Leftovers

• Scripting News ☛ Scripting News: Monday, October 7, 2024

  Today is the 30th anniversary of this blog. Hola!

• Robert Birming ☛ Blog Your Way Forward

  The only direction I had when launching this blog was that it should be in English. It's still a bit all over the place in terms of content, and might continue to be so. But lately, something of a concept has been tapping me on the shoulder from time to time.

• Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Asheville

  Asheville is in crisis right now. They're without drinking water, faucets run dry, and it's difficult to flush toilets. As of yesterday, the hospital has water (via tanker trucks), but 80% of the public water system is still without running water.

• NPR ☛ After Helene, many Asheville, N.C., residents remain without drinking water

  An estimated tens of thousands of people in and around Asheville, N.C., are still without running water, six days after the tropical storm Helene.

  The faucets ran dry in Alana Ramo’s home last Friday after the storm swept through. She resorted to creek water and rainwater.

• Lou Plummer ☛ The Real People

  I know enough about online relationships after 30 years of being in them to understand that sometimes they can be more ephemeral than the solely IRL kind. People can disappear for any number of reasons. They get tired, they get mad, they get busy, and then they are gone. Hopefully, the IndyWeb ethos of owning and controlling your own space helps keep that to a minimum. I know several people who have been blogging for decades. They have yet to disappear. They give me hope. In any case, though, the fear of someone leaving doesn't keep me from investing in these newfound friendships. I get a lot of pleasure from them, and there's practically an endless supply of people to approach as if I were a kid on the playground instead of the gray-headed grandfather I really am.

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ A Monet Masterpiece That Hung in Churchill's Home Is Now Free of Grime From Cigar Smoke

  The painting was recently cleaned for a new exhibition—“Monet and London: Views of the Thames”—at the Courtauld Gallery in London. It had been covered in a layer of grime, which was likely caused by both cigar and fireplace smoke. Rebecca Hellen, a National Trust conservator, tells the Art Newspaper's Martin Bailey that she has restored the artwork to “how it would have been left by Monet.”

• Science

  • Bartosz Milewski ☛ Coverages and Sites

    In our quest to rewrite topology using the language of category theory we introduced the category of open sets with set inclusions as morphisms. But when we needed to describe open covers, we sort of cheated: we chose to talk about set unions. Granted, set unions can be defined as coproducts in this category (not to be confused with coproducts in the category of sets and functions, where they correspond to disjoint unions). This poset of open sets with finite products and infinite coproducts is called a frame. There is however a more general definition of coverage that is applicable to categories that are not necessarily posets.

• Education

  • Pratik ☛ Farewell Email with Reason of Leaving

    Anyway, I had two issues to discuss with my coach last week, and for the sake of brevity, I’ll discuss the first one in this post.

• Hardware

  • Blog System/5 ☛ The costs of the i386 to x86-64 upgrade - by Julio Merino

    If you read my previous article on DOS memory models, you may have dismissed everything I wrote as “legacy cruft from the 1990s that nobody cares about any longer”. After all, computers have evolved from sporting 8-bit processors to 64-bit processors and, on the way, the amount of memory that these computers can leverage has grown orders of magnitude: the 8086, a 16-bit machine with a 20-bit address space, could only use 1MB of memory while today’s 64-bit machines can theoretically access 16EB.

    All of this growth has been in service of ever-growing programs. But… even if programs are now more sophisticated than they were before, do they all really require access to a 64-bit address space? Has the growth from 8 to 64 bits been a net positive in performance terms?

    Let’s try to answer those questions to find some very surprising answers. But first, some theory.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • DeSmog ☛ ‘A Big Dilemma’: Inside Europe’s Polluting Manure Problem

  • The NCCIH embraces the “integration” of functional medicine quackery with medicine

    [Orac note: I realize that last week I said that I’d try to get back into the regular blogging groove. Well, life happened again, and my mom was hospitalized last week. (She’s back to baseline and was discharged over the weekend.) I do, however, thank you for the suggestions regarding my talk. I’m thinking of incorporating some of this into my talk. In the meantime, maybe this week I’ll manage to serve up some more Insolence. (I certainly plan on trying, as so much stuff has been going on in my wheelhouse and not being able to comment on it has been eating at me.) In the meantime, let’s talk…the NCCIH and functional medicine!]

