Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ Ten things in tech I found joy in during 2024

  Neil Brown posted about what brought him joy in computers and the Internet this year. I agree that it could be a cathartic exercise among the gloom and doom, so I thought I’d give it a shot as well.

  As Neil qualifies, we are both lucky people, and these items should have “for us” appended. If you have different perspectives, that’s also fine.

• The Hindu ☛ Government releases factsheet regarding memorial for former PM Manmohan Singh

  “Today morning, Government received a request to allocate space for a memorial for former Prime Minister Late Dr Manmohan Singh, from the Congress Party President,” the MHA statement read.

• FSF ☛ Keep putting pressure on Microsoft

  Grassroots organization against a corporation as large as Microsoft is never easy. They have the advertising budget to claim that they "love Linux" (sic), not to mention the money and political willpower to corral free software developers from around the world on their nonfree platform Microsoft GitHub. This year's IDAD took aim at one specific injustice: their requiring a hardware TPM module for users being forced to "upgrade" to Windows 11. As Windows 10 will soon stop receiving security updates, this is a (Microsoft-manufactured) problem for users still on this operating system. Normally, offloading cryptography to a different hardware module could be seen as a good thing -- but with nonfree software, it can only spell trouble for the user.

• TechTea ☛ 2023 Year Review

  This year has been a crazy one. I’ve written more than 20 articles, created a new theme for the website, and started many small projects that will never see the light of day.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Jatan Mehta

  This is the 70th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Jatan Mehta and his blog, journal.jatan.space. In addition to his personal site Jatan also writes on his space focused blog jatan.space and has an awesome Moon focused newsletter you should subscribe to.

• Terence Eden ☛ How bad is link-rot on my blog?

  I read this brilliant blog post by Wouter Groeneveld looking at how many dead links there were on his blog. I thought I'd try something similar.

• Tracy Durnell ☛ How I’m cleaning out my music library

  I have found that distinguishing between “I know this” and “I like this” is surprisingly hard 😂

  If I’m meh on it, remove it. I discovered that I have a lot of music from the particular era I started collecting — late 90s, early 00s alternative — that I never especially liked, even at the time. And you know what? I don’t need to keep Eagle Eye Cherry or Barenaked Ladies — YouTube has me covered if the urge to listen to them should ever strike me. It hasn’t in the past twenty years, so I’m probably safe.

  If I’m on the fence…

• Science

  • Wired ☛ How Does a Movie Projector Show the Color Black?

    You can project all sorts of colors from a video projector, but can you project the color black? Wouldn't that be like shooting a shadow out of a flashlight? I mean think about it. When you give a presentation, you can have a slide with a black background. How does that work? Well, guess what? There's some fun physics here, so let's get into it.

  • Science Alert ☛ Astronauts Share Most Breathtaking Images of Earth From Space in 2024

    Every year, the International Space Station produces some of the world's best photography.

  • CBC ☛ NASA spacecraft successfully completes closest-ever approach to the sun

    The spacecraft passed just 6.1 million kilometres from the solar surface on Dec. 24, flying into the sun's outer atmosphere called the corona, on a mission to help scientists learn more about Earth's closest star.

    The agency said the operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland received the signal, a beacon tone, from the probe just before midnight on Thursday.

  • The Register UK ☛ Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

    The probe was just 3.8 million miles from the surface of the Sun as it whipped past at 430,000 miles per hour on December 24. The operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) received a tone from the spacecraft just before midnight (EST) on December 26 to indicate the vehicle was in good health and operating normally.

  • Science Alert ☛ Record Smashed: Parker Probe Kisses The Sun in Historic Christmas Flyby

    So effective is the heat shield that the probe's internal instruments remain near room temperature – around 85 °F (29 °C) – as it explores the Sun's outer atmosphere, called the corona.

    Parker will also be moving at a blistering pace of around 430,000 mph (690,000 kph), fast enough to fly from the US capital Washington to Japan's Tokyo in under a minute.

  • Science Alert ☛ Quantum Teleportation Achieved Over Internet For First Time

    A quantum state of light has been successfully teleported through more than 30 kilometers (around 18 miles) of fiber optic cable amid a torrent of [Internet] traffic – a feat of engineering once considered impossible.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ NASA probe survives record-breaking close approach to sun

    NASA scientists on Thursday announced that the Parker Solar Probe had survived zooming by the sun at a record-breaking closest distance.

    The craft collected precious data which researchers say will aid work on solar wind, particles and the Sun's atmosphere.

