (FSE) boilerplates available at the time. That time was October 2022. So, about two years ago.
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David Mead ☛ Doing a little döstädning
This isn't a deep purge, throwing away every drawing, photo, and letter from my past. Nor is it as superficial as giving things a quick dust and re-packing them.
It's more being critical. Do I have a use for this? Will this be useful when I'm gone? If not remove it. That be throwing away, recycling, or donating.
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Robert Birming ☛ The Art of Seeing
This "seeing" isn't limited to creative pursuits. The same principle applies to how we perceive our surroundings and life circumstances. Our mindset makes a world of difference.
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Andy Bell ☛ Just Build Websites
Guess what the resolution was? Simplifying everything. Now I’m swinging great and enjoying myself. So yeh, Just Build Websites™ and enjoy yourself! The rest will come with time and experience.
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Science
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-06 [Older] Rare fossil specimen offers evidence of social behaviour among ancient snakes
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-06 [Older] Ancient 'hobbits' even smaller than originally thought
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The Conversation ☛ Stonehenge’s giant Altar Stone came all the way from north-east Scotland – here’s how we worked out this astonishing new finding
In our new paper published in Nature, we have traced the Altar Stone’s source to north-east Scotland, meaning it travelled at least 430 miles (700km) to Salisbury Plain. This is an incredible distance for Neolithic times, before the wheel is thought to have arrived in Britain. This stunning discovery sheds new light on the capabilities and long-range connections of Britain’s Neolithic inhabitants.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-05 [Older] $80K signing bonus? Rural communities boost incentives to attract medical staff
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US News And World Report ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Farmers Honor 'Peanuts' Creator Charles M. Schulz With Corn Mazes Across US and in Canada
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-05 [Older] Will we ever be able to drink water from the moon? This Waterloo company thinks so
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-06 [Older] Criminal networks are shifting from fentanyl imports to Canadian-made product
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Why silica dust could become the 'new asbestos' health risk
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] Uganda landfill collapse leaves several dead
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] US: FDA says no to pyschedlic MDMA as PTSD treatment
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-09 [Older] Company to begin removing benzene from Sarnia, Ont., petrochemical plant
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The Atlantic ☛ A Logo on a Prosthesis Is Like a Tattoo You Didn’t Ask For
But the more she stared at the brand’s orange-and-black logo slapped across the top of the hand, the more she felt that she’d become a walking billboard, she told me. Bionic (or myoelectric) limbs, which are operated by muscle and nerve impulses to more closely mimic the movements and operation of a real limb, have evolved dramatically in the past few decades. And because they offer so much more movement control, these droid-like devices and their accessories have become more prevalent among prosthetics users. They also nearly universally feature branding. Logos on distal parts (hands, feet, ankles, wrists) are the most visible, but companies brand other parts of a limb, too: tightening knobs, silicone liners, socks, and running blades. Fully adopting a prosthesis as an extension of one’s body can be challenging to begin with, but many prosthetics users have found that branding only makes this harder.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Mike Haynes ☛ Google takes shots at Apple’s AI efforts, forgets Gemini still riddled with problems | crash the arcade
Weird to see them bragging that you can get hallucinogenic, incorrect, and sometimes dangerous answers to your questions in over 200 countries. Google’s own employees had little faith in Gemini (or Bard as it was called at the time) when Google rushed the half-baked AI out the door, leading to glue on pizza, telling people to jump off bridges, etc. I’m not sure how you’d ever take Samat’s comments with a straight face.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ San Francisco sues 16 websites that create AI-generated nudes
Through its investigation, the city attorney’s office found that the websites in question were visited more than 200 million times in just the first six months of 2024.
Once an image is online, it’s very difficult for victims to determine what websites were used to “nudify” their images because these images “don’t have any unique or identifying marks that link you back to websites,” said Yvonne R. Meré, San Francisco’s chief deputy city attorney.
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The Register UK ☛ AI stole my job and my work, and my boss didn’t know or care
Cosmos had been caught out using generative AI to compose articles for its website – and using a grant from a nonprofit that runs Australia's most prestigious journalism awards to do it. That's why my work – writing articles for that website – had so suddenly vanished.
