GNU/Linux

• Kernel Space

  • University of Toronto ☛ I wish Linux exposed a 'OOM kills due to cgroup limits' kernel statistic

    Under certain circumstances, Linux will trigger the Out-Of-Memory Killer and kill some process. For some time, there have been two general ways for this to happen, either a global OOM kill because the kernel thinks it's totally out of memory, or a per-cgroup based OOM kill where a cgroup has a memory limit. These days the latter is quite easy to set up through systemd memory limits, especially user memory limits.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• SUSE/

  • OpenSUSE ☛ Slowroll Distribution Keeps Name

    Choosing a name for anything is not an easy task; the detail can wield significant influence, which is why a survey to make a decision about renaming Slowroll was presented.

    Slowroll is a new distribution based on Tumbleweed, but rolls out updates slower; it is designed to implement updates at a pace of one to two months, integrating bug fixes and addressing Common Vulnerability and Exposure issues as they emerge.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Connor Tumbleson ☛ Bye CentOS & cPanel

    However, I didn't see that in the moment - all I saw was a new private equity investment of Oakley Capital coming in and acquiring cPanel. With what has become common in the industry - when PE money comes in - the price goes up or the product collapses. Not to mention it was the most abrupt pricing change with zero advance notice and no honoring of older pricing plans.

    So I realized my time on cPanel was going to come to an end. I set in my head that once CentOS 8 was released and had a few months to stabilize - I was going to rip out cPanel and swap CentOS 7 to 8 and do things manually with the help of Ansible.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Logikal Solutions ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 USB Drives Don’t Sleep

    Ubuntu 22.04 really screwed the pooch when it comes to external drives. USB drives don’t sleep anymore. Install the Linux Mint version based on this same LTS and it doesn’t have the problem. I mean this pooch is hosed so bad you can’t even see SMART settings in Gnome Disks.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • The Register UK ☛ BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

    Britain’s former state-owned telecoms operator says the EE mobile division will commence a nationwide 3G switch off in January 2024 and plans to complete the process by March, but is keen for everyone to know it aims to take a responsible approach to turning out the lights.

    As part of this, the telco promised that all of customers that are registered as vulnerable will be offered a free 4G-ready mobile phone, or a discount on a monthly plan if they prefer to choose their own handset, to ensure they still have a phone service once 3G is turned off.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• University of Toronto ☛ Changing GNU Emacs Lisp functions through advice-add, not brute force

  It's a tradition with me that sooner or later, I hit a GNU Emacs function that doesn't work the way I want it to and has no applicable customization options. My traditional brute force approach to dealing with these functions has been to redefine them; I'd copy their code to my .emacs or some personal .el file, modify or replace it to taste, and then insure that my definition got used instead of the standard one. If what I really cared about was a keybinding, sometimes I could give my version a new name (and bind the key I cared about to it). Recently, however, Ben Zanin pointed me at advice-add and, after a while, I was able to work out how to do some changes with it in a nicer way than my previous brute force approach. So here are some notes.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Talospace ☛ Partial ppc64le JIT available again for Firefox 115ESR

      While this passes everything that is expected to pass, you may still experience issues using it, and you should not consider it supported. Always backup your profile first. But it's now an option for those of you who were using the previous set of patches against 91ESR.

• GNU Projects

  • FSF ☛ Forty years of GNU and the free software movement

    On September 27, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) celebrates the 40th anniversary of the GNU operating system and the launch of the free software movement. Free software advocates, tinkerers, and hackers all over the world will celebrate this event, which was a turning point in the history of computing. Forty years later, GNU and free software are even more relevant. While software has become deeply ingrained into everyday life, the vast majority of users do not have full control over it.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Society for Scholarly Publshing ☛ Open Access and Sales Revenue Can Co-Exist

      The transition towards open access (OA) varies across publication type, research field, and geography. For example, in STEM publishing, Individual article processing charges (APCs) have given way to transformative agreements, which in turn now seem to be losing favor in some regions. It has been an even greater challenge to develop open models for monograph publishing, given the nature of the business and marketplace for scholarly monographs. Just yesterday, here in The Scholarly Kitchen, four leading university library collections leaders, issued “a call to open 25 university press frontlists by 2030.”

Leftovers

• Chris ☛ The Misunderstood Kelly Criterion

  All of these are false. To understand why, it helps knowing what the Kelly criterion is.

• Sean Conner ☛ Changing the historical record of my blog

  It was over a year ago when I noticed that a lot of my earlier entries had the initial paragraph shifted over to the left, due to a change in the template file I made around 2003. The old template had an initial

  tag so I didn't have to type it, and the new one removed said tag. That left maybe a thousand posts (give or take) that needed fixing. I started doing the job manually at first, then gave up at the sheer number of posts to fix. Again, it was not changing the content but fixing the presentation. And it bothered me that there were posts that weren't formatted correctly.

• Rachel ☛ Expressing my laziness in concrete ways

  No, the problem goes like this - someone sees the little orange feed icon up there (on the web view, that is) and clicks on it and gets a screenful of XML. My server also goes "okay, you just got the feed". Then they take the URL, hand it over to their feed reader, and it reaches out and tries to make the same request. My server says "hey wait a minute you clown, you JUST GOT IT", and rejects it with a 429.

• Hackaday ☛ Saving A Scope From The Dumpster

  If you read Hackaday, you probably get the title of [SunEstra’s] post: A Casual Date with the Dumpster. Many great hacking projects start with finding one man’s trash. This June, [SunEstra] rescued an old Tektronix 2465B oscilloscope, which appeared to be in good shape. Why we never find four-channel 400 MHz scopes in the dumpster is hard to explain, but we are still happy for him, if not a little jealous.

• Adafruit ☛ This library has every book ever published.

  Similar to the United States’ Library of Congress, the UK has the British Library. Everything that gets published in the UK is archived there. “The raw text of history” The volume of material is staggering and requires Matrix-like robots to zip around retrieving and organizing it.

• Daniel Pocock ☛ Abraham Raji & Debian, DebConf kayak death: search abandoned, evading liability

  People claim that Debian is a family. If a member of your family disappeared in the water like this, would you just go home or would you continue the search with the local people?

  In my previous blog, I looked at how Debian and DebConf have been systematically plotting to avoid liability for years.

• The Hindu ☛ Software engineer drowns in waterbody at Pizhala

  The 22-member group had reached Pizhala around 5.30 p.m. Abraham did not turn up long thereafter following which the police and fire and rescue services were alerted. The search was called off shortly after dusk though he could not be traced.

  However, local residents continued the search. The body was eventually recovered around 8.45 p.m. The Varapuzha police registered a case.

• Internet Archive ☛ A Quarter In, A Quarter-Million Out: 10 Years of Emulation at Internet Archive

  10 years ago, the Internet Archive made an announcement: It was possible for anyone with a reasonably powerful computer running a modern browser to have software emulated, running as it did back when it was fresh and new, with a single click. Now, a decade later, we have surpassed 250,000 pieces of software running at the Archive and it might be a great time to reflect on how different the landscape has become since then.

• Tedium ☛ Network Lobotomy

  All of this is to say that if you had The CW or any of the other linear networks pegged, you might be surprised to learn that the landscape is on the brink of changing in a big way.

• Gizmodo ☛ FTC Says Microsoft Leaked Its Own Xbox Plans

  Microsoft’s future plans for its Xbox gaming platform were exposed in the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) legal filings on Monday evening. The FTC claimed on Tuesday that it is not responsible for releasing the documents, which revealed the timeline for Microsoft’s Xbox consoles through 2030.

• Axios ☛ Microsoft leak reveals cost estimates of bringing big releases to Game Pass

  Between the lines: Bond's breakdown of Game Pass options followed an early May 2022 note from Xbox gaming chief Phil Spencer, who said the company was facing a "disaster situation" regarding its gaming lineup.

• Axios ☛ Leak: Microsoft board supported buying Nintendo

  Spencer noted that Nintendo was sitting on enough cash that it didn't have to make many deals. He said a large stockholder might push Nintendo toward dramatic business deals.

• Chris Coyier ☛ Site Realign

  I went for a “blocks” look which I think works for the kind of content around the site. It wasn’t exactly tricky, but when blocks-within-blocks got involved, that was the only bit that had weird edge cases that honestly took more time polishing than the entire design took to pull off.

• Chris ☛ Okay, Microservices Have Benefits Too

  In the previous article on microservices I was fairly negative, but mentioned in passing that I have observed some benefits, too. Several readers have been curious about these. There are two important benefits I’ve come across so far that seem unique to a small service-based design.

• Niels Provos ☛ Producing music video in Unreal Engine: Hair Groom Collisions

  For Activ8te’s latest track, Netrunner, I am producing a music video that tells the story of Lucy, a netrunner who uses social engineering to extract secrets from a Militech corporate hacker. The music video is produced completely in Unreal and makes use of Unreal’s metahuman technology. During the chorus, a dance scene will be playing in which Lucy moves her arms above her head and hits her hair. Unfortunately, by default, metahuman grooms do not collide with the skeleton. Fortunately, the fix is easy.

• Science

  • New York Times ☛ Mammals’ Time on Earth Is Half Over, Scientists Predict

    The researchers built a virtual simulation of our future world, similar to the models that have projected human-caused global warming over the next century. Using data on the movement of the continents across the planet, as well as fluctuations in the chemical makeup of atmosphere, the new study projected much further into the future.

  • Hackaday ☛ NASA’s Parker Probe Gets Front Row Seat To CME

    A little over a year ago, and about 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) from where you’re currently reading this, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe quietly made history by safely flying through one of the most powerful coronal mass ejections (CMEs) ever recorded. Now that researchers have had time to review the data, amateur space nerds like ourselves are finally getting details about the probe’s fiery flight.

  • Science Alert ☛ Physicists Create New Magnetic Material to Unleash Quantum Computing

    In one latest attempt, a team of researchers from the University of Texas, El Paso has developed a highly magnetic quantum computing material that retains its magnetism at room temperature – and doesn't contain any high-demand rare earth minerals.

  • New York Times ☛ Ancient Arrow Is Among Artifacts to Emerge From Norway’s Melting Ice

    As the earth warms, glacial archaeologists are in a race against time to preserve objects before they are destroyed by the elements. Recent field work yielded a surprisingly intact 3,000-year-old arrow.

• Education

  • Ben Hoyt ☛ How (not) to apply for a software job

    To set the scene, remember who you’re writing for: a busy hiring manager or an engineer who’s been tasked with reviewing your application (and hundreds of others). They have to make a decision based on limited information, and they want to hire people who stand out, who’ve built things, and who can communicate well.

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Observer-Expectancy at Scale

    In 1968, a group of teachers and students participated in a psychology study. The students were given an IQ test by the researchers. The results were not disclosed to the teachers. The researchers shared with the teachers that five students exhibited unusually high IQ scores and could be expected to outperform that year. The twist: those five students weren’t the highest scorers but rather entirely chosen at random.

  • The Atlantic ☛ I Was Wrong About the Death of the Book

    In response, Leah Price has been a voice of calm and reason. In What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, the founder of the Initiative for the Book at Rutgers University noted that in the years after the book had been declared dead, sales of printed books rose as those of electronic books drooped. “When we mourn the book, we’re really mourning the death of those in-between moments,” she wrote. Worry for the book is a proxy for other fears. “We may be seeking refuge from technological and commercial upheavals, from the people and places that crowd in on us, or from our own sickness and weakness. The problem is that treating the book as a bunker may shortchange its potential to engage with the world.”

  • The Drone Girl ☛ The future of education: how drones are transforming teaching and learning

    Drones and their rapid development have entered a new era of learning and teaching. Drones are at the forefront of innovation — and using them as technological tools has become an integral part of education. Here’s a look at some of the most standout ways that drones have transformed both teaching and learning: [...]

  • Earthly ☛ A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong Devops Glossary

    You’ve seen them—the pristine glossaries, endorsed by industry titans like the CNCF, with terms that sound like they’re straight out of a sci-fi movie. All impressive and idealistic. But we all know that on the ground, where build meets deploy, things aren’t always as polished as the glossary makes it seem.

    So here’s my DevOps glossary in no particular order.

  • YLE ☛ University students launch nationwide protest against government cuts

    This was followed at 9am by similar protests at the University of Eastern Finland campus in Joensuu, the LUT University campus in Lappeenranta, and three campuses linked to the University of Tampere and Tampere University of Applied Sciences.

  • Digital First Media ☛ Michigan schools are rethinking artificial intelligence in the classroom

    "We are diving into different aspects of AI. We start by looking at the data science aspect, how to make sure that data is clean and good data and relevant. We will learn how the AI models are trained and programmed. We will talk about the different uses of AI, how it's being used, good vs. bad. We are using AI in so many aspects, and people don't even realize it," Davis said.

  • Boiling Steam ☛ What to Expect at the Tokyo Games Show 2023

    Gone are the days when the show was dominated by massive booths from major Japanese corporations. Instead, the event now features a more fragmented approach, with smaller booths occupying a larger portion of the exhibition space. This shift reflects the growing prominence of indie developers and startups in the gaming industry, as well as the increasing importance of digital distribution channels. As a result, attendees now have access to a wider range of games and experiences from diverse companies, both large and small.

  • NYC schools are tightening cybersecurity. Some educators fear unintended consequences.

    “Parent leader accounts had nothing to do with the data breach and should not be the scapegoat for that issue,” Randi Garay, a member of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Committee and Brooklyn parent, said at a meeting last week about the plan to close shared email accounts used by some parent organizations. “It’s honestly a poor excuse to change these accounts to keep us separated and excluded from accessing information.”

    The backlog of approvals for outside software vendors has some technology teachers worried about lost educational opportunities.

  • Daniel Miessler ☛ Why I Love Reading Biographies

    It’s almost like biographies extend our own lives. In terms of experience.

    Of course all reading does that to some extent. But biographies are magnified versions of that. We’re literally watching someone grind and struggle and fail and get knocked down. And then get back up. And then try some more. And (usually) get some measure of success. Which is why there’s a book about them.

  • Security Week ☛ Staying on Topic in an Off Topic World

    We might not want to believe it, but this is often a tactic employed by certain personality types. In other words, it is seldom the case that a person cannot focus or is scatter-brained. Rather, it is far more likely that they are deliberately trying to derail what should be a relatively straightforward discussion.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Dutch universities teach in English. It’s making them too popular.