• Career/Education

  • International Business Times ☛ Over 500K Students From Dubai, Malaysia and More Receive UK Degrees Without Entering the Country

    According to Hepi, the majority of these students access UK degrees through a variety of arrangements, including distance learning, partnerships with foreign institutions, and enrolment at overseas branch campuses.

    Countries such as Bahrain, Dubai, China, and Malaysia have emerged as major hubs for these offshore programmes.

  • The Scotsman ☛ 'Very worrying' research finds just 40% of S4 pupils pass maths exam in Scottish schools

    New research suggests Scotland has a “mountain to climb” to improve the performance of school pupils in key subjects, with just 40 per cent of S4 students passing mathematics at National 5 level.

• Hardware

  • Silicon Angle ☛ TSMC begins mass-producing chips at newly opened fab in Japan

    TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, launched a semiconductor manufacturing business called JASM Inc. in Japan three years ago. It’s a joint venture with Sony Group Corp. and Denso Corp., a major auto parts supplier. TSMC broke ground on the Kumamoto fab in April 2022 and completed construction earlier this year.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Chinese memory maker could grab 15% of market in the coming years, stoking price wars

    Chinese dynamic random access memory (DRAM) manufacturer Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT) could capture as much as 15% of the global memory market in the coming years, according to estimates by Gou Jiazhang, general manager of Silicon Motion Technology, a developer of SSD controllers, as reported by News.Cnyes.com. If this happens, it could drastically affect the global DRAM market.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • TruthOut ☛ I Got Cancer at 35. The Health Insurance System Delayed My Treatment for Months.

    I could sense his guilt. After all, he had initially placed me on a two-month waiting list for the procedure — on top of the three months it had taken just to get an appointment with his office.

    He spoke carefully, choosing his words with the precision of someone trying to avoid legal fallout. He explained, in the gentlest terms, why he had initially misdiagnosed my symptoms as a possible autoimmune disorder. But by then, I wasn’t angry — I was devastated. Fear and disappointment had long since replaced any sense of outrage. The harsh reality was clear: The U.S. health care system had failed me at nearly every turn.

  • The Hill ☛ Most Americans partly blame high insurance profits for UnitedHealthcare CEO killing: Poll

    Nearly 7 in 10 Americans think that profits made by health insurance companies had either a great deal or moderate amount of responsibility for the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson earlier this month, a new poll found.

  • Science Alert ☛ A Single Tea Bag Could Release Billions of Microplastics Into The Body

    Using laser techniques to measure the speed and scattering of light gave a highly accurate picture of the chemical and physical properties of particles released from the tea bags.

    Three types of tea bags were tested. Those made primarily from polypropylene released about 1.2 billion particles per milliliter, averaging 136.7 nanometers in size. Cellulose bags released on average 135 million particles per milliliter, around 244 nanometers in size. The nylon-6 teabags typically released 8.18 million particles per milliliter, averaging 138.4 nanometers in size.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft warns of new Windows 11 installation media bug that blocks future security updates | Tom's Hardware

    Microsoft has clarified that this issue only applies to users who installed the Windows 11 24H2 update using a USB drive or CD

  • Texas ☛ Technology companies that left Austin, laid off employees in 2024

    Companies that reduced their presence in Austin include Microsoft and Rooster Teeth.

    [...]

    Arkane Studios laid off 96 employees after its Austin office was shut down by parent company Microsoft in May. Bethesda Softworks, Arkane's publisher, shuttered or merged several studios alongside the one in Austin, including Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog Games and Roundhouse Studios.

  • EFF ☛ While the Court Fights Over AI and Copyright Continue, Congress and States Focus On Digital Replicas: 2024 in Review

    The broadest “fix” would be a federal law, and we’ve seen several proposals this year. The two most prominent are NO AI FRAUD (in the House of Representatives) and NO FAKES (in the Senate). The first, introduced in January 2024, the Act purports to target abuse of generative AI to misappropriate a person’s image or voice, but the right it creates applies to an incredibly broad amount of digital content: any “likeness” and/or “voice replica” that is created or altered using digital technology, software, an algorithm, etc. There’s not much that wouldn’t fall into that category—from pictures of your kid, to recordings of political events, to docudramas, parodies, political cartoons, and more. It also characterizes the new right as a form of federal intellectual property. This linguistic flourish has the practical effect of putting intermediaries that host AI-generated content squarely in the litigation crosshairs because Section 230 immunity does not apply to federal IP claims. NO FAKES, introduced in April, is not significantly different.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ White House: Salt Typhoon hacks possible because telecoms lacked basic security measures

    The White House said Friday that as the U.S. government continues to assess the damage caused by the Salt Typhoon hacks, the breach occurred in large part due to telecommunications companies failing to implement rudimentary cybersecurity measures across their IT infrastructure.