But that's not even the half of it. The AI most likely had been "fed" my articles – via the "Common Crawl," the gigantic tarball of nearly everything that's ever been published to the web – in order to ensure the correctness of that content.
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Silicon Angle ☛ FTC cracks down on fake reviews and influencer misconduct with new rule
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission today announced a final rule that will ban marketers from using fake reviews, including those generated with artificial intelligence and other deceptive marketing methods such as paying for bots to inflate follower counts.
The rule allows the FTC to strengthen enforcement and seek civil penalties against violators.
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AJ Bourg ☛ How Do You Even Computer
I decided for some reason to try to install Fortnite on my Mac. Let me walk you through all the steps I took to do so: [...]
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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New Statesman ☛ We must break up the tech platforms that threaten our democracy
Yet cyberspace has morphed into a Hobbesian fusion of anarchy and tyranny. Online we are both atomised individuals and cogs in a collective wheel, engaged in a “war of all against all” on social media while being forced to surrender the contents of our lives to impersonal entities if we want to work, trade, travel, communicate, socialise or pay the bills. With new levels of digital dependence and addictive attention-seeking, over-excitement and disenchantment cascade into each other as politics and society become ever more debased. Greater connections mask the paradox of individualism that we are at once more entangled and less involved; we are more connected even as we are more divided.
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Defence/Aggression
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Marcy Wheeler ☛ The Saudi Payments to Trump Are More Important than the Suspected Egyptian One
It is important that Trump face questions about it.
But, in my opinion, that’s not the most important financial windfall to question. The ongoing Saudi funding of Trump is.
There are four payments of interest: [...]
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US News And World Report ☛ France Honors African Soldiers Who Helped Liberate the French Riviera From Nazis 80 Years Ago
Starting Aug. 15, 1944, hundreds of thousands of primarily American and French troops landed on the Mediterranean coast for Operation Dragoon. It was intended to coincide with the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944 but was delayed due to a lack of resources.
Africans made up as much as half the French contingent, soldiers from what are now some two dozen independent countries.
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Le Monde ☛ Leaders mark 'sacrifices' of African soldiers at commemoration of Provence landings
Much of the second part of the day's events were canceled because of storm warnings, including a reception for guests on a helicopter carrier and a re-enactment of the landings in Toulon, at the center of fighting on August 15, 1944.
That day 100,000 American, British and Canadian troops landed on the beaches of the Var region on the French Riviera. They were followed by 250,000 soldiers fighting for France, recruited mostly from overseas colonies in Africa, with the aim of recapturing the key ports of Marseille and Toulon from the German occupiers. They succeeded within two weeks, having encountered only limited resistance from an exhausted German army.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-11 [Older] Australia spy chief: Foreign meddling common, by friends too
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-11 [Older] Geneva Conventions at 75: Crossroads for international law?
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-11 [Older] Switzerland: Police arrest man for pouring gas on synagogue
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] Iran keeps UN-sanctioned Eslami as head of nuclear agency
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] Middle East updates: Gaza reports scores dead in school strike
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] Nigeria: Police increase presence on 10th day of protests
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] US Marine Corps Osprey crash investigation finds major flaws
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] US says Sinaloa cartel head taken to Texas against his will
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-08 [Older] Steel and aluminum CEOs warn of 'existential threat' if Canada doesn't impose tariffs on China
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US News And World Report ☛ 2024-08-08 [Older] Canada and Australia, Eyeing China, Signal More Military Cooperation
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-09 [Older] Germany: Stasi murder in Berlin 50 years ago on trial
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-09 [Older] Philippines, Vietnam coast guards hold first joint drills
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-09 [Older] RECOMMENDED — Rights groups say Israel has held thousands of Palestinians since the October 7 Hamas attacks, imprisoning them without due process
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-09 [Older] Third suspect arrested in Vienna in Taylor Swift plot
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-08 [Older] After Vienna threat: Music venues as terrorist targets
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-08 [Older] Taylor Swift Vienna concerts canceled over terror threat
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-08 [Older] Are Rwandans being relocated to eastern Congo?
