Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz on being ‘extremely online,’ sponcons gone wrong and her dream dinner party

      Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn’t perfect, but we know the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for human connection, and lets everyone find where they belong — their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In My Corner Of The Internet, we talk with people about the online spaces they can’t get enough of, the sites and forums that shaped them, and what reclaiming the internet really looks like.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Simon Willison ☛ Database Migrations

    The biggest of these, which I’ve encountered myself multiple times, is that if you want truly zero downtime deploys you can’t guarantee that your schema migrations will be deployed at the exact same instant as changes you make to your application code.

Leftovers

• Off Guardian ☛ Chance Encounters as the Walls Close In

  “A treasure stumbled upon, suddenly; not gradually accumulated, by adding one to one. The accumulation of learning, ‘adding to the sum-total of human knowledge’; lay that burden down, that baggage, that impediment. Take nothing for your journey; travel light.” Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body These are “heavy” times, colloquially speaking.

• Off Guardian ☛ This Week in the New Normal #73

  Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world.

• Hackaday ☛ Displays We Love Hacking: The HD44780 Family

  There are too many different kinds of displays – some of them, you already know. I’d like to help you navigate the hobbyist-accessible display world – let’s take a journey together, technology by technology, get a high-level overview of everything you could want to know about it, and learn all the details you never knew you needed to know. In the end, I’d like you to be able to find the best displays for any project you might have in mind, whatever it could be.

• Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Prize 2023: An Agricultural Robot That Looks Ready For The Field

  In the world of agriculture, not all enterprises are large arable cropland affairs upon which tractors do their work traversing strip by strip under the hot sun. Many farms raise far more intensive crops on a much smaller scale, and across varying terrain. When it comes to automation these farms offer their own special challenges, but with the benefit of a smaller machine reducing some of the engineering tasks. There’s an entry in this year’s Hackaday prize which typifies this, [KP]’s Agrofelis robot is a small four-wheeled carrier platform designed to deliver autonomous help on smaller farms. It’s shown servicing a vineyard with probably one of the most bad-ass pictures you could think of as a pesticide duster on its implement platform makes it look for all the world like a futuristic weapon.

• Science

  • Mark Dominus ☛ Irish logarithm forward instead of backward

    Whereas I was reverse-engineering Ludgate's tables with a sort of ad-hoc backtracking search, if you do it right you can do it it more easily with a simple greedy search.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Simulations reveal the atomic-scale story of qubits

    Researchers led by Giulia Galli at University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering report a computational study that predicts the conditions to create specific spin defects in silicon carbide. Their findings, published online in Nature Communications, represent an important step towards identifying fabrication parameters for spin defects useful for quantum technologies.

  • Science Alert ☛ Sea Glass Is Disappearing From Beaches For a Very Depressing Reason

    Sad news for beachcombers.

  • Science Alert ☛ Mysterious Dark Matter Mapped Across Space Like Never Before

    Revealing the invisible.

  • Science Alert ☛ Key Ingredient in Most Decongestants Doesn't Work, Experts Say

    No better than a placebo!

  • Latvia ☛ Nordic investor issues "science challenge" to regional startups

    Helsinki and Stockholm-based early-stage investor Voima Ventures has announced what itis calling "a science challenge for pre-seed and seed stage science-based startups in the Nordic and Baltic areas, aiming to accelerate science-based innovations across the region."

  • Science Alert ☛ US Astronaut Breaks NASA Record For Longest Single Spaceflight

    Can he make it a whole year?

  • Science Alert ☛ Eating Insects May Trigger Benefits For Metabolism, Study Finds

    Grab a plate!

  • Science Alert ☛ This Tiny Worm Grows a Huge Mouth And Eats Its Friends When It Gets Stressed

    Terrifying!

  • Science Alert ☛ JWST Just Measured The Expansion Rate of The Universe. Astronomers Are Stumped.

    Oh snap!

  • Science Alert ☛ Two Ancient Human Fossils Just Flew to Space in A Billionaire's Pocket

    Some scientists are "horrified".

  • New York Times ☛ Ian Wilmut, Scientist Behind Dolly the Cloned Sheep, Is Dead at 79

    He led a project in Scotland that, in 1996, cloned a mammal for the first time, a feat of genetic engineering that shocked the world.

  • New York Times ☛ In Space, the Past Is Future (and Equally Unpredictable)

    Not even the most advanced physics can reveal everything we want to know about the history and future of the cosmos, or about ourselves.

  • Science Alert ☛ New Blood Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Has 91% Accuracy

    The potential is huge.

  • Science Alert ☛ Microplastics Infiltrate Every Organ, Including Brain, Study in Mice Shows

    And it changed their behavior.

  • Science Alert ☛ This Self-Destructing Robot Vanishes Into a Puddle of Goo

    Not quite liquid metal. Yet...

  • Science Alert ☛ It's Not All in Your Mind: A Psychiatrist Explains What Fear Does to Your Body

    Scary stuff.

  • Science Alert ☛ Expanding Hotspots in US Are 'Too Hot For Safe Fan Use', Scientists Warn

    Too hot to handle.

  • Science Alert ☛ Solar Orbiter 'Hack' Lets Us Peer More Deeply Into The Sun's Atmosphere

    Incredible to see.

  • Science Alert ☛ Mysterious Black Hole Twins May Fuel The Brightest Galaxies in Space

    A supermassive secret.

  • Schools open with problems in Hatay

    What is the situation with schools in Hatay where the most significant destruction occurred in the February 6 earthquakes? How did the new education year start? What are the experiences of teachers? Mustafa Günal, the President of the Hatay Branch of the Education and Science Workers' Union provided an account.

  • Science Alert ☛ NASA's About to Unveil a Report on 'Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena': Watch Live

    The truth is out there??

  • Science Alert ☛ A Completely New Cause of Alzheimer's Uncovered in Our Brain's White Matter

    Treatments could follow.

  • Science Alert ☛ Wild New Technique Could Finally Measure The Elusive Neutrino

    Scientists are closing in.

  • Rlang ☛ Exploring Machine Learning-Derived Data in Life Sciences with Shiny Applications

    Machine learning (ML) is gaining widespread popularity in the life sciences. Crafting intuitive user interfaces speeds up data exploration and offers modernized ways to present analyses and outcomes from various ML models.

  • Science Alert ☛ Throat Cancer Is Becoming an Epidemic, And Sex Could Be Why

    An alarming, rapid increase.

