Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Make Your Own Remy The Rat This Halloween

  [Christina Ernst] executed a fantastic idea just in time for Halloween: her very own Remy the rat (from the 2007 film Ratatouille). Just like in the film Remy perches on her head and appears to guide her movements by pulling on hair as though operating a marionette. It’s a great effect, and we love the hard headband used to anchor everything, which also offers a handy way to route the necessary wires.

• Computers Are Bad ☛ 2024-10-19 land art and isolation

  There aren't a lot of good things I can say about Las Vegas architecture, but one compliment I can extend is that the casino developers have mostly retained a tradition of commissioning fine art for their buildings. Nothing can really unseat Dale Chihuly's "Fiori di Como," the 2,000 square foot, 40,000 pound glass sculpture that occupies the ceiling of the Bellagio's lobby. But the Shops at Crystals took a pleasingly modernist direction by commissioning James Turrell. Turrell is probably the most prominent member of the "Light and Space movement," which can be simply described as an installation art view of architecture with a particular emphasis on architectural lighting. Turrell's portfolio includes an array of works he calls "Skyspaces," often vaguely gazebo-like structures with apertures in their ceilings intended to frame the sky as if it were a canvas. Most examples are in private ownership, the only one I have seen is "Dividing the Light" at Pomona College (Turrel's alma mater) in Claremont, California. I do recommend a visit.

• Andrew Stiefel ☛ How to Strategically Package New Product Features · Andrew Stiefel

  When your company develops new innovations, a key question is: how should you package those features within your current product tiers? This decision can significantly impact customer perception of value and the ease of selling it.

  There are two main factors to consider: [...]

• Sandor Dargo ☛ Who does what by how much by Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf | Sandor Dargo's Blog

  If you want to be more than just a coding machine and become more business-savvy, you have to care about business outcomes. To do that, you need to understand the language of business people and those who bridge the gap between business and developers. Who Does What by How Much will teach you that language by explaining what OKRs are. But it goes further, especially for internal IT teams where developers often think their work has little to do with customers. The authors who used to be developers themselves emphasize that every team has a customer. It might be colleagues in another department, but you still have a customer. And the way to ensure you’re doing a good job is by measuring how well your customers respond to your work.

• Futurism ☛ Moron Shoots Cybertruck, Alarmed to Discover It's Not Actually Bulletproof

  Shooting it while barely standing a dozen feet away — which in all likelihood means he was actually lucky that the round went clean through, because otherwise he could've been in the path of a dangerous ricochet.

  And of course, there's the big no-no of chucking a gun onto the ground, seemingly without engaging the safety.

• Science

  • Axios ☛ Orionids 2024: How, where to see Orionid meteor shower this weekend

    Be on the lookout for streaking meteors and fireballs — the Orionid meteors are expected to peak overnight Sunday and Monday before dawn each day, according to NASA.

  • New York Times ☛ Reinventing Concrete, the Ancient Roman Way

    By learning the secrets of 2,000-year-old cement, researchers are trying to devise greener, more durable modern options.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Azalea: a science-fiction story

    “This is simply a question of right and wrong.” “You can’t deny the costs, though. You keep saying that just one more year of taxes will solve— “We’re not solving—we’re mitigating!” “Then what’s the point?” The shrill back-and-forth fills the kitchen, where Xia is busy making breakfast, some kind of awful cricket-protein smoothie with kale.

• Education

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Should You Specialize In One Dev Stack?

    I’m a generalist but our society seems to promote specialists. I like learning new things, fiddling with the unknown, and combining that with knowledge of existing programming languages and tools. This enables more options when approaching a problem—and is a proven aspect of creative programming. But at the same time, it also provides a challenge as there’s the sometimes significant learning curve to overcome time and time again.

  • The Local DK ☛ Copenhagen schools block students from social media

    A majority at Copenhagen Municipality's Children and Youth Committee decided on Friday to ban social media during school hours, effective from the end of October.

    In a press statement, Copenhagen Municipality said that a firewall which is already used to block several websites with harmful content will now be extended to gaming, shopping, and social media.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Threatens to Defund Schools for Teaching US History

    “We’re gonna take the Department of Education, we’re gonna close it,” said the former president, explaining that each state would govern educational policy without federal input — a promise of the right-wing policy agenda, Project 2025, that was co-authored by hundreds of former Trump administration staffers.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Inside The RLL Hard Drive Protocol

    If you are younger than a certain age, RLL probably doesn’t mean much to you. Old consumer-grade hard drives used MFM (modified frequency modulation like a floppy disk uses) and soon went to IDE (integrated drive electronics). There was a brief period when RLL (run length limited) drives were the way to get a little more life out of the MFM technology. [W1ngsfly] has an RLL drive on his bench and uses his scope and some other gear to put it through its paces. You can watch over his shoulder in the video below.

