Distributions and Operating Systems

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Rugged VersaLogic SBC Utilizes Coffee Lake Refresh Processor and ECC Memory

    VersaLogic’s Swift is an upcoming high-performance embedded computer powered by Intel’s 6-core Xeon-E processor. This unit is designed for industrial applications, featuring robust capabilities such as up to 32 GB of error-correcting RAM, fast NVMe storage, and multiple expansion slots.

Leftovers

• Robert Birming ☛ Oops! I Did It Again

  It's as if I can't reason my way through some decisions. I have to put them into action to really be able to determine what is right and what is not. Not very practical, I know, but that's apparently how I work.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Marty Day

  This is the 53rd edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Marty Day and his blog, blast-o-rama.com

• Matt Webb ☛ Beaches are for people who enjoy the bureaucracy of going to the beach (Interconnected)

  Ferrying from the car. Identifying a site, setting up base with towels, getting things out of bags, dressing, applying sunblock, putting different things back into bags, inflating inflatables.

• Lou Plummer ☛ We Are the Stories We Tell

  My mother-in-law recently turned 80. We had a birthday party for her with all her kids, lots of her grandkids and great-grandkids and even family who flew in from out of state. Like my own Mom, she is a regular reader of this blog and sometimes comments. Today she read a recent post I made about my upcoming trip to Texas and shared a story it inspired.

• Jason Becker ☛ Ownership, connection, and control— IndieWeb stuff

  I love blogs, obviously. And I love personal websites, hopefully also obviously. I’m thankful that folks like IndieWeb are around. They’re experimenting with figuring out “Why do people choose siloed web applications over the web? How can we close that user experience gap?” The goal is not building a smooth product– that’s left to folks like Micro.blog– but tinkering with and trying to understand what are the interaction primitives that are offered by web applications that lead to mass adoption. IndieWeb observes, “People like to reply to each other’s posts. We’ve had email and comment sections for years, but as soon as ‘native’ replies in web applications came along, it dwarfed email and comments. How can we bring that experience to websites we own and control.”

  And that’s just one example.

• Henrique Dias ☛ Three-Country Point

  Limburg not only has some hills, but it also “houses” the title of this post: a three-country point. In this case, it is a border between the Netherlands 🇳🇱, Belgium 🇧🇪 and Germany 🇩🇪. And a few meters from this three-country point there’s also the highest point in the Netherlands, sitting at an astonishing 322.5 meters above sea level. I’ve wanted to come here for quite some time and I’m glad we did.

• The Register UK ☛ What is missing from the web? We're asking for Google

  This got us thinking. The World Wide Web turned 35 this year and has come quite some way from its inception in 1989. Back then, Tim Berners-Lee imagined a system where information could be shared. He came up with a web server and a browser. He also devised a way of formatting pages, dubbed Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and a few decades and plenty of tears and tantrums later, here we are.

  Today's web is very different from that of the 1990s, with browsers an order of magnitude more complex than the likes of Mosaic.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Detect Invisible Electric Field Around Earth For First Time

    It's called the ambipolar field, an electric field first hypothesized more than 60 years ago, and its discovery will change the way we study and understand the behavior and evolution of our beautiful, ever-changing world.

    "Any planet with an atmosphere should have an ambipolar field," says astronomer Glyn Collinson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

    "Now that we've finally measured it, we can begin learning how it's shaped our planet as well as others over time."

• Education

  • Seth Godin ☛ Redefining a profession | Seth's Blog

    All of these jobs are still important. None of them are the same as they were thirty years ago.

  • Peroty ☛ It's Okay to Ask for Help

    As I’ve gotten older and settled into adulthood, I’ve come to realize that it’s perfectly fine to say, “I don’t know” when faced with a problem. For the longest time, I’ve felt this pressure, self-imposed perhaps, to figure everything out on my own. But the truth is, no one has all the answers, and that’s okay.

  • uni Cambridge ☛ Rossfest Symposium in memory of Ross Anderson

    We solicit scientific contributions to a posthumous Festschrift volume, in the form of short, punchy papers on any security-related topic. These submissions will undergo a lightweight review process by a Program Committee composed of former PhD students of Ross: [...]

• Hardware

  • Mere Civilian ☛ My 13 year old iPad saved me a $1,000

    Last week, I came across another offer which basically was $1000 off if trading any device. I went searching around the house for a device but couldn't find any I could trade in. I found the 2011 iPad, and I went to the trade in website which valued this iPad at $1. Honestly, it sounded too good to be true but since this was from one of the largest retailer in Australia, I thought, I may as well give it a go.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • CBC ☛ 2024-08-22 [Older] Canada banning sales of flavoured nicotine pouches in convenience stores, gas stations

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] Eating processed meats raises type 2 diabetes risk

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Wake up, it's a beautful day: the logistics of life

    Stuff just works when we’re young… well, hopefully. You get out of bed, and you go to school or uni. My main concerns at the time were forcing myself to eat breakfast because I thought I needed to (I no longer do), and making my morning bus or train. In the words of Sting and Shaggy, I’d clean my teeth and wash my face; act like I’m a member of the human race. But that’s about it.

