Leftovers

• Lucidity ☛ Merry Christmas, Ya Filthy Animals (2024)

  In any case, it felt wrong to round out the year without taking a moment to reflect on 2024.

• Chris Coyier ☛ Ads After You Do a Thing

  I’ve already done the thing I set out to do. They didn’t get in the way of that, and don’t get in the way of me moving on.

• Mark Hysted ☛ rss feed link update

  I have (hopefully) put some redirects into effect so your feed readers should find the new location.

• Standards/Consortia

  • France24 ☛ EU law mandating universal chargers for devices comes into force

    Electronics manufactures must from Saturday fit all devices sold in the EU with USB-C charger ports in a bid by the 27-nation bloc to reduce waste and cut costs for consumers, who will no longer have to purchase separate chargers for each device they own.

  • RTL ☛ USB-C: EU universal charger rules come into force

    "Starting today, all new mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, speakers, keyboards and many other electronics sold in the EU will have to be equipped with a USB Type-C charging port," the EU Parliament wrote on social media X.

• Science

  • VOA News ☛ NASA spacecraft 'safe' after closest-ever approach to sun

    The spacecraft is expected to send detailed telemetry data about its status on January 1, NASA added.

    Moving at up to 692,000 kilometers per hour the spacecraft endured temperatures of up to 982 degrees Celsius, according to the NASA website.

• Hardware

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Forlinx Unveils Cost-Effective i.MX8MPL-C SoM for Industrial Applications

    Forlinx Embedded recently introduced the FETMX8MPL-C SoM, a cost-effective solution for industrial and IoT applications that balances performance and functionality without incorporating advanced multimedia or machine learning features.

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Atomic Echo Base Enables Voice Recognition for M5 Atom Series

  • Ken Shirriff ☛ Intel's $475 million error: the silicon behind the Pentium division bug

    In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvements over the previous processor, the Intel 486, including a faster floating-point division algorithm. A year later, Professor Nicely, a number theory professor, was researching reciprocals of twin prime numbers when he noticed a problem: his Pentium sometimes generated the wrong result when performing floating-point division. Intel considered this "an extremely minor technical problem", but much to Intel's surprise, the bug became a large media story. After weeks of criticism, mockery, and bad publicity, Intel agreed to replace everyone's faulty Pentium chips, costing the company $475 million.

    In this article, I discuss the Pentium's division algorithm, show exactly where the bug is on the Pentium chip, take a close look at the circuitry, and explain what went wrong. In brief, the division algorithm uses a lookup table. In 1994, Intel stated that the cause of the bug was that five entries were omitted from the table due to an error in a script. However, my analysis shows that 16 entries were omitted due to a mathematical mistake in the definition of the lookup table. Five of the missing entries trigger the bug— also called the FDIV bug after the floating-point division instruction "FDIV"—while 11 of the missing entries have no effect.

  • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Hackaday ☛ 38C3: Towards An Open WiFi MAC Stack On ESP32

      At the 38th Chaos Communications Congress, [Frostie314159] and [Jasper Devreker] gave us a nice update on their project to write an open-source WiFi stack for the ESP32. If you’re interested in the ESP32 or WiFi in general, they’ve also got a nice deep dive into how that all works.

    • Games

      • Hackaday ☛ Porting Dragon’s Lair To The Game Boy Color Was A Technical Triumph

        If you remember the 80s arcade game Dragon’s Lair, you probably also remember it was strikingly unlike anything else at the time. It didn’t look or play like anything else. So it might come as a surprise that it was ported to Nintendo’s Game Boy Color, and that took some doing!

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • SBS ☛ How to reduce screen time for kids these holidays | SBS News

    Dr Mary Brushe is a researcher at the Kids Research Institute Australia, whose work focuses on screen use among children under five years old. Her tips for reducing the amount of screen time include: [...]

  • Futurism ☛ "Brain Rot" Is Poisoning Our Minds

    As Spanish newspaper El País reports, a growing body of scientific evidence over the past decade suggests that consuming mind-numbing content, from sources ranging from algorithmically driven social media junk to sensationalist news, can literally reduce the physical gray matter in our brains. That's along with wreaking other pernicious effects like shortened attention spans and weakened memory.