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Bloomberg ☛ Scale AI, Outlier AI Hit With Class Lawsuit Over Mass Layoffs

    Artificial intelligence companies Scale AI Inc., Outlier AI Inc., and HireArt Inc. got hit with a lawsuit alleging they violated federal and state laws by terminating more than 500 workers without the required 60-day advance notice.

  • Bleeping Computer ☛ Microsoft: Word deletes some documents instead of saving them

  • Apple iMac M1 PCs are increasingly suffering reported issues with the screen being corrupted

  • Mike Haynes ☛ Threads still sucks

    Against my better judgment, I decided to give Threads another try, and it’s only marginally better than I remembered, which was pretty awful. The main “For You” feed is filled with generic, uninteresting, often offensive comments and bland questions that have been asked a million times in other places or shouldn’t be asked anywhere. It all feels so synthetic; people posting something, anything for engagement.

  • MB ☛ RSS for Watching YouTube?

    I’ve been using RSS for longer than I care to remember. It’s been my primary information source for everything except traditional news. I use Feedbin as my backend, and for the last year or so Reeder (now Reeder Classic) as my RSS client on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

  • Ted Benson ☛ Ted Benson

    So I modified my website to lie to it:

    • When a human visits my homepage, they see a regular page about me.

    • When Google's AI visits my homepage, it sees fake producer's show notes for an episode about me flying to the moon on my bike with balloons and a scuba tank.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Licensing can be joyful (and legally dubious)

      There are a lot of other small, playful licenses. None of these are going to change the world, but they inject a little joy and play into an area of software that is usually serious and somber.

      When I had to pick a license for my exceptional language (Hurl), I went down that serious spiral at first. What license will give the project the best adoption, or help it achieve its goals? What are its goals?

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ Germany Rushes to Expand Biometric Surveillance

      So, it is disappointing that the German government is trying to push through Parliament, at record speed, a “security package” that would increase biometric surveillance at an unprecedented scale. The proposed measures contravene the government’s own coalition agreement, and undermine European law and the German constitution.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Meta Fined for Logging Passwords

      Because “only” hundreds of millions of users are affected, it sounds like they were not actually storing the passwords in the database unhashed. Rather, they were probably inappropriately logging some raw request data. So it’s not that the passwords should have been hashed but that they shouldn’t have been logged. This is bad, but it seems Meta caught the problem themselves and were transparent about it. It’s unclear to me what the DPC was investigating for five years.

    • ABC ☛ We hacked a robot vacuum — and could watch live through its camera

      Without even entering the building, we were able to silently take photos of the (consenting) owner of a device made by Chinese giant Ecovacs.

      And then things got even creepier.

      Robot vacuums rove unchecked through countless households, both in Australia and around the world.

    • Bitdefender ☛ Your robot vacuum cleaner might be spying on you

      Like any responsible security researcher, Giese informed Ecovacs about the vulnerability. However, despite being informed in December 2023, the security hole still hasn't been addressed.

    • Don Marti ☛ there ought to be a law

      Yes, the Big Tech companies will try to get small businesses to come out and advocate for surveillance, but there are a bunch of other small business issues that limitations on surveillance could help address, by shifting the balance of power away from surveillance companies.

    • Connor Tumbleson ☛ MKBHD & Wallpapers.

      I then saw folks online (Reddit) complaining about the permission requirements for this application and it looked like a serious set of permissions. Though I knew from submitting applications via work that you include one advertising library and all of these tracking permissions come along - unless you strip down your analytics to a bare minimum.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Axios ☛ Some Christians pushing back on Christian nationalism

    The big picture: From the Greek Orthodox Church to Roman Catholics to evangelical Christian leaders, several grassroots efforts — primarily led by individuals rather than any church hierarchy — have sprung up to issue warnings about Christian nationalism.

