Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Upgraded Toy Guitar Plays Music

  Getting the finishing details on a Halloween costume completed is the key to impressing friends and strangers alike on the trick-or-treat rounds. Especially when it comes to things like props, these details can push a good Halloween costume to great with the right touches. [Jonathan]’s friend’s daughter will be well ahead of the game thanks to these additions to a toy guitar which is part of her costume this year.

• Futurism ☛ Keith Richards Says He'll Probably Keep Touring After He’s Dead

  That other Rolling Stone, Mick Jagger, suggested in a Wall Street Journal interview in September that he's not altogether opposed to the iconic group touring as holograms after they shimmy off this mortal coil.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Priority order when you start blogging

  I find the same applies to blogging. Because I blog, I look at the world through different scopes and when I’m researching a topic and writing about it, I learn more which leads to my interest to the topic deepening.

  And I find myself searching my blog constantly when I need something because I remember I wrote about it in the past. It’s a publicly available personal documentation system in addition to being a blog that readers enjoy to read.

• Herman Õunapuu ☛ The optimization treadmill: why I keep changing my computing setup all the time

  I keep changing the goals, constantly, and with that I kept optimizing my setup in a different direction every time.

• Ruben Schade ☛ The Rubenerd Style Guide 1.0

  I haven’t ever given much thought to whether I should have a style guide over these past seventeen years. I now know why, having compiled this list.

• Science

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Pakistani clerics 'cancel' theory of evolution, what next?

    Islamic clerics in Pakistan have forced a college professor to publicly renounce Charles Darwin's theory of evolution as against Islamic law. The display was concerning to academics in the Muslim-majority country.

  • Hackaday ☛ That Coin Toss Isn’t Actually 50/50

    A coin flip is considered by many to be the perfect 50/50 random event, even though — being an event subject to Newtonian physics — the results are in fact anything but random. But that’s okay, because what we really want when we flip a coin is an unpredictable but fair outcome. But what if that’s not actually what happens?

• Education

  • New York Times ☛ Visit the Library From the Comfort of Your Own Phone

    Public libraries have lent e-books to patrons for more than 20 years, but many have widened their electronic offerings with digital audiobooks, magazines, comics, videos and other services, even before the pandemic helped shift collections online. If you are curious about what your local library can lend from its digital shelves but never got around to signing up for a free library card — or connecting your existing card to an account — here’s how to get started.

  • BIA Net ☛ University students will receive technology support

    The [Internet] support provided for these students will be free for 12 months, limited to one line, with a maximum monthly limit of 10 GB, totaling 120 GB annually.

    The decision states that second-hand device purchases are not covered by the support, and each student can use the support amount once, and up to a maximum of 5,500 lira.

• Hardware

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ A moment with a hardware bug

    I worked as a dev for more than 4000 days of my life and experience countless silly software bugs. But this is the first time I'm experiencing an actual bug!

  • Hackaday ☛ A Quick And Stealthy Mobile Slot Antenna From Copper Tape

    [Ben Eadie (VE6SFX)] is at it again with the foil tape, and this time he’s whipped up a stealthy mobile sunroof antenna for the amateur radio operator with the on-the-go lifestyle.

  • Hackaday ☛ Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Foot Keyboard

    [crispernaki]’s opening comments to this VCR head scroll wheel project lament that overall technical details aren’t “complex, ground-breaking, or even exciting.” Since when does that matter? The point is that not only did the thing finally, eventually get built, it gets daily use and it sparks joy in its owner.

  • Hackaday ☛ A Nicer Controller For Cheap Power Supply Modules

    These days, you can get all kinds of cheap power supply modules off a variety of online vendors. A lot of examples from brands like Juntek and Drok often have pretty poor interfaces though, with a couple of tactile buttons and a simple 7-segment display. [rin67630] decided to whip up a better controller with a much more informative display.