    Dutch higher education draws 40% of its student body from abroad, due in part to the language in which many classes are taught: English. In the last few decades, however, the growing number of foreign students is threatening to overwhelm university facilities and cut off their accessibility to domestic students.

    To address the issue, authorities have offered a controversial new proposal. It would require universities to teach more classes in Dutch and allow certain enrollment caps, thus effectively shrinking the number of students coming in from outside the Netherlands.

  • DomainTools ☛ Voices From Infosec - Tony Robinson

    Tim Helming and Kali Fencl had the chance to sit down with Tony Robinson in this edition of Voices from Infosec. Tony is a Senior Security Researcher with the Emerging Threats team at Proofpoint and we spoke with him about how he got into cybersecurity, information stealers, his commitment to the community, and interests outside of the industry. It’s a great conversation we hope you all enjoy!

  • Rlang ☛ Algorithmic Fairness

    2nd joint webinar of the IMS New Researchers Group, Young Data Science Researcher Seminar Zürich and the YoungStatS Project.

  • Lusaka ZM ☛ 10 Arrested Following Riots at University of Zambia Over Election Cancellation

    The riots, which involved more than 500 students, erupted as a result of the cancellation of the 2023 UNZA Students Union elections due to financial constraints. These students took to the streets, blocking Great East Road with drums, stones, and burning tires, and even stoning motor vehicles.

  • Futurism ☛ Harvard Says That for $1 Billion, You Can Rename Its Medical School

    Got a billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket? Harvard's got just the thing.

    As the Harvard student newspaper The Crimson reports, The Harvard Corporation — the governing body that prides itself on its status as the "oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere," according to its website — has put the naming rights to Harvard Medical School up for sale, asking for a wee unrestricted donation of $1 billion in exchange for the go-ahead to slap your moniker of choice on the storied establishment's facade. You know, because Harvard's endowment could really use the extra cash!

  • Society for Scholarly Publshing ☛ Ask the Chefs: What is the Single Most Pressing Issue for the Future of Peer Review?

    Peer review faces multiple challenges at the moment, not least of them a simmering feeling in the scholarly community that peer review is no longer necessary, or doubt that it even works. But I think the most pressing problem is the ongoing increase in research output coupled with the decreasing number of scholars and scientists willing to accept review invitations. There’s no great insight behind this observation – we’ve been talking about reviewer fatigue, the problem of ghosting, and the increasing ratio of submissions to existing reviewers for years.

    But the fact that it’s a commonplace notion doesn’t have any bearing on its importance, and as research volume continues to grow (which I suspect it will for the foreseeable future) and the size of faculty continues to stay more or less the same (as it will unless there’s some kind of sudden explosion of institutional bandwidth, either in the form of number or size), this problem is going to keep compounding every year. Open and post-publication peer review models, which I think represent a deeply flawed idea to begin with, will do nothing to address this issue, and honestly I don’t see any obvious solution on the horizon. (The suggestion that faculties stop requiring their members to produce so much publishable scholarship strikes me as a cure worse than the disease.)

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ 16 Kbit DRAM Gives Up Its Secrets

    [Ken Shirriff] is looking inside chips again. This time, the subject is the MK4116 — a 16 Kbit DRAM chip. Even without a calculator, you know that’s a whopping 2 Kbytes, and while that doesn’t sound impressive, in the late 1970s, it was a modern miracle.

  • Dan Langille ☛ Can I really swap CPU and RAM between my Dell R730 servers?

    Sure. It might just work. First, let’s look at the service tags and find out.

  • Terence Eden ☛ A love letter to electric power tools

    All of a sudden the little jobs I'd been putting off for ages were easy to accomplish. When I was tired from a day of DIY, it was a breeze to screw things back together. My hands didn't hurt after grappling with a stuck screw. I became a full convert.

  • Herman Õunapuu ☛ My trip to the Communication and Laptop Museum in Estonia

    While on vacation I went on a small road-trip across Estonia. During the second half of the trip I ended up being in Võrumaa, and while driving I suddenly remembered a random fact that some people mentioned in a hackerspace Slack channel: there’s a new museum around here!

  • Wherein we have lost our biggest fan

    The real tragedy here is that we didn't get video of the event. Our neighbor across the street described the sound as a washing machine falling down the stairs. It lifted itself off its mount and tried to go airborne: [...]/p>

  • Rachel ☛ Memories of a really goofy phone from the late 80s

    You see, it was supposed to be a "voice phone" ... as in voice-activated. While I got mine somewhere around 1990, I've been able to find evidence of it existing as far back as December 1987. So, imagine how mind-blowing that was back then: "wow! dialing the phone with my voice! In the 80s!".

    Yeah well, Siri it was not.

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Never Update Your UEFI “BIOS”, Especially With LVFS on Linux. Also, systemd-boot is a Plot to Overthrow the PC’s Owner.

    systemd’s secondary purpose is to kill GNU’s bootloader, GRUB, and replace it with one that can lock down the whole computer per Microsoft’s orders.

    To quote Debian on “Secure” Boot: [...]

  • Dan Langille ☛ Why didn’t I choose the bigger CPUs?

    If you look at each of the links, you’ll find this information on CPU and RAM. The information is collected from /var/run/dmesg.boot, but not presented as a direct copy/paste. It has been rearranged for ease of reading.

  • Hackaday ☛ Exploring Ground-Effect With A Quadcopter

    The ground-effect (GE) refers to the almost mystical property where the interaction of the airflow around an aircraft’s wing and the ground massively increases efficiency due to the reduction of lift-dependent drag, perhaps best demonstrated by the Soviet Lun-class “ekranoplans” of the 1980s and 90s. Interestingly, this principle also applies to rotary aircraft, which led the [rctestflight] YouTube channel to wonder what would happen if a quadcopter were to be adapted for GE.

  • Hackaday ☛ High Temp Resin Means Faster Hot Foil Stamping

    [This Designed That] does a lot of hot foil stamping. That’s the shiny embellishment you’ll see on wedding invitations and your fancier letterheads. They wanted a way to quickly see if the process is right for a given design, and how it might come together if so. Many of the designs involve letter forms, which they have tried milling out of brass in the past, but the process is fiddly and takes a while. Seeking a faster way to test designs, [This Designed That] turned to 3D printing.

  • Hackaday ☛ Confluence Of Nerdery

    You might find yourself, dear Hackaday reader, attracted to some pretty strange corners of the tech world. Who knows when that knowledge of stenography, ancient retrocomputing, and floppy disk internals will all combine to get someone falsely accused out of jail? Go read this story and come on back, but the short version is that [Bloop Museum] helped recover some 40+ year old court evidence off of some floppies to right an old wrong.

  • Hackaday ☛ Input Device Gets New Input Device

    One of the nicest things about a trackpoint is that you don’t have to take your hands off the keyboard. One of the worst things about a trackpoint is its usual placement, which can force a weird hand position that can cause repetitive stress injury.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Pro Publica ☛ Cleanup of Seattle’s Duwamish River Could Cost Boeing, Taxpayers $1 Billion

    In its early days as a major aircraft manufacturer, Boeing was remarkably open about toxic chemicals flowing from its factory into the neighboring Duwamish, Seattle’s only river and a longtime source of food, tradition and culture for Indigenous people.

    In fact, the company described the Duwamish River as “a natural collector for Boeing’s fluid wastes” in a 1950 magazine article Boeing produced for its employees. Boeing said at the time that it had a handle on the situation — asserting, for example, that some of its most volatile waste would be neutralized by chemicals released by other polluters.

  • Hackaday ☛ Inverse Vaccines Could Help Treat Autoimmune Conditions

    Autoimmune diseases occur when the immune system starts attacking the body’s own cells. They can cause a wide range of deleterious symptoms that greatly reduce a patient’s quality of life. Treatments often involve globally suppressing the immune system, which can lead to a host of undesirable side effects.

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ One of the Prescription Drugs the Pharmacies Can’t Get is the “COVID Shot”. I’m Just Going to Keep Taking Vitamin D.

    One of the Prescription Drugs the Pharmacies Can’t Get is the “COVID Shot”. I’m Just Going to Keep Taking Vitamin D.

    (Yes, vaccines are a prescription drug. If you look, there is a prescriber on the form and it’s a doctor you’ve never actually seen down in Chicago or something.)

    The COVID shots either don’t work, or hardly work. Again, my spouse and I both took 4, including the bivalent.

    All the bivalent did to him was make him so sick he couldn’t work and had to call in for like four days and burn up his sick time for the stupid “vaccine”, and then six weeks after that, he got COVID and gave it to me.

  • Science News ☛ Why sewage may hold the key to tracking diseases far beyond COVID-19

    A subfield that was once a few handfuls of specialists has grown into more than enough scientists to pack a stadium, he says. And they come from a wide variety of fields — environmental science, analytical chemistry, microbiology, epidemiology and more — all collaborating to track the coronavirus, interpret the data and communicate results to the public. With other methods of monitoring COVID-19 on the decline, wastewater surveillance has become one of health experts’ primary sources for spotting new surges.

  • Science Alert ☛ Extreme Fasting: What Does 'One Meal a Day' Actually Do to Your Body?

    Evidence supporting the use of OMAD is limited. Very few studies have actually looked at OMAD itself – and most of those that have were conducted in animals.

  • New York Times ☛ Adults Are Panicked About Teens and Social Media. These Girls Have Advice.

    Adults have been vocal about the effects of phone and social media use on adolescents, and how to best intervene to protect their mental health. Yet rarely are young people asked what they think might be constructive, or what they already do to build healthy habits. So we spoke to girls from ages 12 to 17 who have participated in programs led by Girls Leadership, a nonprofit that teaches confidence-building and how to use social media responsibly.

    Here are some of their best pieces of advice for other teens — and what they want adults to know, too.

  • CS Monitor ☛ For safer drinking water, the ingenuity of simple solutions

    Scientists used sawdust and tannins to trap microplastics in water, potentially paving a way to fight plastics pollution. A filter developed by a team at the University of British Columbia and in Chengdu, China, combined wood dust with the natural compound found in unripe fruit, creating a biodegradable material that trapped up to 99.9% of micro and nanoplastics.

  • New Statesman ☛ Why we should be worried by the new Covid wave

    The answer is: we don’t yet trust the virus not to pull a nasty trick out of the evolutionary hat. We are starting to see cases of a new, highly mutated Omicron descendant called Pirola. This has been detected in numerous countries in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia, implying efficient transmissibility. And some of the UK cases to date have had no relevant travel history, suggesting Pirola is already making its way through the community here.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Futurism ☛ Losing Human Users, Facebook Releasing Chatbots for Lonely to Talk To

    According to new reporting from The Wall Street Journal, which obtained internal documents about the bots — which reportedly feature distinct personalities ranging from "sassy" robot to misogynistic douchebag — are specifically geared toward capturing the attention of Meta's younger crowd. Facebook has been struggling to keep up with the likes of TikTok, the favored app of Gez Z, and according to the documents reviewed by the WSJ, these AI-powered correspondents are a ploy to reclaim some of that lucrative youth attention.

  • Ubuntu ☛ Canonical releases Charmed MLFlow

    Canonical announced today that Charmed MLFlow, Canonical’s distribution of the popular machine learning platform, is now generally available. Charmed MLFlow is part of Canonical’s growing MLOps portfolio. Ideal for model registry and experiment tracking, Charmed MLFlow is integrated with other AI and big data tools such as Apache Spark and Kubeflow. The solution runs on any infrastructure, from workstations to public and private clouds. Conveniently, it is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription and priced per node, with a support tier available. It comes with extensive developer features and a ten-year security maintenance commitment.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Canonical steps up its support for machine learning development with Charmed MLFlow

    Charmed MLFlow is Canonical’s distribution of the popular open-source MLFlow platform, which is used to manage the end-to-end machine learning model lifecycle. It benefits from various integrations with Canonical’s software, simpler deployment and management, and regular security patches.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ How the Cult of the Dead Cow plans to save the [Internet]

    Veilid aims to replace the advertising giants that run social media platforms with an alternative suite of open-source, serverless, peer-to-peer and mobile-first applications. By creating an application framework that puts privacy first, Veilid tries to put tools in the hands of developers to let them build applications with a fundamentally different ethos than today’s advertising-driven [Internet] economy.

  • Gizmodo ☛ Coca-Cola's New AI-Generated Soda Flavor Falls Flat

    Thanks to the magic of AI, Y3000 is a different version of the same old taste that lacks any hint of novelty, and unlike the infinite number of Oreo flavors, there’s not even an “I have to see what this tastes like” impetus to pick Y3000 off the shelf. It’s just buzzwords, not buzzworthy.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ AI-Generated 'Subliminal Messages' Are Going Viral. Here's What's Really Going On

    The technique, called ControlNet, essentially lets users have more control over the generated image by specifying additional inputs—in this case, letting you create images or words within other images. Some users characterized this as a form of “hidden message” that could be used to implant suggestions in the form of subtle visual cues, like a McDonald’s “M” logo appearing in the outlines of a movie poster.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ The New iPhone 15 Is Actually a Repair Nightmare

    The new iPhone Pro Max 15 is a repair nightmare and it’s all thanks to parts-pairing. In its teardown of the device, iFixit praised the design of the machine but pointed to a “slew of software hindrances significantly overshadow any mechanical advancements in design.” It gave the phone a final repairability grade of 4/10.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ These new tools could make AI vision systems less biased

    Two new papers by researchers at Sony and Meta propose ways to measure biases in computer vision systems so as to more fully capture the rich diversity of humanity. Both papers will be presented at the computer vision conference ICCV in October. Developers could use these tools to check the diversity of their data sets, helping lead to better, more diverse training data for AI. The tools could also be used to measure diversity in the human images produced by generative AI.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Intuit Pushing Claim That Free Tax-Filing Program Would Harm Black Taxpayers

    For the past quarter century, Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has worked to thwart one clear threat to its profits: a free, publicly funded tool to file taxes online. The company’s success at preventing that threat was near total — until earlier this year, when the IRS announced a plan to test such an approach. Advocates cheered, seeing it as a first step to a system where Americans, particularly low-income taxpayers, could easily avoid paying big fees for tax preparation.