  • Hackaday ☛ Fundamentals Of FMCW Radar Help You Understand Your Car’s Point Of View

    Pretty much every modern car has some driver assistance feature, such as lane departure and blind-spot warnings, or adaptive cruise control. They’re all pretty cool, and they all depend on the car knowing where it is in space relative to other vehicles, obstacles, and even pedestrians. And they all have another thing in common: tiny radar sensors sprinkled around the car. But how in the world do they work?

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Trump tariffs would increase laptop prices by $350+, other electronics by as much as 40%

    Working with analyst group TPW (Trade Partnership Worldwide), the CTA estimates that a 10% global tariff + 60% China tariff would raise the cost of laptops by 45%.

    That’s an additional $357 for models that hit what the organization considers an average price point of $793. Shoppers seeking premium models on the other hand, including most of those on our lists of best ultrabooks or best gaming laptops, would see much higher increases — to the tune of $450 for every $1,000 of current pricing.

  • Open Source Security Inc ☛ Cross-Process Spectre Exploitation

    I have developed an exploit to demonstrate the impact of an incomplete Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier (IBPB) in Intel Golden Cove and Raptor Cove that I discovered. IBPB is meant to invalidate all indirect branch target predictions, which includes returns and jump/call instructions that take a memory or register operand (i.e., indirect branches). However, due to buggy microcode -- which appears to be an emergent problem in modern processors -- certain return target predictions are retained across IBPBs.

    Back at ETH, Kaveh and I wrote a paper on this matter that we're publishing today along with this write-up. In the paper we also exploited a semantics issue of IBPB on certain AMD parts, leading to privileged memory disclosure on systems using IBPB-on-entry, which ironically is meant to be the more comprehensive mitigation alternative to the suspicious-looking, software-based SafeRET and retbleed thunk mitigations. In this write-up I will focus on the cross-process exploit, which is special for a couple of reasons.

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Reuters ☛ How Israel’s bulky pager fooled Hezbollah

      This three-layer sandwich was inserted in a black plastic sleeve, and encapsulated in a metal casing roughly the size of a match box, the photos showed.

      The assembly was unusual because it did not rely on a standard miniaturised detonator, typically a metallic cylinder, the source and two bomb experts said. All three spoke on conditions of anonymity.

      Without any metal components, the material used to trigger detonation had an edge: like the plastic explosives,

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • New York Times ☛ In L.A., Street Psychiatrists Offer the Homeless a Radical Step Forward

    The crisis of homelessness is pushing American psychiatry to places it has not gone before — like sidewalk injections of antipsychotics.

  • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Lisa Jarvis: Is weed bad for you? Marijuana’s health impacts still aren’t known

    We've racked up decades of evidence demonstrating how smoking and alcohol hurt our health, yet the data on cannabis and health are shockingly thin.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Stigma hinders Malaysians from seeking mental health help

    Societal perceptions play a significant role in discouraging help-seeking behaviour, said one expert. 

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • TechStory Media ☛ Weekly Business News: From Prescinto acquisition to Aakash layoffs

    IBM has purchased Prescinto, a prominent SaaS supplier for asset performance management within the renewable energy industry. IBM’s Maximo Application Suite will be greatly improved by this acquisition, which will also increase its market share in the quickly expanding utilities and energy industries. With IBM’s acquisition, the company is now at the forefront of digital solutions for managing renewable energy assets, as renewable energy plays a bigger role in global energy policies.

  • Federal News Network ☛ How AI can help federal agencies make the most of limited budgets

    While generative AI chatbots have been one of the most visible tools in the AI revolution over the past few years, these tools are not without risks. When it comes to critical government resources like veteran healthcare and retirement benefits, inaccurate information or AI hallucinations are simply not an option. Not to mention, chatbots may not always fit within the experience citizens are expecting.

  • The Atlantic ☛ People Are Asking AI for Child Pornography

    Muah.AI is a website where people can make AI girlfriends—chatbots that will talk via text or voice and send images of themselves by request. Nearly 2 million users have registered for the service, which describes its technology as “uncensored.” And, judging by data purportedly lifted from the site, people may be using its tools in their attempts to create child-sexual-abuse material, or CSAM.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Big Tech has given itself an AI deadline

    But these prophecies might not come from a place of strength, as I wrote yesterday. The energy, water, and capital demands of generative AI are astonishing, requiring perhaps trillions of dollars of spending this decade alone. Revenue hasn’t kept up, so one way for these companies to maintain the flow of investment dollars is to double down on the hype. “That omniscient computer programs will soon end all disease is worth any amount of spending today,” I wrote. This might be AI’s more important “rhetorical scaling law: bold prediction leading to lavish investment that requires a still-more-outlandish prediction, and so on.”