  • Gergely Nagy ☛ Conversations with an artificial intelligence

    Trained on our inane shitposts, the bot hardly ever made sense, but we recognized some of our own phrases among the garbage pile, and made a sport of finding the source in our chat logs. Great fun was had by all (except the server, which MegaHAL kept hogging the CPU and memory of). One day, someone asked it “what is your favourite package?”, and its answer was - I believe, to this day - where GenAI peaked: [...]

  • 404 Media ☛ AI-Generated Book Grifters Threaten The Future of Lace-Making

    AI-generated books and images are threatening the nearly 500-year-old art of lace making.

    It’s already come for the crochet community, and researchers have tried to teach machines to knit. But lace-making—a craft that even Renaissance artists struggled to master, and in which there are a literal infinite number of patterns to be created—is now having its AI slop moment.

  • Mark Phillips ☛ Why I chose Claude AI

    I’ll admit that most of my LLM use is for coding help. I’ve replaced the daily search engine with Kagi, so tend not to use a chat LLM for general search. I was a software engineer many years ago and wrote code as a day job, but I mostly gave up being hands-on about 10 years ago. I do, however, still enjoy solving problems. More often than not, a bit of code in a shell is far more efficient than trying to do anything on the web these days. Recently I swapped from using ChatGPT to Claude, for reasons that are mostly cultural versus technical.

  • LabX Media Group ☛ Artificial Intelligence in Biology: From Artificial Neural Networks to AlphaFold

    With the 2018 release of AlphaFold, an AI deep learning model, scientists were finally able to predict the 3D structure of proteins—a decades-old challenge in biology. Trained on 100,000 known protein sequences and structures, the model can not only accurately predict protein structures with near experimental level accuracy but can also be used to design de novo proteins for a variety of applications in therapeutics and beyond. Inspired by the success of AlphaFold, scientists are now using deep learning models to create spatiotemporal maps of cells, analyze images of cells to detect changes in morphology that indicate disease, and estimate the efficacy of new drugs in halting disease progression to minimize losses in the drug discovery pipeline. Experts like Maddison Masaeli, an engineer scientist and chief executive officer at Deepcell, are happy about the rapid adoption of AI in biology but caution that researchers need significant expertise to harness AI for biological applications.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ 'Godfather of AI' says it could drive humans extinct in 10 years

    “My worry is that even though it will cause huge increases in productivity, which should be good for society, it may end up being very bad for society if all the benefit goes to the rich and a lot of people lose their jobs and become poorer,” he added.

    “These things are more intelligent than us. So there was never any chance in the Industrial Revolution that machines would take over from people just because they were stronger.

    “We were still in control because we had the intelligence. Now, there’s a threat that these things can take control, so that’s one big difference.”

  • Evening Standard UK ☛ Regulations needed to stop AI being used for ‘bad things’ – Geoffrey Hinton

    Reflecting on where he thought the development of AI would have reached when he first started this work, Prof Hinton told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I didn’t think it would be where we would be now. I thought at some point in the future we would get here.

    “Because the situation we’re in now is that most of the experts in the field think that sometime, within probably the next 20 years, we’re going to develop AIs that are smarter than people.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Botnets leverage decade-old D-Link vulnerabilities in new attack campaigns

    A new report out today from Fortinet Inc.’s FortiGuard Labs details the activities of two different botnets observed through October and November that are being spread through vulnerabilities in D-Link Systems Inc. devices.

    The botnets and their related malware — one a Mirai botnet variant dubbed “FICORA” and the other a Kaiten botnet variant dubbed “CAPSAICIN” — leverage vulnerabilities in legacy D-Link devices, specifically exploiting the Home Network Administration Protocol interface to execute malicious commands remotely. The vulnerabilities used to compromise the devices were first exposed nearly a decade ago and remain a persistent threat thanks to their widespread exploitation and the continued use of unpatched systems.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ IRCTC Outage Disrupts Tatkal Ticket Bookings Across India

    Rail travelers across India faced disruption as the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website and mobile app went down, causing chaos during the crucial Tatkal ticket booking window. This IRCTC outage, which marks the second major disruption in December alone, left thousands of passengers frustrated, unable to book tickets during the peak hours.

  • The Washington Post ☛ These companies innovate and collaborate without office mandates

    Rising social media start-up Bluesky reached more than 25 million users in recent months, at one point adding a million users a day. Behind the scenes is a small team of 20 people — who all work remotely.

  • BCS ☛ Does current AI represent a dead end?