    It’s a new chapter in the long-running conflict over free tax filing, but Intuit has fallen back on some tried-and-true tactics, ones previously documented by ProPublica. In Washington, D.C., the company has deployed 63 lobbyists this year, according to OpenSecrets, to stalk the halls of government. Meanwhile, op-eds and stories that parrot Intuit’s talking points have appeared in at least 20 newspapers and other publications across the country.

  • The Register UK ☛ Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024

    It's unclear when Google made the decision to end Basic HTML support – news of which can be found in this support page titled "Use the latest version of Gmail in your browser." Archive.org's last capture of the page comes from late 2022, and Google's own cache has not coughed up info that would identify the date of the change.

  • Sean Conner ☛ Failures in customer facing user interfaces

    I'm not sure what to make of this. Obviously, the makers of the soda dispensing machine thought about the UI but the fact that the gentleman in front of me couldn't figure it out shows that it wasn't entirely intuitive as the makers wanted it to be. I, knowing how the computer sausage is made, and having used various UIs over the decades, knew how to navigate the machine despite not knowing Spanish (the currently selected language with no obvious way that I saw to change it).

  • El País ☛ In Spain, dozens of girls are reporting AI-generated nude photos of them being circulated at school: ‘My heart skipped a beat’

    The young girl was afraid. After school, she returned home, and the first thing she did was tell her mother. “Mom, they say there’s a naked photo of me going around. That they did it with an artificial intelligence app. I’m scared. Some girls have also received it.” Sara, her 44-year-old mother, immediately contacted the mother of her daughter’s best friend, who had also just told her family about the situation. After talking, the mothers started making calls; by then, there were more than 20 girls affected. That is when a mother decided to create a WhatsApp group to better coordinate with everyone. That Monday, there were already 27 people in the group.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Google partners with Defense Department on AI-enhanced microscope

    Called the Augmented Reality Microscope, the microscope brings real-time machine learning into an optical microscope for applications in cancer diagnostics and other areas that rely on bright-field microscopes for visual specimen inspection. According to the GitHub page for the project, the ARM offers novel optics for parallax-free digital overlay projection in an optical microscope, real-time machine learning inference and state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks for accurate cancer detection and classification.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Stephen Fry Discusses Having His Voice Ripped Wholesale for AI

    During his speech, Fry played a clip to the audience of an AI system using his voice to narrate a historical documentary. “I said not one word of that — it was a machine. Yes, it shocked me,” he said. “They used my reading of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter books, and from that dataset, an AI of my voice was created, and it made that new narration.”

    “What you heard was not the result of a mashup. This is from a flexible artificial voice, where the words are modulated to fit the meaning of each sentence,” Fry explained. “It could therefore have me read anything from a call to storm Parliament to hard porn, all without my knowledge and without my permission. And this, what you just heard, was done without my knowledge. I heard about this, I sent it to my agents on both sides of the Atlantic, and they went ballistic — they had no idea such a thing was possible.”

  • Axios ☛ Musk says X will charge everyone to use the platform

    The big picture: Few social networks operate on subscriptions only, although more are experimenting with subscription products amid a weak ad market.

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Moving Upmarket

    But the consumers weren’t enough for a file storage company. Consumers have multiple free options, they are hard to market to, they don’t believe their data is that valuable (how many backups do you keep?), and it’s hard to build a platform on storage alone. The actual customers had to be businesses and other enterprise users.

  • The Register UK ☛ Intel CTO suggests using AI to port CUDA code to – surprise! – Intel chips

    While developed by Intel, it's worth noting that both oneAPI and OpenVINO are open source and aren't limited to the chipmaker's hardware.

  • Gizmodo ☛ Google Sued After Maps Allegedly Directed a Man to Drive Off a Collapsed Bridge

    The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Paxson’s widow, Alicia, claims “directions from Google Maps misguided [her husband] to his death” and occurred shortly after the family moved to Hickory, North Carolina from Florida, Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky, the law firm representing the family, said in a press release.

  • ABC ☛ Google sued for negligence after man drove off collapsed bridge while following map directions

    Philip Paxson, a medical device salesman and father of two, drowned Sept. 30, 2022, after his Jeep Gladiator plunged into Snow Creek in Hickory, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Wake County Superior Court. Paxson was driving home from his daughter’s ninth birthday party through an unfamiliar neighborhood when Google Maps allegedly directed him to cross a bridge that had collapsed nine years prior and was never repaired.

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Google Stadia: Leaked Documents Explain its Failure

    Market researches do not guarantee market success, but the more you do it, the more you increase you chances to, at least, not completely fail right at launch of your service. There is very good evidence, across multiple companies, that market research is a sound way to assess and approach a market you are trying to create or approach.

    The promise of Stadia was eventually to make it possible to play games that would be impractical on physical, consumer hardware: [...]

  • University of Michigan ☛ UMich becomes first major university to develop its own generative AI

    University President Santa Ono announced the release of U-M GPT in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

  • The Strategist ☛ Walking the artificial intelligence and national security tightrope

    Australia’s adversaries will not let us take our time pontificating, however. Indeed, ASPI’s Critical Technologies Tracker has identified China’s primacy in several key AI technologies, including machine learning and data analytics—the bedrock of modern and emerging AI systems. Ensuring that AI technologies are auditable, for instance, may come at strategic disadvantage. Many so-called ‘glass box’ models, though capable of tracing the sequencing of their decision-making algorithms, are often inefficient compared to ‘black box’ options with inscrutable inner workings. The race for AI supremacy will continue apace regardless of how Australia regulates it, and those actors less burdened by ethical considerations could gain a lead over their competitors.

  • Futurism ☛ Actor Stephen Fry Furious After AI Rips Off His Voice Without Permission

    Fry explained an AI was likely taught on the seven official UK-edition Harry Potter audiobooks, all of which he narrated. And although this is a relatively tame use of AI, the actor was careful to warn that the technology could theoretically be used to generate much worse types of content.

    "It could therefore have me read anything from a call to storm parliament to hard porn, all without my knowledge and without my permission," the actor continued. "And this, what you just heard, was done without my knowledge."

  • The Register UK ☛ Excel clone built for Uber China exposed Microsoft calculation error

    “I wasn’t going to be Excel, but it would behave sort of like Excel, it would read an Excel file as input, and it would Excel formulas on some data,” he wrote. “That was about as close to ‘just make it like Excel’ that we were going to get. And it also meant that we could skip the process of translating thousands of dense formulas to JavaScript.”

    Basta’s post details how he built the tool, but gets really interesting when he started testing it – because his kind of-spreadsheet and Excel produced different values when working with the same data. After plenty of internal discussion, he figured out the cause of the error, which he described as follows: [...]

  • Chris Coyier ☛ Blocking AI Scraper Bots

    If a huge company sent a robot to your door to ask for a lock of your hair, would you give it to them? If they asked for one square inch of your land, would you sign it over? If they asked you to run on a treadmill for one minute a day for them, would you hop to it? What if they didn’t ask?

  • Dedoimedo ☛ Google AdSense does not see a certified CMP

    A few days ago, I received an email from Google Adsense, urging me to take action. What about? Well, the email said I need to implement a Google-certified Consent Management Platform (CMP) to comply with GDPR. More specifically, the email said: "It appears you have not yet adopted a Google-certified CMP to collect consent from your users, which means your site(s) will stop showing AdSense ads and receiving revenue on EEA and UK traffic after January 16, 2024."

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Detecting AI-Generated Text

    There are no reliable ways to distinguish text written by a human from text written by an large language model. OpenAI writes: [...]

  • Daniel Miessler ☛ AI Will Likely Crush the B2B Services Economy

    But B2B is different. It’s especially vulnerable to AI because it’s largely middleware. Not completely, but largely.

  • The Register UK ☛ Colleges snub Turnitin's AI-writing detector over fears it'll wrongly accuse students

    Various American universities, however, including Vanderbilt, Michigan State, Northwestern, and the University of Texas at Austin have decided to not use this software over fears that it could lead to students being falsely accused of cheating, as noted by Bloomberg.

  • India Times ☛ The [Internet] is about to get much worse

    Back then, he had recorded a session for IBM and later signed a release form allowing the recording to be used in many ways. Of course, at that time, Mr. Marston couldn't envision that IBM A.would use anything more than the exact utterances he had recorded. Thanks to artificial intelligence, however, IBM was able to sell Mr. Marston's decades-old sample to websites that are using it to build a synthetic voice that could say anything. Mr. Marston recently discovered his voice emanating from the Wimbledon website during the tennis tournament. (IBM said it is aware of Mr. Marston's concern and is discussing it with him directly.)

    His plight illustrates why many of our economy's best-known creators are up in arms. We are in a time of eroding trust, as people realise that their contributions to a public space may be taken, monetized and potentially used to compete with them. When that erosion is complete, I worry that our digital public spaces might become even more polluted with untrustworthy content.

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Using AI to tailor pricing to individuals, devise advertising strategies and more

    If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when a salesman won’t tell you the price of their product. This is common on the streets of Harare. You ask, ‘How much is this?’ and they reply, ‘How much do you want to pay?’ Oh, I hate it.

    They want to make sure that they charge you the most that you are willing to pay, not what the product/service is actually worth.

    Well, AI is helping businesses do just that. Retail companies are using AI to set optimal prices for their products. In some cases, prices are even tailored to the individual consumer.

    I can’t say I’m thrilled about this.

  • Futurism ☛ Google’s New Gmail Tool Is Hallucinating Emails That Don’t Exist

    Last week, Google plugged its large language model-powered chatbot called Bard into a bevy of Google products including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Maps, and the Google-owned YouTube, among other apps and services. While it's understandable that Google would want to marry its newer generative AI efforts with its already-established product lineup, it seems that Google might have moved a little too fast.

    According to New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, Bard isn't the helpful inbox assistant that Google apparently wants it to be — at least yet. In his testing, says Roose, the AI hallucinated entire email correspondences that never took place.

  • New York Times ☛ Google’s Bard Just Got More Powerful. It’s Still Erratic.

    What I found was a bit of a mess. In my testing, Bard succeeded at some simpler tasks, such as summarizing an email. But it also told me about emails that weren’t in my inbox, gave me bad travel advice and fell flat on harder analytical tasks.

    Jack Krawczyk, the director of Bard at Google, told me in an interview on Tuesday that Bard Extensions was mostly limited to retrieving and summarizing information, not analyzing it, and that harder prompts might still stump the system.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • University of Toronto ☛ Unix shells are generally not viable access control mechanisms any more

      Today, the only two measures of login access control that really work in a general environment are either scrambling the login's password (and disable any SSH authorized keys) or excluding the login entirely from your various authentication data sources (your LDAP servers, your Apache htpasswd files, and so on). It's a pity that changing people's shells is no longer enough (it was both easy and convenient), but that's how the environment has evolved.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ The U.S. Government’s Database of Immigrant DNA Has Hit Scary, Astronomical Proportions

      After the Supreme Court’s decision in Maryland v. King (2013), which upheld a Maryland statute to collect DNA from individuals arrested for a violent felony offense, states have rapidly expanded DNA collection to encompass more and more offenses—even when DNA is not implicated in the nature of the offense. For example, in Virginia, the ACLU and other advocates fought against a bill that would have added obstruction of justice and shoplifting as offenses for which DNA could be collected. The federal government’s expansion of DNA collection from all immigrant detainees is the most drastic effort to vacuum up as much genetic information as possible, based on false assumptions linking crime to immigration status despite ample evidence to the contrary.

      As we’ve previously cautioned, this DNA collection has serious consequences. Studies have shown that increasing the number of profiles in DNA databases doesn’t solve more crimes. A 2010 RAND report instead stated that the ability of police to solve crimes using DNA is “more strongly related to the number of crime-scene samples than to the number of offender profiles in the database.” Moreover, inclusion in a DNA database increases the likelihood that an innocent person will be implicated in a crime. 

      Lastly, this increased DNA collection exacerbates the existing racial disparities in our criminal justice system by disproportionately impacting communities of color. Black and Latino men are already overrepresented in DNA databases. Adding nearly a million new profiles of immigrant detainees annually—who are almost entirely people of color, and the vast majority of whom are Latine—will further skew the 21 million profiles already in CODIS.

    • Techdirt ☛ Can Google Be Held Liable For Man Who Died Following Google Maps Over A Collapsed Bridge?

      There’s a pretty well known scene from The Office, when Michael Scott (played by Steve Carrell) follows his GPS device’s instructions (incorrectly, obviously) and drives into a lake:

    • Techdirt ☛ After Passing Online Safety Bill, UK Government Gets Back To Harassing Meta About Its End-To-End Encryption

      Last week, it appeared ever so briefly, the UK government might be finally giving up on its desires to legislate at least one end of messaging services’ end-to-end encryption. Having faced resistance from nearly every encrypted service (all of which threatened to exit the UK if anti-encryption mandates were put in place) as well as internal reports strongly suggesting undermining encryption would be a truly terrible idea, it seemed those pushing the Online Safety Bill were finally willing to accept the uncomfortable fact that breaking encryption only results in broken encryption. What it doesn’t do is end the online harms the UK government felt this bill addressed.

    • New Statesman ☛ Who owns your face?

      Clearview might have flown under the radar a little longer had this memo landed in the lap of a less dogged reporter, but Hill – who describes her beat as “the looming tech dystopia, and how we can try to avoid it” – isn’t one to give up. The first part of her book, Your Face Belongs to Us, is a gripping account of how she uncovered the identity of Clearview’s founders and confirmed that its claims weren’t just hype. The company’s facial recognition abilities were alarmingly advanced and indeed have the potential to completely undermine privacy as we know it. A despot could use Clearview to identify protesters in a crowd. A stalker could take a photo of a woman at a bar and use Clearview to instantly discover her name, her social media accounts, and quite possibly her place of work or home address.

    • 404 Media ☛ The End of Privacy is a Taylor Swift Fan TikTok Account Armed with Facial Recognition Tech

      A viral TikTok account is doxing ordinary and otherwise anonymous people on the [Internet] using off-the-shelf facial recognition technology, creating content and growing a following by taking advantage of a fundamental new truth: privacy is now essentially dead in public spaces.

    • Off Guardian ☛ A Nation of Snitches: DHS Is Grooming Americans to Report on Each Other

      If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you have just been promoted to the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

    • Security Week ☛ Predator Spyware Delivered to iOS, Android Devices via Zero-Days, MitM Attacks

      The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab group and Google’s Threat Analysis Group, which have been credited for reporting the vulnerabilities to Apple, revealed on Friday that the flaws have been chained in an attack targeting Ahmed Altantawy, a leading opposition politician in Egypt.