  • Hackaday ☛ Level Your Trailer Or RV With This Nifty Helper Device

    Getting your RV or trailer parked nice and level is key to getting a good night’s sleep. Traditional methods involve bubble levels and trial and error, but [MJCulross] wanted something better. Enter the Teensy RV Leveling Helper.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Common Dreams ☛ Speaker Mike Johnson is a Clear and Present Danger to America’s Environment and Public Health

    “In lining up behind Mike Johnson, House Republicans have uniformly embraced his dystopian vision and made it clear they are only interested in tearing things down – things like our fundamental clean air, clean water and public health safeguards. Now more than ever it is imperative that Senate Democrats stand firm and disregard the foolish extremism almost certain to begin streaming out of the House.

  • Techdirt ☛ States All Gang Up To Sue Meta Based On Highly Questionable Theories Of ‘Harm’ To Children

    I really wish we could fast forward a few decades to the point where we look back on the moral panic over kids and social media and laugh about it, the same way we now laugh about similar moral panics regarding television, Dungeons & Dragons, rock & roll music, comic books, pinball, chess, novels, and the waltz. But, at the moment, basically everyone is losing their minds over the still totally unproven claim that social media is bad for kids’ mental health.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • El País ☛ California regulators suspend recently approved San Francisco robotaxi service for safety reasons

    The California Department of Motor Vehicles’ indefinite suspension of the Cruise robotaxi service comes just two months after another state regulator, the Public Utilities Commission, approved an expansion that authorized around-the-clock rides throughout San Francisco — the second most dense city in the U.S.

    That approval came over a chorus of protests, including some lodged by police and fire officials who asserted the driverless vehicles had been impeding traffic in emergencies during a testing phase.

  • Futurism ☛ New Tool Lets Artists "Poison" Their Work to Mess Up AI Trained on It

    That's the idea behind a new tool called "Nightshade," which its creators say does exactly that. As laid out in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper spotted by MIT Technology Review, a team of researchers led by University of Chicago professor Ben Zhao built the system to generate prompt-specific "poison samples" that scramble the digital brains of image generators like Stable Diffusion, screwing up their outputs.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Google’s pain is Microsoft’s gain [Ed: No, Microsoft is cheating; the numbers are fake]

    Google Cloud third-quarter revenue rose 22.5% to $8.41-billion, the slowest growth since at least the first quarter of 2021. The cloud unit reported an operating income of $266-million, compared with an operating loss of $440-million a year ago. Wall Street expected cloud computing revenue of $8.62-billion.

  • International Business Times ☛ Godfathers of technology Believe AI Firms Must Be Held Responsible for Harm They Cause

    The government says the meeting aims to consider the risks of AI, especially at the frontier of development, and discuss how they can be mitigated through internationally coordinated action.

    Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said "It's time to get serious about advanced AI systems."

    "There are more regulations on sandwich shops than there are on AI companies," he added.

  • [Repeat] EDRI ☛ Unchecked AI will lead us to a police state

    The growing use of AI in policing and migration contexts has huge implications for racial discrimination and violence. Technologies like AI will only feed this reality of structural racism with more tools, more legal powers, and less accountability for police.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Do not open robots.

    "Bomb Threat in Starship food delivery robots," reads the post from OSU. [...]

  • Harish Pillay ☛ ERP2.0 and the Sunken Cost Fallacy

    From this LTA post (the relevant portion from that link is shown below), it comes with a touchscreen, be able to provide traffic info, toll info etc.

  • David Rosenthal ☛ I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation.

    The reason for yet another post in the series is that Trisha Thadani, Rachel Lerman, Imogen Piper, Faiz Siddiqui and Irfan Uraizee of the Washington Post have published an extraordinarily detailed forensic analysis of the first widely-publicized fatal Autopilot crash in The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash. This was the crash in which Autopilot failed to see a semi-trailer stopped across its path and decapitated the driver.

    Below the fold I comment on the details their analysis reveals.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • NL Times ☛ Scammers posing as customer service agents on X as companies leave platform

      Since X, formerly Twitter, changed its terms of service, fewer companies are offering customer service via the platform. Scammers are taking advantage of that by posing as companies’ customer services and actively approaching customers who have questions, RTL Nieuws reports.