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-08 [Older] How Elon Musk uses X to meddle in world politics
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] German police arrest doctor for allegedly killing 4 patients
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Germany: 2 dead, several rescued, after hotel collapse
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Germany cautious about sending military forces to aid Israel
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-08 [Older] Fresh hope for new talks on Sudan cease-fire
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-08 [Older] Sweden: Net emigration for first time in over 50 years
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Crooked Timber ☛ Young men aren’t shifting right …
The age gradient here is stunning. That probably reflects the division over Brexit a disaster inflicted on the young, primarily by nostalgic retirees (the vast majority of this group voted for Tories/Reform in 2024). If you squint you can see a slightly larger gender gap among young voters than in older cohorts. But, as is true elsewhere, this reflects a leftward shift among young women, rather than a move to the right by men.
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Environment
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Los Angeles Times ☛ Opinion: I'm a pediatrician in Reno. I know climate change threatens children
I am a pediatrician in Reno, the fastest-warming city in the U.S. I am haunted by Keiko Ogura’s words as I look into the eyes of the babies and children in my clinic. A slow-motion bomb is going off over their heads, and unless parents understand the urgent policy choice they face this November, these children will carry the agony and sorrow of our decisions long after we are gone.
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Vox ☛ How Indigenous fire management and controlled burns can help end our deadly cycle of mega fire
Fire has always been a part of Yamamoto’s Karuk culture, but until recently, state and federal authorities saw all fires as bad — a force of nature to suppress, not live with. For decades, the US embraced a policy of fire suppression, underscored by Smokey Bear’s “Only you can prevent forest fires” ads, that caused forests to become denser, and fires more frequent and powerful. Fire suppression in California, for example, undid generations of Indigenous land stewardship, which cultivated a landscape where fire, people, and plants could coexist. By lighting frequent, smaller fires, they created a sustainable cycle that cleared underbrush, regenerated plants and soils, and prevented the sort of “mega fires” we see today. But that stewardship was mercilessly extinguished in the 19th and 20th centuries: According to Bill Tripp, the director of natural resources and environmental policy for the Karuk Tribe, up until the 1930s, Karuk people were shot by white settlers for starting fires.
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] Southern Quebec struggles with flooding, power outages caused by remnants of tropical storm Debby
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Energy/Transportation
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-08 [Older] Boeing in turbulence as Kelly Ortberg becomes new CEO
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] Serbia: Protests over vast Rio Tinto lithium mining project
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-05 [Older] Displaced Winnipeg family says fire that gutted home was caused by e-bike
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-09 [Older] China appeals to WTO over European tariffs on electric cars
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Joerg Jaspert: Electric Car, Vacation trip
Electric Car
A while ago I got my hands on an electric car - after not having owned a car for most of my life (there really is not much need here). It wasn’t planned nor a goal of mine, but it kind of “came out of talks with my boss”, so now it’s there.
Due to some special rules in the german tax system it turns out really cheap for me - it comes from the company, which allows personal use. So I have to pay taxes on the value of it plus whichever amount of kilometers I have to drive to work. And the latter is what is good for me - I have homeoffice in my contract, so no drive to work, except maybe once a year for something. So no regular trip to calculate, only if I ever really have to do a trip to the office.
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-06 [Older] GM Canada supports potential tariffs on Chinese EV imports amid market concerns
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-06 [Older] Cambodia rulers pin reputation on contentious canal project
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-09 [Older] 'No survivors' after Brazil passenger plane crashed with 61 people on board, officials say
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Germany's rail crisis: How can Deutsche Bahn turn things around?
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The Register UK ☛ Northern Virginia is world's hyperscale datacenter capital
If the internet can be said to have a geographic location, then perhaps it is Northern Virginia, which has the largest share of the hyperscale datacenter capacity within which the world's data is stored.