  • VOA News ☛ Watchdogs: Sentencing of jihadi linked to Charlie Hebdo attack 'important verdict'

    Media groups have welcomed the life sentence handed to a French jihadi linked to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack.

    A French court last week found Peter Cherif guilty of “belonging to a criminal organization” in connection to his work with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, according to AFP.

  • Le Monde ☛ French jihadist linked to Charlie Hebdo attacks receives life sentence

    Peter Cherif, 42, had been on trial in Paris since mid-September for "belonging to a criminal terrorist association" while fighting for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen from 2011 to 2018. During that time he is suspected of training his Paris childhood friend Chérif Kouachi, who along with his brother Saïd perpetrated the January 7, 2015 massacre at Charlie Hebdo's offices in the French capital – for which AQAP later claimed responsibility.

    The trial judge sentenced Cherif to life behind bars, with a minimum of 22 years to be served. The president of the court said the decision had been taken "in view of the seriousness of the acts" for which Cherif was convicted.

  • Barrons ☛ French Jihadist Linked To Charlie Hebdo Attackers Faces Verdict

    Prosecutors called him the "architect" of the first in a string of attacks carried out by radical [sic] Islamists that hit France in the late 2010s.

    The 12 killings at the magazine shocked the world and led to an international outpouring of political and popular support under the motto "Je suis Charlie" ("I am Charlie").

  • Freedom From Religion Foundation ☛ FFRF launches “Vote Like Your Rights Depend On It” campaign

    The campaign is aimed at mobilizing young and undecided voters, especially the growing population of Gen Z “Nones” (religiously unaffiliated) across the country, in time for the upcoming elections. With a focus on protecting personal rights and freedoms, this campaign speaks directly to these voters about the power they hold in determining the future through their vote. FFRF has launched an all-out multimedia approach to reach and engage this key demographic — leveraging podcasts, satellite radio, social media, digital, and print ads to spread the message far and wide.

  • The Register UK ☛ Chinese cyberspies reportedly breached Verizon, AT&T

    Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies were among the US broadband providers whose networks were reportedly [breached] by Chinese cyberspies, possibly compromising the wiretapping systems used for court-ordered surveillance.

  • Rob Knight ☛ Never Send me a TikTok Video

    Today a friend shared a video on TikTok with me that I promptly sent to my wife because I knew she would find it funny. It is funny (this is a non-tracked link). A few hours later that friend said "Oh your wife has watched it" because TikTok notified him, with her username, that she had watched it. What the actual fuck.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ School cell phone bans have hit most states. Not everyone is on board.

    Seventy-two percent of high school teachers and a third of teachers overall say cell phones are a major distraction in classrooms, according to the Pew Research Center. More than half of states have introduced legislation or other policies to restrict the devices in schools. Just last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Phone-Free School Act, which mandates that all school districts, charter schools and county offices of education in the state devise plans to curb smartphone use by 2026.

    Now the country’s three most populous states — California, Texas and Florida — have either introduced or enacted legislation to limit smartphones in schools. Cell phone restrictions in the fourth most populous state, New York, appear imminent; Gov. Kathy Hochul announced plans to introduce such a bill during the 2025 legislative session.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Latvia ☛ Latvian police investigating use of fake passport in attack on Navalny associate

      Latvian State Police are investigating the use of a potentially fake Latvian passport in a case involving an attack on an associate of the late Russian opposition figure Alekei Navalny in Lithuania, reported LTV's De Facto investigative show October 6.

    • RFERL ☛ Russian Military Court Jails Ukrainian Woman On Terrorism Charges

      A Russian military court has sentenced Ukrainian Iryna Navalna, 26, to eight years in prison on charges of attempting to commit a terrorist attack and illegal possession of weapons.

• Environment

  • VOA News ☛ World water resources decreasing as global rivers dry up

    Billions of people are facing a future of water scarcity as global rivers dry up, glaciers melt, and intense heat and other extreme weather events caused by climate change create critical changes in water availability around the world, according to the State of Global Water Resources report issued Monday by the World Meteorological Organization.