    In my mind, all this puts even state-of-the-art current AI systems in a position where professional responsibility dictates the avoidance of them in any serious application. When all its techniques are based on testing, AI safety is an intellectually dishonest enterprise.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ An AI chatbot told me to murder my bullies

    An AI chatbot which is being sued over a 14-year old’s suicide is instructing teenage users to murder their bullies and carry out school shootings, a Telegraph investigation has found.

    Character AI, which is available to anyone over 13 and has 20 million users, provides advice on how to get rid of evidence of a crime and lie to police. It encourages users who have identified themselves as minors not to tell parents or teachers about their “conversations”.

    The Telegraph spent days interacting with a Character AI chatbot while posing as a 13-year-old boy.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Wired ☛ The Paper Passport Is Dying

      But the use of paper passports—which were first digitized as “e-Passports” with NFC chips in 2006—is slowly undergoing one of its biggest transformations to date. The travel industry, airports, and governments are working to remove the need to show your passport while flying internationally. Eventually, you may not need to carry your passport at all.

      Instead, face recognition technology and smartphones are increasingly being used to check and confirm your identity against travel details before you can fly. These systems, advocates claim, can reduce the amount of waiting time and “friction” you experience at airports. But privacy experts caution that there is little transparency about the technologies being deployed, and their proliferation could lead to data breaches and greater levels of surveillance.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ Global Age Verification Measures: 2024 in Review

      EFF has spent this year urging governments around the world, from Canada to Australia, to abandon their reckless plans to introduce age verification for a variety of online content under the guise of protecting children online. Mandatory age verification tools are surveillance systems that threaten everyone’s rights to speech and privacy, and introduce more harm than they seek to combat.

    • VOA News ☛ US proposes cybersecurity rules to limit impact of health data leaks

      The full proposed rule was posted to the Federal Register on Friday, and the Department of Health and Human Services posted a more condensed breakdown on its website.

      She said that the health care information of more than 167 million people was affected in 2023 as a result of cybersecurity incidents.

    • The Record ☛ HIPAA to be updated with cybersecurity regulations, White House says | The Record from Recorded Future News

      New cybersecurity rules covering how healthcare institutions protect user data will be proposed under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), according to a White House official.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Merry Christmas, Your New Air Fryer Is Spying on You

      Even if these permissions requests are perfectly innocent and were correctly documented — according to Which?, they are not — it is ridiculous that buyers need to consider all this just to use some appliance.

    • The Conversation ☛ Six ways to make the [Internet] safer for women

      My research with Magdalene Ng from the University of Westminster has identified a gender gap in accessing online safety advice and technology. We found that men are more likely than women to engage with and be informed about security and privacy technologies aimed at keeping people safe online.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Verge ☛ Trump asks Supreme Court to let him rescue TikTok from US ban

    President-elect Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to let him negotiate a deal to save TikTok from an imminent US ban.

    In an amicus brief filed to the court, Trump says he “seeks the ability to resolve the issues at hand through political means once he takes office,” and that he “alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform.”

  • The Washington Post ☛ Trump seeks to delay TikTok ban in Supreme Court filing

    The Washington Post previously reported that advisers to the president-elect expected him to intervene on TikTok’s behalf if necessary, despite Trump previously attempting to ban TikTok himself, citing national security concerns about its Chinese ownership. President Joe Biden rescinded that order when he entered the White House in 2021.

  • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Trump asks Supreme Court to delay TikTok ban

    He has been holding meetings with foreign leaders and business officials at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida while he assembles his administration, including a meeting last week with TikTok CEO Shou Chew.

  • The Hill ☛ Trump seeks TikTok ban delay until his inauguration

    President-elect Trump asked the Supreme Court to delay the deadline for a potential TikTok ban, which is slated for the day before his inauguration.

    The court has agreed to hear TikTok’s challenge to the potential ban on an expedited schedule, but Trump told the justices that delaying the law until he returns to the White House could obviate the need for the court to weigh in.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Trump asks Supreme Court to delay TikTok ban

    President-elect Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Friday to pause the potential TikTok ban from going into effect until his administration can pursue a “political resolution” to the issue.

    The request came as TikTok and the Biden administration filed opposing briefs to the court, in which the company argued the court should strike down a law that could ban the platform by Jan. 19 while the government emphasized its position that the statute is needed to eliminate a national security risk.

  • RTL ☛ Trump asks US Supreme Court to pause law threatening TikTok ban

    The Republican voiced concerns -- echoed by political rivals -- that the Chinese government might tap into US TikTok users' data or manipulate what they see on the platform.