  • EAPL.mx ☛ Pausing for a bit

    I'm focusing more on the offline world. Reading physical books, having talks in a coffee, playing sports, traveling around... The usual.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Marijuana Is Too Strong Now

    In 2022, the federal government reported that, in samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration, average levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—the psychoactive compound in weed that makes you feel high—had more than tripled compared with 25 years earlier, from 5 to 16 percent. That may understate how strong weed has gotten. Walk into any dispensary in the country, legal or not, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single product advertising such a low THC level. Most strains claim to be at least 20 to 30 percent THC by weight; concentrated weed products designed for vaping can be labeled as up to 90 percent.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • The Register UK ☛ Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

    "Large Models of What? Mistaking Engineering Achievements for Human Linguistic Agency" is a recent peer-reviewed paper that aims to take a look at how LLMs work, and examine how they compare with a scientific understanding of human language.

  • 1Password ☛ Explaining the Backlash to the SSO Tax

    Still, even in the face of criticism, the practice of upcharging thousands of dollars for SSO shows no signs of slowing down. Why?

    That’s the question we’re here to explore.

  • Jason Becker ☛ What's behind the SSO Tax?

    2. SSO has never succeeding in reducing support for log in issues, and sometimes has increased it.

  • New Yorker ☛ Does A.I. Really Encourage Cheating in Schools?

    What has increased is the number of teachers and adults who seem convinced that all the kids are cheating. A study by the Center for Democracy and Technology found that “a majority of teachers still report that generative AI has made them more distrustful of whether their students’ work is actually theirs.” Such suspicions have been paired with real questions about the efficacy of A.I.-detection tools, including one concerning finding that showed A.I. detectors were more likely to flag the writing of non-native English speakers. This uncertainty, along with the failure of many school districts to implement a clear and comprehensive A.I. policy, has led to another layer of debate among educators about how to handle instances of alleged cheating. A set of guidelines on the use of Turnitin, which was recently released by the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kansas, warned teachers against making “quick judgments” based on the company’s software and recommended that educators instead “take a few more steps to gather information,” including comparing previous examples of the student’s work, offering second chances, and talking to the student. (Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, had built its own detection tool, which was much more accurate than its competitors’ software, but had held off releasing it, because admitting that students did indeed use ChatGPT to cheat might be bad for business.)

  • The Korea Times ☛ South Korean deepfake crime suspect gets 5 year sentence

    Park was indicted in May this year on charges of creating the 400-odd deepfake videos and distributing as many as 1,700 such videos online between July 2020 and April this year.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Telegram Boss Durov Charged, Banned From Leaving France

    France on Wednesday charged Pavel Durov, the founder and chief of Telegram, with a litany of violations related to the messaging app and banned him from leaving the country while allowing the billionaire to walk free after four days under arrest.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Hackers Rally For Pavel Durov With #FreeDurov Campaigns

    Adding a layer of intrigue to the situation, a data leak surfaced in mid-August 2024, involving the Russian FSB Border Service database. This leak, discovered on a Telegram-based database leak channel, revealed sensitive information about individuals crossing Russia’s borders between 2014 and 2023, including Pavel Durov.

    The data contradicted Durov’s claims of severing ties with Russia, showing that he had traveled to Russia over 50 times since his emigration. Notably, he was present in Russia on the day Roskomnadzor lifted the ban on Telegram. The database, known as “Kordon 2023,” disappeared shortly after its appearance, raising questions about its origins and purpose.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Telegram CEO's arrest fuels debate on platform regulation

    After more than 80 hours in police custody, he was released and formally placed under investigation for allowing harmful content to spread on his network.

  • New York Times ☛ How I Improved My Tainted Reputation With Chatbots

    I’ll explain. Last year, I wrote a column about a strange encounter I had with Sydney, the A.I. alter ego of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. In our conversation, the chatbot went off the rails, revealing dark desires, confessing that it was in love with me and trying to convince me to leave my wife. The story went viral, and got written up by dozens of other publications. Soon after, Microsoft tightened Bing’s guardrails, and clamped down on its capabilities.

    My theory about what happened next — which is supported by conversations I’ve had with researchers in artificial intelligence, some of whom worked on Bing — is that many of the stories about my experience with Sydney were scraped from the web and fed into other A.I. systems.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ A new way to build neural networks could make AI more understandable

    The simplification, studied in detail by a group led by researchers at MIT, could make it easier to understand why neural networks produce certain outputs, help verify their decisions, and even probe for bias. Preliminary evidence also suggests that as KANs are made bigger, their accuracy increases faster than networks built of traditional neurons.

  • Chris ☛ My Most Complicated Prompt So Far

    This seems to be more voodoo than science and it would be interesting to explore which things really work and which only seem to improve results, but that is beyond what I have time for at the moment.