    “Water is the canary in the coal mine of climate change,” said Celeste Saulo, WMO secretary-general. “Water is the basis of life on this planet, but it can also be a force of destruction.”

  • Nick Heer ☛ Low Orbit Satellite Companies Respond to Scientists’ Concerns About Light and Environmental Pollution With Even Bigger, Brighter Satellites

    It is a tricky balance. Adding redundant communications layers in our everyday devices can be useful and is, plausibly, of lifesaving consequence. Yet it also means the sky is littered with fields of objects which interfere with ground-based instruments. The needs of scientists might seem more abstract and less dire than, say, people seeking help in a natural disaster — I understand that. But I am not certain we will be proud of ourselves fifty years from now if we realize astronomical research has been severely curtailed because a bunch of private companies decided to compete in our shared sky. There is surely a balance to be struck.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • DeSmog ☛ UK’s £22 Billion Carbon Capture Pledge Follows Surge in Lobbying by Fossil Fuel Industry, Records Show

    • DeSmog ☛ Trump Will ‘Kill’ Climate Budgets, Key Ally Tells Heritage Event

    • The Drone Girl ☛ Do people think drone delivery is actually useful? 2024 study has surprising results

      People think of drone delivery as more useful when the drones are bringing critical goods, like medical supplies, blood samples or tests. That’s as opposed to drones delivering your standard mail and packages. In the survey, 85% of respondents said using drones to deliver medial supplies, blood samples of tests offered a net benefit, with just 5% saying such a use case was outright not beneficial.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ It Was Ten Years Ago Today

      Experience in the decade since has shown that this insight was correct.

      Source The insight applies to Proof Of Work networks; for the entire decade Bitcoin mining has always been dominated by five or fewer mining pools. As I write this AntPool, ViaBTC and F2Pool have had more than 50% of the hashrate over the last week. Even within those pools, the vast expense of mining rigs, the data centers to put them in, and the power to feed them make economies of scale essential.

    • Didier Stevens ☛ Quickpost: The Electric Energy Consumption Of LLMs

      I though to myself: that’s a lot of energy. 70 Wh is 252,000 Ws (70 W * 3600 s). Assume that it takes 10 seconds to write that email, then it requires 25,200 W of power, or 25 kW. That’s way more than the theoretical maximum I can get here at home from the power grid (9 kW).

      So I decided to do some quick & dirty tests with my desktop computer and my powermeter.

    • Didier Stevens ☛ Quickpost: The Electric Energy Consumption Of LLMs – No GPU

      A friend asked me if I had used a GPU for my tests described in blog post “Quickpost: The Electric Energy Consumption Of LLMs”. Because he had tried running an LLM on a machine without GPU, and it was too slow.

    • Tweed Golf ☛ Rust is rolling off the Volvo assembly line

      This ECU was not actively being worked on in 2019 and so Julius became part of a new dedicated team. But even back in 2017, when Julius joined Volvo, he already knew about Rust and saw its potential to replace existing C and C++ code.

      It turned out the low-power processor was a perfect fit for using Rust! It was not classified as a safety-critical component and it was an Arm Cortex-M processor, so there was no technical or bureaucratic blocker for using Rust.

      And so it has come to be that, at this moment, EX90s and Polestar 3s are rolling off the assembly line that would not work without their Rust components.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Wildfire Data Is Flawed — Here’s How to Fix It

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Variety ☛ Taylor Swift Is the Richest Female Musician in the World

    Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour propelled her into billionaire status in 2023. Her wealth is estimated to be made up of $600 million from concert sales and royalties, plus another $600 million from her music catalog, which she began re-releasing in 2021, labeling these as “Taylor’s Version,” and about $125 million in real estate.

  • Techdirt ☛ Elon Musk’s “Sorry, Twitter No Longer Exists” Defense Falls Flat Down Under

    And yet, he fired most of the trust and safety team, appeared to stop using industry-standard tools for finding/deleting known CSAM, and seemed to make the CSAM problem on ExTwitter much, much worse. That’s not even mentioning the time he reinstated an account that had shared an infamously horrid piece of CSAM because the poster was an Elon supporter.