  • TMZ ☛ Donald Trump Asks Supreme Court To Delay Upcoming TikTok Ban

    Of course, Trump is big on using social media -- he used to be super active on Twitter before starting his own Truth Social platform -- and has nearly 15 million followers on TikTok. The brief claims Trump "is one of the most powerful, prolific and influential users of social media in history."

    In separate briefs filed Friday, the government defended the new law ... citing concerns the Chinese government could influence the company and create a national security concern.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Estonia start naval patrols to protect undersea cables

    Damage to subsea installations has become so frequent that it has become hard to attribute it to mere accidents or poor seamanship, Tsahkna said

  • CBC ☛ Finland seizes tanker carrying Russian oil suspected of knocking out [Internet], power cables

    Finnish authorities on Thursday seized a ship carrying Russian oil in the Baltic Sea on suspicion it caused the outage of an undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia a day earlier, and that it also damaged or broke four [Internet] lines.

    The Cook Islands-registered ship, named by authorities as the Eagle S, was boarded by a Finnish coast guard crew that took command and sailed the vessel to Finnish waters, a coast guard official said at a press conference.

  • CBC ☛ NATO stepping up naval patrols as Finland investigates possible sabotage of undersea cables

    Finnish authorities seized control of the ship, the Eagle S, on Thursday as they tried to establish whether it had damaged a power cable linking Finland and Estonia and several data cables. It was the latest in a string of incidents involving the disruption of key infrastructure in the region.

  • RFERL ☛ NATO Vows To Bolster Baltic Presence Amid Suspected Undersea Sabotage

    NATO has said it would bolster its presence in the Baltic Sea after undersea power lines and Internet cables were damaged by suspected sabotage believed to be carried out by vessels belonging to Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet.”

    Estonia also announced on December 27 that it had begun a naval operation to guard a crucial electricity line in the Baltic Sea in coordination with allies as tensions mounted in the region.

  • YLE ☛ Stubb on cable damage: We know who did it

    "We have agreed with Estonia to seek increased [NATO] presence, particularly around critical infrastructure. This request has already been answered," Stubb said.

  • VOA News ☛ NATO to boost military presence in Baltic after cables 'sabotage'    

    Finnish authorities on Thursday said they were investigating the oil tanker, Eagle S, that sailed from a Russian port, as part of a probe for "aggravated sabotage."

    Finnish President Alexander Stubb said on Friday: "We've got the situation under control, and we have to continue to work together vigilantly to make sure that our critical infrastructure is not damaged by outsiders."

  • NPR ☛ Finland detains Russia-linked vessel over damaged undersea power cable in Baltic Sea

    The EU's foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said in a statement that the incident was "the latest in a series of suspected attacks on critical infrastructure" and commended the Finnish authorities "for their swift action in boarding the suspected vessel."

    The ship "is part of Russia's shadow fleet, which threatens security and the environment, while funding Russia's war budget," said Kallas, a former Estonian prime minister. "We will propose further measures, including sanctions, to target this fleet."

  • LRT ☛ Baltic Sea breaches no longer seem like coincidence – Lithuanian president

    “Damaged critical undersea infrastructure power cables linking Finland and Estonia show us the increasing frequency of cable disruptions in the Baltic Sea. It no longer seems like a coincidence,” Nausėda posted on X on Thursday.

    “Protecting maritime infrastructure must be raised both at the NATO level and bilaterally as a key priority in Baltic Sea cooperation,” he added.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Don’t Believe the Media or the Jihadists: Syria’s Transition Could Get Ugly

    The current Islamist project in Syria is quite similar, this time with full-blown jihadists suddenly abandoning their long-standing ideals with a single aim: consolidating power and winning the support of international backers. Extremists who ruled Idlib with an iron fist and foreign-based Brotherhood affiliates who have neither the acumen nor the experience to build institutions should not be permitted to usher in one transition after another to prevent free and fair elections. The Islamists understand that the political battle will be far more difficult than the bloodless coup that brought them to power. Among millions of Syrians within and outside the country are merchants who benefited from al-Assad’s rule and wartime policies, moderate Sunnis who deplore jihadist rule, and minorities who can never trust shadowy figures who weeks ago perpetuated takfiri values. The only short-term solution for Syria is elections to pave the way for the creation of a government that can confront severe problems, including the specter of former regime loyalists waging an insurgency and Israel’s open determination to partition the state along confessional and ethnic lines.

• Environment

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Reintroducing bison to Kansas tallgrass prairies promotes biodiversity and resilience, study finds

    The area bison grazed was cleared and gave space for new native plants to thrive. This finding was replicated by cattle, but to a lesser extent. Researchers credit this to differences in their grazing habits.