  • Robin Rendle ☛ No one’s ready for this

    My views change on AI stuff all the time and so I’m just noting them here for the future—but!—I can’t think of any creative or even barely useful applications of generating things inside images besides "I can lie to you about motorcycle crashes and natural disasters faster than I can think.” (Unlike Apple Intelligence, where you draw a circle and then a lame image is generated for you—I would certainly judge anyone who used it for anything outside of a placeholder image to be later replaced—but that sort of image generation doesn’t feel immoral to me.)

  • Neil Macy ☛ 15 Years Since Snow Leopard

    I only used Leopard for a few weeks though, because I bought my first MacBook Pro just before Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) came out. I even got the update disc for free, because I bought my Mac after the OS update was announced, but before it shipped.

  • Jonathan Y Chan ☛ LLMs struggle to explain themselves

    LLMs can sometimes recognize number patterns, but can they explain their reasoning? See for yourself!

    The interactive demo below generates a random program and uses that to compute three number sequences. The LLM is given two of those as examples and asked to pick the third out of a lineup. Click expand to see the actual messages sent to/from the LLM. You can run things yourself if you click Settings and enter an Anthropic API key: check out the FAQ for more details! Unfortunately, the demo requires JavaScript: it generates random programs and queries an LLM in your browser! You can still read the write-up below, but I also use a JavaScript library (KaTex) to render the mathematical notation.

  • Vox ☛ Are ChatGPT and its AI generator competitors really necessary? The debate, explained

    In one recent Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans who think AI does more harm than good is twice that of those who think it does more good than harm. (However, ‘“neutral” is the most popular answer.) Fed up with AI hype and with AI-generated text everywhere, a lot of us feel like AI is something tech companies are imposing on people who were perfectly happy before, thank you very much.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Opinion: AI should not be allowed to adjudicate cases in Canada's Federal Court

    2024 marks the first full year of implementing Canada's recent AI policy for the Federal Court. As it stands today, not a single Chief Justice in Canada has firmly said "no" to the use of AI in the courts.

    The Federal Court merely lightly salted the AI policy statement with a commitment that more "public consultation" was needed—without describing what that meant.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Will Never Win

    Mark Zuckerberg seems to enjoy playing politics. The only problem is that he doesn’t appear to be any good at it.

    This week, the Meta CEO wrote a letter to Representative Jim Jordan in response to an inquiry about Meta’s content-moderation policies. Jordan, an Ohio Republican, and the House Judiciary Committee have been investigating supposed collusion between President Joe Biden’s administration and technology companies to censor free speech online. In his letter addressing these concerns, Zuckerberg wrote that in 2021, senior White House officials had “repeatedly pressured” Meta to censor content related to COVID-19, “including humor and satire.” He also noted a separate instance from October 2020, when Meta had temporarily demoted a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop after initial guidance from the FBI that there may have been a Russian disinformation campaign about the Biden family in the lead-up to that year’s presidential election. In the letter, Zuckerberg notes that the article turned out not to be part of such an operation, and that “we shouldn’t have demoted the story.” Zuckerberg also made it clear that Meta had not been forced to remove any material: “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down,” he wrote.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • CBC ☛ 2024-08-23 [Older] $7,800 taken from man's bank account in case of mistaken identity

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ The California Supreme Court Should Help Protect Your Stored Communications

      That is why the California Supreme Court must take up and reverse the appellate opinion in the case of Snap v. The Superior Court of San Diego County. This opinion dangerously weakens the Stored Communications Act (SCA), which is one of the few federal privacy laws on the books. The SCA prevents certain communications providers from disclosing the content of your communications to private parties or the government without a warrant (or other narrow exceptions).

      EFF submitted an amicus letter to the court, along with the Center for Democracy & Technology.

      The lower court incorrectly ruled that modern services like Snapchat and Facebook largely do not have to comply with the 1986 law. Since those companies already access the content of your communications for their own business purposes—including to target their behavioral advertising—the lower court held that they can also freely disclose the content of your communications to anyone.

    • [Repeat] New York Times ☛ Telegram Founder Pavel Durov’s Indictment Thrusts Encryption Into the Spotlight

      The criminal charges against Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder, raised concerns in Silicon Valley about encryption and the app’s approach to privacy and security.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Register UK ☛ Green Berets storm building after hacking its Wi-Fi

    The elite team, one of whose remits is unconventional warfare, includes Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA), highly trained, mature soldiers with intensively honed skills. These now include hacking, as the military demonstrated with a target building near Skillingaryd in Sweden stormed by members of the 10th Special Forces Group.

    "What this allows us to do is target an objective, use the signaling equipment to gain access to any Wi-Fi networks originating at the target, and then monitor activity from that location for a period of time," an identity-protected ODA team member explained.

  • teleSUR ☛ Burkina Faso: Jihadist Massacre Left More Than 200 Civilians Dead - teleSUR English

    More than 200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the latest massacre caused by a brutal jihadist attack last Saturday in north-central Burkina Faso, confirmed on Thursday an international NGO worker living in the attacked town of Barsalogho.