  • Howard Oakley ☛ A brief history of FileVault

    Encrypting all your data didn’t become a thing until well after the first release of Mac OS X. Even then, the system provided little support, and most of us who wanted to secure private data relied on third-party products like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ The race to find new materials with AI needs more data. Meta is giving massive amounts away for free

    “Materials science is having a machine-learning revolution,” says Shyue Ping Ong, a professor of nanoengineering at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the project.

    Previously, scientists were limited to doing very accurate calculations of material properties on very small systems or doing less accurate calculations on very big systems, says Ong. The processes were laborious and expensive. Machine learning has bridged that gap, and AI models allow scientists to perform simulations on combinations of any elements in the periodic table much more quickly and cheaply, he says.

  • Wired ☛ I Made a Wholesome OnlyFans to Try to Make Ends Meet

    For the uninitiated, the OnlyFans homepage has a simple design, with lots of white space, sans-serif text in black and blue, and a few embedded videos. These videos feature young men or women (usually women) working on DIY projects or making recipes—they just tend to wear less clothing or show more cleavage than you might expect on a site’s front door.

    Venture beyond the homepage, however, and you can find some seriously X-rated content. OnlyFans declines to break out how the $5.3 billion it funneled to creators last year was split between sexual and nonsexual content. “We don’t categorize our creators into SFW/NSFW. OnlyFans is all over 18 so we don’t need to,” says spokesperson Normandie Tottman, an external spokesperson speaking for the company.

  • Futurism ☛ The Pentagon Wants to Flood Social Media With Fake AI People

    That's despite the US government's persistent warnings that deepfakes and other AI-generated content will deepen the misinformation crisis and lead to a muddier information ecosystem for everyone.

    In the document, JSOC explains that it's seeking "technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content" for use by Special Operations Forces. This "solution," JSOC adds, "should include facial and background imagery, facial and background video, and audio layers."

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Register UK ☛ Man charged over market-manipulating SEC X account takeover

      When the SEC's X account was briefly compromised, it published a post falsely announcing that the regulator approved Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which caused the price of the digital currency to spike by more than $1,000.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Politico ☛ Police can access mobile phone data for minor crimes, EU top court rules

      European police can access data on people’s phones even when they aren’t suspected of serious crimes, the EU’s top court ruled Friday.

      “To consider that only the fight against serious crime is capable of justifying access to data contained in a mobile telephone would unduly limit the investigative powers of the competent authorities,” the court said in a press release this morning.

      Such a limitation on police powers would mean an “increased risk of impunity for criminal offenses,” the court said.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Sam Altman's Worldcoin rebrands as World and launches updated iris-scanning Orb

      Worldcoin, the identity-proving cryptocurrency project co-founded by OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, today announced a rebrand and a new version of its Iris-scanning Orb.

      Starting today, Worldcoin is now known as World because, at least according to the company, the name Worldcoin “no longer encapsulates the mission of the project — to accelerate every human.” Along with the renaming, the company also introduced the “World Network” with three key pillars — World Chain, World ID and Worldcoin. It’s pitched as a “network of real, verified humans built to enable an optimistic future in which humans will continue to be at the center of AI progress.”

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Straits Times ☛ North Korea says it recovered remains of South Korean drone

    Pyongyang released images of the device that some analysts confirmed was South Korean.

  • Wired ☛ The Disinformation Warning Coming From the Edge of Europe

    “It’s unprecedented in terms of complexity,” says Ana Revenco, Moldova’s former interior minister, now in charge of the country’s new Center for Strategic Communication and Combating Disinformation. What’s happening in Moldova on Facebook, Telegram, TikTok, and YouTube, she believes, carries a warning for the rest of the world. “This shows us our collective vulnerability,” she says. “Platforms are not only active here. If [Russia] can use them here, they can use them everywhere.”

    Ahead of the vote on Sunday, accounts linked to Russia have reached new levels of aggression, Revenco says. “They activate accounts that have been created long ago and have been on standby,” she explains. “They are engaging bots, and they're synchronizing posts across multiple platforms.”