    • Russ Cox ☛ Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler

      Supply chain security is a hot topic today, but it is a very old problem. In October 1983, 40 years ago this week, Ken Thompson chose supply chain security as the topic for his Turing award lecture, although the specific term wasn’t used back then. (The field of computer science was still young and small enough that the ACM conference where Ken spoke was the “Annual Conference on Computers.”) Ken’s lecture was later published in Communications of the ACM under the title “Reflections on Trusting Trust.” It is a classic paper, and a short one (3 pages); if you haven’t read it yet, you should. This post will still be here when you get back.

      In the lecture, Ken explains in three steps how to modify a C compiler binary to insert a backdoor when compiling the “login” program, leaving no trace in the source code. In this post, we will run the backdoored compiler using Ken’s actual code. But first, a brief summary of the important parts of the lecture.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ Your ex isn't the only one stalking your social media posts. The Feds are, too

      ICE is one of seven federal agencies that surveils social media to monitor users' speech online. The ACLU delivered those agencies an FOIA request in 2018. None of the seven handed over any documents, and in January 2019, the ACLU filed a lawsuit to force them to turn over the requested information.

      "The Biden administration has been quietly deploying and expanding programs that surveil what people say on social media, often without any suspicion whatsoever," Shaiba Rather, a Nadine Strossen Fellow with ACLU's National Security Project, told The Register. "These programs chill people from speaking freely online and transform social media into a platform for constant government scrutiny."

    • 404 Media ☛ Inside ICE’s Database for Finding ‘Derogatory’ Online Speech

      The documents peel back the curtain on a powerful system, both in a technological and a policy sense—how information is processed and used to decide who is allowed to remain in the country and who is not.

      “The government should not be using algorithms to scrutinize our social media posts and decide which of us is ‘risky.’ And agencies certainly shouldn't be buying this kind of black box technology in secret without any accountability. DHS needs to explain to the public how its systems determine whether someone is a ‘risk’ or not, and what happens to the people whose online posts are flagged by its algorithms,” Patrick Toomey, Deputy Director of the ACLU's National Security Project, told 404 Media in an email. The documents come from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by both the ACLU and the ACLU of Northern California. Toomey from the ACLU then shared the documents with 404 Media.

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ Chat control: Johansson vainly tries to dismiss lobbying network in LIBE Committee

      “It was only to be expected that Johansson would respond to the revelations with her usual propaganda, such as citing a biased and suggestive Eurobarometer survey that violates the rules of good public opinion research.”[1]

      “In order to really hold Johansson accountable for her foreign-influenced bill and her lobbying in office, my committee, on our initiative, has demanded full access to all correspondence of her office with lobbying organisations – such as the secret letters of the dubious US foundation Thorn. Only then can we see the full extent of the entanglement with our own eyes.

    • [Repeat] EDRI ☛ Why your data might already be on a Europol list

      You don’t have to be a civil rights defender or even an opposition voice to end up on a police list. You don’t even have to commit a crime. And yet in today’s EU, innocent people are being swept up in a police digital dragnet that risks eroding the very basis of democracy.

      Police forces around Europe seem hooked on the habit of collecting information on a massive scale and forwarding it to the EU’s police agency, Europol. This undermines privacy, fair trial rights and the presumption of innocence.

      Once the police have your data, you may inadvertently become a suspect in an open investigation. In defence of hard-fought freedoms, the public needs to curb police overreach. It shouldn’t be the case, but the national police and the EU’s police agency Europol are having a hard time getting the memo.

      At Statewatch, we teamed up with European Digital Rights (EDRi), a Brussels-based network of European network of experts defending human rights in the digital era. Together we published a guide encouraging individuals to request the data held on them by Europol.