  • New York Times ☛ What We Know About Children and Opioids

    A 1-year-old died and three other children fell ill at a New York day care, and the authorities blamed opioids. Children are significantly more vulnerable to drugs because of their small bodies.

  • Science Alert ☛ Expert Panel Warns Dimming The Sun Is Simply Too Risky to Try

    Wrong way, go back.

  • Science Alert ☛ We've Been Misreading a Major Law of Physics For The Past 300 Years

    Oh, this makes more sense.

  • New Yorker ☛ Looking for Art in the James Webb Telescope

    Artists are finding inspiration in the newest images of old and ancient stars.

  • Science Alert ☛ Prehistoric Carvings Are So Accurate, Animals' Sex, Age, And Species Can Be Determined

    Almost like they stepped in wet cement.

  • New York Times ☛ Lise Meitner, the ‘Atomic Pioneer’ Who Never Won a Nobel Prize

    Lise Meitner developed the theory of nuclear fission, the process that enabled the atomic bomb. But her identity — Jewish and a woman — barred her from sharing credit for the discovery, newly translated letters show.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Path To Profiling Extraterrestrial Atmospheres With Astrophotonics

    A major part of finding extraterrestrial life is to be able to profile the atmosphere of any planets outside of our solar system. This is not an easy task, as these planets are usually found through the slight darkening of their star as they pass in front of it (transition). Although spectroscopy is the ideal way to profile the chemical composure of such a planet, having a massive, extremely bright star right next to the planet is more than enough to completely overpower the faint light reflecting off the planet’s surface and through its atmosphere. This is a major issue that the upcoming Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx, also called the Habitable Worlds Observatory, or HWO) hopes to address using a range of technologies, including a coronagraph that should block out most of the stellar glare.

• Education

  • [Repeat] Chris ☛ Intuition and Spaced Repetition

    Can you force intuition for difficult concepts by beating an idea into your head repeatedly? I’m not sure, but sometimes it feels that way.

    I’ve written previously about how my reading patterns have changed since I started with spaced repetition. Since then, I’ve experimented with a tweak to the approach: instead of spending longer time with something to understand it firmly, I make flashcards, move on fairly quickly, and then go back and re-read parts of the material that seems important but that I still don’t get. After some point, it’s like a light switch goes on.

• Hardware

  • Latvia ☛ Eurostat: Latvia has more than 200 hi-tech manufacturing businesses

    Fresh figures from Eurostat give a snapshot of where Latvia's hi-tech sector stands in relation to its European Union peers.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Qualcomm Demands Oryon SoCs to Be Used with Its Own PMICs: Report

    Qualcomm design requirements for Oryon-based PCs may severely damage their adoption.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Disk flux images are fascinating

    The images reveal what parts of the disk contain data, and how the disk was low-level formatted. The sectors on this image make the disk look like the saucer section of a Star Trek ship.

  • Hackaday ☛ 2023 Halloween Hackfest: Ouija Robot Is Even Creepier Than The Real Thing

    When you’re a kid, nothing says spooky like turning off the lights and bringing out the Ouija board. For decades, this mystifying oracle has purported to channel the dead by spelling out messages using a board with numbers, letters, yes/no, and a heart-shaped windowed bit of plastic called a planchette.

  • Hackaday ☛ Computer Space Replica Is Up And Running

    You never forget your first time — watching someone pour several quid’s worth of 10p pieces into a Space Invader machine in 1978, upsetting for a youngster who wanted to have a turn. We’re still waiting, but [Alston] has found an interesting way to get around those arcade video game hoggers by building a replica of Computer Space, the first commercial arcade video game.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Drug Overdoses and Crime Surge in the United States. Decriminalization is the Worst Possible Option.

    Drug Overdoses Surge in the United States. Decriminalization is the Worst Possible Option.

    The New York Times likes to normally engage in pro-United States anti-China propaganda, so I was somewhat taken aback when they described the almost RoboCop-like situation brewing in Oregon and across the country right now.

    Titled “Private Security Guards Become Last Resort for Public Safety”, the article dives into the now $40 billion a year industry of companies, exasperated by the “Defund the Police” movement, hiring private security to try to deal with the Democrat-State crime.

  • European Commission ☛ Questions and Answers on restriction to intentionally added microplastics

    European Commission Questions and answers Brussels, 25 Sep 2023 1. What is the microplastics ban the Commission adopted today?

  • Science Alert ☛ Losing Sleep Raises The Risk of Alzheimer's Thanks to This One Protein

    Getting some shut-eye is protective.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Scientists’ model focuses on sudden death in epilepsy

    U-M researchers have developed a model for studying one type of familial epilepsy, opening the door to understanding the mechanisms that lead to the disorder and its associated fatalities.

  • BBC ☛ Government to announce mobile phone ban in schools - BBC Newsround

    The education secretary for England is expected to say pupils should be banned from using phones at any point during the school day.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Google announces Chromebook Plus with boosted hardware specs and AI features

    Google LLC today rolled out a new line of Chromebooks named “Chromebook Plus” that bring artificial intelligence features into ChromeOS and enhance the hardware specification of the entire family of products for a better productivity and entertainment experience.

  • Tim Kellogg ☛ LLMs are Interpretable

    I’ve worked with explainable machine learning for years, and always found the field dissatisfiying. It wasn’t until I read Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences that it made sense why I wasn’t satisfied. The paper is more like a short book, it’s a 60 page survey of research in psychology and sociology applied to explanations in AI/ML. It’s hard to read much of it and not conclude that: [...]

  • Techdirt ☛ Unity Fallout Continues: Dev Group Shuts Down While Developers Refuse To Come Back

    The fallout from game engine Unity’s decision to try to cram a completely new and different pricing structure down the throats of game developers continues. Originally announced in mid-September, Unity took a bunch of its tiered structures of its offerings and suddenly instituted per-install fees, along with a bunch of other fee structures and requirements for its lower-level tiers that never had these pricing models. The backlash from developers and the public at large was so overwhelmingly one-sided and swift that the company then backtracked, making a bunch of noise about how it will listen better and learn from this fiasco. The backtracking did make a bunch of changes to address the anger from its initial announcement, including: [...]