    The nefarious thing? These symptoms are often by design. The most infamous example is the implementation of infinite scrolling in apps, which is intended to feed our compulsive desire to endlessly consume content, or "doomscroll."

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Futurism ☛ Facebook Planning to Flood Platform with AI-Powered Users

    Were you hoping that bots on social media would be a thing of the past? Well, don't hold your breath.

    Meta says that it will be aiming to have Facebook filled with AI-generated characters to drive up engagement on its platform, as part of its broader rollout of AI products, the Financial Times reports. The AI characters will be created by users through Meta's AI studio, with the idea being that you can interact with them almost like you would with a real human on the website.

  • The Record ☛ US adds 9th telecom company to list of known Salt Typhoon targets

    Nine U.S. telecommunications firms have been breached in a sweeping Chinese espionage campaign, a top White House official said on Friday, as the U.S. preps policy responses to the intrusion.

  • CBC ☛ New York state will monitor its use of AI after signing new bill into law

    The law requires state agencies to perform assessments of any software that uses algorithms, computational models or AI techniques, and then submit those reviews to the governor and top legislative leaders along with posting them online.

  • VOA News ☛ Internet is rife with fake reviews; will AI make it worse?

    But AI-infused text generation tools, popularized by OpenAI's ChatGPT, enable fraudsters to produce reviews faster and in greater volume, according to tech industry experts.

    The deceptive practice, which is illegal in the U.S., is carried out year-round but becomes a bigger problem for consumers during the holiday shopping season, when many people rely on reviews to help them purchase gifts.

  • [Old] Dr Kris Shrishak ☛ There is more to AI than data-hungry AI

    The European Union is regulating artificial intelligence (AI) systems under incorrect assumptions that could result in undesirable outcomes. The EU is assuming more data is always useful to AI and incentivising “big data” approach.

    AI is not restricted to data-hungry techniques. There are several alternative techniques that rely on less data, require less computation and less memory. They are more in line with the principle of data minimisation in the GDPR. The Commission should take a smarter approach and incentivise AI techniques that require less data, that benefit society and that assists with climate change mitigation.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Markup from Hell ☛ Boost website speed with prefetching and the Speculation Rules API

      Everybody loves fast websites, and everyone despises slow ones even more. Site speed significantly contributes to the overall user experience (UX), determining whether it feels positive or negative. To ensure the fastest possible page load times, it’s crucial to design with performance in mind. However, performance optimization is an art form in itself. While implementing straightforward techniques like file compression or proper cache headers is relatively easy, achieving deeper optimizations can quickly become complex.

      But what if, instead of solely trying to accelerate the loading process, we triggered it earlier—without the user noticing?

    • [Old] Dr Kris Shrishak ☛ Do you want cookies?

      The framing of their question (do you want) seems like they are offering me delicious cookies. In reality, they are crunching data while I am left wondering how my experience is being optimized.

    • CCC ☛ From Pegasus to Predator - The evolution of Commercial Spyware on iOS

      The talk will start with an analysis how exploits, infection vectors and methods of commercial spyware on iOS have changed over time.

      The second section of the talk is all about advances in detection methods and the forensic sources which are available to discover commercial spyware. This talk will also include a Case Study about the discovery and analysis of BlastPass (one of the latest NSO Exploits).

      The third part will discuss technical challenges and limitations of the detections methods and data sources.

      Finally, I will conclude the talk with open research topics and suggestions what Apple or we could technically do to make the detection of commercial spyware better.

    • CCC ☛ State of Surveillance: A year of digital threats to civil society

      The digital arms race between activists and government spies continues to shift and evolve. Through a series of cases studies, researchers from Amnesty International's Security Lab will share surveillance wins, the ongoing challenges, and the new threats on the digital horizon.

      Drawing on research by Amnesty International and partners over the past year, we will examine how the digital threats facing activists and journalists continue to evolve and adapt.