  • Futurism ☛ Startup Says It'll Use Huge Space Mirror to Sell Sunlight During Nighttime

    A provocative startup claims it will soon let people buy spots of sunlight reflected with a giant satellite mirror — but there are still a lot of outstanding questions about how (and whether) the whole thing will actually work.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Why Trump’s Arlington Debacle Is So Serious

    For Trump, defiling what is sacred in our civic culture borders on a pastime. Peacefully transferring power to the next president, treating political adversaries with at least rudimentary grace, honoring those soldiers wounded and disfigured in service of our country—Trump long ago walked roughshod over all these norms. Before he tried to overturn a national election, he mocked his opponents in the crudest terms and demeaned dead soldiers as “suckers.”

    But the former president outdid himself this week, when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the final havoc-marked hours of the American withdrawal. Trump laid three wreaths and put hand over heart; that is a time-honored privilege of presidents. Trump, as is his wont, went further. He walked to a burial site in Section 60 and posed with the family of a fallen soldier, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up for his campaign photographer and videographer.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Suggests Gold Star Families to Blame for Arlington Cemetery Mess

    Earlier that day, the Army confirmed that a member of Trump’s entourage “pushed” a cemetery staffer when they attempted to prevent the former president’s aide from entering the area in order to film and photograph the visit to Section 60 — an area of the cemetery reserved for recently deceased service members with strict rules surrounding media presence.

    Army and cemetery rules prohibit campaigning and political activity on the burial ground. Following the visit, Trump’s campaign social media posted several videos and images taken during the visit — including in Section 60.

  • CS Monitor ☛ What happened at Arlington National Cemetery? And did Trump’s campaign break the law?

    Federal law and Pentagon policies do not allow political activities in Section 60 of the cemetery, which is considered hallowed ground. An official was abruptly shoved aside, the U.S. Army said. And videos were taken by Donald Trump’s campaign and used in ads.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Further | A Despicable Individual: On Using Graves As Billboards | Opinion

    Even by "seditionist crapsack standards," Trump's grotesque fuckery at Arlington Cemetery, where he and his henchmen used dead soldiers as a campaign prop, has been reviled as "repugnant," "nauseating," and "Too Damn Much," especially after news they shoved aside a female employee to do it. The desperate "hole-in-the-soul" stunt pissed off veterans, their families, the Army and many others; some said they've never grinned thumbs-up at a grave, but now they hope to live long enough to get to do it.

  • The Hill ☛ Even our sacred spaces aren't safe from Donald J. Trump

    Lest anyone think this is a partisan issue, recall that the cemetery at Gettysburg was dedicated by Republican President Lincoln and that national parks were established by Republican President Teddy Roosevelt. Traditionally, both Democrats and Republicans have been committed to the hallowed ground within our nation.

    But the death of the sacred and its resurrection for crass commercial or partisan use is not limited to space. It has also leaked into time.

  • Security Week ☛ 2 Men From Europe Charged With 'Swatting' Plot Targeting Former US President and Members of Congress

    A former U.S. president and several members of Congress were targets of a plot carried out by two European men to intimidate and threaten dozens of people by calling in bogus reports of police emergencies at their homes, according to court records unsealed on Wednesday.

  • The Register UK ☛ US indicts duo over alleged Swatting spree

    The indictment describes their activities as “Swattting” – a reference to the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams operated by some law enforcement agencies. SWAT teams are often heavily armed and frequently exercise deadly force.

  • [Repeat] ACLU ☛ Project 2025 Offers Dystopian View of America

    Project 2025 is a federal policy agenda and a blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch that would undercut decades of progress and Constitutional values. Though Trump has claimed he is not connected to Project 2025, a CNN report found that 140 people who worked on Project 2025 previously worked in Trump’s administration. The Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts also worked on Trump’s 2016 transition team and has described his organization’s role in Project 2025 as “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Trump himself told a conference, after taking a flight with Roberts, “they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

  • US News And World Report ☛ Czech Explosive Experts Safely Detonate a Rare World War II Bomb at a Major Chemical Plant

    The bomb was found during construction work last week on Aug. 21 away from a building. Experts decided not to transport the 250-kilogram (550-pound) bomb to a safer place to dispose of it, because it contained a chemical mechanism designed to delay the explosion, a rare discovery in the country.