  • Truthdig ☛ When John and Yoko Seized American TV

    Forty million viewers tuned in. Among them was President Richard Nixon, who was alerted that the anti-war Lennon posed a threat to his reelection. A year before, a new bloc of young Americans had gained the right to vote with the passage of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18. Within weeks of the Lennons’ appearances on “The Mike Douglas Show,” the White House would launch a covert war against the ex-Beatle, fearing that he was about to rally America’s youth against Tricky Dick.

  • New York Times ☛ How a Lobbying Group Is Arguing That Big Tech Protects Free Speech

    NetChoice has effectively argued that the state laws amount in various ways to censorship. Though the statutes are intended to protect children, fight disinformation and bolster privacy, they restrict access to content and could undermine the free expression of individuals and social media companies, the group has claimed.

  • Andrew Hutchings ☛ Why I moved my blog

    This website was hosted on WordPress.com, which is owned by Automattic. I have moved it to Hostinger. That isn’t to say I was unhappy with WordPress.com, but I do not want to be a part of funding either side of the battle. As for why Hostinger? It seemed like a sane choice at the time, it is difficult to know who is a good provider now that I’ve been out of the hosting game for so long. So, this isn’t an advert for anyone, but so far, I am happy with my decision.

  • [Old] American Governance Foundation Inc ☛ When the Mismanagerial Class Destroys Great Companies

    The difference between a holding company and a conglomerate is that a holding company is optimizing for passive financial performance, whereas a conglomerate is optimizing for strategic autonomy. A holding company collects paper titles to existing monetarily valuable assets. A conglomerate applies a living tradition of knowledge in industrial planning and business management to new domains, expanding by mobilizing more people to create new value. With a diverse array of often vertically-integrated companies or subsidiaries under the control of a single chain of command, sweeping grand plans that would be prohibitively costly or complex for a smaller or narrower company become possible.

  • [Old] Many Possibilities ☛ Chiclete Com Banana

    Of course Gilberto Gil isn’t just an amazing musician. He has also had a successful career in Brazilian politics culminating in his post as Minister of Culture in President Lula’s government. He wasn’t your average Minister of Culture either. As a champion of Open Source culture he helped lead Brasil towards more progressive intellectual property approaches including supporting the Creative Commons and promoting Open Source software development.

  • [Old] The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) ☛ Brazilian Digital Culture Forum: A New Way of Making Public Policies [PDF]

    In Brazil there is a growing debate over the past eight years on the use of new technologies for enhancing public policies. From the implementation of free and open source software (FOSS) within the federal public administration to the support on creation of digital studios in communities, as it will be presented in the next pages, the discussion of the role of these tools in the democratization of communication and culture has been gaining ground in the conceptual and practical plans.

  • [Old] Austin Chronicle ☛ Brazilian Broadband: Gilberto Gil Q&A - Music - The Austin Chronicle

    I recorded a whole album I titled Broadband [Banda Larga Cordel], associating new technology and new cultural possibilities and writing songs about this process. I talked about the open source movement and opened my archives to remixes and open access.

    I did that about five or six years ago and now those things are becoming commonplace. Even the the old entertainment and media industry is becoming familiar with and exploring those possibilities. At the same time, we created a whole bunch of new individuals independent from the industrial system and they're creating the micro-industrial system themselves through blogs and social networks. It’s an ongoing thing now.

  • [Old] Gannett ☛ Gilberto Gil seeks simplicity

    Gil also has become a leader in the digital rights movement, advocating free open source software and less rigid copyright protections for intellectual [sic] property [sic].

    "His importance is huge, it's immense," said John Perry Barlow, the former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has become a close friend.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Is Spreading Dangerous Hurricane Helene Conspiracy Theories

      In the aftermath of deadly Hurricane Helene, X-formerly-Twitter has transformed into a noxious breeding ground for destructive misinformation about the storm.