  • Johan Halse ☛ The idle elite

    At this point, if you’re still on Twitter, it might be time to accept a hard fact about yourself: there’s not a single thing that its leadership could do that would push you off the site. Since the takeover almost a year ago they’ve fired everyone who cared, they’ve invited back 4chan, kiwifarms, and sundry other threat actors, they’ve started revenue sharing with the rape peddlers and insurrectionists, they’ve given priority lanes to every paying NFT and AI grifter, and even outright blamed the jews for their bad finances. That’s not even close to an exhaustive list!

  • Windows TCO

    • The Register UK ☛ US State Dept has no idea if its IT security actually works, say auditors

      The State Department, which handles diplomacy and US foreign policy, wrote a risk management strategy for its IT security, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said, and that's basically where the dept gave up. As a result, department-wide risks haven't actually necessarily been mitigated, there's no overall monitoring program in place, and IT infrastructure used by the department may not have been adequately secured.

• Security

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Snap store from Canonical hit with malicious apps

    Canonical are currently dealing with a security incident with the Snap store, after users noticed multiple fake apps were uploaded so temporary limits have been put in place.

  • Krebs On Security ☛ Don’t Let Zombie Zoom Links Drag You Down

    Many organizations — including quite a few Fortune 500 firms — have exposed web links that allow anyone to initiate a Zoom video conference meeting as a valid employee. These company-specific Zoom links, which include a permanent user ID number and an embedded passcode, can work indefinitely and expose an organization’s employees, customers or partners to phishing and other social engineering attacks.

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Kent Stater ☛ Phishing, not fishing: Campus community remains on the lookout for online fraudulent practice

      Several students received phishing emails in July and August about changing their university-affiliated email passwords.

    • El País ☛ Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda slams AI for recreating her father’s voice

      Zelda Williams, who has described AI technology as “disturbing,” said on Instagram that “while I find it personally disturbing, the ramifications go far beyond my own feelings. Living actors deserve a chance to create characters with their choices, to voice cartoons, to put their HUMAN effort and time into the pursuit of performance.”

      One of the main reasons why screenwriters and actors went on strike was to protect themselves from artificial intelligence. “These recreations are, at their very best, a poor facsimile of greater people,” added Williams, who has herself worked as an actress and director. “But at their worst, a horrendous Frankensteinian monster, cobbled together from the worst bits of everything this industry is, instead of what it should stand for.”

    • The Register UK ☛ Fuming Tom Hanks says he had nothing to do with that AI dental ad clone of him

      A dental healthcare advert featuring what looks like a younger Tom Hanks dressed in a black suit is fake and AI-generated, the Forrest Gump actor has warned.

      "BEWARE!!" Hanks yelled on Instagram. "There's a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it."

    • New York Times ☛ Tom Hanks Warns of Dental Ad Using A.I. Version of Him

      Tom Hanks and Gayle King, a co-host of “CBS Mornings,” have separately warned their followers on social media that videos using artificial intelligence likenesses of them were being used for fraudulent advertisements.

    • Gizmodo ☛ A Deep Fake Tom Hanks Is Promoting a Dental Plan, But the Actor Has 'Nothing to Do With It'

      Hanks and Williams’s posts come as Hollywood grapples with the use of AI in the movie and television industry. The Writer’s Guild of America and the Screen Actor’s Guild went on strike this May and July, respectively, with generative AI technology being a key issue. WGA’s strike just recently came to an end after almost five months as writers and studios came to an agreement, which prominently forbids studios from using AI-written content as source material for productions. SAG, meanwhile, remains on strike. A previous proposition included studios scanning background actors’ faces to be owned in perpetuity to create digital likenesses, in exchange for one day’s pay.

    • University of Toronto ☛ Brief notes on doing TOTP MFA with oathtool

      Time-Based One-time Passwords (TOTP) are one of the most common ways of doing multi-factor authentication today and are, roughly speaking, the only one you can use if the machine you're authenticating on is a Linux machine. Especially, I believe they're the only one you can use if you want a command-line way of generating your MFA authentication codes. While there are a number of programs to generate TOTP codes, perhaps the most widely available one is oathtool, part of OATH Toolkit.

    • Connor Tumbleson ☛ Safety in Patterns

      It seems this notion of finding anomalies within a pattern is the strength of many many systems. Whether its a network defense system looking for out of the norm packets or a credit card company noticing where and what you normally buy.

    • Simon Willison ☛ Weird A.I. Yankovic, a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning.

      This is no longer a niche interest. There’s a Discord with 500,000 members sharing tips and tricks on cloning celebrity voices in order to make their own cover songs, often built with Google Colab using models distributed through Hugging Face.

    • Thunderbird ☛ Ransomware Alert: Are You Using A Trusted Version Of Thunderbird?

      There are ongoing Mozilla efforts to take down these sites but since they are hosted in Russia, takedowns are difficult and often not effective. What you can do in the meantime is to make sure you are getting Thunderbird from a trusted location like thunderbird.net directly, or your Linux distribution’s software store.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • YLE ☛ Yle's Areena app will soon require login [Ed: So it wants to spy on people and sell their data??? You should not have to log in to read news, just as they will never ask you at a kiosk to pretend your ID card when you purchase a newspaper.]

      The public broadcaster says it wants to improve the way it offers content.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ NSA AI Security Center

      The NSA is starting a new artificial intelligence security center: [...]

    • SANS ☛ Friendly Reminder: ZIP Metadata is Not Encrypted

      Although the file is password protected, it's the compressed file content that is encrypted (see screenshot: Encrypted +) but the filename, the filsize, filedate, ..., all that metadata is not encrypted. That can be read without knowing the password.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ New NSA center will oversee development and integration of AI capabilities

      The new NSA AI Security Center has been designed to become a focal point for developing best practices for evaluating methodology and risk frameworks, with an aim to promote the secure adoption of AI capabilities across the national security and defense industries. The new center will also consolidate the NSA’s previous AI security-related activities in one place.

    • APNIC ☛ What is Lawful Interception?

      Lawful Interception (LI) is a tool for police and other Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) when investigating serious crimes. Sometimes called ‘wiretapping’, LI is the process where an LEA can require a telecommunications provider to intercept the voice, data and message-based communications of a subscriber and pass them to the LEA.

      The word ‘lawful’ is used because the process is based on the law of that jurisdiction. The OpenLI project, working through the University of Waikato, received two grants from ISIF Asia to assist with LI deployment in the Pacific. The first piece of work has been to understand the laws that apply to LI across the region’s economies.