• Defence/Aggression

  • LRT ☛ Lithuania detains migrant group on border with Belarus

    Lithuanian border guards detained a group of 14 migrants in Ignalina District on Monday as they tried to enter the country from Belarus. Five of them needed medical assistance and complained about brutal treatment by Belarusian border guards, the State Border Guard Service (VSAT) said on Tuesday.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Video shows Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu inspecting troops in Ukraine — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry investigates renowned Russian child psychologist for ‘discrediting the army’ — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russia’s Federation Council approves bill to withdraw ratification of Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Former Wagner Group fighter goes to court to prove he’s alive after Buryatia war memorial lists him among dead — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russia launches drone attack near Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant, injuring at least 18 people — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russia’s State Duma introduces bill banning businesses from displaying foreign words on signs or storefronts — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ ‘It’s just insulting’: The story of a woman who fled the war in Ukraine, only to become homeless as a refugee in Russia — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Ukrainian ex-prisoners deported to Russia stuck at border crossing for two weeks as Georgia refuses to let them enter — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ A ‘field of wonders’: for campaign season The Kremlin’s latest housing and travel giveaway just happens to coincide with Putin’s reelection bid — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • EFF ☛ Access to Law Should Be Fully Open: Tell Congress Not to Be Fooled by the Pro Codes Act

    Tell Congress: Access To Laws Should Be Fully Open

    At EFF, we are especially proud of the work we have done helping our client, Public.Resource.Org (PRO), improve public access to the law. Public Resource’s mission is to make all government information available to the governed. As part of that mission, it posts safety codes such as the National Electrical Code, on its website, for free, in a fully accessible format—where those codes have been adopted into law by reference.  

• Environment

  • New York Times ☛ Chasing Big Mergers, Oil Executives Dismiss Peak Oil Concerns

    The disconnect between what oil companies and many energy experts think will happen in the coming years has never been quite this stark.

    Big oil companies are doubling down on drilling for oil and gas and processing it into fuels for use in engines, power plants and industrial machinery. And, with only a few exceptions, they are not spending much on alternatives like wind and solar power and electric-car batteries.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • DeSmog ☛ LNG plant operators change their tune on carbon capture

      This article was originally published by The Lens and is republished with permission. The Lens is the New Orleans area’s first nonprofit, nonpartisan public-interest newsroom, dedicated to unique investigative and explanatory journalism. Their mission is to educate, engage and empower readers with information and analysis necessary for them to advocate for a more transparent and just governance that is accountable to the public.

      As Louisiana attempts to spew less climate-warming pollution, which disproportionately comes from industry, fossil-fuel companies have convinced lawmakers to jump onto the bandwagon of carbon capture and storage (CCS), a controversial and unproven  method of addressing the issue.

    • El País ☛ Zambia embraces copper (and Silicon Valley)

      Yet it seems that the solution lies beneath the Gambia’s feet. Digging underground to reach it though is a daunting task. Hichilema intends to triple copper production from 800,000 tons per year to some three million tons by 2032. This means surpassing the output produced by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — Africa’s largest extractor — which is catching up with Peru, the second-largest producer behind Chile.

• Finance

  • Democracy Now ☛ Juan González: U.S. “Economic Warfare” Targeting Venezuela, Cuba & Nicaragua Fuels Migrant Crisis

    Democracy Now! co-host Juan González discusses his new report on “The Current Migrant Crisis,” about how U.S. policy toward Latin America has fueled historic numbers of asylum seekers. He argues U.S. “economic warfare” against countries like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela is what motivates many migrants to risk the journey north. “We’re seeing this enormous increase from these three countries. What do all these three countries have in common? They are all being subjected to United States sanctions,” says González. “The sanctions are reducing the ability of people to survive in the region, and then we’re surprised by all these people appearing at the border.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Nation ☛ Weaponized

  • Security Week ☛ The Cybersecurity Resilience Quotient: Measuring Security Effectiveness

    In the ever-changing landscape of cybersecurity, where threats morph, adversaries grow increasingly sophisticated, and new technology is adopted at ever greater speed, organizations are continually challenged to evaluate the effectiveness of their defenses.