Hyperscale companies accounted for 41 percent of the entire global bit barn presence last year, and this share is increasing, as The Register reported recently.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Overpopulation
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] How massive holes in Berlin help fight water shortages
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Vox ☛ Global lack of clean drinking water is bigger than previously thought, new study says
Sufficient access to clean, reliable, affordable drinking water is a human right, though, and the United Nations has urged governments to funnel resources toward building and maintaining water infrastructure. (One of the UN’s sustainable development goals is for every community to have clean water — a far-off goal.) Better funding is vital, but unless money is strategically directed toward the right places and programs, throwing cash at the problem won’t necessarily fix it. That’s where the new data comes in.
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AAAS ☛ Mapping safe drinking water use in low- and middle-income countries | Science
Safe drinking water access is a human right, but data on safely managed drinking water services (SMDWS) is lacking for more than half of the global population. We estimate SMDWS use in 135 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) at subnational levels with a geospatial modeling approach, combining existing household survey data with available global geospatial datasets. We estimate that only one in three people used SMDWS in LMICs in 2020 and identified fecal contamination as the primary limiting factor affecting almost half of the population of LMICs. Our results are relevant for raising awareness about the challenges and limitations of current global monitoring approaches and demonstrating how globally available geospatial data can be leveraged to fill data gaps and identify priority areas in LMICs.
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Semafor Inc ☛ Global access to safe drinking water may be significantly overestimated
The difference in the WHO and UN’s estimates and the new estimate has to do, on some level, with the data, Esther Greenwood, the study’s lead author, told Semafor. Her team looked at the household level, in contrast to the UN and WHO, which seemingly made their calculations at the population level, she said.
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US News And World Report ☛ Water Crisis in Mississippi Capital Developed During Failures in Oversight, Watchdog Says
In January 2022, the EPA issued a notice that Jackson’s water system violated the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. The system nearly collapsed in August and September 2022 after heavy rains exacerbated problems at a treatment plant, leaving tens of thousands of people without water for drinking, bathing, cooking or flushing.
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Finance
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] UK looks to overcome damaging skills 'deficit'
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-05 [Older] Canada wants to be in the top 10 global tourism destinations — but it's struggling to get there
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Rents are still rising across Canada, but at the slowest rate in 2 and a half years
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Bank of Canada summary suggests weak job market was a concern ahead of July rate cut
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] Bangladesh: Yunus has work cut out to boost economy, jobs
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-06 [Older] Bangladesh: Muhammad Yunus to head interim government
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] Bangladesh chief justice steps down amid demonstrations
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Forbes ☛ The Silent Venture Capital & Startup Recession
With funding drying up and valuations plummeting, the once-thriving ecosystem of innovation and risk-taking is now grappling with a stark new reality: the days of free money are over.
The data is clear: startups and venture capital are in a recession that is as bad as the recession of 2008. But no one is talking about it. It’s not dominating the headlines like the election or climate change. Why? While Amazon’s layoffs may hit the headlines because it’s publicly traded, startups are closing quietly. Your favorite brands and apps have silently gone dark. Their last Instagram post was a year ago and their website isn’t working. The founders haven’t updated their Linkedin, or if they have, they are consulting/advising now. That’s because while startups are keen to shout news of their launch to the sky, they’re not as likely to tout the closure of a firm. They go out quietly into the night without a word.
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CRN ☛ The 10 Biggest Tech Company Layoffs Of 2024 (So Far)
The U.S. unemployment rate has been fairly steady in the last year, and currently dances around a mere 4.3 percent, according to the latest from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
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US Job Cuts: Google, Amazon, Tesla Hit Indians?
The united states is seeing a concerning rate of employment losses in 2024; this trend began last year. Even when economic worries lessen, many businesses continue to exercise caution, which prompts them to reduce staff. For indian experts employed by these multinational behemoths or in allied industries, this tendency has significant ramifications.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The Register UK ☛ Cisco slashes seven percent of workforce
In a LinkedIn post today, Cisco boss Chuck Robbins said that Davidson had "made the decision to step away from his current role leading Cisco Networking and will serve as an advisor to me."
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The Conversation ☛ What is the Online Safety Act and why have riots reopened debates about it?
At present, social media platforms such as TikTok, X, Facebook and YouTube are designed to optimise user engagement through their recommendation algorithms, with safety concerns not typically weighted within these systems. X, for example, employs different algorithms for content moderation versus content recommendation.