  • RFERL ☛ Dual Votes Test Moldovans’ European Future, Moscow’s Reach

    Moldovan and foreign warnings of alleged Russian meddling ranging from disinformation to vote-buying and co-opting sympathetic Moldovans and channeling money to encourage unrest after the election have underscored the value that Chisinau and the international community place on the importance of free and fair – and peaceful -- voting.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Oil Companies Are Still Determined to Burn the Planet Down

    The big energy firms have largely stopped denying the scientific consensus about climate change. But behind their rhetoric about “net zero emissions,” there’s an unflinching determination to keep profiting from oil and gas, whatever the cost.

  • TruthOut ☛ Student Voters Lean Left — So the Right Is Making It Harder for Them to Vote

    Fast forward to 2024, and GOP-governed states — their legislators in thrall to Donald Trump’s oft-debunked theories of rampant voter fraud — are again targeting student voters, seemingly as part of their growing effort to prune voter rolls and limit voter participation among groups that have historically favored the Democrats.

  • Tao Security Blog ☛ Digital Offense Capabilities Are Currently Net Negative for the Security Ecosystem

    The costs of improved digital offense currently outweigh the benefits. The legitimate benefits of digital offense accrue primarily to the security one percent (#securityonepercent), and to intelligence, military, and law enforcement agencies. The derived defensive benefits depend on the nature of the defender. The entire security ecosystem bears the costs, and in some cases even those who see tangible benefit may suffer costs exceeding those benefits.

• Environment

  • Science News ☛ Saving Mexico’s fir forests could help monarch butterflies

    While moving a whole forest may sound like a drastic measure, “desperate times call for desperate measures,” says Karen Oberhauser, a conservation biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who wasn’t involved in the research. “If we don’t help organisms move around, you know, we’re just going to lose a lot of ecosystems.”

    Each fall, after monarchs (Danaus plexippus) migrate from the milkweed-laden meadows of southern Canada to the mountains of central Mexico, they hibernate exclusively on the oyamel fir. Thousands might cluster on a single branch, causing it to droop under their collective weight. But the forests — and the butterflies who hibernate within — are at risk (SN: 4/4/11). Monarch butterfly populations continue to decline. And climate change projections predict that oyamel fir will vanish almost entirely by 2090.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Ocean eddy currents funnel extreme heat and cold to the life-filled depths

    In research published today in Nature, we show almost half of the heat waves and cold snaps reaching the ocean's twilight zone—between 200 and 1,000 meters—are driven by large eddy currents, swirling currents which transport warm or cold water.

    As the oceans heat up, heat waves linked to eddy currents are getting more intense—and so are cold snaps. These pose potential threats to the vast amount of life in the twilight zone, home to the world's most abundant vertebrate and the largest migration on the planet.

  • TruthOut ☛ Global Water Cycle Out of Balance for First Time in Human History, Report Says

    The commission mapped the “vast, interconnected network of atmospheric water exchanges that span the entire planet” at an animated storytelling website accompanying the report, providing a visual of how “green water flows connect countries across the globe.”

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Straits Times ☛ BMW recalls almost 700,000 vehicles in China over fire safety risk

      Models affected include 3 Series and 5 Series vehicles, as well as several X Series SUVs.

    • Pro Publica ☛ Far-Right Extremists Embrace Environmentalism to Justify Violent Anti-Immigrant Beliefs

      Patrick Crusius worried that Texas — hot and dry and facing climate calamity — was being overrun by immigrants. For his entire life he’d watched as Allen, Texas, the upper-middle-class Dallas suburb where he grew up, more than doubled in size, with quick-built mansions and car-choked freeways. Crusius, 21 years old, with wavy dark brown hair, sparse stubble collecting on his round chin, was awkward and introverted. He spent eight hours a day on his computer. He learned to hate the influence of megacorporations and the culture of consuming cheap goods that he thought they fostered, and he detested the waste and pollution that came with it. He brooded over the dwindling supplies of clean water and that too many people were competing for too little of it. But more than anything he had come to hate Hispanic migrants, who had turned his overwhelmingly white town into a nearly-half ethnic one. He wanted to keep them out. “#BuildTheWall is the best way that @POTUS has worked to secure our country so far!” he tweeted in 2017. In a world of constraints and an environment under stress, why should he have to share with them?