    • EFF ☛ Cities Should Act NOW to Ban Predictive Policing...and Stop Using ShotSpotter, Too

      ShotSpotter is currently linked to over 100 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. PredPol, on the other hand, was used in around 38 cities in 2021 (this may be much higher now). Shotspotter’s acquisition of Hunchlab already lead the company to claim that the tools work “hand in hand;” a 2018 press release made clear that predictive policing would be offered as an add-on product, and claimed that the integration of the two would “enable it to update predictive models and patrol missions in real time.” When companies like Sound Thinking and Geolitica merge and bundle their products, it becomes much easier for cities who purchase one harmful technology to end up deploying a suite of them without meaningful oversight, transparency, or control by elected officials or the public. Axon, for instance, was criticized by academics, attorneys, activists, and its own ethics board for their intention to put tasers on indoor drones. Now the company has announced its acquisition of Sky-Hero, which makes small tactical UAVS–a sign that they may be willing to restart the drone taser program that led a good portion of their ethics board to resign. Mergers can be a sign of future ambitions.

      In some ways, these tools do belong together. Both predictive policing and gunshot recognition are severely flawed and dangerous to marginalized groups. Hopefully, this bundling will make resisting them easier as well.

      As we have written, studies have found that Shotspotter’s technology is inaccurate, and its alerts sometimes result in the deployment of armed police who are expecting armed resistance to a location where there is none, but where innocent residents could become targets of suspicion as a result.

    • Techdirt ☛ ShotSpotter Looking To Compound Bad Cop Tech Ideas By Acquiring Predictive Policing Software Company

      ShotSpotter has long presented itself as a reliable detector of gunshots. Mileage, however, has varied. Law enforcement customers that have gotten disgruntled with this limited service have pointed out — en route to terminated contracts — that (a) detected gunshots are not always gunshots, (b) detected gunshots are rarely useful intel, and (c) detecting gunshots rarely results in less gun-related crime.

    • Techdirt ☛ Europol Tells EU Commission: Hey, When It Comes To CSAM, Just Let Us Do Whatever We Want

      When it comes to the children, Wu-Tang Europol is for the children.

• Defence/Aggression

  • New York Times ☛ Air Force Receives Its First Electric Air Taxi

    Joby Aviation delivered the aircraft, which can carry a pilot and four passengers, to Edwards Air Force Base in California for testing.

  • RFERL ☛ Chechen Strongman Releases Video Of Teenage Son Beating Alleged Koran Burner

    Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov has released а video showing his teenage son, Adam, assaulting a man accused of burning a Koran, an assault that the Kremlin declined to condemn.

  • New York Times ☛ Baltimore Police Search for Suspect in Killing of Tech C.E.O.

    Pava LaPere, 26, had been heralded in the city as a rising businesswoman devoted to her community. Officials said the suspect, a sex offender released from prison last fall, was armed and dangerous.

  • LRT ☛ ‘One suffering for us, another for Jews’ – why Lithuanians see Holocaust as alien history

    Two histories and two sufferings – one for Lithuanians and the other one for Jews. This is how Lithuanians perceive the tragedy of the Holocaust, experts say.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuanian mulls posthumously awarding ghetto anti-Nazi resistance fighters

    The Lithuanian parliament Seimas has proposed posthumously awarding military ranks and decorations to participants of ghettos’ anti-Nazi resistance.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuanian president awards Jewish savers with Life Saving Crosses

    Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda on Tuesday awarded 38 people, 36 of them posthumously, who saved Jews from Nazi genocide during World War Two with the Life Saving Crosses.

  • The Strategist ☛ The new world disorder

    There’s an old Soviet joke in which a journalist asks the general secretary of the Communist party to assess the country’s economy. ‘Good’ is the short answer.

  • The Strategist ☛ Is Myanmar about to go nuclear?

    A front-page story in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2009 confidently predicted that within five years Myanmar would have its own nuclear weapon and be capable of producing one atom bomb every year thereafter...

  • BBC ☛ Sweden gangs [sic]: Army to help police after surge in killings

    He said that from next week the army would start providing assistance with analysis and logistics, as well as in handling explosives and forensic work.

  • VOA News ☛ Sweden's Leader Turns to Military for Help as Gang [sic] Violence Escalates

    The prime minister said that the government is overhauling Sweden's criminal code to give police more powers, criminals longer sentences and witnesses better protection.

    "Swedish laws aren't designed for gang wars and child soldiers," Kristersson said.

  • Le Monde ☛ Sweden calls in the army as gang [sic] warfare escalates

    Conflicts between rival gangs [sic] left 12 people dead in the Nordic country in September alone. The gangs [sic], which have branches abroad, are recruiting younger and younger children.

  • CNN ☛ Sweden’s prime minister summons police and army chiefs, as gang [sic] violence surges

    The Scandinavian nation has been rocked by a record number of shootings this month, amid a spread of gang [sic] violence from larger urban areas to smaller towns, Reuters reported.

  • India Times ☛ TikTok parent ByteDance's valuation slumps to $223.5 billion in stock buyback: report

    ByteDance is buying back shares from U.S. employees in a deal that values the TikTok parent company at $223.5 billion, about 26% lower than the valuation it hit in a similar transaction a year earlier, the Information reported on Monday.

  • YLE ☛ Finland practices for mass migrant event

    The exercise, called Latu 23, tests how Finland would cope with a significant number of people arriving at its borders in a short period of time.

  • AntiWar ☛ Imagining a Progressive Pentagon

    In September 2007, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore emailed me out of the blue. He’d been reading TomDispatch articles on this country’s Global War on Terror, especially the invasion of, and never-ending conflict in, Iraq.

  • Latvia ☛ Corruption cops probe Valmiera's acquisition of EU funds: LTV's De Facto

    Official statements from the European Public Prosecutor's Office and the Corruption Prevention and Combating Bureau (KNAB) have indicated officials from Valmiera municipality may have abused the service position in order to unlawfully obtain more than EUR 4 million from the European Regional Development Fund, Latvian Television's De Facto broadcast reported on Sunday, September 24.

  • Meduza ☛ Azerbaijan presents plan to ‘reintegrate’ Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian population — Meduza

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Bulgaria to ban entry for cars with Russian license plates — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russification Lite How Moscow’s integration plans for occupied Ukraine changed in a year — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ The New York Times: Russia likely preparing to test nuclear-powered cruise missile — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Ukraine to build first underground school in Kharkiv to continue in-person education ‘even during missile threats’ — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Exhausting work Available battlefield videos suggest that Russia and Ukraine are ‘knocking out’ each other’s tanks and artillery equipment at roughly the same pace — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Ukraine’s defense intelligence says it carried out drone attack on Russian aircraft plant involved in missile production — Meduza

• Environment

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Under-appreciated existential threats of AI: drinking water.