      What’s interesting about the exploit is that it was delivered through an MitM attack, which are typically launched by threat actors with many resources, such as state-sponsored groups.

    • VOA News ☛ Taliban Weighs Using US Mass Surveillance Plan, Met with China's Huawei

      Details of how the Taliban intend to expand and manage mass surveillance, including obtaining the U.S. plan, have not been previously reported.

      The mass camera rollout, which will involve a focus on "important points" in Kabul and elsewhere, is part of a new security strategy that will take four years to be fully implemented, Ministry of Interior spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani told Reuters.

    • Gizmodo ☛ Tinder Thinks Some of You Are Horny Enough to Pay $500 Every Month

      Tinder recently announced that it will be rolling out an ultra-premium membership for its most active users for the low price of several hundred dollars every month, reports Bloomberg. The program is called Tinder Select and is invite-only. The outlet reports that only the most active part of the platform’s user base, about 1%, was selected to join. While invitations were already sent out, the company will reportedly open applications on a rolling acceptance basis. Tinder Select will include member-only features like souped-up search, matching, and conversation capabilities.

    • US News And World Report ☛ Taliban Weighs Using U.S. Mass Surveillance Plan, Met With China's Huawei

      The Taliban are creating a large-scale camera surveillance network for Afghan cities that could involve repurposing a plan crafted by the Americans before their 2021 pullout, an interior ministry spokesman told Reuters, as authorities seek to supplement thousands of cameras already across the capital, Kabul.

    • Security Week ☛ TikTok Is Hit With $368 Million Fine Under Europe’s Strict Data Privacy Rules

      Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, the lead privacy regulator for Big Tech companies whose European headquarters are largely in Dublin, said it was fining TikTok 345 million euros and reprimanding the platform for the violations dating to the second half of 2020.

      The investigation found that the sign-up process for teen users resulted in settings that made their accounts public by default, allowing anyone to view and comment on their videos. Those default settings also posed a risk to children under 13 who gained access to the platform even though they’re not allowed.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Kashmir Hill's "Your Face Belongs to Us"

      Your Face Belongs To Us is Kashmir Hill's new tell-all history of Clearview AI, the creepy facial recognition company whose origins are mired in far-right politics, off-the-books police misconduct, sales to authoritarian states and sleazy one-percenter one-upmanship: [...]

    • Futurism ☛ Microsoft’s AI Team Accidentally Leaks Terabytes of Company Data

      The scope of the data spill is extensive, to say the least. Per the report, the leaked files contained a full disc backup of two employees' workstations, which included sensitive personal data along with company "secrets, private keys, passwords, and over 30,000 internal Microsoft Teams messages."

      Worse yet, the leak could have even made Microsoft's AI systems vulnerable to cyberattacks.

    • Techdirt ☛ UK Government ‘Concession’ On Breaking End-to-End Encryption In The Online Safety Act (Just Passed) Turns Out Not To Be One

      The hardliners who don’t understand the technology might be happy with that approach, but the tech companies won’t be. As soon as the latter are ordered to begin that harder nerding, they will probably pull out of the UK. In other words, despite the “technically feasible” fig leaf, nothing has changed. The UK government’s desperate attempt to come up with Schrödinger’s encryption backdoor – there for the police, but not there for the tech companies – has failed. It had to choose between mass surveillance and messaging services; by passing the Online Safety Act with the text unchanged, it seems to have chosen surveillance.

    • Arduino ☛ Some of the biggest ways home automation is changing in 2023

      In 2021, the average household had 25 connected devices, a massive increase on previous years, driven in no small part by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. And in 2023, the number of smart homes worldwide looks set to hit 195.8 million.

      We’re living through a fascinating time for technology in general, with new breakthroughs hitting the headlines all the time, and the home automation industry is especially exciting.

      In this article, we’ll dive into some of the main ways home automation is changing in 2023, some of the biggest current trends, and what’s on the horizon.

    • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ It’s Getting Harder to Do Anything on the Web That Doesn’t Demand Personal Identification. E-Mail, Included. Also, “Smart Cars” and “COVID”.

      I noticed that the list of E-Mail providers that doesn’t immediately pop up and demand a phone number, which can be linked back to you, has fallen off a cliff.

      Most also seem to be blacklisting burner phone number apps.

    • New York Times ☛ The Man Who Trapped Us in Databases

      One of Asher’s innovations — or more precisely one of his companies’ innovations — was what is now known as the LexID. My LexID, I learned, is 000874529875. This unique string of digits is a kind of shadow Social Security number, one of many such “persistent identifiers,” as they are called, that have been issued not by the government but by data companies like Acxiom, Oracle, Thomson Reuters, TransUnion — or, in this case, LexisNexis.

    • Security Week ☛ Researchers Discover Attempt to Infect Leading Egyptian Opposition Politician With Predator Spyware

      Citizen Lab said in a blog post that recent attempts to hack former Egyptian lawmaker Ahmed Altantawy involved configuring his connection to the Vodaphone Egypt mobile network to automatically infect his devices with the Predator spyware if he visited certain websites not using the secure HTTPS protocol.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Ahmed Eltantawy Targeted with Predator Spyware After Announcing Presidential Ambitions

      In August and September 2023, Eltantawy’s Vodafone Egypt mobile connection was persistently selected for targeting via network injection; when Eltantawy visited certain websites not using HTTPS, a device installed at the border of Vodafone Egypt’s network automatically redirected him to a malicious website to infect his phone with Cytrox’s Predator spyware.

  • Confidentiality

    • APNIC ☛ Verisign to update DNSSEC algorithm

      Verisign will soon make an important technology update to how we protect the top-level domains (TLDs) we operate. The vast majority of Internet users won’t notice any difference, but the update will support enhanced security for several Verisign-operated TLDs and pave the way for broader adoption and the next era of Domain Name System (DNS) security measures.

      Beginning in the next few months and continuing through the end of 2023, we will upgrade the algorithm we use to sign domain names in the .com, .net, and .edu zones with Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC).

      In this blog, I’ll outline the details of the upcoming change and what members of the DNS technical community need to know.

    • Krebs On Security ☛ LastPass: ‘Horse Gone Barn Bolted’ is Strong Password

      LastPass told customers this week they would be forced to update their master password if it was less than 12 characters. LastPass officially instituted this change back in 2018, but some undisclosed number of the company’s earlier customers were never required to increase the length of their master passwords.

      This is significant because in November 2022, LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Register UK ☛ Ukraine accuses Russian spies of hunting for war-crime info on its servers

    The Ukrainian State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection (SSSCIP) has claimed that Russian cyberspies are targeting its servers looking for data about alleged Kremlin-backed war crimes.

  • Site36 ☛ Asylum seekers: EU fingerprint database to be expanded as it reaches capacity limit

    The 20-year-old system can store seven million entries, now it is reaching its capacity limit: in 2022, Eurodac contained biometric data of 6.5 million people, up from 5.8 million the previous year. Compared to 2021, the system’s queries also increased by 73 per cent. This is according to a recent report by eu-LISA, the agency for the operational management of large-scale IT systems. It is responsible for the organisation of the Eurodac central system and publishes statistics on it annually. According to the report, maximum utilisation could be reached between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024.

  • NPR ☛ Italy cracks down on migrants as Meloni calls for a naval blockade off North Africa

    Premier Giorgia Meloni announced the "extraordinary measures" after Lampedusa, which is closer to Tunisia in North Africa than the Italian mainland, was overwhelmed last week by nearly 7,000 migrants in a day, more than the island's resident population. Italy has been offloading them slowly by ferry to Sicily and other ports, but the arrivals once again stoked tensions on the island and in political corridors, especially ahead of European Parliament elections next year.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Migrants on Lampedusa: Italy, EU announce action plan

    Over the past week, more than 7,000 migrants have arrived in Lampedusa on flimsy boats from Tunisia. More continue to reach its shores. One of Italy's Pelagie Islands located in the Mediterranean Sea between Tunisia and Malta, Lampedusa has a local population of around 6,000. The migrant reception center only has capacity for 400 migrants, prompting the local authorities to declare a state of emergency.

  • NPR ☛ A former Navy SEAL went to college at 52. His insight led to a new class

    HATCH: Yeah. As we got into it, Mary Louise, about two weeks into it, I realized - this is a hard thing for me to admit to, but I was actually kind of part of the problem because in my heart, I truly believed that if we just killed enough people, they would just leave us alone. I thought, man, if we just get over there and just really give them a good beating, they'll stop. And then we'll want to fight, and they'll say, hey, man. Can we just chill? And that isn't how it works ever. That's just not how it works.

  • Gizmodo ☛ TikTok Employees Recoil at Return-to-Office Tracker App

    Employees at TikTok told the Times they received notices about the new tool, called MyRTO, which reportedly monitors badge swipes into an office and may ask employees to explain absences on days when they were expected in the office. The staff were reportedly informed that “any deliberate and consistent disregard may result in disciplinary action.” These “deviations” could also impact the workers’ performance reviews which could impede a path to promotion.

  • New York Times ☛ Trump Attacked Me. Then Musk Did. It Wasn’t an Accident.

    Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.

    This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Migration as a weapon: Is Tunisia blackmailing the EU?

    According to Italian officials, more than 127,000 irregular [sic] migrants have reached Italy by sea so far this year. Over the same period last year, only 65,500 made the journey. Indeed, by the end of the year, the numbers may top those from 2016, the year which saw more than 181,000 arrivals, the highest number ever.

  • New York Times ☛ U.S. Wants to Keep Migrants Away From the Border by Moving It South

    The centers, in Colombia, Costa Rica and others planned in Guatemala, have become a primary focus of the president’s migration strategy, U.S. officials said, and the administration is already exploring expanding the program to other nations in the region, including opening a similar office in Mexico.

  • ADF ☛ U.N. Report: IS in Sudan Financed Through Businesses in Turkey

    IS has had a foothold in Sudan since 2019. Al-Iraqi’s operations in Sudan include 100 to 200 IS fighters who are, according to the U.N. report, “seasoned operators, but act as facilitators for logistical movements and transactions.” Al-Iraqi also has significant investments in Sudan.

    Sudanese operatives use al-Iraqi’s resources to help other IS extremists move to southern Libya, Mali and West Africa, the investigators wrote in their report. Sudan’s civil war may attract fighters from other countries.

  • ADF ☛ Islamic State, al-Qaida Groups Grow in Sahel’s Security Vacuum

    The ramifications are roiling northern Mali, where problems began 11 years ago with an Islamist revolt and continue to proliferate in neighboring Burkina Faso to the south. In that country, militants have dominated the north, east and west since a coup removed the civilian government in 2022.

    Two groups are responsible for most of the violence: the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara (ISGS) and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM). In northern Mali, ISGS has been able to nearly double the territory it controls in less than a year, according to a 104-page report by U.N. experts circulated in August.

  • Reason ☛ Insurrectionists Who Think they are Upholding the Constitution are Still Insurrectionists—and Still Subject to Disqualification Under Section 3 the Fourteenth Amendment

    Whether the Confederates, Trump, or anyone else engaged in insurrection or aided one turns not on subjective states of mind, but on objective reality. Whatever Trump and the January 6 rioters might have subjectively believed, objectively they were trying to use force and fraud to overthrow the duly elected president and replace him with the man he had defeated.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Europe tackles its migrant influx

    The number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea en route to Italy has more than doubled this year. Spain, France, and Greece have seen smaller increases. That rising tide has added momentum to the most significant overhaul of immigration policy in Europe in decades.

  • teleSUR ☛ Berlin Can No Longer Accommodate More Refugees

    Last week, the Interior Ministry announced that it has suspended the reception of migrants and asylum seekers from Italy through the European voluntary distribution mechanism.

  • El País ☛ A gateway to Europe for migrants and a paradise for tourists: The two Lampedusas that rarely intersect

    This week has been unusual in every sense. Nearly 12,000 migrants arrived in Lampedusa in just a few days, and the exception that proves the rule occurred: a group of boys from the Gambia, Liberia, Ivory Coast and Nigeria who had just landed on the island danced with tourists and locals to the rhythm of Bob Marley’s reggae. This almost never happens. But most of the neighbors, who have gone out of their way to bring clothes, blankets, water and food, celebrate it as a sign of welcome and normality.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Drone hits administrative building in Russian city of Kursk — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russia’s Federation Council moves to censure Senator Lyudmila Narusova for traveling to French Riviera — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Former Wagner Group fighter who sought asylum in Norway arrested for trying to return to Russia — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ What we know so far about Ukraine’s attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence says it carried out drone attacks on FSB building and oil refinery in Russian city of Kursk — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Explosion reported near Russian Black Sea Fleet shipyard in Sevastopol — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russian war bloggers share video allegedly showing aftermath of Azerbaijani attack on Russian ammunition depot in Nagorno-Karabakh — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says Russia has ‘no problems with Ukraine’s territorial integrity’ — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Polish Defense Ministry posts two-year-old video of migrants at border, says Belarus tried to ‘destabilize’ Poland — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza sent to ‘punishment cell’ immediately after arriving to Omsk penal colony — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Armenian prime minister says events in Nagorno-Karabakh ‘raise serious questions’ about Russian peacekeepers’ motives — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russian authorities report drones in Bryansk, Kursk, and Tula regions — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Ukraine says drone hit Russian Interior Ministry building in Kursk — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russia puts top International Criminal Court judges on federal wanted list — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Combat drone explodes, killing Russian Air Force personnel after supposedly being ‘neutralized’ in Kursk region — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russia launches drone and missile attack on Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Scheerpost ☛ Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and The Lies She Spread About People ‘Weaponizing FOIA’

    The urgency with which Sanders pushed for the changes garnered widespread attention, and a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) task force created by the state of Arkansas in 2017 unanimously opposed the initial bill. The task force also denounced Sanders for introducing the bill in a special session.

    Still, Sanders spread enough lies to convince lawmakers to pass a bill that made it legal for the state government to hide files related to the “provision of security services” when the governor and other senior officials travel.

  • Patrick Breyer ☛ Transparency of landmark judgements: European Parliament wants to introduce public access to EU court documents

    The EU Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) today unanimously voted in favour of giving the public, civil society and the media a right of access to documents, positions and arguments exchanged in court proceedings, subject to some exceptions. The proposal was originally made by MEPs René Repasi (S&D group) and Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party, Greens/EFA group). Whether the Parliament‘s amendment will become part of the reform of the Statute of the European Court of Justice will now be decided in the upcoming trilogue negotiations with the EU Council and the EU Commission.