      Crusius bought a semiautomatic rifle online and 1,000 rounds of hollow-point 39 mm shells. On Aug. 3, 2019, he got into his gray Honda Civic and drove nearly 10 hours toward El Paso, Texas. Entering the city, he turned into the Cielo Vista Walmart Supercenter parking lot. By some accounts, he wanted a snack, but after briefly going into the store filled with Hispanic shoppers, he returned to his car, posted a vitriolic 2,400-word manifesto to the extremist social media site 8chan and got the gun. He shot 45 people, ultimately killing 23, eight of them Mexican citizens. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Crusius wrote. “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

    • The Washington Post ☛ Regulators open new probe of Tesla ‘Full Self-Driving’ after crashes

      Federal car safety regulators are investigating reports of four crashes involving Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology that happened on roads where visibility was limited by conditions like fog and dust, the latest probe to raise questions about the safety of the electric-car maker’s signature technology.

    • RTL ☛ Grid collapse: Electricity blackout puts Cubans on edge

      "It's not only the lack of electricity but also of gas and water," she told AFP, 11 hours after the unplanned shutdown of Cuba's main thermal power plant triggered the collapse of the country's grid.

    • CBC ☛ U.S. regulator investigating Tesla's self-driving software after fatal crash

      The preliminary evaluation is the first step before the agency could seek to demand a recall of the vehicles if it believes they pose an unreasonable risk to safety.

      Tesla says on its website its "Full Self-Driving" software in on-road vehicles requires active driver supervision and does not make vehicles autonomous.

    • France24 ☛ SUV driver charged with murder for running over cyclist in Paris

      A motorist who ran over and killed a 27-year-old cyclist following a dispute in central Paris this week was handed preliminary murder charges on Friday. The French capital has undergone extensive transformations in recent years to become a bike-friendly city under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, whose cyclist-favouring policies have drawn resentment from motorists.

    • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Batteries Save the Day After Norway-UK Power Link Fails

      Battery energy storage systems, a hallmark of low-emission energy development, “casually kept the lights on” in the United Kingdom during a major disruption in power imports from Norway this month.

    • NPR ☛ Cuba plunged into an island wide blackout as power grid fails

      The massive outage leaves 10 million people on the Caribbean island without electricity.

      One of the country’s largest power plants, the Antonio Guiteras power plant in the western province of Matanzas, failed shortly before midday on Friday. The failure prompted a total breakdown of Cuba’s electrical system.

      The power outage comes after days of rolling blackouts.

    • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Surge in Data Centres, AI to Drive 75% Growth in Ontario Power Demand, IESO Says

      Demand for electricity in Ontario is set to soar by 75% in the next couple of decades, far higher than was projected just last year, in part due to a sudden surge in data centres supporting artificial intelligence, the province’s Independent Electricity System Operator said Wednesday.

    • Quartz ☛ Boeing layoffs, Facebook firings, meat recalls, and Big Tech goes nuclear: Business news roundup

      Plus, Hurricanes Milton and Helene showed the problem of insurance and moral hazard.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • New York Times ☛ 5 Provisions in China’s Panda Contracts With U.S. Zoos

      Normally confidential contracts show that U.S. zoos are accepting increasingly strict terms governing panda cams and public statements.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ How to Read the Immunity Appendix

    Most of the evidence in the appendix to Jack Smith's immunity filing remains sealed. But by understanding how the four volumes work, we can understand most of what appears in it.

  • The Straits Times ☛ More baby steps for Anwar as political hurdles not over yet

    Analysts are concerned that Budget 2025 is not making enough headway to untangle Malaysia's fiscal challenges.

  • European Commission ☛ Artificial intelligence – implementing regulation establishing a scientific panel of independent experts

    Feedback period: 18 October 2024 - 15 November 2024

    The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act envisages the establishment of a scientific panel of independent experts to advise on, and assist the AI Office and national market surveillance authorities with, implementing and enforcing the AI Act. This initiative sets out rules for the establishment and operation of this scientific panel.

  • Future of Life Institute ☛ EU Artificial Intelligence Act: Implementation Timeline

    This page lists all of the key dates you need to be aware of relating to the implementation of the EU AI Act.

  • European Commission ☛ Shaping Europe’s digital future

    The AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence) provides AI developers and deployers with clear requirements and obligations regarding specific uses of AI. At the same time, the regulation seeks to reduce administrative and financial burdens for business, in particular small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

    The AI Act is part of a wider package of policy measures to support the development of trustworthy AI, which also includes the AI Innovation Package and the Coordinated Plan on AI. Together, these measures guarantee the safety and fundamental rights of people and businesses when it comes to AI. They also strengthen uptake, investment and innovation in AI across the EU.

    The AI Act is the first-ever comprehensive legal framework on AI worldwide. The aim of the new rules is to foster trustworthy AI in Europe and beyond, by ensuring that AI systems respect fundamental rights, safety, and ethical principles and by addressing risks of very powerful and impactful AI models.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Vox ☛ Democrats are losing Black men. Why?