As a result of this, it is possible that harmful content can be recommended by one algorithm before it is identified as needing to be moderated by another algorithm.
The Online Safety Act aims to address this challenge by requiring platforms to test the safety implications of their recommendation algorithms. That is, when changes are made to their recommendation algorithms, services will be encouraged to collect safety metrics, allowing them to assess whether these algorithm changes are likely to increase individuals’ exposure to illegal content.
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New York Times ☛ Cisco to Cut About 7% of Staff in Second Round of Job Layoffs
The company did not say how many workers would be affected, but it reported it had 84,900 employees in July 2023, which would amount to around 6,000 jobs cut. In February, Cisco laid off 4,000 employees.
In an earnings report, Cisco posted net income of $2.16 billion in its most recent quarter, down 45 percent from a year ago, and revenue of $13.64 billion, down 10 percent. Still, the company exceeded Wall Street expectations, and its stock was up nearly 6 percent in after-hours trading.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Catalan separatist to return to Spain, despite arrest threat
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-09 [Older] Guinea-Bissau: Popular Resistance Against Dictatorial Tendencies
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-08 [Older] Kenya: Police fire tear gas as Ruto's Cabinet sworn in
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-09 [Older] Kenya: What next for Gen Z's digital revolution?
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Kenyans vow to 'take back' their country on August 8
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Myanmar junta on backfoot as ethnic rebels capture key base
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Nepal: Helicopter crash leaves 5 people dead
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Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2024-08-04 [Older] Stop the Nonsense: Justin Trudeau Is No Marxist
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-08 [Older] With Move Forward dissolved, what's next for Thai democracy?
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Thailand: Court dissolves opposition Move Forward Party
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Polish man convicted for assault on Danish PM Frederiksen
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-07 [Older] Fact check: False claims fuel ethnic tensions in Bangladesh
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The Record ☛ Meta warns of [astroturfer] networks from Russia, Iran ahead of US elections
The company’s latest quarterly review, released on Thursday, states it has disrupted 39 covert influence operations originating in Russia since 2017, followed by 30 from Iran and 11 from China.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ Why should Kamala Harris bother with the news media?
You have something dangerous — two of the most influential men in the world undermining democracy with lies.
There are no consequences for Musk, and few for Trump. This election is a broken info-pipe of raw sewage spewing in every direction, and these guys are boogieing down in the muck.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] Venezuela's Maduro cracks down on X, election dissent
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RFERL ☛ Iranian Rapper Sentenced To Death Over Protest Lyrics Acquitted
Salehi was serving a six-year prison sentence for his involvement in the 2022 protests that rocked Iran when he was sentenced to death on the "corruption on Earth” charge.
Salehi was initially arrested in October 2022 after making public statements in support of the protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died while in police custody for allegedly wearing her head scarf improperly.
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The Moscow Times ☛ U.S.-Russian Woman Jailed 12 Years for Donating Money to Pro-Ukraine Charity
A court in the Ural Mountains region of Yekaterinburg sentenced U.S.-Russian citizen Ksenia Karelina to 12 years in prison for "treason" on Thursday after she allegedly donated around $50 to a pro-Ukraine charity.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-11 [Older] Guinea-Bissau escalates crackdown on press freedom
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CBC ☛ 2024-08-08 [Older] Court approves Postmedia bid for insolvent Atlantic newspaper chain
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Techdirt ☛ Looks Like The Judge Who OK’ed A Raid On A Small Town Paper Didn’t Read The Warrants Until AFTER She’d Signed Them
Caught in the fallout, Judge Viar was facing possible discipline for approving these search warrants. But she has managed to avoid being (at least professionally) tainted by here involvement. But her defense of her actions raises more questions than it answers, as Sherman Smith reports for the Kansas Reflector.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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EFF ☛ EFF Honored as DEF CON 32 Uber Contributor
EFF Staff Attorney Hannah Zhao and Staff Technologist Cooper Quintin accepting the Uber Contributor Award from DEF CON founder Jeff Moss
The Uber Contributor Award is an honor created three years ago to recognize people and groups who have made exceptional contributions to the infosec and hacker community at DEF CON. Our connection with DEF CON runs deep, dating back over 20 years. The conference has become a vital part of keeping EFF’s work, grounded in the ongoing issues faced by the creative builders and experimenters keeping tech secure (and fun).