  • RFERL ☛ Kazakhstan Declassifies Files Of 2.4 Million People Repressed By Soviets

    Kazakh Prosecutor-General's Office said in a statement late on September 18 that the Central Asian nation's authorities had declassified documents for 2.4 million cases of individuals repressed by Soviet authorities between 1929-1956 on politically motivated charges. [...]

• Environment

  • Bert Hubert ☛ A Spherical Cow Model of Global Warming (With Data and Code)

    It turns out that CO₂ and global warming are superficially simple (“CO₂ traps heat”), but as soon as you study it in any depth it all becomes fiendishly complex. And this complexity leaves ample room for people to sow doubt. Sadly, the complexity also makes it a challenge to satisfy reasonable folks who just want to know what is going on. You just can’t summarise the CO₂ situation in a few sentences.

    Instead, this page will use more words than that to give you a solid handle on how our atmosphere traps & releases heat.

  • DeSmog ☛ Italian Oil Giant Eni Knew About Climate Change More Than 50 Years Ago, Report Reveals

    The report comes four months after the two organizations announced a lawsuit against the company alleging Eni used “lobbying and greenwashing” to push for more oil and gas production, despite having known about the risks fossil fuels posed over the past 53 years.

    The two groups had previously unearthed a 1970 report by Eni’s Isvet research centre that warned of the “catastrophic” climate risk from the build-up of carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by burning fossil fuels. They also found a 1978 report produced by Eni’s Tecneco company that included a projection of how much atmospheric CO2 levels would rise by the turn of the 21st century.

  • uni Stanford ☛ How Human Exceptionalism is Pushing Planetary Boundaries–A MAHB Dialogue with Co-Author Brian Swartz

    The implications get us straight into speciesism, the dual proposition that a) species are uniquely real and b) one or more species are superior to all others. Each tenet falters under scrutiny. We just spoke about how species are human constructs. Regarding superiority, it is clear that most humans see themselves as undeniably superior to other forms of life. This worldview scales to a planetary ego and sets into motion much about how we behave. Things go bananas when we consider the consequences of this behavior. What problems on Earth are not downstream of those consequences? From climate change and biodiversity loss to pollution and the future of life, it all extends from human perceptions and behaviors as a globally dominant lineage.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Water-watching satellite monitors warming ocean off California coast

    Warm ocean waters from the developing El Niño are shifting north along coastlines in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Along the coast of California, these warm waters are interacting with a persistent marine heat wave that recently influenced the development of Hurricane Hilary. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite is able to spot the movement of these warm ocean waters in unprecedented detail.

  • New York Times ☛ Saltwater in the Mississippi Threatens Water Supply in New Orleans

    Though the issue has gained heightened attention in recent days as the saltwater heads toward more populous areas, officials have been aware of the problem since the early summer. The lower portion of Plaquemines Parish, on the southern edge of the state, has had drinking advisories in place since June and has been working with the state to provide bottled drinking water for residents.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Global warming did the Unthinkable

    Mountain Wilderness, a French environmental group, says it has dismantled 22 ski lifts in France since 2001, and estimates that there are still 106 abandoned ski lifts across 59 sites in the country.

    According to a report published in August by the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, 53% of 2,234 ski resorts surveyed in Europe are likely to experience “a very high snow supply risk” at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) of global warming above pre-industrial levels, without use of artificial snow.

  • CNN ☛ French ski resort closes permanently because there’s not enough snow

    A report published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal found a “substantial possibility” of global temperature rises crossing this 2-degree Celsius threshold by mid-century.

    La Sambuy’s Dalex said that “all winter sports resorts in France are impacted by global warming,” particularly those at a medium mountain altitude between 1,000 and 1,500 meters.

  • CS Monitor ☛ March to End Fossil Fuels: 75,000 protestors descend on NYC

    Many of the leaders of countries that cause the most heat-trapping carbon pollution will not be in attendance. And they won’t speak at the summit organized by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a way that only countries that promise new concrete action are invited to speak.

    Organizers estimated 75,000 people marched Sunday.

  • DeSmog ☛ Tens of Thousands March to the UN, Declaring a Climate Emergency

    Sunday’s protest occurred ahead of a major climate ambition summit scheduled to take place at the UN’s New York headquarters on Wednesday. UN Secretary General António Guterres has asked states to present their commitments to cease developing new coal, oil, and gas projects and to provide plans to phase out existing fossil fuel production.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Florida pays python hunters to clear the Everglades. Ten years later, is it working?

    Bite by bite, these invaders have reshaped the ecosystem they've slithered through for almost 30 years, thanks to irresponsible owners dumping their pets in the swamp when they got too big or cumbersome to care for. (That theory that they were released from a lab when Hurricane Andrew blew through in 1992? Busted.)

  • Science Alert ☛ Mass Extinction: Entire Branches on Tree of Life Are Dying, Scientists Warn

    So ecologist Gerardo Ceballos from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Stanford University conservation biologist Paul Ehrlich assessed species extinctions since 1500 CE and compared those through the past 500 million years. They found we've driven 73 genera of back-boned animals to extinction during the last 500 years.

    Genus is the taxonomic classification just above species, grouping together the most closely related organisms, much like siblings, in a family tree.

    This rate is 35 times higher than previous genus-level extinctions.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • DeSmog ☛ How Carbon Capture and Storage Projects Are Driving New Oil and Gas Extraction Globally

      When Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber opens the 28th annual UN climate conference in Dubai in November, he will be juggling two roles – convincing the world of the United Arab Emirates’ leadership in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while preserving the very industry that’s causing them. 

      In addition to his job as summit president, Al Jaber heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), which plans to increase its oil and gas output by 11 percent by 2027. The company says that more oil will mean less emissions, however — provided the industry builds enough facilities to capture carbon dioxide (CO2), the main gas causing the climate crisis.  

    • DeSmog ☛ Fossil Fuel Companies Made Bold Promises to Capture Carbon. Here’s What Actually Happened.

      Carbon capture and storage (CCS) was high on the agenda at New York Climate Week last week, where critics of the technology raised concerns it would be used to extend the life of the fossil fuel industry.

      For years, experts have pointed out that CCS has been primarily used to pump more oil out of the earth, using a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Burning that oil emits far more carbon dioxide (CO2) than what is captured, and therefore CCS doesn’t represent a viable solution to tackle climate change, critics argue. 

    • New York Times ☛ Can the U.S. Make Solar Panels? This Company Thinks So.

      As a result, many companies, including First Solar, have announced the construction of dozens of factories, in total, around the country. But nobody is entirely sure whether these investments will be durable, especially in businesses, like battery or solar panel manufacturing, where China’s domination is deep and strong. Chinese manufacturers enjoy lower labor costs, economies of scale and incentives from a government eager to control industries critical to fighting climate change.

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft hiring a nuclear power program manager, because AI needs lots of 'leccy

      A job ad spells out that whoever gets the job "will be responsible for maturing and implementing a global Small Modular Reactor (SMR) and microreactor energy strategy."

    • H2 View ☛ EET Hydrogen commences FEED study of 1,000MW hydrogen project

      The HPP2 project will have up to a 1,000MW capacity and is expected to produce around 230,000 tonnes of low carbon hydrogen annually, suitable for local industrial and power generation customers.

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Agony of the School Car Line

      Car lines are a classic tragedy-of-the-commons problem: Every parent acting in their perceived self-interest—Oh I’ll just drop him off again; it’ll only take a minute—makes us collectively worse off in the form of dirtier air, increased traffic, less human connection, and more frustration.

      This soul-sucking system is sadly the norm. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

    • Vox ☛ It’s time to replace urban delivery vans with e-bikes

      Remember, during lockdown, how we all got obsessed with ordering everything online and having it delivered right to our doorsteps? Yeah, turns out that isn’t going away anytime soon — and we’re starting to understand the many downsides. The delivery vans that make our next-day shipping dreams come true are driving up CO2 emissions while making our streets more crowded and less safe.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ IOSCO DeFi WG Report

      The body of the report ends with a set of 10 questions for public comment. Those to which I have a substantive response are: [...]

    • BW Businessworld Media Pvt Ltd ☛ [NATO] Member Turkey Imports Coal From Russian Occupied Crimea

      Between February and July 2023, about 160,400 tonnes of coal from the annexed eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk arrived in Turkey, the data showed

    • India Times ☛ California governor vetoes bill banning robotrucks without safety drivers

      But labor unions led by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have been calling for Governor Newsom to sign the bill, saying autonomous trucks - some of which weigh over 80,000 pounds - were unsafe and would lead to job losses.

      Governor Newsom in his veto message said any regulations framed by the department of motor vehicles would be transparent, with inputs from stakeholders and experts to ensure safety.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Lusaka ZM ☛ Line-Of-Rail Tourism: A threat to Zambia’s Community Development

      For example, in the 2021 edition of the Tourism Digest, only the five national parks received the usual first-born treatment, at the expense of the many potent national parks located in marginalised rural communities of the country.

    • The Conversation ☛ The secret world of rhododendrons: a plant more ancient than the Himalayas that inspired fables and stories around the world

      But the mountain ranges and plunging valleys of the Himalayas created a dizzying diversity of rhododendrons as neighbouring populations were isolated from each other. Tourists flock to see the colourful blooms found there, especially in Yunnan and the Baili areas of China.

    • New York Times ☛ The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?

      With each discovery, the cognitive and moral divide between humanity and the rest of the animal world has eroded. For centuries, the linguistic utterances of Homo sapiens have been positioned as unique in nature, justifying our dominion over other species and shrouding the evolution of language in mystery. Now, experts in linguistics, biology and cognitive science suspect that components of language might be shared across species, illuminating the inner lives of animals in ways that could help stitch language into their evolutionary history — and our own.

  • Overpopulation

    • University of Michigan ☛ U-M center gets $5M to study climate change impacts on water

      The National Science Foundation has awarded $5 million to U-M to establish the Global Center for Understanding Climate Change Impacts on Transboundary Waters. Partners in the project include Cornell University, the College of Menominee Nation, the Red Lake Nation and the University of Wisconsin.

    • France24 ☛ Accessing drinking water ‘a battle’ in French overseas territory Mayotte

      Getting access to tap water in Mayotte, a French overseas territory in the Indian Ocean northwest of Madagascar, has become an uphill battle. Since September 4, residents have only had access to the archipelago’s water supply for two days out of three on average.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ 'It's an emergency.' Midwest towns scramble as drought threatens drinking water

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Common Dreams ☛ The Mayors Max Do Their Duty

    Another week in a teetering America: Fascists on the rise; threats and shutdowns loom; crooks, clowns, nihilists imperil democratic governance. But all politics is local, so we take heart from an unincorporated California mountain town where determinedly non-partisan Mayor Max lll conveys unconditional love, does as many good deeds as possible, vows "We don’t do anything divisive, ever," and pledges on his food bowl to "faithfully execute my duties." He's a dog, but still. GOP, take note.

  • New York Times ☛ Amazon Takes a Big Stake in the A.I. Start-Up Anthropic

    Amazon said on Monday that it would invest up to $4 billion in the artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic, as the world’s biggest technology companies race to benefit from A.I. breakthroughs that could reshape parts of their businesses — and the economy as a whole.

  • India Times ☛ Apple to scale up production over five times in India to $40 billion

    iPhone maker Apple has plans to scale up production in India by over five-fold to around $40 billion (about 3.32 lakh crore) in the next four-five years, according to government sources. The official, who did not wish to be named, said the company has crossed the $7-billion production mark in the last financial year.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Sen. Bob Menendez Indicted in Case Revealing How Egypt Tried to Keep U.S. Military Aid Flowing

    On Friday, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez and his wife were accused by federal prosecutors of accepting bribes in exchange for using his position to increase U.S. assistance to Egypt and to do favors for three New Jersey businessmen, including Wael Hana, an Egyptian American who ran a lucrative business certifying halal meat exports. “Egypt is a major meat importer,” says Lina Attalah, publisher of the independent Cairo-based news website Mada Masr that investigated the monopolization of halal certification in 2019. “What was straightforward financial corruption had this major political tentacle that affects bilateral relations to a great extent.” Menendez has stepped down as head of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, but as he faces growing pressure to resign from his role as senator, New Jersey-based reporter Bob Hennelly says, the state’s political establishment that enabled him for years now appears ready to let him fend for himself. Democrats “really can’t afford to have Bob Menendez hanging around,” says Hennelly, who reports that Menendez has faced serious corruption charges in the past but retained his Senate seat. “This is what he does.”

  • Democracy Now ☛ Clarence Thomas & the Koch Network: ProPublica Reveals SCOTUS Justice Attended Fundraising Events

    A new damning investigation from ProPublica reveals Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas attended multiple fundraisers in connection with the billionaire Koch brothers, who have spent millions on conservative causes and funneled vast donations into Republican campaigns. “None of this was disclosed as it should have been on his annual financial disclosures,” says Justin Elliott, reporter for ProPublica covering Supreme Court corruption and ethics. “He’s spending time with people like the Kochs who have active interest and, in fact, cases at the Supreme Court.” This comes as a Supreme Court precedent known as Chevron is set to be revisited, with conservatives seeking to limit the power of federal agencies to issue regulations in areas ranging from the environment to labor rights to consumer protection. “If this Chevron doctrine is overturned by the Supreme Court, it’s going to make it much, much easier to challenge a regulation if you, as a company, don’t like it,” says Elliott.

  • Quartz ☛ How Turkey is using Starlink to win a Tesla factory

    Turkey’s government, though, isn’t necessarily interested in expanding connectivity for its citizens. The NGO Freedom House said last year that Turkish [Internet] users are not free due to restrictions on content and retaliation against users for online speech. Telecommunications are state-controlled, and Turkey traditionally asks foreign satellite firms to partner with TurkSat. But Starlink’s network doesn’t have an obvious role for the state-backed firm to play.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ White House grapples with harmonizing thicket of cybersecurity rules

    The initial goal is to create a framework for a single mandate so critical infrastructure owners and operators have “reciprocity” across standards. That would mean that complying with a set of standards in one domain would, in theory, result in compliance in another and reduce compliance costs. Large corporations spread across multiple sectors would spend more on cyber defense , and smaller corporations that currently can’t keep up with security spending might allocate a bit more of their budget toward defense.