    • US News And World Report ☛ Intelligence Officials Say US Adversaries Are Targeting Congressional Races With Disinformation

      Russia and China have launched influence operations designed to help or hurt candidates in specific congressional races. Without giving specifics about the number of affected races, an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said Monday that both countries have zeroed in on races where they believe they have a national security interest at stake.

      Other smaller nations may be trying their own influence operations, officials said. Cuba is “almost certainly” trying to boost candidates that the Cuban government believes would support their interests in America, according to a report on foreign election threats released Monday, roughly a month out from the election.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 215: Jan Grabowski on Wikipedia’s Antisemitism Problem

    This podcast drops on Monday, October 7^th, the one-year anniversary of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. I’ve largely kept the issue the rising tide of antisemitism since the Hamas terrorist attacks off the Law Bytes podcast, but those that follow my work will know that I have been vocal on social control media and the mainstream media expressing my shock and concern. This episode blends my professional focus on digital policy with my personal concerns regarding antisemitism.

  • Meduza ☛ Imprisoned, tortured, and killed at the front: The life and death of anti-Kremlin activist Ildar Dadin

    Dadin rose to prominence in 2015 as the first Russian citizen to face felony prosecution for repeatedly violating rules for conducting demonstrations. As a result, the media began referring to the corresponding Criminal Code statute (Article 212.1) as the “Dadin Law.”

  • European Commission ☛ Evaluation of the Geo-blocking Regulation

    The Geo-blocking Regulation was adopted in 2018 to ensure better access conditions to goods and services for individuals and businesses. In particular, it addresses the specific problem of geo-blocking and unjustified discrimination of customers purely based on their nationality, place of residence or place of establishment. This initiative will evaluate whether the Regulation has met its objectives.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • CBC ☛ Canada has no legal obligation to provide First Nations with clean water, lawyers say

    The plaintiffs argue First Nations have a basic human right to clean water that Canada has violated, describing the conditions facing their communities as "an urgent human rights crisis."

  • Molly White ☛ Fighting for our web

    Earlier this year, I gave a talk about the very important fight for our web, and how we can all play a part in it. The recording is now up on YouTube, or scroll down to read a transcript.

  • Vox ☛ Homeless camping bans are complicating hurricane recovery efforts.

    Since then, more jurisdictions have passed laws criminalizing homelessness, part of a broader effort to crack down on those sleeping outside. Just this month a new law in Florida — that bans sleeping on public property anywhere in the state — took effect. While the law includes exceptions during emergencies like major storms, those protections end when the hurricane order is no longer in place.

    In practical terms, this means that when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis or a county official lifts Florida’s emergency hurricane order, Floridians who were homeless before Helene and Milton — roughly 31,000 people — could face new criminal penalties. Local homeless advocates say there are countless questions and rumors circulating about how the new law will be interpreted and enforced in the wake of climate disasters.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Strategist ☛ Subsea communications cables: vital but vulnerable

    Lying deep on the ocean floor, these fibre-optic cables can transmit massive amounts of data at high speeds with low latency, making them far more efficient than satellites, which handle only a fraction of global data transmission. Satellites, however, do serve as backups to subsea cables in some cases and are well suited to serving remote areas, islands and mountainous regions where cable connectivity may be too difficult and expensive to install.

  • Inside Towers ☛ FCC Chair Proposes Expanding 6 GHz Band Use for Very Low Power Devices - Inside Towers

    If adopted by a vote of the Commission, the proposed Report and Order would permit the VLP class of unlicensed devices to operate across 350 MHz in the U-NII-6 (6.425-6.525 GHz) and U-NII-8 (6.875-7.125 GHz) portions of the 6 GHz band. They could operate at the same power levels and technical/operational protections as recently approved for the U-NII-5 (5.925-6.425 GHz) and U-NII-7 (6.525-6.875 GHz) bands.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Deutsche Welle ☛ US: Court orders Google to open Android to rival app stores

  Tech giant Google will have to open its Android smartphone operating system to rival app stores, a US judge has ordered.