      A problem that only amplifies Democrats’ struggles is the rise of disinformation, multiple experts posited.

      Childs notes that influencers on the right have seized on real concerns Black men may have — like economic frustration — to advance false messages about how Harris and Biden haven’t accomplished anything to help members of this group.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Hurricane misinformation is just one piece of America’s rumor habit

      Crime rumors are nothing new, but Cotton lamented that they can now travel farther and faster.

      “Once it gets put on the internet, it takes on a life of its own,” he said. “It’s nuclear-level gossip.”

      Cotton’s experience suggests that misinformation including about recent hurricanes is not only the work of irresponsible politicians, anti-government attitudes or social media sites with little regard for the truth. It’s also more evidence that misinformation is a natural outgrowth of our human anxieties, turbocharged by online connections.

    • The Moscow Times ☛ U.S. Posts $10 Million Reward Citing Russian Election Interference

      It said Rybar also used social media channels #HOLDTHELINE and #STANDWTHTEXAS to spread pro-Russian propaganda.

      Rybar, it asserted, receives funding from Russian defense industrial organization Rostec, which the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions against in 2022.

      "Rybar relies on the connections and funding from Rostec to bolster Russia’s military capabilities and advance pro-Russian and anti-Western narratives," the announcement said.

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Could This Week's Developments Change the Race?

      I read an anecdote on Bluesky that exemplifies this: Someone chatting about voting with two guys who planned to vote for Trump who believed that all of his criminal cases had been dismissed and who had no idea that Trump has been exhibiting signs of mental instability. It’s a media thing. Given that virtually no media outlets correct Trump’s false claims about his criminal exposure, you can’t expect voters to know better. And thus far, the press has sane-washed Trump’s recent decline.

    • NBC ☛ Musk pushes debunked Dominion voting conspiracy theory as he stumps for Trump

      Billionaire Elon Musk promoted debunked conspiracy theories about election fraud Thursday at the first of a series of planned campaign events across Pennsylvania meant to rally support for former President Donald Trump’s campaign.

      At a town hall hosted at a high school outside Philadelphia, Musk referred to the false conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems was part of a plot to rig U.S. elections in recent years.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • ABC ☛ Program: Lawyer Jennifer Robinson calls for defamation laws to change

    What happens if laws that are meant to protect people are instead used to silence them?

    That's the central question posed by renowned human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson in her new book.

    Press play to hear Raf Epstein and Jennifer Robinson discuss her work with Julian Assange, the Bruce Lehrmann-Brittany Higgins matter and why she wants defamation laws in Australia to change.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • JURIST ☛ Civil society groups demand due process in Guatemala journalist detention review

    19 international civil society organizations issued a statement Friday demanding due process guarantees at a key hearing for Guatemalan journalist Jose Rubén Zamora. The hearing is scheduled for October 18.

  • VOA News ☛ Mexican newspaper offices hit by gunfire in Sinaloa state capital

    Assailants fired a dozen gunshots at a building housing the newspaper El Debate in the embattled northern Mexico state of Sinaloa, the media outlet said Friday.

    The newspaper is based in the state capital, Culiacan, where rival factions of the Sinaloa Cartel have been staging bloody battles.

  • VOA News ☛ Pro-Iran protesters storm office linked to Saudi TV channel in Iraq

    Supporters of pro-Iran armed groups in Iraq ransacked offices affiliated with a Saudi TV channel in Baghdad early Saturday, two security sources said, after the broadcaster aired a report referring to commanders of Tehran-backed militant groups as "terrorists."

    After midnight, between 400 and 500 people attacked the studios of a production company in Baghdad that works for the Saudi broadcaster MBC.

  • New York Times ☛ Iraq Suspends the Saudi-Owned MBC Channel After Protesters Storm Office

    Iraqi regulators have suspended the license of a Saudi-owned television channel and are taking steps to terminate its right to operate in Iraq after the channel aired a report describing former leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s Quds Force as “faces of terrorism.”

    The suspension of the channel, MBC Media Group, was announced by the Iraqi Communication and Media Commission on Saturday, less than 24 hours after supporters of the Iranian linked armed groups stormed the channel’s offices in Baghdad, filming themselves as they vandalized equipment and smashed computers.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong court delays are so long, juvenile offenders become adults while awaiting justice

    I have been complaining for many years – it’s not particularly fun but someone has to do it – about the lamentable speed with which prosecutions proceed in Hong Kong. You will notice that a sentencing involving 2014 Umbrella Movement democrats predated both Covid-19 and the 2019 “arrestfest.” I will not repeat the details.