    • EFF ☛ NSA Surveillance and Section 702 of FISA: 2024 in Review

      But 2024 became the year this mass surveillance authority was not only reauthorized by a lion’s share of both Democrats and Republicans—it was also the year the law got worse. 

      After a tense fight, some temporary reauthorizations, and a looming expiration, Congress finally passed the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA) in April, 20204. RISAA not only reauthorized the mass surveillance capabilities of Section 702 without any of the necessary reforms that had been floated in previous bills, it also enhanced its powers by expanding what it can be used for and who has to adhere to the government’s requests for data.

      Where Section 702 was enacted under the guise of targeting people not on U.S. soil to assist with national security investigations, there are not such narrow limits on the use of communications acquired under the mass surveillance law. Following the passage of RISAA, this private information can now be used to vet immigration and asylum seekers and conduct intelligence for broadly construed “counter narcotics” purposes.

    • EFF ☛ Cars (and Drivers): 2024 in Review

      While we’ve been keeping an eye on the evolving state of car privacy for years, everything really took off after a New York Times report this past March found that the car maker G.M. was sharing information about driver’s habits with insurance companies without consent.

      It turned out a number of other car companies were doing the same by using deceptive design so people didn’t always realize they were opting into the program. We walked through how to see for yourself what data your car collects and shares. That said, cars, infotainment systems, and car maker’s apps are so unstandardized it’s often very difficult for drivers to research, let alone opt out of data sharing.

      Which is why we were happy to see Senators Ron Wyden and Edward Markey send a letter to the Federal Trade Commision urging it to investigate these practices. The fact is: car makers should not sell our driving and location history to data brokers or insurance companies, and they shouldn’t make it as hard as they do to figure out what data gets shared and with whom.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Pro-Russian [attacker] group claims cyberattack on Italy's foreign ministry, airports

    [Attackers] targeted around ten official websites in Italy on Saturday, including the websites of the Foreign Ministry and Milan's two airports, putting them out of action temporarily, the country's cyber security agency said.

  • RFA ☛ Almost 65,000 Rohingya have entered Bangladesh since late 2023, govt says – Radio Free Asia

    The Rohingya entered Bangladesh despite declarations from the previous government that it wouldn’t allow any more Rohingya into the country and it had sealed the borders to them.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Mozambique's major cities paralyzed by post-election unrest

    Maputo and its largest suburb, Matola, have experienced chaos since the Constitutional Council, Mozambique's highest court, confirmed the results of the disputed October presidential election, extending the ruling Frelimo party's grip on power into a 50th year.

  • India Times ☛ Trump asks Supreme Court to delay TikTok ban so he can weigh in after he takes office

    US 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 emphasised its position that the statute is needed to eliminate a national security risk.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Pleads With Supreme Court to Let Him 'Save' TikTok

    When addressing Trump’s pivot on the matter, Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Politico, “When it comes to Donald Trump, follow the money.”

  • NPR ☛ Trump asks the Supreme Court to delay the start of the TikTok ban

    The Biden administration has argued in court that TikTok poses a national security risk due to its connections to China. Officials say Chinese authorities can compel ByteDance to hand over information on TikTok's U.S. patrons or use the platform to spread or suppress information.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Trump asks Supreme Court to delay TikTok ban so he can weigh in after he takes office - lonestarlive.com

    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.

  • New York Times ☛ How Donald Trump Went From Calling for a TikTok Ban to Backing Off

    A law passed with wide bipartisan support and signed by President Biden in April calls for ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app to a non-Chinese company or face a ban in the United States because of its risk to national security and free speech. The justices are considering the company’s challenge to that law.

  • JURIST ☛ EU condemns Baltic Sea cables destruction as part of Russia's 'shadow fleet'

    The European Commission and EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs condemned the deliberate destruction of electricity and data cables in the Baltic Sea, in a joint statement issued on Friday. Kaja Kallas, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, described this incident as part of a disturbing trend of attacks on infrastructure linked to Russia’s “shadow fleet” of aging vessels involved in circumventing Western sanctions.