    They covered the bomb with hundreds of sandbags before the explosion. A nearby road was closed and trams halted operations before the explosion at about noon (1000 GMT). Police sealed off an area 2 kilometers (more than a mile) from the site of the explosion.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-27 [Older] Indian protesters clash with police at rally over Kolkata rape case

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-27 [Older] Islamic State: Germany and Europe are once again a target

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-27 [Older] Israeli army says Hamas hostage rescued from Gaza

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-27 [Older] Pakistan's PM Sharif vows retribution for terrorist attacks

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-27 [Older] Pakistan: What's behind the armed insurgency in Balochistan?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] Germany, Philippines eye closer defense ties in Indo-Pacific

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-25 [Older] South China Sea: Philippines accuses China of ramming supply vessel

  • EFF ☛ The French Detention: Why We're Watching the Telegram Situation Closely

    On August 24th, French authorities detained Durov when his private plane landed in France. Since then, the French prosecutor has revealed that Durov’s detention was related to an ongoing investigation, begun in July, of an “unnamed person.” The investigation involves complicity in crimes presumably taking place on the Telegram platform, failure to cooperate with law enforcement requests for the interception of communications on the platform, and a variety of charges having to do with failure to comply with  French cryptography import regulations. On August 28, Durov was charged with each of those offenses, among others not related to Telegram, and then released on the condition that he check in regularly with French authorities and not leave France.  

    We know very little about the Telegram-related charges, making it difficult to draw conclusions about how serious a threat this investigation poses to privacy, security, or freedom of expression on Telegram, or on online services more broadly. But it has the potential to be quite serious. EFF is monitoring the situation closely.  

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] Germany's Scholz seeks new knife laws after Solingen attack

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] London apartment fire forces 100 residents to evacuate

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-24 [Older] France: Macron says arson attack on synagogue 'terrorist'

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-25 [Older] French police arrest suspect after synagogue blast

  • CBC ☛ 2024-08-22 [Older] CUPE vice-president vows to carry on despite calls to resign amid accusations of antisemitism

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] Solingen attack puts spotlight on German deportation laws

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-24 [Older] Germany: Police hunt killer after Solingen stabbings

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-24 [Older] Germany: Several killed in stabbing at Solingen street party

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-24 [Older] Germany wants to get tough on knife crime with stricter laws

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-25 [Older] Germany detains Solingen attack suspect over triple murder, IS links

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-25 [Older] Ugandan opposition members face 'terrorism' charges

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-25 [Older] Telegram’s Pavel Durov arrested in France on criminal charges

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] Telegram CEO Pavel Durov's arrest not political — Macron

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] Who is Telegram's billionaire founder Pavel Durov?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] RECOMMENDED — A den of criminal activity? After the arrest of Telegram's boss, attention is on the app's hands-off approach to content moderation

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-25 [Older] How Israel's air defense system works

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-25 [Older] Israel says Hezbollah attack on base did not cause damage

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-25 [Older] Israel vs. Hezbollah in Lebanon: A Timeline

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Insight Hungary ☛ Hungarian citizen arrested on charges of conspiring to export US military grade radios to Russia

      A 46-year-old Hungarian citizen, Bence Horvath was arrested in San Francisco on Monday on charges, that he conspired with others to illegally export U.S.-origin radio communications technology to Russian government end users without a license, a press release by the US Attorney's Office at the District of Columbia revealed.  

      According to 444. hu. Horvath has ties to high-level Hungarian diplomatic circles. Horvath's mother previously worked as the head of the office for a Hungarian Foreign Ministry-affiliated company. She was also the official supplier of Motorola communications equipment to the Russian Interior Ministry.  Horvath. faces allegations of attempting to export American-made Motorola radio transceivers to Russia without a license. The devices, intended for Russian state use, were reportedly being funneled through various shell companies. This operation came under scrutiny from US authorities who suspect these transactions were part of a broader scheme to supply the Russian government with restricted technology.

• Environment

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Concrete Facts About Concrete

    Did you know that according to various easy to find sources, the total CO2 emissions as a by-product of producing cement and concrete account for more than 10% of the total emissions we as humans are responsible for? By expanding our house, we have made our humble contribution to that.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-27 [Older] Sudan dam bursts in heavy rains; 30 dead, thousands impacted

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-27 [Older] UN chief Guterres warns of fast-rising Pacific ocean

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CBC ☛ 2024-08-22 [Older] Air Canada pilots vote overwhelmingly to authorize a strike. It could start next month

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] Lufthansa subsidiary Discover Airlines plans strike

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-27 [Older] Ryanair to cut flights to Berlin due to 'sky-high costs'

    • Vox ☛ 2024-08-23 [Older] Canada’s railway lockout saga, briefly explained

    • DeSmog ☛ ‘Colossal Waste’: U.S. Leads Way in Public Spending on False Climate Solutions

    • Nick Heer ☛ Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau Were Killed by a Driver While Cycling

      As Theisen writes, over a thousand cyclists were killed by drivers in 2022 in the United States alone. This is a high-profile tragedy, but not an outlier.

    • Molly White ☛ Polling: Are Democratic voters really “increasingly gravitating towards [cryptocurrency]”?

      Paradigm, a cryptocurrency-focused venture capital firm, has released a new poll of Democratic voters, following their June poll of Republicans and their March poll of American voters irrespective of party.

    • Zimbabwe ☛ Could Converting Regular Cars to Electric Vehicles Be Viable in Zimbabwe?