  • America Online ☛ A leading remote-work expert says Amazon's RTO order is about 'backdoor layoffs'

    Amazon's strict return-to-office push is an attempt to reduce head count, according to Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, a world authority on remote work.

    Bloom told Business Insider that requiring employees to work in the office five days a week could be a "backdoor layoff" strategy — a move sometimes used by employers to reduce head count without facing the consequences of formal layoffs.

  • Scheerpost ☛ John Kiriakou: US Prisons Still a Disaster Zone

    When Joe Biden took office nearly four years ago, he promised an overhaul of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the largest and best-funded entity within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The BOP had long been one of the biggest embarrassments in the federal government with a parade of incompetent directors from both inside and outside DOJ.

  • The Register UK ☛ AWS boss: Come back to the office or find another job

    A poll of more than 2,500 Amazon workers last month found that 91 percent were unimpressed by the RTO mandate, a stark contrast to the "nine out of ten" workers Garman said he had spoken with who supported the policy.

  • Reuters ☛ Amazon AWS CEO: Quit if you don't want to return to office

    Speaking at an all-hands meeting for AWS, unit CEO Matt Garman said nine out of 10 workers he has spoken with support the new policy, which takes effect in January, according to a transcript reviewed by Reuters. Those who do not wish to work for Amazon in-office five days per week can quit, he suggested.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Sexless marriages: Why are they prevalent in South Korea?

    A survey showed that South Korea had the second-highest rate of sexless marriages among the countries surveyed.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Family pays kidnappers more than $6 million to secure release of Johor businessman

    The kidnapping of the 59-year-old developer took place around 5am on Oct 13.

  • ABC ☛ Program: Jennifer Robinson on Julian Assange, Brittany Higgins and the state of Australian Justice

    High profile lawyer of Julian Assange, Jennifer Robinson, reflects on Assange's recent testimony to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The Assembly criticised the role of both the US and the UK in Assange's imprisonment and called on member states to improve protections for whistleblowers and journalists. Robinson is also in Australia to discuss the release of the now uncensored and unredacted version of her book which discusses how defamation law is being used to silence women who speak out about sexual abuse and misconduct.

  • Fair Observer ☛ Europe Calls Assange a Victim of Disproportionate Harshness

    Julian Assange’s long-running legal ordeal ended this year, ambiguously, of course. It went on for 14 years and involved three nations: Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The stakes were high. Three US administrations insisted on applying the letter of a 1917 law called the Espionage Act, stretched well beyond its original purpose to punish an Australian citizen’s investigative journalism. Now that Washington accepts that Assange has “served his time,” a European agency dares to assess the damage done and draw some much-anticipated lessons.

  • Assange Family to Join Lugano’s Third Plan ₿ Forum To Discuss Freedom of Speech

    Tether, the largest company in the digital asset industry, and the Swiss city of Lugano announced the elite line-up of thought leaders who will headline the third annual Plan ₿ forum. This year’s line-up includes the Assange family, who will be addressing the profound significance of freedom of speech and the far-reaching implications it holds worldwide.

  • Assange Family, Tether CEO, Crypto Titans Set To Attend Plan ₿ Forum. 99Bitcoins Will Bring Exclusive Reports!

    The Plan ₿ Forum, a key event in the blockchain and cryptocurrency calendar, is returning for its third edition on October 25-26, 2024, in Lugano, Switzerland.

    Organized by Tether, the largest company in the digital asset industry, in collaboration with the City of Lugano, this forum has become a significant platform for discussions on the democratization of finance through cryptocurrency adoption.

    This year, the forum will feature an elite lineup of speakers, including members of the Assange family, renowned for their advocacy of freedom of speech and information.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Michał Sapka ☛ FLAME ON: web

    Speaking of the RFC1855 I’ve mentioned yesterday, the idea of “flame” is a bit lost on us. Let me give you a few short snippets from that guide: [...]

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Where Harris, Trump campaigns stand on tech policy

    Though technology policy isn’t one of the main drivers getting voters out to the polls in the upcoming presidential election, the speed in which technology develops will undoubtedly impact the way everyday Americans communicate, work and interact with the world in the next four years.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Hackaday ☛ A Robust Guide To The Xbox 360 Glitch Hack

    The Xbox 360 was a difficult console to jailbreak. Microsoft didn’t want anyone running unsigned code, and darn if they didn’t make it difficult to do so. However, some nifty out of the box thinking and tricky techniques cracked it open like a coconut with a crack in it. For the low down, [15432] has a great in-depth article on how it was achieved. The article is in Russian, so you’ll want to be armed with Google Translate for this one.