  • The Register UK ☛ VMware staff reportedly told job cuts may start before Broadcom acquisition

    Speculation online is morbid, and morale among those sharing these details is clearly not high. Some suggest that job cuts could be announced on Monday, October 16, making unlucky Friday, October 13th the last business day on which VMware employees can confidently plan an all-hands farewell party.

  • The Register UK ☛ Former CIO accuses Penn State of faking cybersecurity compliance

    The lawsuit [PDF], recently unsealed, is a qui tam complaint (in Latin "who as well,") meaning it was filed on behalf of the US government by former CIO Matthew Decker, who claims his former employer defrauded the government under the False Claims Act.

  • India Times ☛ Microsoft's chief product executive Panos Panay to step down after 19 years

    Another longtime executive, Yusuf Mehdi, will take lead on the Windows and Surface businesses and products, Jha said. The note said Panay would be helping with the transition.

  • India Times ☛ Microsoft's hardware unit head resigns, CEO Satya Nadella's statement on his departure

    Panay is reportedly joining Amazon to oversee the company’s hardware business. He is likely to stay to help his replacements transition into the role, Rajesh Jha, executive vice president of the experiences and devices group, announced in an email to employees on Monday. The company’s “commitment” to Surface and the mixed-reality business “remains unchanged,” Jha wrote in his email. “Thank you, Panos, for your impact on our products, culture, company, and industry over the past two decades,” Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in a statement, adding that the company will “remain steadfast and committed to our strategy.”

  • Pro Publica ☛ In Nasty Fight Over Election Maps, Wisconsin GOP Counters Threats to Its Power

    In the northwest corner of Wisconsin, the 73rd Assembly District used to be shaped like a mostly rectangular blob. Then, last year, a new map drawn by Republican lawmakers took effect, and some locals joked that it looked a lot like a Tyrannosaurus rex.

    The advent of the “T. rex” precipitated dark times and perhaps extinction for local Democrats.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Massachusetts to Launch 90-Day Push to Fill Vacant State-Funded Apartments

    Massachusetts housing officials announced Friday that they are launching a “90-day push” to reduce the number of vacancies in state public housing by the end of the year.

    The initiative comes after an investigation by WBUR and ProPublica found nearly 2,300 of 41,500 state-funded apartments were vacant at the end of July — most for months or years — despite a housing shortage so severe that Gov. Maura Healey called it a state of emergency. Massachusetts is one of only four states with state-subsidized public housing, and about 184,000 people are on a waitlist for the units. Massachusetts also has federally funded public housing, which is more common nationwide.

  • Off Guardian ☛ UK quietly passes “Online Safety Bill” into law

    Of some note is the “information offenses” clause, which empowers OfCom to demand “information” from users, companies and employees, and makes it a crime to withhold it. The nature of this “information” is never specified, nor does it appear to be qualified. Meaning it could be anything, and will most likely be used to get private account information about users from social media platforms.

    In one of the more worrying clauses, the Bill outlines what they call “communications offenses”. Section 10 details crimes of transmitting “Harmful, false and threatening communications”.

    It should be noted that sending threats is already illegal in the UK, so the only new ground covered here is “harmful” and/or “false” information, and the fact they feel the need to differentiate between those two things should worry you.

  • The Drone Girl ☛ Exclusive interview: FAA gives insight into Remote ID enforcement plans

    One of the biggest stories in the drone industry has been the Federal Aviation Administration’s final rule for remote ID, which mandates a way that drones must provide identification and location information. But perhaps one of the bigger stories in drones is the fact that — while the Remote ID deadline was still technically Sept. 16, 2023 (as was always intended — the FAA announced just days ahead of that date that it would extend Remote ID enforcement by six months.

  • ADF ☛ Africa Cyber Surge II Tackles Cybercrime Through International Cooperation

    Africa Cyber Surge II was a four-month joint operation by Interpol and Afripol that involved 25 countries across the continent. It began in April and by August resulted in the arrests of 14 people running online scams in countries including Cameroon, Mauritius, and Nigeria.

    The operation followed the first Africa Cyber Surge conducted in 2022. Both operations were a reminder that the rapid spread of the internet and smartphone technology across Africa has happened, in many cases, without the necessary protections to guard against online scammers and other malicious actors, according to experts.

  • Greece ☛ Internet piracy [sic] still rampant in Greece

    According to the latest report of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), titled “Online Copyright Infringement in the European Union: Films, Music, Publications, Software and TV, 2017-2022,” which was made public on Tuesday, piracy [sic] of live events, such as the streaming of sports matches, is on the rise across Europe.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ On the Cybersecurity Jobs Shortage

    The numbers never made sense to me, and Ben Rothke has dug in and explained the reality: [...]

  • JURIST ☛ EU Parliament adopts resolution against decriminalization of prostitution

    Countries such as Germany and the Netherlands allow legal prostitution. The resolution stated that the legalization of “a system organised for profit which is intrinsically violent, discriminatory and deeply inhuman” runs counter to stated EU human rights goals. On the other hand, Sweden, France, Spain and Ireland employ the Nordic/Equality Model. This model criminalizes the purchase of sex but does not punish individuals who are prostituted or trafficked. Parliament rejected an EU-wide implementation of the model despite statistics in the resolution that showed it decreased demand for sex work and decreased overall rates of violence against sex workers.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Bill revising Technology Modernization Fund would extend program through 2030

    Reps. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., and Nancy Mace, R-S.C., introduced the Modernizing Government Technology Reform Act of 2023 on Monday, largely revising and adding some additional requirements to the original Modernizing Government Technology Act, passed in 2017.

    The new bill would reauthorize the TMF through 2030 and authorize the addition of $50 million to the fund, according to the bill’s text. Under the original law, the fund is set to sunset in 2025.

  • El País ☛ UN chief gives dire warning: ‘Our world is becoming unhinged. And we seem incapable of coming together to respond’

    “Our world is becoming unhinged. Geopolitical tensions are rising. Global challenges are mounting. And we seem incapable of coming together to respond,” Guterres told the people who run the world’s nations. He said that the United Nations — and the ways that countries cooperate — must evolve to meet the era.

    “The world has changed. Our institutions have not,” Guterres said before the opening of the U.N. General Assembly’s General Assembly. “We cannot effectively address problems as they are if institutions don’t reflect the world as it is. Instead of solving problems, they risk becoming part of the problem.”

  • Michael Geist ☛ A Reality Check on the Online News Act: Why Bill C-18 Has Been a Total Policy Disaster

    Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked this week about concerns with the implementation of Bill C-18, to which he responded that other countries are quietly backing Canada in its battle against tech companies. I posted a reality check tweet noting that Meta is not returning to news in Canada, the law’s regulation stipulating a 4% fee on revenues is not found anywhere else, and that Bill C-18 has emerged as a model for what not to do. With the House of Commons back in session, it is worth providing a more fulsome reality check on where things stand with the Online News Act. While the government is still talking tough, the law has been an utter disaster, leading to millions in lost revenues with cancelled deals, reduced traffic for Canadian media sites, declining investment in media in Canada, and few options to salvage this mess.

  • Michael Geist ☛ Why the Government is Quietly Undermining Competition Bureau Independence in Bill C-56

    Second, far from establishing safeguards, Bill C-56 does the opposite as the government also grants itself significant powers over the inquiry itself. The bill provides that the terms of the inquiry and the timeline for reporting on it are ultimately decided by the Minister and not the Competition Bureau.

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Twitter (X) could one day go behind a paywall

    Elon Musk is tossing up the idea of putting Twitter behind a paywall. It’s one of his aggressive ideas to try and make the platform a profitable business. In a live stream he had with the Israeli Prime minister he says, “We are moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system,”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Meduza ☛ Russia’s sprawling wartime fake news machine: Meet the organization behind the Kremlin’s disinformation about Ukraine

      She sent a private message to one of her classmates, asking her why others were responding that way to Tabak. “Oh, but he’s one of the people who monitor social media groups and pages and report who should be shut down and who should receive support,” the woman replied.

    • Gizmodo ☛ California Sues Big Oil Over Climate Deception

      “Industry-funded reports directly linked fossil fuel consumption to rising global temperatures and damage to our air, land, and water,” a press release from California Governor Newsom’s office announcing the lawsuit explained. “Oil companies intentionally suppressed that information from the public and policymakers to protect their profits, and spent billions of dollars to spread disinformation on climate change and delay our transition away from fossil fuels.”

    • People of the State of California v. Big Oil

      What Attorney General Bonta said: “Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change — but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment. Enough is enough,” said Attorney General Rob Bonta. “With our lawsuit, California becomes the largest geographic area and the largest economy to take these giant oil companies to court. From extreme heat to drought and water shortages, the climate crisis they have caused is undeniable. It is time they pay to abate the harm they have caused. We will meet the moment and fight tirelessly on behalf of all Californians, in particular those who live in environmental justice communities.”

    • Futurism ☛ Don Jr's Twitter Account Got Hacked, Posted That Trump Had Died

      Details about the hack remain hazy.

    • Gizmodo ☛ Donald Trump Jr. Tweets That His Dad Died, Says He Was Hacked

      Donald Trump Jr. and the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment, though a representative for the former president’s son told the Hill the account was hacked. A spokesman for Donald Trump Sr. said the same. X did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

    • EDRI ☛ Tackling disinformation: Strengthening democracy through information integrity

      By focusing on tangible questions around what works and why, the conference will also set the stage for working toward OECD guidelines on the issue and provide the occasion to discuss expanding the OECD DIS/MIS Resource Hub’s engagement and reach.

    • EDRI ☛ Disinformation Congress

      This event, organized in collaboration between Madrid University Carlos III and StopFake Ukraine, aims to foster cross-border dialogue, promote knowledge sharing, and develop innovative strategies to combat disinformation and strengthen fact-checking practices.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFA ☛ What to do about ‘freedom from speech?’

    It’s more straightforward, though not easy, to pick a fight with governments for their repression of free speech, as it is to argue against the common claims that free speech is an illusion or that democracies are just as censorious as authoritarian states. What’s harder to comprend, and more dangerous not to rebut, is the proposition that freedom of speech is undesirable and honesty is a species of antisocial behavior. Indeed, the argument you should keep silent even if you know you would speak the truth. But that is what one confronts in Southeast Asia, vide the Pew survey.

  • Meduza ☛ Head of self-proclaimed ‘DNR’ imposes curfew and ‘military censorship’ of mail, Internet, and phone communications — Meduza

  • CPJ ☛ Russia blocks two more Central Asian news outlets over Ukraine war coverage

    Roskomsvoboda, a Russian independent internet freedom group, reported that on September 12 an unspecified government agency blocked four of 24.kg’s web pages from October 2022 about the Ukraine war and two of Payom’s articles—a November 2022 speech by a Tajik politician in support of Ukraine and a February 2023 report about Russia potentially drafting individuals of Central Asian origin into the military.

    A database maintained by Russian state media regulator Roskomnadzor also said that individual pages of those outlets were blocked.

  • Spiegel ☛ Roya Piraei's Photo Made Her an Icon

    Piraei still remembers precisely what happened on that evening that destroyed her family and her life. An evening that also catapulted her into a new orbit – that of an international dissident with access to the highest circles of power.

  • Off Guardian ☛ How Not to Launch a Global Anti-Censorship Movement

    So, I’ve been excommunicated from Michael Shellenberger’s global anti-censorship movement. It’s my own fault. I was sowing dissension. I engaged in harmful speech in the group chat. I was making people feel uncomfortable. I was not playing ball. I was not with the program.

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ The Regional Impact of Iran's Protests, One Year Later: A Democracy in Exile Roundtable

    Last fall, Democracy in Exile convened an expert roundtable to understand what Iran's protests meant for the Arab world, especially women's rights activists in repressive Arab countries. Now, following the one-year anniversary of the death of Amini, who was also known by her Kurdish name, Jina, we are approaching that question again in a new roundtable to find out what has changed in the past year—both in Iran and in the region as the protest movement has been suppressed. We asked experts: What impact have Iran's protests had across the region a year later, both for pro-democracy activists in Arab countries and their repressive governments? Has Iran's repression of its protest movement reverberated beyond its borders?

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ ORG warns of threat to privacy and free speech as Online Safety Bill is passed

    “No one disputes that tech companies could do more to keep children safe online but the Online Safety Bill is an overblown legislative mess that could seriously harm our security by removing privacy from internet users. The bill will also undermine the freedom of expression of many people in the UK.

    “While the UK government has admitted it’s not possible to safely scan all of our private messages, it has just granted Ofcom the powers to force tech companies to do so in the future. These are powers more suited to an authoritarian regime not a democracy and could harm journalists, and whistle-blowers, as well as parents, domestic violence victims and children who want to keep their communications secure from online predators and stalkers.

    “The Bill also poses a huge threat to freedom of expression with tech companies expected to decide what is and isn’t legal, and then censor content before it’s even been published. This re-introduces prior restraint censorship for the written word back into UK law for the first time since the 1600s. In addition, young people, whom the law is supposed to protect, could be denied access to large swathes of the web, including resources that provide them with information and support.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Shadowproof ☛ From Behind Enemy Lines, Prison Journalists Report On Conditions At Their Own Risk

    Those who are brave enough to practice journalism in prison often encounter the most aggressive intimidation and retaliation from prison administrators and guards.

    Closely monitored telephone calls and messages. “Lost” and delayed mail. Random transfers. Contaminated food. Withheld healthcare. Frequent cell searches, with belongings shuffled through and thrown around; papers torn up and left in the toilet. A stint in solitary confinement, that might last a month or never-ending years. Directives and rules that target you, increasing your risk for a repeat of all the punishments above.

  • France24 ☛ Burkina Faso suspends French news outlet Jeune Afrique for trying to 'discredit' army

    The decision came almost a year after Captain Ibrahim Traore came to power in a coup, Burkina's second in eight months.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Violence against journalists: A tool to restrict press freedom in Mexico

    In this chapter, we analyze press freedom in Mexico, considering the socio-territorial particularities and political landscape of the country. Specifically, our analysis includes the presence of drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) throughout the territory, the levels of marginalization, and the Mexican president’s stance on the press.