      There are apparently a number of Chinese companies selling EV retrofit kits for different vehicle models, even going back vehicles made in the 80s. The Latin America company that’s the subject of the article are supplied by a Chinese electric power system company called Zhuhai Enpower Electric. You can also buy EV parts on platforms like Alibaba if you know what you’re doing.

    • India Times ☛ Google to open second data center in Latin America, to invest over $850 million

      Google announced it will open its second data center in Latin America in Uruguay's Canelones, investing over $850 million. This follows the first data center in Chile's Quilicura, established in 2015. This project aims to boost technological development in Uruguay and the region.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-27 [Older] World’s oldest sloth dies in Germany’s Krefeld Zoo

  • Overpopulation

    • International Business Times ☛ 'People My Age Can Barely Afford Rent': 22-Year-Old Reveals 417 Reasons Why She Doesn't Want Kids

      One of Evert's most compelling arguments revolves around the financial burden of raising a child in today's economy. "Clothes, strollers, car seats, healthcare, insurance, diapers, more food, toys, childcare, college—the list goes on, and it all adds up," she said.

      SmartAsset says the average cost of raising a child in a large U.S. metro area is $25,181 per year, with significant variations depending on location. For instance, in Boston, the most expensive metro area, the annual cost of raising a child reaches nearly $38,000, with $22,806 going towards childcare alone. In contrast, New Orleans is the least expensive metro area, where raising a child costs less than $18,000 per year, mainly due to lower childcare costs.

      "People my age can barely afford rent; how do people expect us to be able to pay for kids?" Evert questioned. Her concerns resonate with many young adults facing the harsh realities of today's economic landscape.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] Germany’s investments in China increase despite warnings

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-25 [Older] Foreign workers 'indispensable' for eastern Germany — study

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] Paralympics: Transgender sprinter set to draw attention [Ed: Paralympics first, then the rest]

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-25 [Older] EU 'extremely concerned' over Venezuela election

  • FAIR ☛ US Press Loses Interest as Winners of French Election Aren’t Allowed to Take Power

    One of the US’s oldest and closest allies is currently undergoing a constitutional crisis. Its government is in disarray, led by a head of state whose party has been rejected by voters, and who refuses to allow parliament to function. Coups and crises of transition may pass by relatively unnoticed in the periphery, but France has gone nearly two months without a legitimate government, and US corporate media don’t seem to care to report on it.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ OpenAI, Anthropic enter AI agreements with US AI Safety Institute

    The agreements, known as memorandums of understanding, were announced Thursday by the AI Safety Institute, which called them “first-of-their-kind” government and industry partnerships. Under those agreements, the institute, which is housed at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, will “receive access to major new models from each company prior to and following their public release” and collaborate with the companies on evaluation and risk mitigation, according to a news release.

  • Wired ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Be Neutral–While Tossing Gifts to Trump and the GOP

    This week Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. For months, the GOP-led committee has been on a crusade to prove that Meta, via its once-eponymous Facebook app, engaged in political sabotage by taking down right-wing content. Its investigation has involved thousands of documents, and the committee interviewed multiple employees, which failed to locate a smoking gun. Now, under the guise of offering his take on the subject, Zuckerberg’s letter is a mea culpa where he seems to indicate that there was something to the GOP conspiracy theory.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ A way out of Silicon Valley's profit-driven devastation

    We should not make the mistake of thinking this is a battle over ideology or policy. It’s a battle to maximize Silicon Valley’s profits regardless of the consequences for society.

  • The Nation ☛ Big Tech Is Very Afraid of a Very Modest AI Safety Bill

    California is on the brink of passing regulation to start to do just that. Yet despite universal recognition among leading AI executives of the risks their work poses the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act (SB1047), has become the target of an extraordinary lobbying effort. The bill is said to be certain to stifle technical innovation in Silicon Valley and almost purposely designed to end “open source” AI development.

    Malarkey. This fight is less about “corporate capture” or the California legislature’s desire to kill its golden-egg-laying goose, and more about the same-as-it-ever-was power of money in American politics. If the bill fails — and this week will determine whether it does — it will signal yet again the loss of America’s capacity to address even the most significant threats.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Atlantic ☛ Chatbots Are Primed to Warp Reality

      With the entire tech industry shifting its attention to these products, it may be time to pay more attention to the persuasive form of AI outputs, and not just their content. Chatbots and AI search engines can be false prophets, vectors of misinformation that are less obvious, and perhaps more dangerous, than a fake article or video. “The model hallucination doesn’t end” with a given AI tool, Pat Pataranutaporn, who researches human-AI interaction at MIT, told me. “It continues, and can make us hallucinate as well.”

    • NPR ☛ The GOP is making false claims about noncitizens voting. It’s affecting real voters

      Despite the fact that it has long been illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and there is no credible evidence showing it happens in significant numbers, the false claim has continued to gain momentum.

    • Harvard University ☛ Toll of QAnon on families of followers

      Since 2021, QAnon belief among Americans jumped from 14 percent to 23 percent, while the percentage of skeptics declined from 40 percent to 29 percent, according to a national survey published last fall by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).