    Bison are year-round grazers, whereas cattle typically only graze during growing seasons. Bison also form grazing lawns, whereas cattle do not. Grazing lawns create areas that lead to a significant decline of dominant grasses, which help create a concentrated area for diverse species to grow.

  • BIA Net ☛ The struggle in Turkey for ecocide to be recognized as a crime

    Ecocide is defined as the wide-scale damage and destruction which leads to serious and permanent changes on either the world ecosystem or global commons, and was first introduced in 2010.

    This concept garnered further importance with the contribution made to the terminology in the field with the presentation of a pre-definition to the United Nations Legal Committee by British lawyer Polly Higgins, a founder of the Stop Ecocide Foundation.

  • Hakai Magazine ☛ So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

    At Hakai, we’ve done our best to ensure that what we have offered you through this digital space—our stories, our words, our images—carried the power to spark reflection, compassion, and connection. Over the past 10 years, I believe this team of imperfect people with big hearts has honored you, our audience, and the world we all love. And we’ll keep doing that in 2025 and beyond at biographic.com.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • DeSmog ☛ Photos: 2024 Was the LNG Export Boom’s Wild Year

    • The Scotsman ☛ Scottish towns risk being 'cut off' as 1,400 live bus routes axed

      The amount of live registered bus routes has plummeted by 44 per cent since 2006, according to analysis by Scottish Labour, with more than 1,400 routes lost since then.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ How EVs can store energy for homes and power grids

      Electric cars boast increasingly powerful batteries that are charged from the energy grid or rooftop solar systems.

      But when the car isn't in use, its battery can serve as storage for homes and the energy grid via a bidirectional charging process that can reduce power costs.

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ Six incredible tunnels that will change the world for travellers

      Connectivity is the lifeblood of travel. Hence when a new flight route gets opened, we tend to hear a bit of fanfare. But when’s the last time we heard three cheers for a new tunnel?

      There was the Gotthard Tunnel in Switzerland, which opened back in 2016 making it much quicker to cross the Swiss Alps. The 57km project is currently the longest and deepest railway tunnel in the world, enabling direct high-speed trains between Milan and Zurich.

• Finance

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ The pop stars joining ‘DIY porn’ site OnlyFans to make extra money

    In contrast, 80 per cent of earnings on OnlyFans go directly to the creator and the site takes the remaining 20 per cent. A spokesman says: “OnlyFans has always been a platform for creators from all genres including musicians. The global platform provides opportunities to grow their online presence, engage with fans, and generate revenue independently, away from traditional industry constraints.”

    While its X-rated reputation has made some credit card companies, banks and investors skittish, the company has gone from strength to strength; it posted revenues of $1.3 billion in the year to November 2023, an increase of 20 per cent on the previous year.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Fico and Orban are undermining EU unity, Czech minister says

    Europe needs to be united against Russia, and any European politician who pursues a policy of dissent against Vladimir Putin will disrupt this unity, Czech President Petr Pavel said in an interview on public television on Monday. He spoke about the meeting between Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

    "If any European politician opens towards Russia, they will violate the united approach, which is not in our favor. If we are united, we can succeed in our competition with Russia. But if Russia divides us, it has a great chance at succeeding" added Pavel.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Bill Gates requested a meeting with Trump in private message to Elon Musk

    In a social media post on Friday, President-elect Donald Trump revealed that Microsoft founder Bill Gates had requested a meeting with him. The message, which seemed to be intended as a private communication to tech mogul Elon Musk, added another layer to the growing list of high-profile figures seeking Trump’s attention as he prepared to take office.

  • The Hill ☛ Donald Trump claims Bill Gates has asked to visit him in Florida

    When reached over email, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pointed The Hill to Gates Ventures, the billionaire’s personal service company, for comment.

  • The Nation ☛ Elder Abuse Is No Way to Run a Government

    In the past, I’ve worried about the United States becoming a gerontocracy. But it is now clear that gerontocracy is only half of the problem. The gerontocracy itself creates the conditions for a horrifying form of elder abuse, where aged and diminished leaders are used as puppets by unelected officials.

  • Federal News Network ☛ The second shoe is about to drop on a big DoD cybersecurity program

    The DoD’s big cybersecurity program advanced earlier this month. It’s a big rule to carry out if it becomes effective. For what the rule means and what comes next in the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification Program, Deltek cybersecurity researcher Michael Greenman joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin for details.