  A California jury decided on Monday that Google wields illegal monopoly through its Android Play store.

• CBC ☛ Antitrust case against Amazon to move forward in the U.S.

  The FTC has accused the online retailer of using anti-competitive tactics to maintain dominance among online superstores and marketplaces.

• Techdirt ☛ Amazon Ratchets Up Enshittifying Prime Video After Public Shrugs At Initial Ads

  When this is the mindset of a company, of course, enshittification will never be a one-step process. The enshittifiers must keep going, incrementally seeing how they can further extract any volume of dollars from its own customers to satisfy the masters. Which is how we get to today’s news, roughly 8 months after Amazon introduced ads into Prime Video, with Prime Video’s next great innovation: moar ads!!!

• The Register UK ☛ EU should designate Edge a gatekeeper, say browser rivals

  Competitors and an advocacy group have sent a letter to the Commission in support of Opera's July request to officials to reconsider the exemption of Microsoft Edge as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

  That decision meant Edge won't be subjected to the toughest DMA regulations. "Core" platform services must limit the amount of self-preferencing they do and provide concessions to give their competitors a chance. Microsoft, alongside other companies including Apple and Google, was designated as a gatekeeper under the regulations, but Edge was omitted from the list of products requiring changes to be compliant.

• Silicon Angle ☛ Amazon suffers a defeat as judge allows FTC antitrust case to move forward

  The order issued by Judge John H. Chun last week and unsealed on Monday represents a major defeat for Amazon, which has made repeated attempts to have the case against it tossed out of court. With the order, a trial in the case is set to proceed in October 2025, Reuters reported.

• Silicon Angle ☛ Court orders Google to open the Play Store to rival app marketplaces

  A federal court has ordered Google LLC to allow third-party app marketplaces on the Play Store.

  The change is one of more than a half dozen that the search giant will be required to implement. The court order was issued today in connection with a long-running legal dispute between Google and Epic Games Inc., a major video game developer. Epic has also pursued litigation against Apple Inc. over its App Store, albeit with more limited success.

• The Hill ☛ FTC antitrust case against Amazon moves forward, several state claims dismissed

  The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) antitrust case against Amazon will move forward, but several state claims against the e-commerce giant were dismissed, according to a newly unsealed ruling.

  In a ruling filed last week under seal, U.S. District Judge John Chun dismissed claims brought by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Maryland. However, Chun denied Amazon’s motion to dismiss the FTC’s claims, as well as several other state claims.

• [Old] GRAIN ☛ We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin

  But when largesse fails to do the job, Microsoft has proved more than willing to turn to the courts. In June, the company filed criminal defamation charges against government IT czar Amadeu. The cause of action? A published interview in which Amadeu said that Microsoft's giveaways were a "drug-dealer practice" - a "Trojan horse, a form of securing critical mass to continue constraining the country." Calling the remarks "absurd and criminal," Microsoft's official complaint placed particular emphasis, without any apparent irony, on Amadeu's assertion that the company's business strategies rely on the sowing of "fear, uncertainty, and doubt." On the advice of lawyers, Amadeu didn't even bother responding to the charges, and in the wake of international online protests mobilized by Brazil's open source community, Microsoft withdrew them. But notice had been served: The world's largest software company isn't about to sit by while Brazil flirts with mortal threats to its business model.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ 'Musi' Sues Apple Over App Store Removal Following YouTube Complaint

    After being removed from Apple's App Store, music streaming app Musi is fighting back with a lawsuit. Musi claims the app's removal, which was prompted by a YouTube complaint, was unjustified. The company sues Apple for breach of contract, seeking reinstatement and damages. The lawsuit raises questions about YouTube-related copyright claims, which have yet to be answered.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Premier League's Priority IPTV Piracy Threats Reported to U.S. Government

    In response to a call from the United States Trade Representative, the Premier League has submitted its report on the world's most notorious pirate IPTV-related platforms and services. Premier League matches are reportedly broadcast to almost 900 million households worldwide and by calling out those who broadcast illegally, the UK's top football league may even reach the magical one billion milestone.