      A new book, “The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family,” delves into the private lives of some believers, chronicling the painful emotional and financial toll this elaborate conspiracy has taken on ordinary people.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] Taliban silence Afghan women entirely with new laws

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Press freedom is no excuse for breaking law, Beijing says

    Western politicians, including those from the US and the UK, have condemned the convictions. US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller called the verdict a “direct attack on media freedom.”

    Britain’s foreign office minister for the Indo-Pacific, Catherine West, said the editors were found guilty for “doing their job,” adding that free media was essential for the prosperity of society.

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Man Jailed For Wearing T-Shirt With Photo Of Slain Opposition Leader Nemtsov

    A court in Russia's Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk on August 30 sentenced activist Zigmund Khudyakov to 23 days in jail for publicly wearing in January a T-shirt with a picture of late opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead near the Kremlin in 2015. [...]

  • India Times ☛ Pakistani blogger Asma Batool jailed on blasphemy charges: 'All gods were witness to ...' poem on rape sparks outrage

    A Pakistani blogger named Asma Batool has been jailed on blasphemy charges after sharing a poem on social media about the harassment women face in South Asian countries. She was detained following the filing of a First Information Report (FIR) by religious clerics who claimed that the poem insulted Allah.

  • VOA News ☛ Hong Kong journalists found guilty of sedition in landmark media case

    The legal proceedings against Chung and Lam began in December 2021 when the newsroom offices of Stand News were raided by dozens of police. The two were among at least six news employees detained. The well-known online news site stopped publishing the next day.

  • Futurism ☛ Trump Threatens to Imprison Mark Zuckerberg

    In a forthcoming coffee table book titled "Save America," former president Donald Trump accuses billionaire Meta-formerly-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg of scheming to skew the 2020 election against him — and, as spotted by Politico, swears that Zuckerberg will "spend the rest of his life in prison" should he do so again.

  • Politico LLC ☛ Trump claims Zuckerberg plotted against him during the 2020 election in soon-to-be released book

    It represents Trump’s most recent attack on Zuckerberg, who he has repeatedly accused of intervening in the last presidential election. And it comes as Meta has taken steps to assure conservatives it will not influence this year’s campaign.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CBC ☛ 2024-08-22 [Older] Postmedia begins takeover of parts of SaltWire Network

  • Pro Publica ☛ What a Dismissed Defamation Suit Cost One Journalist

    After publishing a story on a doctor accused of violating federal research rules and skirting ethical guidelines, ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein was named in a libel suit. An appeals court recently dismissed the case, but the experience took a toll.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Farewell to AnandTech

    AnandTech has been one of the resources the technically-minded have gone to get news and analysis. Anand Lal Shimpi’s early posts about Socket 7 informed the first computer I built in 1998 when I was a kid, and I’ve read them ever since. Their site was among the first RSS feeds I ever subscribed to, along with Tom’s Hardware. More recently, I knew that when the YouTube or social media drama mill was hyperfixated on something, I could go to AnandTech to get a considered perspective.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Russia jails journalist for eight years over Ukraine war reporting

    Massacres of civilians in both of those locations have been well-documented, with evidence of summary executions and allegations of war crimes.

    It became a criminal offence in Russia to criticise the war in Ukraine under a new law that was adopted just days after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022.

  • CPJ ☛ Russia retaliates against foreign journalists covering Ukraine advance into Kursk

    “The prosecution of the journalists covering an important development in the Russian-Ukraine war is another assault on press freedom,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator, in New York. “These reporters were performing their essential role of informing the public about the ongoing conflict. It is imperative that Russian authorities allow journalists to report on the war from within the conflict zone without the threat of prosecution.”

  • CPJ ☛ Russian journalist Sergey Mikhaylov sentenced to 8 years in prison

    “The sentencing of journalist Sergey Mikhaylov to eight years in prison on what Russian authorities label as ‘fake news’ is another sign of the Kremlin’s fear of journalists telling the truth about the 2022 civilian massacre in Russian-occupied Bucha,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s program coordinator for Europe and Central Asia. “Russian authorities should not contest Mikhaylov’s appeal and stop their prosecution of independent journalists.”

  • AnandTech ☛ End of the Road: An AnandTech Farewell

    It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] Australian workers now have the 'right to disconnect'

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-08-26 [Older] Dutch watchdog fines Uber over driver data protection

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Confiscate Their Money

    One of the privileges of great wealth is the ability to pretend that spending it amounts to a job. For the pharma executives Calvin and Orsula Knowlton, that spare job was the planning and construction of a $27 million New Jersey mansion, complete with an indoor pub and an elevator to the his-and-hers gym and an underground tunnel leading to the planned auto gallery. The religious couple also installed a chapel in the mansion, a home they did not often spend time in, because they had others. How they squared their allegiance to the Bible with their superfluous $27 million palace was not discussed.

  • RTL ☛ 'Opposing side': Taliban's morality ministry refuses to cooperate with UN Afghan mission

    The Taliban government's morality ministry said it would not cooperate with the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, calling it "an opposing side".