  • The Register UK ☛ World checks it's not April 1 as Apple signals support for full US right-to-repair rule

    The California right to repair law, signed by governor Gavin Newsom on October 8, made California the third US state after Minnesota and New York to pass such laws covering electronic devices. Under the rules, any electronic device priced between $50 and $99.99 would need to have parts available for five years, and devices that cost in excess of that would have to have parts available for seven years.

    Apple has already begun to comply with the law, at least for iPhones and MacBooks, iFixit director of sustainability Elizabeth Chamberlain told The Register. If Apple's nationwide right-to-repair rollout is consistent with the California law, it "will undoubtedly be a good thing," Chamberlain said.

  • DomainTools ☛ The Awe and Horror of Cybersecurity

    It is October, after all; there’s a new crispness to the air, a thinness to the world’s veneer as we move towards the death of 2023, and to 2024 being born of its cold ashes. Fears carve our masks – which may be why the best ones elicit quiet discomfort before laughs and merriment. Consider Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” in its juxtaposition of horror and joviality: in the magnificent ball that takes place amidst a furious pandemic outside the compound, “There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.” Revelers convinced themselves the masks they wore encompassed and controlled their fears until the moment they realized the mask was the walls raised around them, the illusion that those walls were enough, and the mistaken impression that the people could know the nature of their peril.

  • Overpopulation ☛ Overpopulation as a local problem

    Overpopulation is commonly associated with global ecological overshoot, but it can occur at any level from the local to the global. Ecological overshoot in industrialised countries is complicated by labour migration, especially in urban areas. Population pressure on top of ecological overshoot should force these countries to reconsider overly permissive immigration policies.

    It is a straightforward definition: if a country or region cannot sustainably support its inhabitants, it is overpopulated. It applies to rabbits, deer and human beings. It holds for the Earth and its inhabitants. The renewable resources of our planet are not sufficient to cater to present day human consumption. However, the conclusion that humanity would require 1.75 Earths to sustainably support the world population does not imply that the inhabitants of all countries on Earth are in overshoot.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • VOA News ☛ Former Chief of Hamas Falsely Claims Militant Group Doesn’t Target Civilians

      When Nabil asked if Mashal would apologize for Israeli civilian deaths on October 7, he responded:

      “Hamas does not kill civilians on purpose. It focuses on the soldiers. Period.”

      That is false.

      Documents found on the bodies of Hamas militants outlined their plans to kill civilians, including the intentional targeting of women and children. Video and other evidence show they carried out those plans.

      Of the nearly 1,400 people killed on October 7, the bodies of 1,033 civilians have been collected.

    • LRT ☛ Lithuania under largest-ever disinformation attack by online scammers – experts

      Lithuania is currently facing a massive attack by online scammers using the names of well-known news websites and companies to trick people into putting their money into fake investment schemes, Debunk.org, a disinformation analysis centre, said on Tuesday.

      This is the largest disinformation and scam attack ever recorded in Lithuania, the centre said.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Tedium ☛ Enemies At The Gates

    Recently, Apple decided that it couldn’t square its desire to dive into entertainment with the fact that the host of its news analysis program, Jon Stewart, is known for incisive commentary that works best with limited input from gatekeepers. Stewart wanted to cover China and he wanted to talk about artificial intelligence, two topics which matter a lot to Apple’s business. With The Problem With Jon Stewart, Apple wanted Stewart to toe the line. Stewart wanted to tell the stories he wanted to. Stewart, who doesn’t deserve this kind of shoddy treatment given the legendary career he’s already built, walked. It turned out, quite obviously to any observer, that the problem was Apple.

    The issue that Stewart has run into is the same one that people up and down the batter roll of the creative ecosystem are stuck with: Platforms simply have too much power over the work people do.