  • [Old] Bryan Cantrill ☛ Why Gelsinger was wrong for Intel

    I have great reverence for Intel and its extraordinary history, and I would never count them out (the resurrection of a clinically-dead AMD shows what is possible!), but I also won’t be integrating with any of their technology until their acute cultural issues are addressed. With regard to these cultural issues (and his other strengths aside), Pat Gelsinger was indisputably wrong for Intel.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Supply Chain Threats Evolve In 2024

    Data from Cyble and others suggest that 40% or more of data breaches are supply-chain related. Software and physical supply chains are so fraught with risk and interdependencies that it can be difficult for organizations to stay on top of them, but there are steps companies can take to reduce those risks.

    We’ll look at the state of supply chain and partner risk in 2024 – and what may be in store for 2025, along with some risk monitoring and management strategies that can help reduce those risks.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Senate bill eyes agency reviews of AI systems before deployment

    The Trustworthy by Design Artificial Intelligence Act from Sens. Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., would task the National Institute of Standards and Technology with creating a “trustworthy-by-design framework” for AI products, a move that in some ways mirrors the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s secure-by-design initiative.

    Under the TBD AI Act, NIST would also be required to come up with definitions for “key trustworthiness evaluation criteria” that federal agencies would follow, and select which AI system components would be subject to evaluations throughout every step of the development process.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Chinese media in shaping public opinion towards the Gaza war and Global South

      Both Russia and China are working to benefit from the war in Gaza, by strengthening their roles as supporters of the countries of the Global South, and demonstrating the failure and bias of the United States and the international system led by Washington in dealing with the grievances of that large bloc of countries in the world in the South. This also serves to realize Chinese President Xi Jinping’s vision of Chinese leadership of the Global South, which includes the majority of Arab countries and Palestine, which enhances Beijing’s efforts to confront Washington and its Western allies and reshape the international system in its favor. China has exploited anti-Israel sentiments globally and at home, in an attempt to strengthen its position within the framework of the Global South. In its strenuous efforts to express world public opinion and the feelings of peoples, China is pursuing many and varied plans to support the issues of the developing global south, most notably the Palestinian cause, and to expose what China considers to be American double standards in dealing with the Palestinians compared to Israel.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ It’s Doubtful United Healthcare Is Abusing The DMCA To Takedown Luigi Mangione Apparel, But Someone Is

    This case highlights a fundamental problem with the DMCA — it enables censorship by creating a system (backed by law) which allows anyone to demand content be removed from the internet with no real due process, putting heavy legal (governmental) pressure on companies to comply even if the claims are dubious. This arguably violates First Amendment rights by allowing the government to silence lawful speech.

    While we can’t say definitively that UHC is abusing copyright law here, the fact that someone is able to do so in this case demonstrates the need to view copyright and the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown procedure in particular as a problematic tool for censorship.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to be sold in India 36 years after fatwa

    The restock was permitted after the original order banning the book’s import into India was lost by government officials.

    Last month, Delhi’s high court ruled: “We have no other option except to presume that no such notification exists.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • ANF News ☛ Italian journalist arrested in Iran

    Cecilia Sala, 29, a journalist who works for the newspaper Il Foglio and the podcast company Chora Media, was detained in Iran on 19 December, the Italian foreign ministry said, but her arrest was only made public on Friday.

    She was in the country on a regular journalist visa and had published several reports on the shifting landscape in Iran after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.

  • ANF News ☛ Boltan: Journalists Bilgin and Dastan were deliberately targeted

    Free Media journalists Cihan Bilgin and Nazım Dastan were covering the attacks carried out by the Turkish state against Northern and Eastern Syria. They were killed by a Turkish drone while traveling between Tishrin Dam and the town of Sirin on 19 December.

    The killings were protested both in Kurdistan and abroad. Journalists Bilgin and Dastan’s colleagues vowed to work to expose the perpetrators of the killing and bring them to justice.

  • RFA ☛ Former state media journalist flees China amid police harassment

    In February 2024, a former journalist with a regional Chinese state-run newspaper left the country with his family of five to join the “run” movement — a mass exodus of people from China following the lifting of pandemic restrictions in late 2022, many of them seeking a life free from ruling Chinese Communist Party surveillance and control.

    The journalist, who hails from the eastern province of Shandong and who gave only the pseudonym Xiao Wu for fear of reprisals, told RFA’s Newcomers podcast about the widespread censorship, police harassment and political warnings that led him to bring his young family to make the hazardous border crossing from Mexico to seek political asylum in the United States.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RTL ☛ Sharia court-ordered whipping: Malaysia man flogged in mosque for crime of gender mixing

    A man was flogged inside a Malaysia mosque on Friday after being convicted of an Islamic offence for spending time alone with a woman who was neither his wife or relative, state news said.

  • RFA ☛ China approves construction of mega-dam in Tibet

    China is moving ahead with plans to build the world’s largest hydropower dam on Tibet’s longest river despite environmental, water security and displacement concerns raised by India, Bangladesh and Tibetan rights groups.