    The announcement comes after the UN mission (UNAMA) warned that a new morality law -- requiring women to cover up completely and not raise their voices -- would damage prospects for engagement with the international community.

  • RFERL ☛ The Azadi Briefing: Afghan Clerics Are Opposing Taliban Bans On Female Education

    The Islamist group has barred girls from attending school past the sixth grade and banned women from going to university.

  • India Times ☛ Uber CEO says growth in South Korea promising despite underdog status

    Khosrowshahi said about 20% of South Korean taxi drivers were on the Uber Taxi platform, and that the number of passengers grew nearly 80% year-on-year during the first half of 2024, including a more than doubling of the usage by international travellers to South Korea since the rebranding.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • India Times ☛ Why Telegram chief's arrest raises 'red flags' for tech bosses

    French lawyers told AFP it was "unprecedented" for an individual to be held criminally liable for what users chose to do on a tech platform.

  • VOA News ☛ Starlink's Botswana entry hailed as 'game-changer' amid concern over costs

    “The advent of Starlink on the continent is a big game changer,” he said. “It gives [Internet] access to the underserved populations in the rural areas and even in high density areas. It is going to bring about innovation. The more access our people have to the internet, they can learn.”

  • Tedium ☛ Anderson v. TikTok: The Ruling That Breaks Section 230?

    The issue is, of course, that people don’t know these things and end up getting injured or even killed over it. And it’s the consequences of one of these challenges that has led to perhaps the most notable ruling on a fundamental rule of the internet era in years.

    A recent appeals-court ruling in Anderson v. TikTok, Inc. could put the brakes on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as we know it. The case, pitting the mother of a young woman who died in a “blackout challenge” against the most addictive social network on the internet—puts a fundamental law of the internet at risk. And in some corners of the internet, people seem ready for this tree trunk of internet law to fall over.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Brandon ☛ ffbe - an end of an era

    Back to the end of service announcement, the writing has been on the wall for awhile. The global version (which is what is EoS) started skipping character upgrades and some new characters from the Japanese version (which was about 6 months ahead of the global version) awhile ago. Events then started getting skipped (especially character upgrade events). So I don't think it came as a surprise to many people.

  • The Independent UK ☛ You use Spotify to listen to music. Here’s how money from ads and subscription fees flows to artists

    How does Spotify pay artists and songwriters?

    Short answer: They don't. Spotify pays roughly two-thirds of each dollar it makes from music streams — a collection of paid subscriptions and advertiser income — to the rights holders of the music on its platform, paid out between recording and publishing agreements.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• FAIR ☛ Freddy Brewster on Supermarket Megamerger

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • The Hill ☛ Tom Hanks warns fans against AI-generated ads using his likeness

      “There are multiple ads over the [Internet] falsely using my name, likeness, and voice promoting miracle cures and wonder drugs,” Hanks wrote to his more than 9 million followers in an Instagram post Thursday.

      “These ads have been created without my consent, fraudulently and through AI,” the “Forrest Gump” star said in the post, which he titled a “public service announcement from Tom Hanks.”

• Copyrights

  • Six Colors ☛ Who’s blocking Apple’s AI crawler

    Remaining unanswered is the question of just what was already used to train Apple’s LLM before people were aware of the ability to block it, and whether blocking the crawler now has any effect after the horse is out of the barn.

  • Wired ☛ Major Sites Are Saying No to Apple’s AI Scraping

    WIRED can confirm that Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, Vox Media, the USA Today network, and WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast, are among the many organizations opting to exclude their data from Apple’s AI training. The cold reception reflects a significant shift in both the perception and use of the robotic crawlers that have trawled the web for decades. Now that these bots play a key role in collecting AI training data, they’ve become a conflict zone over intellectual property and the future of the web.

    This new tool, Applebot-Extended, is an extension to Apple’s web-crawling bot that specifically lets website owners tell Apple not to use their data for AI training. (Apple calls this “controlling data usage” in a blog post explaining how it works.) The original Applebot, announced in 2015, initially crawled the internet to power Apple’s search products like Siri and Spotlight. Recently, though, Applebot’s purpose has expanded: The data it collects can also be used to train the foundational models Apple created for its AI efforts.

  • India Times ☛ “World's largest” piracy streaming website shut down by police in Vietnam

    This action comes amid a broader crackdown on piracy sites. Other popular illegal streaming platforms like Aniwave and AnimeFlix have also recently gone offline, though ACE has not claimed direct responsibility for those shutdowns.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Operation Redirect: Police Anti-Malware Action Protects Music & Pirates

    Despite malware having an even worse reputation than piracy, until now police operations to take sites down, explicitly because they're involved in both, have been pretty much non-existent. This week, music industry group IFPI revealed Operation Redirect, "the first operation of its kind in Brazil to target illegal sites associated with malware distribution." Intrigued by the announcement, we took a closer look and found plenty of drama.