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Papers Please ☛ Travel blacklists target political critics
US government travel blacklists (euphemistically described by the government as merely “watchlists”) are being used to restrict airline travel and target searches of electronic devices of organizers of protests against US support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza, according to a complaint filed this week in Federal court by attorneys for two blacklisted Palestinian-American US citizens, Dr. Osama Abu Irshaid and Mr. Mustafa Zeidan.
It might be tempting to interpret the allegations in this complaint as indicative of the need for oversight or guardrails to prevent “abuse” of the blacklisting and travel control system. But we think it makes more sense to see this case as indicative of the risk of political weaponization inherent in the system of algorithmic, identity-based, extrajudicial administrative control of travel. This case shows why this travel control system should be abolished entirely, and why any restrictions on the right to travel should be imposed through existing judicial procedures for restraining orders and injunctions — adversary procedures that incorporate notice, the right to confront one’s accusers, and the other elements of Constitutional due process.
The heavy lifting that makes this use of travel controls to restrict political dissidents possible was carried out when airlines were required to install communication and control lines enabling the US government to decide, in real time, on the basis of information from airline reservations and travelers’ ID documents, whether or not to give airlines “permission” to transport each would-be passenger. That entailed more than $2 billion, by the US government’s own underestimate, in unfunded mandates imposed on airlines and their IT providers for changes to their reservation and departure control systems.
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RFERL ☛ At Least 1.4 Million Afghan Girls Banned From Attending School Since Taliban Takeover, UNESCO Says
It comes as the Taliban marked three years since its forces seized Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, on August 15, 2021, after the U.S.-backed government collapsed and its leaders fled into exile.
Since the Taliban's return to power, women have been squeezed from public life -- banned from many jobs as well as parks and gyms -- and barred from secondary and higher education.
The restrictions amount to what the United Nations has described as "gender apartheid."
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The Hill ☛ UAW's Shawn Fain says Donald Trump 'doesn't care about working-class people'
Federal law protects workers who go on strike from being fired, and it is illegal to threaten to do so, the UAW argued in the complaint.
“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean,” Fain said in a statement early Wednesday, a moniker he has given the former president before. “When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean.”
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-11 [Older] UK teens who lived through racist riots want change
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-10 [Older] German gov't split over adding LGBTQ+ rights to constitution
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The Verge ☛ Californians will be able to add their driver’s licenses to Apple Wallet
Some California residents will be able to add their driver’s licenses and state IDs to Apple Wallet soon, Apple announced Thursday.
Apple’s announcement doesn’t say when the mobile driver’s licenses will be rolled out, just that it will happen “this fall” as part of California’s mobile driver’s license (mDL) pilot. The pilot, which will be limited to 1.5 million participants, will let users traveling through certain terminals at Los Angeles International and San Francisco International airports go through TSA screening without handing over their driver’s licenses — or their phones.
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Jason Becker ☛ I’m worried about my wallet
I know that Matt works in payments so he definitely loves Apple opening up the NFC chip for payments (including double tap to pay), but I’m personally terrified. I have at least 8 payment instruments with like 6 different issuers in my Apple Wallet. When they each retreat to their own app that wants to be my default, my life is going to get harder.
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Nick Heer ☛ Patreon’s iOS App Will (Now) Be Forced to Use In-App Purchasing Instead of Its Safari-Based System
That is a fair argument. Apple says its cut reflects services it provides, mostly marketing, though it does also admit it is just making money off its platform because it can. Patreon users do not benefit from the former. If Apple promotes In-App Purchases from third-party developers at all, I could not find an example in the App Store. Even if it did, Apple would not be a bigger draw for fans of people who make their living on Patreon than those individuals themselves.