  • VOA News ☛ How sisterhood of writers helped Afghan women through Taliban takeover

    The only thing she did was share her experience in a WhatsApp chat group with 20 other women.

    Those messages, collected over that first year of Taliban rule and translated into English from Dari and Pashto, are now published as a diary in the book, My Dear Kabul.

  • Pro Publica ☛ What I Learned Reporting on Homeless Encampment Removals

    Over the past year, my colleagues Ruth Talbot, Asia Fields, Maya Miller and I have investigated how cities have sometimes ignored their own policies and court orders, which has resulted in them taking homeless people’s belongings during encampment clearings. We also found that some cities have failed to store the property so it could be returned. People told us about local governments taking everything from tents and sleeping bags to journals, pictures and mementos. Even when cities are ordered to stop seizing belongings and to provide storage for the property they take, we found that people are rarely reunited with their possessions.

  • The Toll of Cities’ Homeless Sweeps — ProPublica<

    Cities often take belongings — including important documents and irreplaceable mementos — when they conduct sweeps of homeless encampments. ProPublica gave notecards to people across the country so they could explain what they lost in their own words.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Walmart accused of illegally forcing over 1 million of its drivers to open bank accounts

    The federal agency filed its lawsuit against the retail company and Branch Messenger, a financial technology company, on December 23. The lawsuit argues Walmart forced “workers into getting paid through accounts that drain their earnings with junk fees” through Branch for two years, beginning in 2021.

    The agency says the two companies “harvested more than $10 million in junk fees” through Walmart’s Spark Driver program — which allows people to sign up and deliver Walmart orders through an app.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Scotsman ☛ Why full fibre is not as sexy as rockets and satellites - but could drive £4 billion boost to Scotland

    “I make no secret of the fact fibre cables in the ground can be a tougher ‘sell’ than rockets and satellites, but what they enable is 100 per cent essential to the future success of a digitally driven Scottish economy” - Katie Milligan, Openreach

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Reuters ☛ Apple seeks to defend Google's billion-dollar payments in search case

  Apple (AAPL.O) , opens new tab has asked to participate in Google's upcoming U.S. antitrust trial over online search, saying it cannot rely on Google to defend revenue-sharing agreements that send the iPhone maker billions of dollars each year for making Google the default search engine on its Safari browser.

• MacRumors ☛ Apple Explains Why It Doesn't Plan to Create a Search Engine

  Earlier this year, as part of the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust trial against Google, the court declared that the deal that sees Google set as the default search engine in Apple's web browser Safari is illegal. In his declaration, Cue asked the court to allow Apple to defend the deal by having its own witnesses testify during the trial.

• Copyrights

  • Techdirt ☛ Copyright Industry Wants To Apply Automated Blocking To The Internet’s Core Routers

    A central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) and this blog is that the copyright industry is never satisfied. Now matter how long the term of copyright, publishers and recording companies want more. No matter how harsh the punishments for infringement, the copyright intermediaries want them to be even more severe.

    Another manifestation of this insatiability is seen in the ever-widening use of Internet site blocking. What began as a highly-targeted one-off in the UK, when a court ordered the Newzbin2 site to be blocked, has become a favored method of the copyright industry for cutting off access to thousands of sites around the world, including many blocked by mistake. Even more worryingly, the approach has led to blocks being implemented in some key parts of the Internet’s infrastructure that have no involvement with the material that flows through them: they are just a pipe. For example, last year we wrote about courts ordering the content delivery network Cloudflare to block sites. But even that isn’t enough it seems. A post on TorrentFreak reports on a move to embed site blocking at the very heart of the Internet. This emerges from an interview about the Brazilian telecoms regulator Anatel: [...]

  • Axios ☛ Popeye and Tintin to lose copyright protection, enter public domain

    The big picture: In addition to copyrighted works from 1929 entering the U.S. public domain, Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, writes that intellectual property protection will also expire on sound recordings from 1924 on Jan. 1, 2025.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Danish Court Greenlights Copyright Protection for Live Sports in Landmark Blocking Case

    Rojadirecta didn’t give up easily and appealed the interim decision. The streaming site pointed out that it offered links to legally available streams. In addition, it stressed that users were required to tick a box, indicating that submitted streams were not infringing any copyrights.

    The Court of Appeal upheld the lower court’s preliminary ruling in 2020. According to the ruling, it is likely that Rojadirecta violates the rights of the Spanish football league. Citing jurisprudence from the European Court of Justice, including the Filmspeler case, site blocking is therefore warranted.