    One thing Microsoft-backed OpenAI needed for its technology was plenty of water: [...]

  • Vice Media Group ☛ The Amazon Is Getting So Hot That Dolphins Are Dying En Masse

    “It’s still early to determine the cause of this extreme event but according to our experts, it is certainly connected to the drought period and high temperatures in Lake Tefé, in which some points are exceeding 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit),” the institute said in a statement to CNN.

  • Mongabay ☛ Indonesia’s peatland restoration claims in question as fires flare up

    Yet fire monitoring carried out by peat watchdog Pantau Gambut found 14,437 hotspots in peatlands in August alone. This marked a fourfold increase from the number of hotspots in peat areas the previous month.

    Some of the hotspots were detected within concessions that had burned in the past, said Pantau Gambut researcher Abil Salsabila. Three of the top five concessions with the highest number of hotspots in August have a history of burning, data from Pantau Gambut show.

  • ABC ☛ Indonesia's Sumatra island fire causes haze, prompting calls to work from home

    More than 300 forest and peatland fires on Indonesia’s Sumatra island are causing hazy skies across the region, prompting government officials to ask people to work from home

  • Reuters ☛ Indonesia denies smog from forest fires drifted to Malaysia

    More than 267,900 hectares (661,995.3 acres) of forests have been burned so far this year, bigger than a total of 204,894 hectares for all of 2022, according to the environment ministry's data.

    This has brought haze into several cities in Sumatra and Borneo.

  • The Jakarta Post ID ☛ Malaysia blames Indonesian fires for haze, poor air quality

    "Overall air quality in the country shows deterioration," he said in a statement issued on Friday.

    "Forest fires that occur in the southern part of Sumatra and the central and southern parts of Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia have caused haze to cross borders," he said.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Fires on Indonesia's Sumatra island cause smoky haze, prompting calls for people to work from home

    The military, police and local government were working together to extinguish the fires, which were burning in 316 places across South Sumatra province, but their work was complicated by the extreme dry weather, said Iriansyah, the head of the South Sumatra Disaster Management Agency.

  • CTV News ☛ Fires on Indonesia's Sumatra island cause smoky haze, prompting calls for people to work from home

    The military, police and local government were working together to extinguish the fires, which were burning in 316 places across South Sumatra province, but their work was complicated by the extremely dry weather, said Iriansyah, the head of the South Sumatra Disaster Management Agency.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Malaysia says unhealthy levels of haze caused by fires in Indonesia

    Malaysia’s environment department echoed the Singapore-based ASMC’s assessment, that forest fires in southern Sumatra and Kalimantan were causing transboundary haze to affect the west coast of the Malay Peninsula as well as the eastern state of Sarawak.

    “Satellite imagery from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration detected 52 hot spots in Sumatra, 264 hot spots in Kalimantan, and no hot spots within (Malaysia),” the department’s director-general Wan Abdul Latiff Wan Jaffar said in a statement.

  • New Yorker ☛ Life and Death in America’s Hottest City

    Carolyn Kormann on how climate change threatens to increase the high incidence of heat-related deaths in and near Phoenix, Arizona.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • New York Times ☛ [Cryptocurrency] Goes on Trial, as Sam Bankman-Fried Faces His Reckoning

      Mr. Bankman-Fried, who faces seven criminal counts, is accused of orchestrating a yearslong fraud that siphoned billions of dollars from customers to finance political contributions, venture capital investments and luxury real estate purchases. He has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he could receive what would amount to a life sentence.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Whoosh: Indonesia's high-speed rail dream becomes a reality

      This ambitious project, with a total cost of $7.3 billion, is a testament to Indonesia's commitment to modernizing its transportation infrastructure, albeit with significant involvement from Chinese state-owned firms as part of the Belt and Road initiative.

    • The Register UK ☛ Co-founder of collapsed [cryptocurrency] biz Three Arrows cuffed at airport

      Zhu is expected to spend four months in jail for failing to comply with investigations into his ill-fated company, according to the 3AC's liquidators, consultancy firm Teneo. Three Arrows co-founder Kyle Davies would likely share the same fate, if his whereabouts were known, Teneo said.

    • DeSmog ☛ Ex-Shell Tory MP Defends Oil and Gas Funding for Hydrogen Parliamentary Group

      The Conservative chair of a parliamentary group on hydrogen has defended the body’s receipt of £70,000 in funding from fossil fuel giants including Shell and Equinor.

      Alexander Stafford, a former Shell employee and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Hydrogen, was speaking today on a panel about heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) and net zero at Conservative Party conference in Manchester. 

    • Pro Publica ☛ California Bill Requiring Companies to Pay for Oil and Gas Well Cleanup in Limbo

      The California Legislature recently passed a bill that would provide the state’s taxpayers some of the strongest protections in the nation against having to pay for the cleanup of orphaned oil and gas wells. But Gov. Gavin Newsom has not indicated if he will sign it.

      AB1167 would require companies that purchase idle or low-producing wells — those at high risk of being left to the state — to set aside enough money to cover the entire cost of cleanup. Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo, a Los Angeles Democrat who authored the bill with the support of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environment California, said it’s needed to “stem the tide” of orphaned wells.

    • New Yorker ☛ Inside Sam Bankman-Fried’s Family Bubble

      At Stanford Law School, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried specialized in ethics and social fairness. Now that their son stands accused of one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history, they’re scrambling for legal escape routes.

    • YLE ☛ Consumer disputes board says "unreasonable" electricity contracts can be cancelled

      Consumers should now be able to cancel expensive fixed-term electricity contracts without huge penalties.

    • The Straits Times ☛ 18 hurt after faulty electric bus slams into 3 cars in Bangkok

      The vehicle's brakes were not working and the driver was unable to avoid the vehicles crossing an intersection.

    • Vice Media Group ☛ Fallen Crypto Influencer Arrested In Lambo Dispute During Unhinged Live Stream

      Ben "BitBoy" Armstrong went to the house of an individual he claims has his Lamborghini and told police he had a gun in his back seat.

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong contractor involved in suspected gas leak fatalities barred from bidding on some gov’t projects

      Authorities have suspended the contractor involved in a suspected gas leak that took two workers’ lives from bidding for some government projects, as the city’s leader pledged an investigation into the incident.

    • H2 View ☛ Rolls-Royce and easyJet achieve hydrogen aviation breakthrough in collaboration with Loughborough University

      Rolls-Royce has announced its hydrogen aviation research project has made advancements, working in collaboration with Loughborough University.

    • Hackaday ☛ ModuCoil – A Modular Coil For Motor And Generator Projects

      While renewable energy offers many opportunities for decentralizing energy production, it can sometimes feel that doing so on a truly local level remains unachievable with increasingly large utility-scale deployments re-centralizing the technology. [AdamEnt] hopes to help others seize the means of energy production with the development of the ModuCoil.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Latvia ☛ Ministry: Latvia has an invasive species combat plan

      A plan to combat invasive species in Latvia has been submitted to the European Commission (EC). Consequently Latvia will avoid sanctions which could have been imposed if such a plan were not in place, says Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development (VARAM). Meanwhile, this summer the number of population reports on observations of invasive species in the nature of Latvia has increased six times, Latvian Radio reported September 25.

• Finance

  • Metro UK ☛ Video game layoffs hit epidemic levels as Team17 is latest to cut jobs

    Seven game companies have announced redundancies in the past month, painting an increasingly very bleak picture of the industry.

  • CS Monitor ☛ G20 face-lift: Delhi removes poor people, but not poverty

    Delhi’s push to get beggars off the streets before the G20 summit makes for a more attractive event, but makes life harder for the city’s poorest people.

  • WhichUK ☛ 'I paid for an experience day, but the company went out of business': your refund rights when companies go bust

    We help a reader get a refund on a classic car experience

  • Pro Publica ☛ LA Housing Department Proposes Increasing Residential Hotel Enforcement

    The Los Angeles Housing Department is proposing to significantly increase staff and double the frequency of inspections of residential hotels in an effort to stop some landlords from renting the low-cost housing to tourists in violation of city law.

    The recommendations, detailed in a report to the mayor’s office last month, follow an investigation by Capital & Main and ProPublica that found some residential hotel owners had turned their buildings into boutique hotels and were advertising nightly rentals on travel websites.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • JURIST ☛ Paris prosecutors request trial for Marine Le Pen following embezzlement investigation

    The Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement Friday that they have requested a trial for over 20 National Rally (RN) members on suspicion of embezzling European public funds over 12 years, according to AFP.

  • JURIST ☛ Federal judge rules California ban on high-capacity gun magazines unconstitutional

    A US district judge struck down on Friday a California ban limiting gun magazines to ten rounds. In the decision, US District Judge Roger Benitez stated that the state’s prohibition of high-capacity magazines was a violation of the US Constitution’s Second Amendment and “clearly unconstitutional.” In defense of the ban, California offered two main positions.

  • YLE ☛ Helsinki mayor denies committing criminal offense: "I was the one who called the police"

    The suspected offence relates to the activities of an NGO, of which mayor Juhana Vartiainen also serves as chair of the board.

  • JURIST ☛ Spain protesters gather in Madrid to challenge possible amnesty for Catalan independence leaders

    A crowd of 40,000 Spaniards took to the streets of Madrid Sunday to protest the possible plans to grant amnesty to Catalans who face legal trouble for their roles in the separatist bid six years ago, according to Spanish news site EFE.

  • India Times ☛ Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testifies at once-in-a-generation US Google antitrust trial

    Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, long after the tech giant had faced its own federal antitrust lawsuit. That court fight, which began in 1998 and ended in a 2001 settlement, forced Microsoft to end some business practices and opened the door to companies like Google.

  • India Times ☛ Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testifies at once-in-a-generation US Google antitrust trial

    The government has argued that Google, worth more than $1 trillion with some 90% of the search market, illegally paid $10 billion annually to smartphone makers like Apple and wireless carriers like AT&T and others to be the default search engine on their devices. The clout in search makes Google a heavy hitter in the lucrative advertising market, boosting its profits.

  • NDTV ☛ Microsoft Was Willing To Pay Apple "Dearly" To Unseat Google: Satya Nadella

    Microsoft's Bing has been trying since 2009 to build market share against Google, but Nadella said it could never compete against the search engine behemoth, largely due to its arrangements with Apple.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Child online safety laws will actually hurt kids, critics say

    This summer, the Senate moved two bills dealing with online privacy for children and teens out of committee. Both have been floating around Congress in various forms over the last few years and are starting to get some real bipartisan support.

    At the same time, we’ve also seen many states pick up (and politicize) laws about online safety for kids in recent months. These policies vary quite a bit from state to state, as I wrote back in April. Some focus on children’s data, and others try to limit how much and when kids can get online.

  • New York Times ☛ Microsoft C.E.O. Testifies That Google’s Power in Search Is Ubiquitous

    Mr. Nadella’s appearance on the witness stand in the case — U.S. et al v. Google, which is the first monopoly trial of the modern [Internet] era — was also a sign that the bitter rivalry between Microsoft and Google continues unfettered. Over more than two decades, the two companies have battled over online search, mobile computing, web browsing and cloud computing, and dueled in multiple legal battles as both became ever more powerful. Now the companies are locked in an increasingly intense fight over A.I.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Gavin Newsom Taps Laphonza Butler to Fill Sen. Feinstein’s Seat, Rejecting Calls to Pick Barbara Lee

    California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, the longest-serving woman to ever serve in the Senate, has died at the age of 90. Feinstein had previously announced plans to retire at the end of this term, sparking an ongoing race to replace her open seat that’s been led by California Congressmembers Barbara Lee, Katie Porter and Adam Schiff. California Governor Gavin Newsom has tapped Laphonza Butler, the president of the Democratic pro-abortion organization EMILY’s List and a former leader of the California SEIU, as Feinstein’s temporary replacement. Butler will become the only Black woman in the Senate and California’s first openly LGBTQ+ senator. For more on Newsom’s choice of Butler, the race to replace Feinstein and the late senator’s political legacy, we continue our conversation with journalist Sasha Abramsky, whose latest piece for The Nation is titled “Dianne Feinstein’s Empty Seat.”

  • The Nation ☛ What’s at Stake in the MAGA Shutdown Threats

    The federal budget is back on life support after the passage of an 11th-hour continuing resolution holding government spending at par. This measure is the “clean” spending bill that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had formerly vowed he would never pass. And now that McCarthy has stepped forward as “the adult in the room” to tamp down all the rudderless tantrum-throwing in the caucus he nominally presides over, he’s on schedule to lose his post—just as his predecessors John Boehner and Paul Ryan did in the wake of past shutdown crises. A vote to oust him could come as early as Monday, October 2.

  • The Nation ☛ The Perils of My Kevin

    Credit where it’s due: I did not see House Speaker Kevin McCarthy finding the votes to avert a government shutdown this weekend. But he did, by passing a 45-day continuing resolution with the same contours as one that had overwhelming support in the Senate, except for one thing: It zeroed out aid to Ukraine, at least this time around.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Far-Right Republicans Look to Oust Speaker McCarthy After He Averts Government Shutdown

    Congress passed an 11th-hour short-term funding bill this weekend, narrowly avoiding a government shutdown for the next 45 days, but the House is in a state of turmoil as far-right lawmakers threaten to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for working on the bipartisan bill. “It’s a crisis entirely of Kevin McCarthy’s own making,” says our guest Sasha Abramsky, the West Coast correspondent for The Nation, who also calls McCarthy’s impeachment inquiry into President Biden “the most ill-prepared, ill-thought-out, poorly advised Republican inquiry you could possibly imagine,” and discusses Republicans’ embrace of Vladimir Putin to contrast with establishment Democrats’ support of Ukraine in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • India Times ☛ Social media fatigue can make you believe, share misinformation: study

      The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, is based on over 8,000 survey responses from participants in Singapore, the United States, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

      With millions of users relying on social media as a source [sic] of news and entertainment and as a mode of communication, addressing social media fatigue and its consequences is imperative, said the researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) .

    • Powerful people like Rep. Jim Jordan are promoting health misinformation

      It turns out that health misinformation and disinformation and the “freedom” to promote them now have very powerful allies, as a report in the Washington Post published a week ago demonstrates [...]

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Scheerpost ☛ Get Real, Congress: Censoring Search Results or Recommendations Is Still Censorship

    Despite never addressing this central problem, some members of Congress are convinced that a new change will avoid censoring the [Internet]: KOSA’s liability is now theoretically triggered only for content that is recommended to users under 18, rather than content that they specifically search for. But that’s still censorship—and it fundamentally misunderstands how search works online.

  • Project Censored ☛ Let Freedom Read: Banned Books Week for 2023

  • Off Guardian ☛ Online Censorship: Canada Continues Crackdown

    On Friday the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission published new guidelines requiring media outlets to register with the service so their content can be “regulated”.

    Under the new regulations all streaming services, social media companies and platforms that host podcasts would be [emphasis added]:

    "required to provide the CRTC with information related to their content and subscribership"

  • The Nation ☛ Fighting Censorship

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ US Congress: Pass the Khashoggi Act and Khashoggi Resolution

    Members of Congress should pass two significant pieces of legislation introduced today, the Khashoggi Act and Khashoggi Resolution, on the fifth anniversary of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, said Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), the organization founded by the late Khashoggi.

    The Khashoggi Act aims to protect activists and journalists by codifying the Khashoggi Ban and allow lawsuits in the United States against governments implicated in extraterritorial repression. The Khashoggi Resolution aims to honor Khashoggi's legacy by pledging continued action to hold the Saudi government accountable for human rights abuses.

  • CPJ ☛ On fifth anniversary of Khashoggi murder, CPJ joins call for Biden administration to prioritize human rights in Saudi Arabia

    On the fifth anniversary of the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Committee to Protect Journalists has joined 14 other press freedom and human rights groups in calling on the Biden administration to reverse its current policy on Saudi Arabia and to urge the Saudi authorities to stop detaining and targeting the country’s journalists. CPJ’s annual prison census documented 11 Saudi journalists in jail for their work as of December 1, 2022.

  • Vox ☛ How MBS has won over Washington and the world

    On the campaign trail, candidate Biden had pledged to hold Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to account, saying he would make Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” Initially, Biden held a hard line, but within a year that evaporated. He traveled to the kingdom in summer 2022 in an about-face visit that resulted in an unforgettable fist bump.

  • CPJ ☛ Journalist Josh Kruger shot, killed in Philadelphia

    Kruger covered homelessness, addiction, HIV, poverty, and trauma, and his work has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Citizen. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Kruger worked for the city for five years in various communications roles and returned to journalism in 2021.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • ‘The Drew Barrymore Show’ Eyeing October Return After WGA Reaches Tentative Resolution

    Late night television may return at that time, as well.

  • New York Times ☛ Irish Gymnastics Body Apologizes After Black Girl Is Shunned at Ceremony

    A video of the medals ceremony fueled indignation online, and drew criticism from the seven-time Olympic medalist Simone Biles.

  • New York Times ☛ In Romania, the Traumas of a Bloody Revolution Still Cast a Long Shadow

    People struggling for justice for family members killed in the 1989 uprising say that servants of the Ceausescu regime have blocked any reckoning with the past.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuanian parliament moves closer to turning to Constitutional Court over Istanbul Convention Lithuanian lawmakers on Tuesday gave their initial backing to turning to the country’s Constitutional Court regarding the compatibility of the Istanbul Convention with Lithuania’s Constitution.

  • New York Times ☛ Some London Police Officers Step Back From Armed Duty After Murder Charge

    After a fellow officer was charged with murder in the death of a Black man, several armed officers refused to carry firearms in protest, the Metropolitan Police Service said.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Organizing can give tenants power to effect change

    Michener, who has spent years researching tenant organizing, asserts that tenants acting collectively can wield power in "Racism, Power, And Health Equity: The Case Of Tenant Organizing," which published Oct. 2 in Health Affairs.

    In her paper, Michener—recently named the inaugural director of Cornell's Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures—examines health through the lens of housing, and demonstrates how people within racially and economically marginalized communities can, through organizing, build political power in response to poor and dangerous living conditions.

  • India Times ☛ IT companies nudge staff to work from office all five days

    Wipro, Capgemini and LTIMindtree are among the leading IT companies in India that have begun nudging employees to be in office on all or at least 50% of the working days in a week, according to sources, in what could signal the end of the work-from-home era in the country’s tech sector.

    This push to return to office is being implemented by IT/BPM and some technology companies across the country through verbal and informal communication channels, the people cited earlier said, as the industry faces a client demand crunch due to the global macroeconomic crisis which is squeezing tech spending.

  • Dhole Moments ☛ Return to Office Is Bullshit And Everyone Knows It

    As someone who had been working remote since 2014, as soon as the shift happened, many of my peers reached out to me for advice on how to be productive at home. This was an uncomfortable experience for many of them, and as someone who was comfortable in a fully virtual environment, I was happy to help.

    By early 2021, I was considered to not only be a top performer, but also a critical expert for the cryptography organization. My time ended up split across three different teams, and I was still knocking my projects out of the park. But more importantly, junior employees felt comfortable approaching me with questions and our most distinguished engineers sought my insight on security and cryptography topics.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Survived & Punished: Meet Tracy McCarter, a Nurse Jailed, Then Cleared, for Stabbing Abusive Husband

    October is National Domestic Violence Awareness and Prevention Month, and we look at how Black and Brown survivors of domestic abuse are further criminalized by police and prisons — and how activists have been organizing to win their freedom. In her first broadcast interview, we speak with Tracy McCarter, a nurse and grandmother who was jailed after her abusive husband, a white man, died of a stab wound when she defended herself during an altercation. McCarter, who is Black, describes being a criminalized survivor of both domestic violence and the criminal legal system. She was held at the notorious Rikers jail for nearly seven months and had her murder charges dropped in November after a campaign led by the grassroots abolitionist organization Survived and Punished. This comes as one-third of women imprisoned in New York for homicide were abused by the person they killed. “It became clear to me that I wasn’t going to be considered a person whose life was important enough to defend,” says McCarter, a registered nurse and graduate student at the time of her arrest, who shares her story and explains how racism affected her case. We also speak with Brooklyn Law School professor Jocelyn Simonson, a member of the “I Stand With Tracy” solidarity campaign and author of the new book, Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Incarceration.

  • Techdirt ☛ What Will Be The Impact Of The AI & Streaming Data Language In The New WGA Contract?

    As you’ve likely heard, earlier this week the WGA worked out a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on a new contract that ended their months-long strike. By all accounts, this looks like a big win for the WGA, which is fantastic and long overdue.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • RIPE ☛ CAPIF 2 Report - Toward a Stronger Central Asian Internet

    IPv6 adoption is quite low in the region, but the need for it worldwide is quite pressing. The session started with Jen Linkova (Google) sharing six misconceptions about IPv6. Unlike Scarlett O’Hara, we can’t ‘think About It Tomorrow.’ Gladly, there are success stories from the region that hopefully incentivise local operators to adopt IPv6.

  • Techdirt ☛ A Volunteer Army Is Deploying Dirt Cheap Broadband In NYC

    A few years ago during one of our Greenhouse forums, activist Terique Boyce wrote about how an all-volunteer army had been spending their days deploying free broadband to NYC residents. It’s the latest example of frustrated communities building their own infrastructure after decades of being ripped off and underserved by powerful, local broadband monopolies.

• Monopolies

  • Reason ☛ Could Another Baby Formula Shortage Be on the Horizon?

    Removing high tariffs from foreign imports of baby formula would ease the supply shock of possible factory closures.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ FTC and 17 States Sue Amazon 'for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power'

    The Federal Trade Commission alleges that the company is a “monopolist” that uses “illegal, exclusionary” and “anticompetitive” conduct to maintain its power.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Cisco-Splunk under the microscope: Joint customers weigh in

    Before we get into the survey, let’s set the table with the recent rocky road Splunk had to travel to get here.

  • Patents

    • Access to documents filed at the UPC [Ed: UPC is illegal and this firm promoted this illegal thing to profit from; patent law firms are basically not promoting laws but crimes.]

    • Press Gazette ☛ Online subs, events and advertising fuel FT revenue boost for 2022 to £458m [Ed: They may be missing the point that FT is pocketing bribes (e.g. from EPO) to spread lies and promotes crimes like UPC. This isn't reporting, it's even worse than lobbying. If rogue institutions can bribe fake "news" sites to tell lies and promote crimes, then they can hire some firm to add those paid-for pieces as Wikipedia references and make crime seem acceptable, even noble.]

      Globally the FT Group grew revenues by 5% in 2022 according to unaudited accounts.

  • Copyrights

    • Futurism ☛ Scammers Are Using AI to Sell Ripped Off Versions of Other People’s Books

      It seems that scammers who use AI to mimic actual human writers are getting smarter, after a British journalist found a memoir that bore a shocking resemblance to his own that he'd just published — except that this one was full of made-up stories and was published under a different name than his.

      In an interview with The Guardian, former BBC tech reporter Rory Cellan-Jones said that when he went to Amazon to check his author bio, he found something he hadn't written: a biography, penned by someone (or something) else, about his life.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Artists Are Losing the War Against AI

      Even so, artists, writers, and others have been agitating to protect their work from AI recently. The ownership of not only paintings and photographs but potentially everything on the [Internet] is at stake. Generative-AI programs like DALL-E and ChatGPT have to process and extract patterns from enormous amounts of pixels and text to produce realistic images and write coherent sentences, and the software’s creators are always looking for more data to improve their products: Wikipedia pages, books, photo libraries, social-media posts, and more.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Ed Sheeran Battles Yet Another Litigant Claiming Infringement with ‘Thinking Out Loud’

      Now, Structured Assets has filed their own appeal, arguing the lower court judge’s decisions in the courtroom caused them to lose their case. Structured Assets hopes to have a specific performance by Sheeran — in which he mashes up the two songs in the courtroom under cross-examination — admitted into the appeals court proceedings, among other items of note.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ "Mission Impossible" Leak with Chinese Connection Floods Pirate Sites

      The latest installment of the Mission Impossible franchise has its digital release scheduled for next week, but high quality copies of the film are already circulating on numerous pirate sites. After the movie's theatrical release was previously pushed back by the COVID-19 pandemic, this pirate leak also comes with a prominent Chinese connection.

    • Techdirt ☛ Canada’s Online News Act (C-18) Has Been An Unmitigated Disaster; Why Does California Still Want To Move Forward With Its Version?

      We’ve written a bunch of stuff about the obvious to anyone who understands the internet problems of Canada’s C-18, now dubbed the Online News Act. The fundamental premise behind it is to break the open internet, as an obviously corrupt forced wealth transfer from one disfavored industry to an industry that helps get politicians elected. Everything about this concept is bad, as we recently discussed with Paul Matzko, who reviewed the history of these types of laws and how they’ve done serious damage to journalism.