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The Conversation ☛ Google monopoly ruling: where the tech giant goes from here
To provide users with answers ranging from the best recipe for an apple pie to a recommendation for a new vacuum cleaner, Google first gathers information about every page available on the Internet. Then, it uses its database of websites, the keywords used for search, what other people typically liked as an answer to similar queries, but also everything it knows about you, to rank possible answers.
Businesses then pay for the right for their own text to be prominently displayed alongside genuine search results. A higher quality of search results means more customers, which makes it easier to attract advertisers. It also means the advert can be tailored to consumer tastes and is therefore more valuable to advertisers.
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The Washington Post ☛ Google’s foes build case to break up the company after landmark court ruling
If Judge Amit Mehta rules that way in Washington in the months ahead, it would be the first time federal antitrust law has been used to dismantle a company in a generation. And the consequences of such an action would be complex: Scholars are still arguing more than four decades later over how much the breakup of AT&T fueled or diminished American innovation.
Meanwhile on Wednesday, a federal judge in San Francisco signaled that he would “tear the barriers down” that have given Google a near-lock on Android app downloads and digital purchases.
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The Register UK ☛ Google is a monopoly. The fix isn't obvious
In the past eight months, however, Google has lost two major US competition lawsuits: One brought by Epic Games over Google's grip on the Android ecosystem, the other brought by the Department of Justice over the Big G's market-dominating search advertising business.
In the Epic Games case this week, the FTC – emboldened under boss Lina Khan – urged the judge to consider an appropriate remedy and ignore Google's fretting about the potential cost of compliance.
And in the DoJ's search advertising case, the focus has also turned to possible remedies, now that Google has been declared an unlawful monopolist.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ Cox Asks Supreme Court to Protect Internet Subscribers from 'Piracy Terminations'
Cox Communications has filed a petition at the Supreme Court, requesting a review of a Fourth Circuit ruling that held the company liable for pirating subscribers. While the case is ultimately about service provider liability, the ISP stresses that the current verdict jeopardizes internet access for all Americans, and threatens to cause mass disruption across the internet.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Kim Dotcom's Extradition to the U.S. Given Green Light By New Zealand
With the stakes this high, no legal resources are being spared. Many millions of dollars have been poured into this legal battle since 2012, and the end is still nowhere in sight.
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The Verge ☛ Kim Dotcom is being Megauploaded to the US for trial
As the founder and former CEO of Megaupload, Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz) was accused by US authorities of having cost film studios and record companies over $500 million by enabling users to share pirated content. The German-born Internet mogul moved to New Zealand in 2010, and has been fighting extradition since local police, at the behest of the FBI, raided his Auckland mansion in 2012 over charges of racketeering, money laundering, and copyright infringement. The Department of Justice shut down Megaupload that same year.
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Reuters ☛ Kim Dotcom to be extradited from New Zealand after 12-year fight with US
Kim Dotcom, who is facing criminal charges relating to the defunct file-sharing website Megaupload, will be extradited to the United States from New Zealand, the New Zealand justice minister said on Thursday. German-born Dotcom, who has New Zealand residency, has been fighting extradition to the United States since 2012 following a FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion. Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed an extradition order for Dotcom, a spokesperson for the Minister of Justice said
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RNZ ☛ Justice Minister signs Kim Dotcom’s extradition order
In a post to social media, Dotcom said Goldsmith's decision showed New Zealand was an "obedient US colony in the South Pacific".
He said he had no control of what Mega Upload's users decided to upload.
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VOA News ☛ Kim Dotcom to be extradited from New Zealand after 12-year fight with US
The company's chief marketing officer Finn Batato and chief technical officer and co-founder Mathias Ortmann, both from Germany, along with a third executive, Dutch national Bram van der Kolk, were arrested with Dotcom in 2012.
Ortmann and van der Kolk entered plea deals that saw them sentenced in 2023 to jail terms in New Zealand but allowed them to avoid extradition. Batato died in 2022 in New Zealand.
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ABC ☛ Internet mogul Kim Dotcom to be extradited to the US, NZ justice minister says
A New Zealand court previously ruled in 2015 that Mr Dotcom be extradited to the US to face online piracy charges.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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