    Kallas also warned that these ships pose security risks and contribute to financing Russia’s military operations. The Estonian government has responded by initiating a naval operation to protect other undersea cables, and has convened emergency meetings to address the situation.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Putin apologizes over Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash, says ‘tragic incident’ occurred as Russia repelled Ukrainian drone attack — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Whistleblower Karen Silkwood’s Urgent Message for Us

    Figures like Daniel Ellsberg, who copied and leaked the Pentagon Papers, and Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke elements of the Watergate affair, were revered not only because they revealed the sordid inner workings of power, but also because their very existence provided reassurance that exposure worked as a tool for democratic accountability.

    It is not coincidental that the early 1970s is when the term “whistleblower” first came into political parlance. Ironically, because “Vietnam,” “Watergate,” and COINTELPRO were so confusing, and the cast of characters involved so large, the names of individuals associated with exposing these conspiracies took on outsize significance. Narratives demand simplicity; it takes a hero to take down a villainous regime.

    “Karen Silkwood” was created as a folk hero by a left political culture that, while deeply cynical about institutions, still clung to the idealistic belief in the power of individual action to challenge systemic corruption or wrongdoing.

  • International Business Times ☛ Mom of Dead OpenAI Whistleblower Speaks Out: 'He Was Too Innocent for This Dirty Corporate World'

    Balaji, who accused OpenAI of copyright infringement in the development of ChatGPT, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on 26 November, in what authorities initially ruled as a suicide.

    His death has sparked debate about the cost of unchecked AI development and the vulnerabilities of whistleblowers.

  • CCC ☛ Transparency? Not from the European Commission

    The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union with the duty to uphold the law. The transparency of the Commission´s actions and decisions range from questionable to abysmal. Attempts by the public to access information are often thwarted. This talk will cover the Commission´s lack of transparency, challenges faced by the public in accessing information, Commission´s tactics and examples of the European Ombudsman´s interventions to improve the situation. Whether you are interested in ChatControl, AI or public procurement, this talk will have you covered.

• Environment

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Supreme Court Could Gut Bedrock Environmental Law in Oil Train Case

    Opponents predict health harms from increased pollution for people living in states along the entire route. They cite the additional risk of derailments leading to oil spills into the Colorado River, threatening the drinking water supply of 40 million people in seven states across the Southwest, including 30 Native American Tribes and major cities including Denver, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. The climate impacts of burning an extra 350,000 barrels of oil a day would produce 53 million tons of carbon dioxide, roughly the equivalent of six coal-powered power plants.

    The primary beneficiaries of the project are likely to include oil companies both large and small, including industry giants ExxonMobil, Shell, and Marathon.

  • NDTV ☛ What Is Kessler Syndrome And Why It Has Scientists Worried For Future Of Space

    Kessler Syndrome is a hypothetical scenario proposed by NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978 which predicts that when the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO)-roughly 100-1,200 miles above our planet at a certain critical level, it could lead to a chain reaction of collisions which could render the orbit unfit for human use and halt the space age.

  • [Old] CCC ☛ Software Licensing For A Circular Economy: What's FOSS Got To Do With It

    In this talk I provide an overview of the environmental harm driven by software and how FOSS is well-positioned to address the issues. I will link the inherent values that come with a Free & Open Source Software license to sustainable software design, and I will present the various ways that Free Software aligns with the Blue Angel ecolabel. Finally, I will provide an overview of the current sustainability goal of KDE and the work of the KDE Eco initiative. This includes publishing the KDE Eco handbook, setting up a measurement lab for FOSS developers (KEcoLab), squashing hundreds of efficiency bugs, among others.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Nicolas F ☛ Gathering Data On TLS Power Draw Measurements

      As is evident from the plot, the moving average of requests with TLS is only about 100mW to 200mW above the plain-text example, which barely registers for a SoC that runs at 5W during an all-core CPU load. The only stark difference is that using TLS means the test runs for longer. This is because TLS throughput is only 1139.62 requests per second, whereas plaintext HTTP gets us 1828.24 requests per second. The important takeaway: both are so fast that the CPU frequency governor will not show a notable difference in how long the CPU is kept awake for for your typical 1 to 100 requests page load. The additional 30 milliseconds to complete 100 requests will not make a difference when the SoC will be kept awake by the web browser rendering the content anyway.