  • France24 ☛ French police release journalist arrested for reporting on alleged France-Egypt spy operation

    Amnesty International's secretary general Agnes Callamard said: "It is deeply chilling that, almost two years after the revelations that France was allegedly complicit in the extrajudicial executions of hundreds of people in Egypt, it is the journalist who exposed these atrocities that is being targeted, rather than those responsible."

  • CBC ☛ She fears Russia wants her dead. Now she's on the run

    Russian journalist Elena Kostyuchenko can only plan her life a few weeks at a time because she may be on a Russian kill list. In a Canadian exclusive, CBC’s chief correspondent Adrienne Arsenault meets her and reports on the young Russian author's life on the run.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Explainer: The decline of Hong Kong’s press freedom under the national security law

    As Chief Executive John Lee assures Hongkongers that press freedom is “in our pocket,” HKFP rounds up media industry incidents since the onset of the national security law.

  • El País ☛ Hero or villain? Rupert Murdoch’s exit stirs strong feelings in Britain, where he upended the media

    Journalists and politicians in the U.K. both hailed and reviled the 92-year-old mogul after he announced Thursday that he was stepping down as leader of his companies Fox and News Corp., handing control to his son Lachlan

  • New Yorker ☛ Rupert Murdoch Takes a Step Back—Not Away

    All of that is just speculation. What is beyond dispute is that 2023 has been extremely trying for Murdoch and his businesses. At the start of the year, the external shareholders of Fox Corp. and News Corp., which until 2013 were part of a single company, forced Murdoch to abandon an effort to reunite them. In April, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to avoid a trial on Dominion’s claims that the cable news network knowingly broadcast falsehoods about the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election, including assertions that Dominion’s voting machines flipped votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Rupert Murdoch built a right-wing media empire

    Murdoch began building his media empire by inheriting a single Adelaide newspaper, The News, from his father in the early 1950s. During the 1960s, he purchased several Australian local newspapers, including The Sunday Times in Perth and The Daily Mirror in Sydney. In 1964, he launched The Australian, a newspaper with national reach.

  • BIA Net ☛ Kurdish journalist Sedat Yılmaz faces 'terror' charges over 'lack of banking transactions,' social media activities

    The 44-page indictment primarily consists of information related to the history and activities of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the organization Yılmaz is accused of being a member of.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Techdirt ☛ Court Shoots Down Cop’s Attempt To Instruct Jury That He’s Innocent Just Because He Wasn’t The FIRST Violator Of Rights

    Are you familiar with “felony murder?” Let’s talk about it. It’s a handy way to send more people to prison for more years just because they participated in a crime that contained a murder. While I can (sort of) understand the deterrent effect of laws like these, the simple fact is felony murder laws hold all crime participants liable for a murder if anyone involved in the initial criminal act kills somebody during the commission of the crime.

  • Techdirt ☛ Co-Sponsor Of Unconstitutional AADC Law Completely Misrepresents Court’s Ruling, Showing His Lack Of Attention To Detail

    Last week, we wrote about a federal district judge in California, Beth Labson Freeman, tossing out California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AB 2273) as unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. The ruling was careful and thorough, which did not surprise me, having sat through the oral arguments on the matter, where it seemed that the judge was asking all the right questions.

  • Techdirt ☛ With Basically Zero Press Coverage At All, California Assembly Passes Its Own Version Of FOSTA

    It is quite incredible to me how, over the last five years or so, the California legislature has pushed over a dozen absolutely horrific, dangerous (and often unconstitutional) laws to completely undermine the very principles of an open internet… and it gets basically no attention at all.

  • Vox ☛ Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strike: News and updates

    There’s also a looming concern over the role of AI in Hollywood. That’s not just some buzzy tech idea. It’s a threat to working actors’ and writers’ livelihood, and one that could in the end be a much bigger problem than everyone may anticipate.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Striking Hollywood Writers Reach Tentative Deal with Studios After 146 Days on Picket Line

    The Writers Guild of America has announced that a tentative deal has been reached between striking writers and Hollywood studios, four months after the strikes shut down production of scripted movies and television. The WGA leadership will meet Tuesday to vote on the deal, which includes many of the demands of the striking writers, including higher pay and residual payments for streaming content and new rules about the use of artificial intelligence. “It’s not a done deal yet,” says labor writer Alex Press, who says it’s ultimately up to rank-and-file members to approve the plan.

  • VOA News ☛ Sanctioned for Airing Forced Confessions, Iran’s Propaganda Mouthpiece Cries Press Freedom

    Last week, the United States, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom introduced a new round of sanctions against Iran over its human rights abuses.

    The announcement was timed to commemorate Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian woman who died on September 16, 2022, three days after Iran’s Guidance Patrol (morality police) took her into custody for allegedly violating the country’s hijab regulations.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The UAW Strike May Be a Watershed for the US Labor Movement

    The UAW’s strategy — striking all of the Big Three at once, but escalating gradually by beginning at a few worksites and calling out more over time to ramp up pressure — is unprecedented in the union’s history. The strike represents a dramatic departure from the union’s recent history in other ways as well, with leadership actively working to involve members in the contract campaign, and President Fain declaring that the union is fighting “for the good of the entire working class.” The leadership’s new approach is due in large part to the election of Fain and other officers associated with Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a union reform caucus that earlier this year swept out the corrupt old guard that had dominated UAW for over seventy years.

  • University of Michigan ☛ It Happened at Michigan — ‘They gave him ten for two’

    The former Beatle and his wife, the artist Yoko Ono, were giving their first U.S. performance in two years in support of John Sinclair, a radical poet imprisoned for possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Sinclair, a graduate of UM-Flint and founder of the White Panther Party, was 29 months into a sentence of up to 10 years. His incarceration made him a cause célèbre for those who viewed Sinclair as a political prisoner and victim of oppressive drug laws.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Chicago Is About to End the Subminimum Wage for Tipped Workers

    Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson’s One Fair Wage ordinance cleared the City Council’s workforce committee in a 9-3 vote this past Wednesday, the culmination of years of organizing by low-wage workers and activists, and of months of wheeling and dealing by the mayor and his socialist allies in the city council. If approved by the city council on October 4, as it’s expected to be, the ordinance will scrap the city’s two-tier wage system that leaves tipped workers laboring for a minimum wage five dollars lower than nontipped counterparts, with a uniform $15 minimum wage phased in for all workers by 2028.

  • RFA ☛ ‘I was beaten by guards when I fought for prisoners’ rights’

    Demonstrators claimed the first bill favored foreign companies and the second would curtail people’s freedom of expression online.

  • YLE ☛ Finland to introduce law allowing for dissolution of forced marriage

    Finnish law expressly forbids parents or any other individuals from exerting pressure or compelling someone into marriage, classifying such actions as criminal offences.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Motorists shouldn’t fear the cops. Let’s make sure the Kansas ‘two-step’ is left behind for good.

    “Hey, sir, can I ask you some questions?” the trooper asked.

    Rohr had just executed the “Kansas two-step,” a technique formerly taught to troopers to extend a traffic stop in order to search a vehicle. Motorists don’t have to consent, but many will, either because they don’t know the law or because of the intimidating presence of law enforcement. The goal is to keep a conversation going with motorists in the hope they will either consent to a search or that the trooper will gather enough evidence to establish probable cause for a search.

    And that’s just what Rohr did with Erich.

  • Vox ☛ What’s the state of the Hollywood strikes?

    Trying to figure out what’s going on with the Hollywood double strike — both writers and actors are still on the picket lines — can feel like peering into a particularly muddled crystal ball. On the one hand, the unions have exhibited extraordinary solidarity; on the other, the AMPTP fired one crisis PR firm and hired another, and has denied rumors of division in its ranks.

    But onlookers are likely to have plenty of questions. Here are four of the most relevant, with what we know about the answers.

  • El País ☛ Two years ago, the Taliban banned girls from school. It’s a worsening crisis for all Afghans

    The Taliban stopped girls’ education beyond sixth grade because they said it didn’t comply with their interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia. They didn’t stop it for boys. In the past two years, they’ve shown no signs of progress in creating the conditions they say are needed for girls to return to class.

    Their perspective on girls’ education partly comes from a specific school of 19th century Islamic thought and partly from rural areas where tribalism is entrenched, according to regional expert Hassan Abbas.

  • El País ☛ The strike by auto workers is entering its fourth day with no signs that a breakthrough is near

    So far the strike is limited to about 13,000 workers at three factories — one each at GM, Ford and Stellantis. GM warned, however, that 2,000 UAW-represented workers at an assembly plant in Kansas City are “expected to be idled as soon as early this week” because of a shortage of supplies from a GM plant near St. Louis, where workers walked off the job Friday.

  • CBS ☛ Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signs legislation to ban child marriage in Michigan

    Here are the bills that raise the age of consent and update laws to reflect and implement the ban on child marriage:
    House Bill 4294, sponsored by Rep. Kara Hope, D - Lansing, establishes 18 as the minimum age of consent for marriage.
    House Bill 4295, sponsored by Rep. Alabas Farhat, D – Dearborn, prohibits secret child marriages, which are done when a marriage record is sealed to the public.
    House Bill 4296, sponsored by Rep. Betsy Coffia, D – Traverse City, is a grandfather law that ensures minors who are currently married do not lose their spousal benefits under the new laws.

  • Newsweek ☛ These Michigan Republicans Voted Against Child Marriage Ban

    Newsweek has reached out via email to all five GOP lawmakers who voted to reject the ban.

• EDRI ☛ EU lawmakers must regulate the harmful use of tech by law enforcement in the AI Act

  As the European Union inches closer to finalising the AI Act, civil society organisations are concerned about the unchecked, discriminatory and mass surveillance due to the use of AI in policing and migration control. The AI Act is an opportunity to prevent such harms by drawing limits on harmful use of AI technology.

  115 civil society organisations are asking EU policymakers to regulate the use of AI systems by law enforcement, migration control and national security authorities throughout Europe. The use of AI by these authorities is dangerous for people’s fundamental rights, including the right to freedom of assembly, liberty, the right to asylum, privacy and data protection, the right to social protection, and non-discrimination.

• The Register UK ☛ As TikTok surveils staff's office hours, research indicates WFH is good for planet

  The ByteDance owned entity recently told staff on the US payroll they'll be expected in the office three days a week – for some roles it is five – from October, and it will be checking in to make sure they comply.

• Reason ☛ Family of 6-Year-Old Florida Girl Handcuffed at Orlando School Files Lawsuit

  The family of Kaia Rolle, a Florida child whose handcuffing and arrest at the age of 6 led to national outrage in 2019, filed a lawsuit today against the city of Orlando, the now-fired police officer who handcuffed and arrested her, and his supervisors.

• Scheerpost ☛ EFF to Michigan Court: Governments Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Use a Drone to Spy on You Without a Warrant

  The Township argued that the Maxons had no reasonable expectation of privacy based on a series of cases from the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1980s. In those cases, law enforcement used helicopters or small planes to photograph and observe private backyards that were thought to be growing cannabis. The Court found there was no reasonable expectation of privacy—and therefore no Fourth Amendment issue—from aerial surveillance conducted by manned aircraft.

• NPR ☛ Alabama band director tased by police for not stopping his students' performance

  But Mims said he was simply caught off guard, adding that it was difficult to see who was grabbing him because the stadium's lights went out. Moments later, an officer pulled out a stun gun and tased Mims. Birmingham police said it happened once, but Mims insists he was tased up to three times.

  The entire confrontation was witnessed by dozens of students, parents and faculty members. On Tuesday, the Birmingham Police Department released body-worn camera footage of the incident.

• ABC ☛ Body cam footage released after high school band director shocked with stun gun, arrested

  "This incident is an alarming abuse of power and a clear violation of our client's civil rights," Givan, who is also a member of the Alabama House of Representatives, said in a statement. "It is unacceptable for law enforcement to engage in home rule in the field of play or with regard to band activities unless there is a significant threat to the safety of the general public. These matters should be addressed by school district administrators or other leaders with expertise to de-escalate situations like this."

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Apple fucked us on right to repair

  Tim Cook laid it out for his investors: when people can repair their devices, they don't buy new ones. When people don't buy new devices, Apple doesn't sell them new devices. It's that's simple: [...]

• El País ☛ Biden to make history by joining Michigan motor strike pickets

  There is no precedent for a U.S. president joining a picket line, although it is unclear what form President Biden’s visit will take and where it will take place. In 1937, then Vice President John Nance Garner supported federal intervention to end the historic strike at the Flint auto body plant in Michigan, indirectly sowing the seeds of the UAW, but the idea was rejected by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The president urged General Motors, then the largest company in the world, to recognize the union, which would become a very influential political player in the following decades.

• YLE ☛ Unions announce new industrial action to protest government policies

  These industrial measures are part of a three-week campaign announced by the Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK) in response to the government's economic policy, which unions say erodes worker protections.

  The government aims to weaken the terms of employee contracts, tighten the payment of earnings-related unemployment benefits and restrict the right to strike.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Strategist ☛ Putin’s quest to disconnect Russia from the global [Internet]

  Moscow also stepped up its international advocacy for the concept of cyber and [Internet] ‘sovereignty’, pushing for more state control over the governance of the internet in forums such as the United Nations. These efforts—supported by China and other authoritarian countries like Iran and North Korea—have so far had limited success, prompting Putin to explore how Russia could independently break away from the global [Internet] architecture.

• Techdirt ☛ Activists Say California Is Backtracking On Plan For Statewide Affordable Broadband

  While the California legislature often screws up tech policy, they’ve generally been pretty good on broadband. At least in relation to most U.S. states. California was among the first in the country to pass a net neutrality law after the telecom industry got Trumpists to dismantle federal rules.

• APNIC ☛ Dual subsea cable cuts disrupt African Internet

  By far, the greatest threat to the submarine cables connecting the global Internet is human maritime activity. This usually involves seafaring vessels breaking submarine cables either by snagging them during fishing operations (especially trawling) or by inadvertently dragging their anchors along the seafloor, the cause of the 2008 submarine cable cuts in the Mediterranean Sea.

  But after marine activity, the next biggest category of threat consists of natural causes — and let me emphasize, I’m not talking about sharks biting cables. On numerous occasions, undersea landslides and earthquakes have damaged cables lying on the seafloor.

• APNIC ☛ Measuring the use of DNSSEC

  The canonical specification of the DNS that is normally cited are the pair of quite venerable RFCs, RFC 1034, ‘Domain names – concepts and facilities’ and RFC 1035, ‘Domain names – implementation and specification’, both published in November 1987. However, these two specification documents are just the tip of a rather large iceberg.