  • The Verge ☛ Activision says it’s fixed an anti-cheat hack in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone

    Activision says it has “disabled a workaround to a detection system” in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone that led to legitimate players getting banned by the Ricochet anti-cheat system. The company says the problem “impacted a small number of legitimate player accounts,” and all accounts affected were restored.

  • PC World ☛ Call of Duty anti-cheat bug let hackers ban people with a DM

    In Activision’s defense, millions of people play the Call of Duty games, so thousands of bans would still be a relatively small number. Policing these online systems is essentially impossible without a large degree of automation, and it’s inevitable that cheaters will always find some way to exploit them on a pretty regular basis.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• India Times ☛ Google: Google granted request to pause order on Play store overhaul

  A federal judge in California has granted Google's request to temporarily pause his order directing the Alphabet unit to overhaul its Android app store Play by Nov. 1 to give consumers more choice over how they download software.

• Patents

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Western Digital loses over $310 million lawsuit for patent infringement — data security patent used in PCMCIA and Compact Flash cards | Tom's Hardware

    Western Digital lost a $315.7 million lawsuit over PCMCIA and Compact Flash patents infringed by Ultrastar, My Book, and My Passport products.

    [...]

    According to Reuters, Western Digital has been ordered to pay $315.7 million in damages for violating a patent related to data encryption technology owned by SPEX Technologies. The patents originate from the company Spyrus and largely cover data encryption technologies originally used in PCMCIA and Compact Flash devices.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Futurism ☛ Father Disgusted to Find His Murdered Daughter Was Brought Back as an AI

      A user took to the billion-dollar AI companion platform Character.AI to make a chatbot version of a murdered teen nearly two decades after her tragic death, AdWeek first reported earlier this month.

      Now, the late girl's father is speaking out about the experience of discovering that his daughter's name and likeness were bottled into a chatbot without his consent.

    • AdWeek ☛ Character.AI Deletes Avatar of Murdered Girl After Admitting a Policy Violation

      AI firm Character.AI is facing backlash after using the likeness of Jennifer Ann Crecente, an 18-year-old murder victim from 2006, in a video game without her family’s consent. The company said that the character violated its policies against impersonation and removed the character.

    • The Washington Post ☛ A murdered high-schooler’s image was used to create an AI chatbot

      Jennifer’s name and image had been used to create a chatbot on Character.AI, a website that allows users to converse with digital personalities made using generative artificial intelligence. Several people had interacted with the digital Jennifer, which was created by a user on Character’s website, according to a screenshot of her chatbot’s now-deleted profile.

      Crecente, who has spent the years since his daughter’s death running a nonprofit organization in her name to prevent teen dating violence, said he was appalled that Character had allowed a user to create a facsimile of a murdered high-schooler without her family’s permission. Experts said the incident raises concerns about the AI industry’s ability — or willingness — to shield users from the potential harms of a service that can deal in troves of sensitive personal information.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Court Orders Cloudflare to Block and Identify 'Pirate Site' Customer

    The Court of Rome has ordered Cloudflare to take action against one of its customers, pirate streaming site 'Guardaserie'. Cloudflare is required to disconnect the site and block related domain names, including those that are registered in the future. In addition, the company must share information that can help to identify the operator.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Penguin Random House, AI, and writers’ rights

    My friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden is a wellspring of wise sayings, like "you're not responsible for what you do in other people's dreams," and my all time favorite, from the Napster era: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side."

    The record labels hated Napster, and so did many musicians, and when those musicians sided with their labels in the legal and public relations campaigns against file-sharing, they lent both legal and public legitimacy to the labels' cause, which ultimately prevailed.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ The Megacorporate Copyright Pirates

    The tyranny of modern-day Russia originated when what was state-owned became oligarch-owned. We’ve let that happen here in Europe and America, with apps and now with LLMs. Unpopular opinion but I think LLMs could be so cool. They’re remix machines, they’re like a rhyzomatic library that’s cross-connected on the micro level. We loved mixtapes and RSS and wikis and fanfics—and LLMs could be the trajectory of that, but things have got to change quickly because as long as they’re privately owned we’re in trouble.

  • CBC ☛ X is the latest social media site letting 3rd parties use your data to train AI models

    Elon Musk's X was already using your data to train its own artificial intelligence. Soon, it'll let other companies do the same.

    Starting Nov. 15, the social media site formerly known as Twitter will share user data — including posts, likes, bookmarks and reposts — with third-party platforms that may use the information to train AI models.

    The company updated its privacy policy on Wednesday to detail the changes. When the policy takes effect, users are automatically opted in until they opt out.