      In conclusion, TLS even on bargain bin hardware is so cheap, it disappears in the noise when it comes to power draw.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Bored Ape 'NFT Supergroup' Kingship Seemingly Calls It Quits

      Defined by highly questionable token prices and unbridled enthusiasm, that height ultimately made way for a material valuation falloff; data last year suggested that 95% of NFT collections had become “worthless.”

    • CCC ☛ Opt Green: Coordinating a Windows 10-to-Linux upcycling campaign across Free Software communities worldwide

      Windows 10 security updates end on 14 October 2025, KDE's 29th birthday and also, ironically, International E-Waste Day [1] (you cannot make these things up!). Hundreds of millions of functioning devices [2] will become e-waste. This means manufacturing and transporting new ones, which is perhaps the biggest waste of all: hardware production alone can account for over 75% of a device's CO2 emissions over its lifespan.

      Free Software is a solution, today, and if we work together Windows 10 could truly be the last version of Windows users ever use! In this talk I will present the issue of e-waste and the importance of right-to-repair software, and invite the audience to participate in coordinating a global, unified Free Software campaign over the next year to raise awareness about the environmental harm of software-driven hardware obsolescence, while promoting upgrading users from Windows 10 to GNU/Linux directly. Extending hardware's operating life with Free Software is good for users, and better for the environment. Let's think big and act boldly as a unified community!

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • VOA News ☛ Trump sides with Musk in H-1B visa debate, saying he supports program

    President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday sided with key supporter and billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk in a public dispute over the use of the H-1B visa, saying he fully backs the program for foreign tech workers opposed by some of his supporters.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Trump backs H-1B visas, aligning with Musk in immigration fight

    While Trump said he employs H-1B workers, past reporting has found he employs workers under the H-2A program, which covers temporary visas for agricultural workers, and the H-2B program, for seasonal workers in sectors such as tourism, hospitality and landscaping. The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ The Rise of Echo Chambers in a Connected World

    As we navigate this new era, it is essential to recognize the dual role of users as both consumers and producers of information. This recognition should inform efforts to foster dialogue, combat misinformation, and bridge divides. The Fourth Industrial Revolution offers unprecedented potential for human connection, but realizing this potential requires a commitment to inclusivity, transparency, and mutual understanding. Only then can we harness the power of information to unite rather than divide.

  • Axios ☛ OpenAI confirms plans to separate its nonprofit and for-profit arms

    OpenAI confirmed Friday its plan to restructure its operations in a move that will separate its large and growing business from the nonprofit board that currently oversees it.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ OpenAI switching to a for-profit company to raise more cash as it continues to lose money

    Statistics and reports suggest that OpenAI is projected to incur a substantial $5 billion loss this year compared to $3.7 billion in revenue. This financial picture might have also affected OpenAI's decision to become a for-profit company and secure the necessary funding, helping it maintain its competitive edge.

  • CCC ☛ From Silicon to Sovereignty: How Advanced Chips are Redefining Global Dominance

    Recent breakthroughs in machine learning have dramatically heightened the demand for cutting-edge computing chips, driving advancements in semiconductor technologies. At the forefront of this progress is Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography—a transformative method in microchip fabrication that enables the creation of ultra-small, high-performance devices. However, the path from raw materials to these state-of-the-art chips navigates a complex global supply chain riddled with technical challenges and geopolitical tensions. As nations vie for dominance in computing power, control over this supply chain has emerged as a strategic priority, featuring prominently in a high-stakes competition with global implications. Designed for all audiences, this talk explores the critical intersection of science, technology and global affairs shaping our future.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • VOA News ☛ Russia blames birds for Azerbaijan Airlines crash; evidence points to Russian missile

      Open-source intelligence, or OSINT, analyst Oliver Alexander wrote on X that the plane's wreckage displays entry holes on the left (port) side and exit holes on the right (starboard) side. He stated that this type of damage could not have resulted from a bird strike or an accident during landing.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Explainer: The 6 overseas activists wanted by HK nat. security police

    Andrew Kan, deputy police commissioner for national security, said on Tuesday that authorities will freeze the bank accounts of the six newly wanted individuals, as he urged residents not to engage in any financial transaction with them.