• New York Times ☛ Billions to Connect Everyone to High-Speed Internet Could Still Fall Short

  Attempts to get broadband to everyone are not new: The federal government has already pumped billions into efforts that have had mixed results. Biden administration officials have said the new program, coupled with other federal and state funding, would be enough to finally reach everyone who lacked high-speed [Internet] access.

Monopolies

• Deutsche Welle ☛ EU blocks Booking takeover of Swedish online travel rival

  The European Commission blocked US travel giant Booking from acquiring its Swedish rival eTraveli on Monday.

  Booking commands a 60% market share for online travel agencies in Europe, the Commission said. Meanwhile, eTraveli operates several websites to compare airfares like Gotogate and MyTrip.

• Quartz ☛ A little-known giant of local TV wants to buy ABC from Disney

  Nexstar, which is based in Irving, Texas, is reportedly in talks with Disney to purchase the TV network, according to Bloomberg. The deal is still under wraps, but Nextsar—which has merged and acquired its way to top spot among all US local [sic] TV companies—certainly has an appetite for purchases.

• Terence Eden ☛ Book Review: The Internet Con - How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow

  He is relentless at pointing out the hypocrisy of big tech - fighting to carve out exceptions for themselves which they then deny to others. We get a full-on historical lesson about the VCR and how the fight for the right to party infringe copyright was won and lost several times.

  I spent many years working inside the UK Government pushing the agenda of open standards and interoperability. So it was particularly gratifying to read:

  " Governments can—and should—have rules about interoperability in their procurement policies. They should require companies hoping to receive public money to supply the schematics, error codes, keys and other technical matter needed to maintain and improve the things they sell and provide to our public institutions."

• The Register UK ☛ Google on trial: Feds challenge deals that set your web search defaults

  The government complaint [PDF], initially filed in October 2020 and amended [PDF] the following year, contends that Google has "foreclosed competition for internet search" through a series of exclusionary contracts with makers of mobile phones, developers of web browsers, and telecommunication companies.

  Through these contracts, Google Search becomes the default search engine on Android phones, on Apple iOS and macOS devices, and in rival browsers like Mozilla's Firefox. Google also made Google search the default service in its own Chrome web browser.

• Digital Music News ☛ Spotify Continues Its Fight Against Apple’s App Store Monopoly — ‘The Future of the Internet Economy Depends on It’

  Further, Spotify cites several other Apple-imposed constraints, including the inability to inform customers of pricing options and alternative payment methods. Spotify also reveals that to gain Apple’s approval, the company must share proprietary information with its largest competitor, providing Apple an unfair advantage.

  Apple’s 30% tax on app developers while exempting its own apps from this fee further burdens consumers. Spotify urges regulators to take action and intervene, like Europe’s passing of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the UK’s developing Digital Markets, Competition, and Consumers bill (DMCC) to alleviate these concerns.

• India Times ☛ Google in last ditch effort to overturn $2.6 billion EU antitrust fine

  It was the first of three penalties for anti-competitive practices that have cost Google 8.25 billion euros in total in the last decade.

• The Register UK ☛ Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks

  Among the designated gatekeepers – Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft – browser choice is relevant for Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and Microsoft's Windows operating systems.

  Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, on Thursday published a report [PDF] arguing that in order for browser choice screens to provide actual choice and not manipulated choice, the content and design of choice screen interfaces need to be tailored to promote competition rather than a specific vendor.

• Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition wins tentative green light in the UK

  The Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, announced its decision today. The regulator’s reversal comes a few weeks after Microsoft proposed a series of major changes to the acquisition terms. Those changes, the CMA stated, “substantially address” its concerns about the deal.

  Microsoft announced its plans last January to buy Activision Blizzard, a publicly traded video game developer. The $68.7 billion deal is poised to establish Microsoft’s as the world’s third-largest video game company by revenue. Soon after its announcement, the transaction began drawing scrutiny from the CMA and other antitrust regulators.

• New York Times ☛ Microsoft Closes In on Activision Deal After Britain Signals Approval

  He said that it was incredibly rare for Britain’s C.M.A. to reverse course and that the agency had faced a lot of pressure to approve the deal after it cleared hurdles in other jurisdictions.

• Mozilla ☛ Can browser choice screens be effective? Experimental analysis of the impact of their design, content and placement [PDF]

  Operating systems and device manufacturers currently decide which web browsers are pre-installed and set as the default. Research shows that many people do not change this default - they may not realise there’s a default browser or know the additional steps needed to change it. To improve competition, regulators around the globe are considering mandating the use of ‘choice screens’, which would prompt people to actively select their preferred default browser.

  We undertook an experiment to test how different types of choice screen influence people’s choices and levels of satisfaction. Our analysis provides insight into the impact of the design of choice screens and their potential to be effective.

• The Register UK ☛ CMA says new Microsoft-Activision deal addresses concerns

  As such, it was important that Microsoft found a way to sweeten the CMA so last month – seemingly out of desperation more than anything – it proposed divesting cloud streaming rights for Activision games to France's Ubisoft.

  This appears to have worked, going by an announcement from the CMA this morning.

• India Times ☛ Microsoft-Activision timeline: Ubisoft deal opens doors to Britain's nod

  Here is a snapshot of key events in the Microsoft-Activision saga: [...]

• India Times ☛ Microsoft closes in on Activision deal after Britain signals approval

  Britain's Competition and Markets Authority, the last remaining agency that must sign off before Microsoft can complete the acquisition, said the companies took action that "substantially addresses" remaining antitrust concerns. The regulator initially tried to block the deal, saying it would undercut competition, but reversed course after Microsoft agreed not to purchase a part of Activision's business associated with so-called cloud gaming, a small but promising new area for the industry.

• India Times ☛ EU reduces Intel antitrust fine to €376 million

  The European Commission slapped a reduced fine of 376 million euros ($400 million) against US chipmaker Intel Friday for abusing its dominance in the computer chip market, after an EU court annulled a bigger penalty.

  The European Union's antitrust enforcer said Intel had "engaged in a series of anticompetitive practices aimed at excluding competitors from the relevant market", it added.

• Silicon Angle ☛ EU fines Intel €376M in connection with 2007 antitrust case

  EU officials determined that Intel had paid HP, Acer and Lenovo to scrap or delay the launch of PCs powered by x86 processors from competitors. Furthermore, the chip giant reportedly asked the three companies to “limit the sales channels” available to rival CPU suppliers. The arrangement was reportedly in effect between November 2002 and December 2006.

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ Google Is on Trial for Violating Antitrust Law. The Verdict Is Unlikely to Change Much.

  But the company has its own advantages, above all the weak iteration of US antitrust law in the neoliberal era. Modern antitrust law relies on companies raising prices before government intervention, while Google’s products are free, and the corporate agreements at issue are not exclusive.

  Google of course wields enormous power over our lives; whatever the outcome of the case, that is unlikely to change. With antitrust action vanishingly unlikely to end its dominance, bringing Google under public, democratic control is a better option.

• Patents

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Patent and Trademark Office looks to bring faxing to the cloud

    While the current USPTO fax system, RightFax, has only had one outage in 18 years, the system remains at risk for a larger disruption that could get in the way of the office’s handling of public customer document submissions, the patent agency said in a request for information this week. The agency is now searching for information regarding an accessible cloud fax solution that is capable of withstanding “regional catastrophic disruption.”

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Romi's Revenge: Notorious Manga Pirate Launches Explosive Book, Demands Retrial

    In 2021, Romi Hoshino was sentenced to three years in prison for operating Mangamura, the world's most notorious manga piracy site. Freed last year, the 31-year-old will release a book tomorrow which promises to tell the real story of his prosecution while exposing Japan's judicial problems. Twenty-four hours later, Hoshino will demand a retrial: "This time, we're aiming for the world."

  • The Register UK ☛ Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement

    The suit, filed in a New York federal court [PDF], asks for a legal order "requiring the transfer of the Libgen domain names to plaintiffs or, at plaintiffs' election, canceling or deleting the Libgen domain names," with the idea of frustrating visitors - mostly students - believed to number in their millions. The filing said that according to similarweb.com, the sites collectively were visited by 9 million people from the US each month from March to May 2023.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Getty Images promises its new AI contains no copyrighted art

    Getty’s model is only trained on the firm’s creative content, so it does not include imagery of real people or places that could be manipulated into deepfake imagery.

  • Wired ☛ The Bizarre Cottage Industry of YouTube Obituary Pirates

    Obituary pirating, where people scrape and republish obituaries from funeral homes and websites like Legacy.com, has been an ethically dubious business for years. Piracy websites are often skilled enough at search engine optimization to rise to the top of search results, and they use the resulting traffic to charge a premium for digital ads that appear next to text lifted wholesale from funeral homes, local newspapers, and other authorized obituary publishers. Occasionally, these pirate sites go a step further, manipulating bereaved people into buying sympathy gifts like candles or flowers and pocketing the money.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Ed Sheeran Beats Appeal in Marathon ‘Let’s Get It On’ Copyright Infringement Lawsuit

    The long-running courtroom confrontation’s conclusion just recently emerged in a jointly filed notice. Counsel for Sheeran as well as the heirs of “Let’s Get It On” co-writer Ed Townsend acknowledged in the document that the “case is withdrawn with prejudice without costs and without attorneys’ fees.”

  • Digital Music News ☛ Major Music Publishers Hit Back at Twitter’s Move to Dismiss Infringement Lawsuit

    A group of major music publishers, including Universal Music, Sony Music, and EMI, argue that Elon Musk’s Twitter (now X) is liable for the rampant music infringement that takes place on its platform — no matter how much the social media platform tries to ignore it. With $250 million in damages on the line and ample evidence to support their claims, the companies argue the legal battle against Twitter should continue and the court should deny the social media company’s request for dismissal.

    The companies filed their initial complaint at a Nashville federal court earlier this year, arguing that Elon Musk’s Twitter is a breeding ground for mass copyright infringement. Their filing states that X Corp, Musk’s company behind the current Twitter platform, has not properly responded to takedown notices and lacks an adequate policy for addressing and disabling the accounts of repeat offenders.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ X Clearly Profits from Widespread Music Piracy, Labels Argue

    A group of major music publishers insist that Elon Musk's X is liable for the widespread music piracy that takes place on its platform. X asked the court to dismiss their lawsuit, but the music companies say the social media platform is clearly in the wrong. With roughly $250 million in damages on the line, this legal battle should run its course, they argue.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 09/25/2023

    Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Blue Beetle' tops the chart, followed by 'Barbie'. ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' completes the top three.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ LaLiga "Talks to Google" About Deleting Piracy Apps From a Million Phones

    On Saturday the head of LaLiga spoke of the piracy challenges faced by top-tier Spanish football. Javier Tebas said in the first five days of the new season, LaLiga 'eliminated" 58 pirate apps with over a million downloads in Spain. He said that LaLiga is now talking to Google about "locating" the apps already downloaded on users' phones so they too can be "eliminated". If it can be done for child abuse images, then it can be done for piracy tools too, Tebas said.

  • Walled Culture ☛ Ebook pledge aims to protect libraries and authors from publishers’ growing abuse of copyright

    Authors already get a pretty raw deal from publishers, and it’s unacceptable that the rise of ebooks seems to be exacerbating that. Any publisher that values authors and regards itself as helping to nurture culture, rather than simply feeding off it, should be signing up to the new Library eBook Pledge. Sadly, at the time of writing, few have./p>

  • Terence Eden ☛ Why is it so hard to watch foreign TV in the streaming era?

    It looks like it's the end of the party for streaming services. Prices are going up, choice is going down, and the quality is declining.

    Despite all the hype about how transformative streaming would be for the industry - there's one thing which never really seemed to take off. It's almost impossible to find "foreign" TV on Netflix, Apple, Prime, and the BBC.

  • Techdirt ☛ EU Piracy Rates Tick Back Up In Study That Shows Income Inequality And Less Legal Options To Blame

    If you only listened to executives from the content industries, you might think that copyright infringement, or online piracy, is and has been a growing threat in dire need of stricter and stricter enforcement measures. But I’ll let you in on a secret: that’s been bullshit for the better part of a decade now. In fact, as we have discussed in the past, piracy trends are actually declining and have been for at least 9 years or so, and probably longer. There have been more than one reason for that trend, but it all mostly redounds back to making these copyright products available as widely as possible in as many formats as possible at a price that is reasonable. Streaming services, for instance, had the effect of tamping down piracy of movie, television, and music content. Great job, content industries!

  • Torrent Freak ☛ The World’s Oldest Active Torrent Turns 20 Years Old

    Twenty years ago, a group of friends shot a Matrix fan film on a limited budget. Sharing their creation with the rest of the word initially appeared to be too expensive, but then they discovered a new technology called BitTorrent. Fast forward two decades and their “Fanimatrix" release is the oldest active torrent that's still widely shared today.

  • Creative Commons ☛ Marina Núñez Bespalova to Keynote CC Global Summit 2023

    We have an incredible group of people lined up to be keynote speakers at the 2023 CC Global Summit, to be held 3–6 October in Mexico City. In our first announcements, we welcomed writer Anya Kamenetz and Māori media leader Peter-Lucas Jones. We are now deeply honored to announce that the Summit’s opening keynote will be from Marina Núñez Bespalova, Mexico’s Undersecretary of Cultural Development, speaking on global culture from the deeply rooted perspective of Mexico and Latin America.

  • Light Blue Touchpaper ☛ Extending transparency, and happy birthday to the archive

    As it happens, I scanned a number of old music manuscripts years ago to help other traditional music enthusiasts, but how can this be done at scale? One way forward comes from my college’s Archives Centre, which holds the personal papers of Sir Winston Churchill as well as other politicians and a number of eminent scientists. There the algorithm is that when someone requests a document, it’s also scanned and put online; so anything Alice looked at, Bob can look at too. This has raised some interesting technical problems around indexing and long-term archiving which I believe we have under control now, and I’m pleased to say that the Archives Centre is now celebrating its 50th anniversary.

    It would also be helpful if old history books were as available online as they are in our library. Given that the purpose of copyright law is to maximise the amount of material that’s eventually available to all, I believe we should change the law to make continued copyright conditional on open access after an initial commercial period. Otherwise our historians’ output vanishes from the time that their books come off sale, to the time copyright expires maybe a century later.