  • Techdirt ☛ Stop Letting Nonsense Purveyors Cosplay As Free Speech Martyrs

    A few people have been asking me about last week’s release of something called the “Westminster Declaration,” which is a high and mighty sounding “declaration” about freedom of speech, signed by a bunch of journalists, academics, advocates and more. It reminded me a lot of the infamous “Harper’s Letter” from a few years ago that generated a bunch of controversy for similar reasons.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Don't Extradite Assange ☛ Lugano’s Plan B Forum welcomes back Julian Assange’s family

    This year’s panel about the fight for Julian Assange’s freedom at Plan B Forum in Lugano, Italy, was attended by his wife Stella Assange, his brother Gabriel and father John Shipton. The session was moderated by Rizzo, editor of Bitcoin Magazine.

  • FAIR ☛ Australians Call to End Long Persecution of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange

    Given what is at stake for freedom of the press in the Assange case, and the intensified pressure from Australia—a country being wooed to actively enlist in the US campaign against China by spending $368 billion on nuclear submarines and supersonic missiles (Sydney Morning Herald, 8/10/23)—we ought to expect coverage from the Washington Post, New York Times and major broadcast networks. But coverage of the press conference was virtually absent from US corporate media.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Assange Freedom May Be Pivotal in Australia’s Support for US Cold War With China

    Another item on the agenda when Albanese meets with Biden is the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian citizen. Assange, who has been incarcerated for four years in a top-security London prison, was indicted by the Trump administration for charges under the Espionage Act for WikiLeaks’ 2010-2011 revelations of U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. If extradited from the U.K. to the United States and convicted, Assange faces up to 175 years in prison.

    The Obama administration, which indicted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined, refused to indict Assange because of the “New York Times problem.” That is, if the administration charged Assange, it would also have to charge The New York Times and other media outlets that also published classified military and diplomatic secrets.

    But instead of dismissing the indictment and the request for extradition, the Biden administration is vigorously pursuing it.

  • VOA News ☛ Freed Journalist Recalls Ordeal in Afghan Prison

    Speaking at a news conference in the French capital, Paris, on Monday, the newly released Mortaza Behboudi said he didn’t think he would make it out of custody alive.

    The Taliban arrested Behboudi outside Kabul University in January while the reporter was working on a story about how female students are banned from higher education.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Republicans heckle reporter for asking about efforts to overturn 2020 election

    House Republicans booed and heckled a reporter who asked their latest choice for speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, about his support for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

  • BIA Net ☛ Editor of Kurdish Weekly Xwebûn newspaper detained in raid on home

    Xwebûn is a Kurdish-language weekly newspaper that started publishing in 2019. It is the only newspaper in Kurdish that is both an [Internet] outlet and also published in papers in Turkey.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Iran regime intimidating journalists with long prison terms

    "First, they were accused of espionage, even though their employers, two Iranian newspapers, repeatedly stressed that both journalists were assigned to cover the case," says Moein Khazaeli. Khazaeli studied law and political science at Tehran University and at Malmö University in Sweden. He currently works as a legal expert specializing in media issues.

    Khazaeli points out that, even in Iranian law, the verdict has no legal basis — "above all because no evidence was presented against Hamedi and Mohammadi." The verdict now claims that they changed societal behavior from passivity to activism. "This is not a criminal offense under Iranian law," says Khazaeli. "It is absurd that the verdict contains this wording. It clearly shows how the Iranian judiciary and security agencies regard people who demand their civil rights as criminals."

  • BIA Net ☛ Police break journalist's door, say 'we'll cover expenses'

    The police proceeded to ransack the house but left without taking anything. No explanation was provided to the homeowner or Kar-Odabaş.

    Kar-Odabaş expressed her frustration, saying, "We don't know why they raided our home. They didn't inform us about what they were searching for. There are no arrest warrants either."