  • JURIST ☛ RSF urges China to release blogger detained for reporting on forced land seizures

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on Friday called on the Chinese government to immediately release Liu Hanbin, a blogger who has been detained for one month following his publication of information regarding a protest by farmers against forced land seizures.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • RFERL ☛ Italian Podcaster Detained In Tehran For 'Journalistic Activities'

    Sala posted a podcast from Tehran on December 17 about patriarchy in the Iranian capital.

    Iran is routinely accused of arresting dual nationals and Western citizens on false charges to use them to pressure Western countries.

  • VOA News ☛ Efforts to free reporter held in Iran 'complicated,' says Italy

    Chora Media, an Italian podcast publisher for which Sala worked, said she had traveled from Rome to Iran on December 12 on a journalist visa, and was due to return on December 20.

    But she went quiet on December 19 and then did not board her flight. Shortly afterwards she called her mother to say she had been arrested, it said.

  • CPJ ☛ Iran arrests, detains Italian journalist Cecilia Sala

    Iran — the world’s sixth-worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s last annual prison census, with 17 imprisoned journalists as of December 1, 2023 — has not yet commented publicly on the arrest.

  • YLE ☛ How the Finns [sic] Party turned Yle into a political battleground

    "The tone in the party executive was along the lines of, 'Do something about Yle,'" Elo said.

    Initially, Elo saw these remarks as typical media criticism, but he later recognised the strategy as part of a broader effort to pressure and silence journalists.

  • JURIST ☛ Iran detains Italian journalist amid ongoing crackdown on press freedom

    The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy disclosed on Friday that Tehran police authorities have detained Italian journalist Cecilia Sala since December 19. Under instructions from Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, Italian diplomatic officials have been monitoring Sala’s detention in Evin prison while working with Iranian authorities to clarify her legal situation.

    Italian Ambassador Paola Amadei conducted a consular visit Friday to check on Sala’s conditions and detention status, the Ministry reported. Sala, who works for the Italian newspaper Il Foglio, had previously been allowed phone contact with her relatives, who had been informed of the visit’s findings. The Ministry has requested media discretion while diplomatic efforts continue.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • EFF ☛ Behind the Diner—Digital Rights Bytes: 2024 in Review

    Since each topic Digital Rights Bytes aims to tackle is in the form of a question, why not do this Q&A style? 

    Great question! At its core, Digital Rights Bytes is a place where you can get honest answers to the questions that have been bugging you about technology. 

    The site was originally pitched as ‘EFF University’ (or EFFU, pun intended) to help folks who aren’t part of our core tech-savvy base get up-to-speed on technology issues that may be affecting their everyday lives. We really wanted Digital Rights Bytes to be a place where newbies could feel safe learning about internet freedom issues, get familiar with EFF’s work, and find out how to get involved, without feeling too intimidated. 

  • The Hindu ☛ Teenage girl’s bold stand against child marriage sparks reforms in Rajasthan village

    A 15-year-old girl’s courageous stand against child marriage recently has initiated reforms in her village in Rajasthan’s Karauli district. Tula Ram, the father of Shivika (name changed), burdened with debt and joblessness, had planned to marry off his four daughters, aged 17, 15, 14, and 13, on the same day.

  • The Scotsman ☛ Taliban’s shocking treatment of women shows why world must impose apartheid-style sporting boycott

    Last week in Geneva, the special envoys on Afghanistan from some of the world’s leading economies, including the USA and Britain, issued a statement expressing their “grave concern” over the treatment of Afghan women and girls, and looked forward to meeting again in the near future. Perhaps next time they will take action, instead of simply publishing toothless texts.

    The sporting boycott of South Africa was widely regarded as an essential part of the successful international campaign to end apartheid. The country was banned from the Olympics, the Fifa World Cup and international cricket tournaments for nearly 30 years, until 1992. Rugby and cricket were central to the national identity of South Africa’s white minority and the sporting ban did as much as economic isolation and political pressure to bring about the end of apartheid.

  • BoingBoing ☛ IRS goes after gig workers instead of billionaire tax dodgers

    While billionaires stash fortunes in offshore havens, the IRS is targeting gig workers who make a few bucks answering questions on a platform where people earn side income by sharing expertise.

    A federal court in California has authorized the IRS to demand records from JustAnswer. While ProPublica revealed that America's wealthiest often pay lower tax rates than schoolteachers, the IRS is focusing its investigative muscle on gig workers trying to earn extra income.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Federal agencies must now share code with one another

    Federal agencies must now share their own source code with one another. A bipartisan bill (H.R. 9556) requiring them to do came into affect this week.

  • CCC ☛ Automated Malfare - discriminatory effects of welfare automation

    An increasing number of countries is implementing algorithmic decision-making and fraud detection systems within their social benefits system. Instead of improving decision fairness and ensuring effective procedures, these systems often reinforce preexisting discriminations and injustices. The talk presents case studies of automation in the welfare systems of the Netherlands, India, Serbia and Denmark, based on research by Amnesty International.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • CCC ☛ Net Neutrality: Why It Still Matters (More Than Ever!)

    Net Neutrality is a core pillar of the open internet. But we witness a coordinated, world-wide attack from the telecom industry on the very foundation that ties the internet together. The interconnection of autonomous parts of the internet used to be a non-political and non-commercial field that not many paid attention to. But through heavy lobbying activity we are on the brink of regulating interconnection in the EU, Brazil and India to establish a new payment obligation that would force everyone who wants to send a significant amount of data to customers. Telecom companies would end up being paid twice for the same traffic, from their customers and the content and cloud providers that want to reach them.

    This talk by Raquel Renno Nunes from Article 19 and Thomas Lohninger from epicenter.works gives insights into the global civil society fight against the telecom industry. We will lift the veil about the lobbying of companies like Deutsche Telekom, Orange and A1 and showcase strategies how NGOs fought back in Latin America and Europe. This war for the open internet is only heating up. European Commissioner Henna Virkkunen for Digital will have in her hands to uphold net neutrality in Europe.

    We want to extend our perspective by also looking at the successful fight in Latin America. Brazil in particular made their own experience with Zero-Rating tariffs that connected millions of Brazilians only to a selected few Apps instead of the whole internet. We will showcase how WhatsApp became a catalyst for the spread of fake news around the election of Jair Bolsonaro.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • CCC ☛ The master key

    This is the story of the HDCP master key. How in 2010 we derived it from various public sources and from a bunch of cheapish hardware (and how we made money in the process!), and then published it on pastebin. After that it was just wait-and-see what Intel and the rest of the world would do.

    With the master key anyone can make source and sink keys that interoperate with any HDCP device.

  • CCC ☛ We've not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure

    You've probably already heard the story: we got contracted to analyze a bunch of trains breaking down after being serviced by independent workshops. We reverse engineered them and found code which simulated failures when they detected servicing attempts. We presented our findings at 37C3… and then shit hit the fan.

    This talk will be an update about what happened since our 37C3 presentation. We’ll talk about: [...]

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • India Times ☛ Tech companies face tough AI copyright questions in 2025

    The New Year may bring pivotal developments in a series of copyright lawsuits that could shape the future business of artificial intelligence.The lawsuits from authors, news outlets, visual artists, musicians and other copyright owners accuse OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Platforms and other technology companies of using their work to train chatbots and other AI-based content generators without permission or payment.

  • Techdirt ☛ The Public Domain Game Jam Starts Next Week!

    As we announced earlier this month, we’re once again celebrating the new year with the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! With 2025 just a few days away, it’s time to get ready. Whether you’re an experienced game designer, a total newbie, or anything in between, we want you to dive into works from 1929 that are exiting copyright protection this year and use them to build something new and exciting.