  • BIA Net ☛ Police uses violence, journalist faces charges

    AFP's world-renowned photojournalist Bülent Kılıç will stand trial only for practicing journalism during the 2021 Pride March despite clear evidence of police brutality in the camera footage. "The culture of impunity in Turkey gave the police the courage for such actions," says Kılıç.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Vice Media Group ☛ Office Landlord Titan Says Remote Workers Don’t ‘Work As Hard’

    Blackstone has every incentive to get people back into the office. While the investment firm has made an aggressive push into the rental housing market, it remains the largest owner of commercial real estate in the world, meaning that its future success is tied with the future of the office building.

    Schwarzman himself said that one-fifth of office buildings in the U.S. office market are currently vacant, and another 20 percent are leased but largely unused.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Why OSHA Doesn’t Investigate All Dairy Farm Deaths

    On a below-freezing morning in March 2013, Israel Lepe Quezada was crushed to death while working on a dairy farm in northeast Wisconsin. The farm’s owner had found Lepe pinned between the engine compartment and hydraulic arms of a forklift-like machine.

    Almost six years later, Blas Espinoza Cuahutzihua was killed when the arms of a skid-steer loader, another kind of farming vehicle, fell on him at the dairy farm where he worked near the Minnesota border. His last words, according to court documents, were to say goodbye to his family.

  • Techdirt ☛ How The Courts Have Made It Easier For Cops To Steal From Citizens

    It’s always been easy for cops to take stuff from people. Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement to bypass most of the Constitution so long as they imply things about the supposedly illegal source of the property they’ve taken from citizens.

  • Techdirt ☛ GAO Tells TSA It Needs To Make Sure Its Screening Tech Still Works Well, Isn’t Racist

    The TSA was imposed on us following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Supposedly necessitated by this “new” terrorist threat, the TSA shrugged into action, becoming another layer of irritating bureaucracy standing between benign travelers and their freedom of movement.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ Error 402: E-Commerce Goes Mainstream, But Something Is Missing

    Last week in our Error 402 series on the history of web monetization, we talked about the earliest secure monetary transactions on the web, soon after the National Science Foundation opened up the early internet for commercialization. There were electronic transactions over networks that pre-dated this (such as on proprietary online services like CompuServe, but the World Wide Web commercialization only began in the early 1990s).

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Techdirt ☛ Netflix’s Idea Of Innovation: Two Big Price Hikes In A Row

    So we’ve been talking a lot about how as the streaming video market matures, it’s increasingly behaving a lot like the old, shitty cable companies the sector once disrupted. Instead of innovation and risk taking, we’re seeing endless price hikes, lower quality catalogs, strange new catalog gaps, labor issues, ethically flimsier policy positions, annoying new surcharges, and more and more arbitrary restrictions.

• Monopolies

  • New York Times ☛ What the U.S. Has Argued in the Google Antitrust Trial

    The government is now wrapping up its side in the case — U.S. et al. v. Google — setting the stage for the [Internet] giant to mount its defense starting this week.

    Two prime threads have emerged from the government’s case: what it said Google did to illegally maintain its search and search ads monopolies and how those practices harmed consumers and advertisers. We lay out the main arguments.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Instagram and Facebook 'Flag' IPTV Searches Over Piracy Concerns

      Facebook and Instagram are trying to educate users on copyright infringement by showing a 'popup' to those who search for potentially problematic terms such as IPTV. This is one of the many voluntary anti-piracy tools the Meta-owned social media platforms have implemented, in an effort to help combat online copyright infringement.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ 20 Pirate IPTV Arrests, €1.6m Seized; Held For 7 Months, Suspects Confess

      Austrian law enforcement agencies have revealed details of a major operation against a pirate IPTV network claimed to have generated up to €11m during the last three years. Following a TV company complaint, 40 investigators arrested 20 Turkish suspects living in Austria and Germany. Authorities seized €1.6m, 60 bank accounts, and an Audi A7. After seven months in custody, the main suspects have reportedly confessed.

    • Techdirt ☛ NY Times Tried To Block The Internet Archive

      The Intercept has an interesting article that reveals another reason why some newspaper publishers are not great fans of the site: