Leftovers

• Truthdig ☛ The new series "Four Died Trying" seeks to expose what—and who—was really behind the sizzling ’60s’ politics of assassination. We sat down with the filmmakers, John Kirby & Libby Handros.

  This Nov. 22 marks the exact 60th anniversary of the 1963 shooting of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas — and it’s also the date a new nonfiction streaming series, “Four Died Trying,” premieres on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and Google Play. The documentary, directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, investigates not only the JFK liquidation, but also the people and players allegedly behind the assassinations of Malcolm X on Feb. 21, 1965; Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on April 4, 1968; and Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy on June 6, 1968.

• New Statesman ☛ Bill Gates is bad for humanity: By “maximising” lives, the billionaire philanthropist is making ours worse.

  Solving the Bill Gates Problem doesn’t mean larger problems are solved. It just leaves us with the usual ones of democratic gridlock, evaporating public funding for higher education and basic research, and vaporised revenue models for journalism and publishing. Dispelling the Noughties mirage of celebrity-billionaire global governance does help clear the mind, though. Human lives have to be more than notches on a plutocrat’s bat.

• Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Multi-tiered SLOs

  🔴 SLI (service level indicators) are normalized metrics to measure the reliability of a system and give a focus to data driven optimization. 🔴 SLO (service level objective) specifies the reliability target.

  But there’s no rule that says we need exactly one target. In fact, using multiple targets can be beneficial to maintain a guarantee on a critical threshold while optimizing for a desired threshold.

• Vintage Everyday ☛ USS Pueblo POW’s Secret “Flipping the Bird” Gesture to North Korea Captors, 1968

  In August 1968, eight sailors were photographed by the North Koreans where every sailor held up his middle finger, the meaning of which was not recognized by their captors. “We told them the finger was a Hawaiian good luck sign so they thought that was wonderful,” Lt. Schumacher remembered. “In two short movies shown in June, people on the street in London were shown giving the finger to the North Korean cameraman. It became obvious that these people did not know the meaning of this symbol of contempt, and that they were also unfamiliar with current western “culture,” or colloquialisms. In the coerced letters written to families, friends and political figures, and in subsequent “press” conferences the Pueblo men now attempted to use this knowledge as a means to discredit their captor’s propaganda efforts.”.

• Science

  • Matt Rickard ☛ The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences

    The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) is exactly what it sounds like. A database of different sequences of integers is useful for researchers to identify known integer sequences, find formulas, and discover connections between different areas of mathematics.

  • Science News ☛ Crabs left the sea not once, but several times, in their evolution

    Wolfe and her colleagues collected genetic data from 333 species of crabs in the group Brachyura. These crustaceans are evolutionarily distinct from, although closely related to, another group of crustaceans that independently evolved crablike bodies and are often erroneously referred to as crabs, including animals like the hermit and king crabs.

    The team then combined that genetic data with dozens of fossils to generate a crab evolutionary tree, layering on details about each species’ life history and adaptations for living on land to reconstruct a possible timeline of when crabs colonized drier ground.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Revive A Sony Vaio P-Series With KiCad’s Background Bitmaps

    You might remember that KiCad 7 came out this February, with a multitude of wonderful features. One of them was particularly exciting to see, and the KiCad newsletter even had an animated GIF to properly demo it – a feature called “Background Bitmaps”, which is the ability to add existing board images into your board editor, both front and back, and switch between them as you design the board. With it, you can draw traces, recreate the outline and place connectors over these images, giving you a way to quickly to reproduce everything on an existing PCB! I’ve seen some friends of mine use this feature, and recently, I’ve had a project come up that’s a perfect excuse for me to try it.

  • Hackaday ☛ Easy Hackintosh With Docker-OSX: Soon To Be Impossible?

    The Docker-OSX project has to be among one of the easiest ways to get a fully functional Hackintosh off the ground on any Linux or Windows (10+) system, with the Docker image handling the heavy lifting of keeping the copy of MacOS happy and satisfied, even as the legality remains questionable, as we previously reported on in 2021. Officially, Apple’s software license for MacOS states that it can only be installed and use on Apple-branded hardware, which precludes the installation in e.g. a Docker container. This has left Docker-OSX in a gray zone where it’s technically illegal, but as it’s being advertised by its developer [Sick Codes] to be for use by security researchers who participate in Apple’s Bug Bounty program (including iOS, which requires XCode, which requires MacOS, etc.), it seems to slip through the cracks.

  • Hackaday ☛ DIY Loading Coil Shortens Antenna Lengths

    A newly licensed amateur radio operator’s first foray into radios is likely to be a VHF or UHF radio with a manageable antenna designed for the high frequencies in these radio bands. But these radios aren’t meant for communicating more than a double-digit number of kilometers or miles. The radios meant for long-distance communication use antennas that are anything but manageable, as dipole antennas for the lowest commonly used frequencies can often be on the order of 50 meters in length. There are some tricks to getting antenna size down like folding the dipole in all manner of ways, but the real cheat code for reducing antenna size is to build a loading coil instead.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Pro Publica ☛ The Future of the Colorado River Hinges on One Young Negotiator

    John Brooks Hamby was 9 years old the last time a group of Western states renegotiated how they share the dwindling Colorado River. When the high-stakes talks concluded two years later, in 2007, with a round of painful cuts, he hadn’t reached high school.

    Yet this June an audience of water policy experts listened with rapt attention as Hamby, now 27, recited lessons from those deliberations.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ High temperatures may have caused over 70,000 excess deaths in Europe in 2022

    The authors of the study, published in The Lancet Regional Health—Europe, revised upwards initial estimates of the mortality associated with record temperatures in 2022 on the European continent. The study is titled "The effect of temporal data aggregation to assess the impact of changing temperatures in Europe: an epidemiological modelling study."

  • How “natural herd immunity” approaches to the pandemic destroyed public health

    It has been over three years now since the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), whose authors in early October 2020 advocated a “natural herd immunity” approach to the pandemic, in which the young and healthy, who were (presumably) at very low risk of serious illness and death from COVID-19, would be allowed to go (mostly) about their business reopening society, while the elderly and those with chronic medical conditions, who were at the highest risk of complications and death from the novel coronavirus, would supposedly be kept safe with “focused protection.” The idea was that, by letting SARS-CoV-2 circulate in the “low risk” population we would reach “natural herd immunity” more rapidly—in six months!—all without the serious damaging consequences of business closures (which proponents of a GBD-like approach always called “lockdowns,” whether they were lockdowns or not) and all the other public health interventions instituted early in the pandemic to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Unfortunately, one of the requirements to achieve “natural herd immunity” is that postinfection immunity—which antivaxxers like to refer to as “natural immunity“—be durable, and, as we later learned with the Delta and Omicron waves, a coronavirus that was spreading widely through a population of billions was very capable of evolving into new variants that could not only become a lot more transmissible than the original Wuhan strain but also evade immunity acquired as a result of infection with prior variants. Then there was the problem that the GBD never really defined “focused protection” in a way that could be operationalized. It appeared to mean something akin to indefinite quarantine of the “high risk” their homes, ignoring that these people could never entirely avoid interacting with all those young healthy people spreading the virus. Moreover, in practice “focused protection” could never really have worked, anyway,

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • New York Times ☛ ‘Lost Time for No Reason’: How Driverless Taxis Are Stressing Cities

    His experience was a sign of how self-driving taxis are increasingly starting to take a toll on city services. In San Francisco and Austin, Texas, where passengers can hail autonomous vehicles, the cars have slowed down emergency response times, caused accidents, increased congestion and added to the workloads of local officials, said police officers, firefighters and other city employees.

    In San Francisco, more than 600 self-driving vehicle incidents were documented from June 2022 to June 2023, according to the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency. After one episode where a driverless car from Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, ran over and dragged a pedestrian, California regulators ordered the company to suspend its service last month. Kyle Vogt, Cruise’s chief executive, resigned on Sunday.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ AI-powered crab gender identification: Revolutionizing fishery management and conservation

    Their latest paper, published in the journal Scientific Reports, is co-authored by Associate Professor Yoshitaka Ueki and Professor Ken Takeuchi from TUS and Assistant Professor Kenji Toyota and Professor Tsuyoshi Ohira from Kanagawa University.

    The researchers implemented three deep convolutional neural networks based on three well-established image classification algorithms: AlexNet, VGG-16, and ResNet-50. To train and test these models, they used 120 images of horsehair crabs captured in Hokkaido; half of them were males, and the other half were females. A notable advantage of these models is that they are "explainable AI."

  • [Repeat] Computers Are Bad ☛ Centrex

    I've had it in my mind to write something about Centrex for years, but I've always had a hard time knowing where to start. The facts about Centrex are often rather dry, and the details varied over years of development, making it hard to sum up the capabilities in short. So I hope that you will forgive this somewhat dry post. It covers something that I think is a very important part of telephone history, particularly from the perspective of the computer industry today. It also lists off a lot of boring details. I will try to illustrate with interesting examples everywhere I can. I am indebted, for many things but here especially, to many members of the Central Office mailing list. They filled in a lot of details that solidified my understanding of Centrex and its variants.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Public Citizen Rolls Out New Tracker of State-Level Bills to Ban Political Deepfakes

    Public Citizen today rolled out a new tracker for monitoring the progress of state-level bills that ban or require disclosure of political deepfakes – A.I.-generated images, audio, or video depicting a candidate saying or doing things they never did to damage their reputation and deceive voters. The tracker includes the state, bill number, a link to each bill, and its current status.

    State legislatures across the country are starting to pass urgently needed legislation to regulate deepfakes in elections, usually with bipartisan backing. So far, this legislation has received bipartisan support in every state where it has passed, including California, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas, and Washington.

  • Digital Music News ☛ The Beatles “Now And Then” — How Did It Come Together?

    Notably, this software utilizes artificial intelligence to ‘learn’ what a sound is and isolate that sound from others in the recording. “It has to learn what the sound of John Lennon’s guitar is, for instance, and the more information you can give it, the better it becomes,” Giles told the BBC.

    Using the software, Lennon’s voice could be isolated from the original cassette recording, removing the background noise from his New York home that had made the Beatles’ previous attempts to finish the song impossible.

    Suddenly, Lennon’s voice was “crystal clear,” said Paul McCartney. “It was the closest we’ll ever come to having him back in the room,” added Ringo Starr. “Far out.”

  • NDTV ☛ 500 OpenAI Staff Threaten To Quit, Join Sam Altman Unless Board Resigns

    OpenAI's staff has threatened to quit the artificial intelligence startup and join former boss Sam Altman at Microsoft's new division unless the board resigns, according to a letter seen by Reuters.

  • BW Businessworld Media Pvt Ltd ☛ About 500 Employees Threaten To Quit Unless OpenAI’s Board Resigns, Reappoints Altman

    Following the unexpected removal of Sam Altman, it has been reportedly said that nearly 500 employees at OpenAI have threatened to quit the company if the board does not resign and reappoint Sam Altman, according to a recent report by tech publication The Wired.

    In a letter addressed to the OpenAi board of directors, the employees said the board’s decision has spoiled their working process and is likely to develop a new argument between the workers and management.

  • India Times ☛ Sam Altman saga: Key moments in the seven-year partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI

    Microsoft's hiring of ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday marks another twist in the seven-year-old partnership between the US giant and the startup that created ChatGPT.

  • BW Businessworld Media Pvt Ltd ☛ Who Is OpenAI’s New CEO Emmett Shear?

    OpenAI has appointed Emmett Shear as its interim Chief Executive Officer (CEO), amidst much speculation about the position after the company sacked Sam Altman on Friday. The significant position was also briefly assumed by Mira Murati (CTO at OpenAI) after Altman's sudden removal.

    The company has not officially declared Emmett Shear as its new CEO yet but Shear X post clarified his new position.

  • The Register UK ☛ OpenAI staff threaten to leave if ousted CEO Altman is not reinstated

    OpenAI stunned the industry when Altman was ejected from the artificial intelligence biz on Friday. Now, 550 of OpenAI's 700 staff have signed a letter saying they may stand down and join the newly announced Microsoft AI subsidiary that Altman was put in charge of today.

  • India Times ☛ OpenAI employees threaten to quit unless board resigns, reappoints Sam Altman: report

    In a letter addressed to the OpenAi board of directors, the employees said the board was negotiating in bad faith and the process through which they terminated Altman and former president Greg Brockman has jeopardised their work.

  • India Times ☛ Satya Nadella brings Sam Altman to Microsoft; Twitch’s Emmett Shear is OpenAI’s new interim chief

    Putting an end to speculation over whether Sam Altman will return to OpenAI, the startup he cofounded, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Altman, former OpenAI president Greg Brockman and some of their colleagues would join Microsoft to lead “a new advanced AI research [sic] team”.

  • India Times ☛ Who is Emmett Shear? The new interim CEO of OpenAI post Sam Altman's ouster

    ​​The company named Emmett Shear, cofounder and former CEO of Twitch, as the new interim CEO, pushing aside Mira Murati, a longtime OpenAI executive who was named interim CEO after Altman's ouster.

  • CBC ☛ OpenAI employees say they'll leave unless board resigns

    Several mebers of OpenAI's top management signed the letter, including chief technology officer Mira Murati and chief operating officer Brad Lightcap.

  • Vox ☛ Why OpenAI blew up — and why it matters

    Now, we may be looking at the end of OpenAI, which was shaping up to be one of the most important companies in the world. It was also the developer and owner of the technology that could shape how (or if) we live in the future. And we’ll soon see what takes its place.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Schism That Toppled Sam Altman

    I spoke with my colleagues Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel this afternoon about the tensions at the heart of the AI community, and how Sam Altman’s firing may ironically entrench the power of a tech giant.

  • Daniel Miessler ☛ Sam Altman Wants AGI as Fast as Possible, and He Has Powerful Opposition

    As I’ll explain below, I believe what happened ultimately came down to two opposing philosophies on AI—and specifically AGI (the ability for an AI to fully replace a pretty smart human).

    On one side you have what people like Balaji call the Accelerators, and on the other side you have what he calls the Decelerators. I have my own problems with Balaji, but the analysis below looks pretty good.

  • The Register UK ☛ OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

    Microsoft is stuck in a hard place. It needs OpenAI co-founder and fired CEO Sam Altman back at the helm of the upstart, or working internally at the Azure giant.

    Either way is awkward, though: if Altman returns to OpenAI, changes need to be made to prevent a fiasco like this happening again, the lab's board and some colleagues may well have to go, and questions asked about how Microsoft – as a significant investor in OpenAI - was somehow completely blindsided by this meltdown. And if Altman takes up Microsoft's offer and joins the cloud goliath, will he and any loyalists who follow him have the freedom and agility to continue shaping machine learning as they did at OpenAI?

  • The Atlantic ☛ Inside the Chaos at OpenAI

    OpenAI was deliberately structured to resist the values that drive much of the tech industry—a relentless pursuit of scale, a build-first-ask-questions-later approach to launching consumer products. It was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to the creation of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that should benefit “humanity as a whole.” (AGI, in the company’s telling, would be advanced enough to outperform any person at “most economically valuable work”—just the kind of cataclysmically powerful tech that demands a responsible steward.) In this conception, OpenAI would operate more like a research facility or a think tank. The company’s charter bluntly states that OpenAI’s “primary fiduciary duty is to humanity,” not to investors or even employees.

    That model didn’t exactly last. In 2019, OpenAI launched a subsidiary with a “capped profit” model that could raise money, attract top talent, and inevitably build commercial products. But the nonprofit board maintained total control. This corporate minutiae is central to the story of OpenAI’s meteoric rise and Altman’s shocking fall. Altman’s dismissal by OpenAI’s board on Friday was the culmination of a power struggle between the company’s two ideological extremes—one group born from Silicon Valley techno-optimism, energized by rapid commercialization; the other steeped in fears that AI represents an existential risk to humanity and must be controlled with extreme caution. For years, the two sides managed to coexist, with some bumps along the way.

  • Digital Music News ☛ What Is Going On with Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Microsoft?

    An apparent power struggle has surfaced inside of OpenAI and nearly all employees appear to be on Altman and Brockman’s side. The three-person board that opposes the two has conducted its own CEO search for the company. Reports indicate that employees refused to attend an emergency meeting on Sunday with CEO Emmett Shear. Employees have posted on social media to state they are keeping the lights on and maintaining service stability for OpenAI developers—but hope the board is pressured to resign.

  • Futurism ☛ This Might Be the Reason OpenAI Fired Sam Altman

    And now, one feasible explanation may have floated to the surface. As Bloomberg reports, prior to his shocking expulsion Altman had been spending time in the Middle East raising funds for a new chip venture billed as a competitor to Nvidia — a high-dollar side project that sources say added extra pressure to an already-strained relationship.

    Per Bloomberg, Altman's side hustle, dubbed "Tigris," appears quite ambitious. Nvidia has a chokehold on the semiconductor marketplace, as its popular GPU chips remain the favorite among AI startups for their computing power; Altman, according to Bloomberg, wants to take some of that market share away from Nvidia by introducing his own lower-cost Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, to the industry. This would not only stand to displace the market incumbent but would also give OpenAI more control over its production, likely making its products cheaper in the long run.

  • NPR ☛ Ousted OpenAI leader Sam Altman joins Microsoft

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made the announcement that Altman, 38, would be coming on board in a post on X sent just before 3 a.m. eastern time Monday.

    Nadella also said Greg Brockman, the former president of OpenAI who quit in protest after Altman's sudden departure, would be joining the new AI division at Microsoft alongside Altman.

  • New York Times ☛ How Microsoft’s Satya Nadella Kept the ‘Best Bromance in Tech’ Alive

    Since OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot almost a year ago, artificial intelligence has captured the public’s imagination, with hopes that it could be used for important work like drug research or to help teach children. It could also lead to job losses or even autonomous warfare. And whoever builds it could control what some computer scientists believe is one of the most important new technologies since the steam engine.

  • New York Times ☛ Microsoft Hires Sam Altman Hours After OpenAI Rejects His Return

    Hours later, in another head-spinning move, Microsoft said it was hiring Mr. Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and a company co-founder who quit in solidarity with Mr. Altman. The two men will lead an advanced [sic] research [sic] lab [sic] at Microsoft.

  • Security Week ☛ Microsoft Hires Sam Altman and OpenAI’s New CEO Vows to Investigate His Firing

    Microsoft invested billions of dollars in the startup and helped provide the computing power to run its AI systems. Nadella wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he was “extremely excited” to bring on the former executives of OpenAI and looked “forward to getting to know” Shear and the rest of the management team.

  • Gizmodo ☛ Most OpenAI Staff Threaten to Quit After Microsoft Hires Sam Altman

    Early on Monday morning, Microsoft hired Sam Altman to lead a new advanced AI research team after he was ousted from his position at OpenAI last week. Within hours, OpenAI employees threatened to resign en masse with more than 500 out of 750 employees signing a letter demanding that the board resign and Altman be reinstated as CEO.

  • Futurism ☛ 700 OpenAI Staffers Demand Board Reinstate Sam Altman as CEO

    At press time, the letter has reportedly been signed by a whopping 700 of the company's 770 employees — including CTO Mira Murati, who the board briefly named interim CEO only to be replaced just a few days later, and Altman's fellow cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who initially appeared to be one of the forces behind his ouster.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft hires Sam Altman and others for new AI research group as most OpenAI staff threaten to leave

    It remains murky where OpenAI goes from here, since it’s not yet clear whether Nadella will prioritize the existing relationship with OpenAI or the new research unit where potentially most of OpenAI’s employee could end up. Axios’ Dan Primack suggested that it’s possible Nadella is using the new research lab as a stick to force OpenAI’s board to recant and rehire Altman and Brockman. However, he noted that would be a risky gambit, since one benefit of OpenAI to Microsoft is that the former can operate more independently and, not least, keep the heat from any AI missteps from burning Microsoft.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Common Dreams ☛ WIRED Analysis Reveals Disturbing Details of Government Surveillance Program, Highlights Urgent Need for Reform

• Defence/Aggression

  • CBC ☛ Shift away from fossil fuels now or face nearly 3 C warming by century's end: UN

    The world is on pace to warm by as much as 2.9 C by the end of the century, nearly double the international target agreed upon less than a decade ago, a new United Nations report says.

    The Emissions Gap report, released this morning, says maintaining the goal of limiting warming to the 2015 Paris Agreement target of 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels hinges on a rapid transformation away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy.

  • Axios ☛ Earth is hurtling toward nearly 3°C of warming: Report

    The 2016 edition, for example, had a projected warming of up to 3.4°C (6.12°F) under a current-policies trajectory.

  • The Atlantic ☛ 2023 Just Notched Its Most Ominous Climate Record Yet

    The news of the 2-degree Celsius days came first from Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which published the results from a model that uses observations to estimate global climate conditions in real time. The numbers are preliminary, but the model is considered by experts to be reliable. Direct measurements of surface temperatures could confirm its results in the coming weeks.

  • Axios ☛ Earth likely briefly passed critical warming threshold on Friday and Saturday

    Between the lines: The dataset that shows the record, known as ERA5, comes from a process known as reanalysis, in which a computer model uses surface temperature readings from land and ocean sources as well as algorithms to arrive in near time at an accurate global temperature reading for each day.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Women are leading the fight to stop climate change

    Over the past few years, international climate policy has been shaped largely by a close-knit group of politicians in the twilight of their careers. Now leaders from beyond the traditional U.S.-Europe-China power center—some new to the international stage, others already veterans—are emerging. And women are at the forefront.

  • India Times ☛ TikTok's alarming sexual content: Easy access poses risk for children

    Explicit content has long been a feature of the [Internet] and social media, and young people's exposure to it has been a persistent concern.

    This issue has taken centre stage again with the meteoric rise of TikTok. Despite efforts to moderate content, it seems TikTok's primary focus remains on maximising user engagement and traffic, rather than creating a safe environment for users.

  • India Times ☛ US senators expect Meta, TikTok CEOs to testify at hearing on child sexual exploitation

    The committee also has issued subpoenas to the CEOs of Discord, Snap, and X, formerly known as Twitter, to compel them to testify.

    Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin and its top Republican Lindsey Graham said the hearing will allow Committee members to press CEOs from some of the biggest social media companies on their failures to protect children online.

  • NPR ☛ An appeals court will hear arguments over Trump's gag order in Jan. 6 case

    Just days after the Justice Department unveiled a four-count felony indictment against Trump in Washington, D.C., the former president posted, "If you go after me, I'm coming after you." Prosecutors said some of Trump's supporters took note and took action.

    "The defendant does not need to explicitly incite threats or violence in his public statements, because he well knows that by publicly targeting perceived adversaries with inflammatory language, he can maintain a patina of plausible deniability while ensuring the desired results," assistant special counsel Cecil VanDevender wrote in a recent court filing.

  • New Statesman ☛ The Iran Trap: Why Israel and the West are running out of time.

    All that, of course, poses a challenge for Israel and the US. The longer the Gaza conflict goes on, the more chance of others being drawn in and the lower the chances of Israel being inclined to make concessions. It also makes a durable settlement of the Palestinian issue (which gives Iranian support to Hamas its particular resonance in the wider Islamic world) more urgent. But given Israeli reluctance to look weak, it also makes such a settlement less likely.

    That is the trap Iran has set. It is an agonising dilemma for Western policymakers. It is also a threat to the stability of Arab states that have no sympathy for Iran or Hamas but have publics outraged by the destruction in Gaza.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do

    Signal jamming in the Middle East is common, but this kind of powerful spoofing is new. According to Todd Humphreys, a UT Austin professor who researches satellite communications, extremely powerful signal jammers have been present in the skies near Syria since 2018. “Syria was called ‘the most aggressive electronic warfare environment on the planet’ by the head of [U.S. Special Operations Command],” Humphreys told Motherboard.

  • JURIST ☛ Germany police raid Islamic Center of Hamburg, accuses group of Hezbollah support

    Hezbollah is an Iran-backed militant group opposed to Israel that operates in Lebanon, and it has been supporting Hamas in its current war with Israel. It is designated as a terrorist organization by Germany and a number of Arab states described it using similar language in 2017.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Senior Ukrainian cybersecurity officials sacked amid corruption probe

    Yurii Shchyhol, the head of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine (SSSCIP), and Victor Zhora, his deputy, were fired, the cabinet official Taras Melnychuk wrote on Telegram. Dmytro Makovskyi, the first deputy to Shchyhol, was installed as interim head of the agency.

  • El País ☛ From fascination to fear of a hidden agenda: The year of ChatGPT will define the battle for the future of humanity

    It’s a cycle, the researcher explains, that we’ve seen before, whether with the emergence of the [Internet] or mobile phones. And now comes generative AI, which is capable of creating texts and images. “It takes time to discover the best uses and how to develop them. It doesn’t happen overnight,” the researcher cautions. She wrote a guiding document for the AI Safety Summit that was held at the Bletchley Park estate, in the United Kingdom. From that summit — organized by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — a declaration was released on November 1, in which thirty nations (such as the U.S., the U.K. and China) demand security and transparency from the AI sector.

  • TruthOut ☛ AOC, 20 NY Lawmakers Demand Columbia Reinstate Pro-Palestine Student Groups

  • The Nation ☛ Humanitarian Pause?

  • The Nation ☛ It’s Time for American Healthcare Workers to Stand in Solidarity With Gaza

    It has been over a month since Hamas attacked southern Israel and the ensuing Israeli assault on Gaza began. The consequences for civilians have been disastrous—1,200 people killed in Israel on October 7 and, in the month since, nearly 10 times as many, 11,000 Palestinians, killed in Gaza, most of them women, children, or elderly. This number is likely an undercount, especially since the Palestinian Ministry of Health has had trouble getting accurate casualty counts. Last month, I wrote a piece for The Nation warning that a public health catastrophe was unfolding in Gaza, one that would put as many as 2 million people at risk of death, disease, and starvation due to Israel’s withholding of food, fuel, and water and the IDF’s attacks on medical facilities. Since then, the situation has only become more dire.

  • TruthOut ☛ Disarmament Grows More Distant as US Plans Another “Upgrade” to Nuclear Bomb

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ In unannounced visit, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arrives in Ukraine for ‘high-level’ talks — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Top officials from Ukraine’s Special Communications Service dismissed, charged with embezzlement — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russian aviation authority proposes regular flights to North Korea — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Status update: Russia moves to integrate scattered volunteer units into army reserve and mercenary structures — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Zelensky says Kremlin planning to oust him by end of year in ‘Maidan 3’ plot — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ A deported teen finds his way home: Earlier this month, the Russian army sent him an enlistment summons. Now Bogdan Ermokhin is back in Ukraine and with family. — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Pro Publica ☛ Nonprofit Explorer Gets Email Alerts and Other Major Improvements

    For the past decade, ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer has published financial details of every tax-exempt organization in the United States that files annual reports with the Internal Revenue Service. And until this year, the site looked about its age.

    While we regularly update our database with new documents, we’ve only occasionally added new features (like a full-text filing search and an employee search) or updated its looks or back-end code. This year, however, we dedicated a team to take our favorite news app and give it some much-needed love, as well as new bells and whistles. Most exciting of all, we now have email alerts to let you know when we publish new documents for an organization you’re interested in. You tell us which nonprofits you want notifications for, and we’ll do the rest.

  • Techdirt ☛ NY Federal Court: There’s A Right To Record Police Officers And State Law Says That Includes Inside Station Lobbies

    The NYPD has plenty of problems with accountability and transparency. The main problem is this: the public wants some of this and the NYPD wants none of this. So, it does stupid things repeatedly that do little more than remind the public it’s not to be trusted.

• Environment

  • NPR ☛ This is how far behind the world is on controlling planet-warming pollution

    The hottest year on record is coming to a close, emissions of planet-warming gasses are still rising globally and the most ambitious climate goal set by world leaders is all but impossible to meet, according to a new analysis by the United Nations.

    The annual report from the U.N. Environment Program lays out how far behind the world is on controlling planet-warming pollution, most of which comes from burning oil, gas and coal.

    [...]

    If such conditions aren't met, the planet is headed for more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, the analysis finds.

  • NL Times ☛ Tiger mosquito throughout the Netherlands, except Friesland and Groningen

    The tiger mosquito was found this summer in nearly all parts of the Netherlands, with the exception of Friesland and Groningen. The mosquitoes first appeared in Zeeland, specifically in the municipalities of Middelburg and Veere. Authorities in 35 different municipalities have tried to combat the mosquitoes, according to figures from the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA).

    Those figures were published Monday on the website of invasive species monitor Stop Invasieve Exoten. The tiger mosquito, which originated in Asia, can transmit all kinds of viral diseases, such as dengue fever and Zika. The mosquito is smaller than the mosquitoes native to the Netherlands, and can be recognized by a white stripe on the back and white hind legs

  • Omicron Limited ☛ New psychology study unearths ways to bolster global climate awareness and climate action

    The web-based tool, and the methods undergirding its creation, are described in a newly posted paper, "Addressing Climate Change with Behavioral Science: A Global Intervention Tournament in 63 Countries," on the preprint server PsyArXiv.

    The tool stems from a study involving nearly 250 researchers that drew more than 59,000 participants from 63 countries, including Algeria, China, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Peru, and the United States.

  • TruthOut ☛ Richest 1 Percent Produced as Many Emissions as Poorest Two-Thirds of Humanity

  • TruthOut ☛ In First-of-Its-Kind Lawsuit, New York Targets PepsiCo’s Plastic Pollution

  • TruthOut ☛ Friday’s Global Temperature Breach Is a Canary in the Coal Mine, Scientists Say

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ NASA's X-59 'quiet' supersonic jet now closer to being the real thing

      NASA's X-59 plane, which promises to bring back the days of supersonic flight, is now closer to being the real thing after its makers, Lockheed Martin, moved the aircraft to a paint barn at its facility in Palmdale, California, U.S., according to a blog post by the space agency.

    • NASA ☛ NASA’s X-59 Goes from Green to Red, White, and Blue

      The X-59 is the prototype aircraft to demonstrate NASA's Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST). Measuring 94 feet (29 meters) in length and with a wingspan of nearly 30 feet (nine meters), the X-59 is designed to demonstrate that sonic booms can be dampened from loud bangs to milder thumps.

      At first sight, the aircraft resembles the Concorde aircraft, thanks to the pointed nose cone that obstructs the pilot's vision. Nevertheless, the aircraft's perceived level decibels (PLdB) are being targeted at 75 dB, which would be louder than a regular conversation but lesser than the roar of a motorcycle engine.

    • YLE ☛ Electricity spot prices to get a jolt on Tuesday

      Tuesday's spot prices will shoot up to 68.20 cents per Kwh at 7am and then hit a peak of 96.37 cents at 4pm. Changing hourly, a day's spot prices are set according to electricity market prices one day in advance.

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Electricity prices to reach €777 per MWh on Tuesday

      Tuesday's exchange price in the Estonian, Finnish, Latvian and Lithuanian price zones will remain stable, with an average of €287.87 per MWh for the day.

      During the night, the electricity price will be just under €100 per megawatt-hour before rising to €550 per megawatt-hour from 7 a.m. on Tuesday. After that, the price will hover at around €400 per MWh, peaking at €777.18 per MWh between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.

  • Overpopulation

    • Kansas Reflector ☛ Governor’s new adviser on Kansas water crisis working to influence policy talks

      Water — both its availability and quality — are pressing concerns for Kansas. The Ogallala Aquifer, the primary source of water for western Kansas, is running out. A months-long drought has pushed farmers and communities to the brink. Kelly has repeatedly stressed the importance of stabilizing Kansas’ water supply for future generations.

• Finance

  • TruthOut ☛ NYC Budget Cuts Forces Public Libraries to Close on Sundays, Reduce Services

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • TruthOut ☛ Far Right Trump Admirer Javier Milei Wins Argentina’s Presidential Runoff

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Falsely Claims DOJ Is Corrupt for Charging Him But Not Biden in Docs Cases

  • TruthOut ☛ Federal Court Guts Enforcement of Voting Rights Act in “Catastrophic” Ruling

  • TruthOut ☛ Mike Johnson Once Said Only God Gives Authority for Presidents to Take Office

  • Futurism ☛ AI and Military Leaders Gathered for Mysterious Event in Utah

    As Bloomberg reports, the AI Security Summit — not to be confused with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's AI Safety Summit earlier in November — was hosted by the startup Scale AI, a contractor that offers data security to everyone from OpenAI to the US Army.

    At the rented-out luxury hotel located somewhere near-ish to Park City, Utah, the summit's assembled AI and military insiders were given the chance to speak candidly — no direct attribution was allowed from attendees or press — about issues facing the industry, even as President Joe Biden and China's President Xi Jinping held their own tête-à-tête 800 miles away in San Francisco to discuss, among other things, regulations on AI.

  • Patrick Breyer ☛ Child Protection Day: Mass surveillance prevents finding real solutions

    On the European Day on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse (#EndChildSexAbuseDay) on 18 November 2023, civil rights activist and MEP Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party, Greens/EFA) calls for a rational debate on effective child protection rather than embracing mass surveillance solutionism: [...]

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • EFF ☛ Protecting Kids on Social Media Act: Amended and Still Problematic

    As we wrote in August, the original bill (S. 1291) contained a host of problems. A recent draft of the amended bill gets rid of some of the most flagrantly unconstitutional provisions: It no longer expressly mandates that social media companies verify the ages of all account holders, including adults. Nor does it mandate that social media companies obtain parent or guardian consent before teens may use social media. 

    However, the amended bill is still rife with issues.   

    The biggest is that it prohibits children under 13 from using any ad-based social media. Though many social media platforms do require users to be over 13 to join (primarily to avoid liability under COPPA), some platforms designed for young people do not.  Most platforms designed for young people are not ad-based, but there is no reason that young people should be barred entirely from a thoughtful, cautious platform that is designed for children, but which also relies on contextual ads. Were this bill made law, ad-based platforms may switch to a fee-based model, limiting access only to young people who can afford the fee. Banning children under 13 from having social media accounts is a massive overreach that takes authority away from parents and infringes on the First Amendment rights of minors.  

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian Activist Gets Back Passport, Phone Upon Arrival From Germany

    Iranian activist Parastoo Forouhar has confirmed to RFE/RL the return of her passport and electronic devices, which were confiscated when she arrived at Tehran airport from Germany last week for a trip to commemorate the anniversary of the death of her parents, who were both vocal critics of Iran's religious leadership.

  • Techdirt ☛ ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Elon Musk Promises To Sue Media Matters To Silence Their Speech

    The fakest “free speech absolutist” who ever lived is at it again. As you may recall, earlier this year, Elon Musk sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claiming that its report documenting an alleged “surge of hateful content” on exTwitter somehow violated contracts (after first threatening to sue for defamation, but not actually suing for defamation).

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Craig Murray ☛ The Supreme Court, Rwanda and Assange

    The judgment of the Supreme Court on the illegality of deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda was given massive publicity in connection with the sacking of Suella Braverman, but in fact it is a decision of much wider significance. It also has great relevance to the coming High Court hearing on Julian Assange, both in terms of the arguments, some of which are common to both cases, and the stance of the judges, some of whom are also common to both cases.

  • RFERL ☛ 'I Won't Be Silenced': Turkmen Journalist Defiant After Being Strip-Searched, Stopped From Flying To Europe

    Achilova said she was strip-searched and humiliated at Ashgabat International Airport, where officials didn't allow the 74-year-old journalist or her daughter to board a plane on November 17 despite having valid passports, visas, and tickets.

  • HRW ☛ Three Questions on Saudi Sportswashing, Daily Brief, 2 November, 2023.

    Recall, too, the slaughter and dismemberment of critical journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate.

    Saudi Arabia’s human rights record is so egregious, I really don’t think a sports tournament is going to make the world forget about it. You’re reading this, after all.

  • [Old] HRW ☛ The World Lets Saudi Arabia Get Away with Murder

    Inside the consulate, Saudi agents murdered Khashoggi and then hacked his body to pieces.

    It was hardly a rogue operation or a misstep by “bad apple” agents. A UN investigation in 2019 highlighted “significant government coordination, resources and finances” behind the killing. In 2021, US intelligence concluded Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had approved the operation. However, no high-level Saudi official has ever been held accountable.

    It would be horrific enough if this were the only outrage perpetrated by Saudi Arabia, but it’s one of countless others at home and abroad.

  • Meduza ☛ Google Discover reportedly ditches two Russian propaganda outlets, but others remain — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ Russian Internal Affairs Ministry says no legal violations found in RT executive’s suggestion that Russia detonate nuclear bomb ‘somewhere over Siberia’ — Meduza

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Techdirt ☛ If You Kill Two People In A Car Crash, You Shouldn’t Then Sue Their Relatives For Emailing Your University About What You Did

    Holy shit.

  • Locus Magazine ☛ Ness Brown Guest Post

    Today, 56% of humans live in cities. Only 20% experience skies dark enough to see the stars undimmed by manmade light, with light pollution growing at a minimum of 2% each year—faster than the global population. This affects nearly all species on the planet from breeding sea turtles to blooming flowers to migrating birds; there is evidence that it affects human health. By the end of the decade, thousands more satellites will intrude on our remaining dark skies and could outnumber visible stars by a few tens to one.

    This isn’t just a problem for astronomers. This is a problem for every human denied a birthright central to much of our artistic traditions.

  • RFA ☛ Former Tibetan political prisoner wins international democracy award

    Golog Jigme is both a human rights activist and filmmaker. In 2008, he co-produced the documentary “Leaving Fear Behind,” which highlighted the injustices faced by Tibetans under Chinese rule.

    Golog Jigme and his co-producer Dhondup Wangchen were both imprisoned and tortured by Chinese authorities shortly after the film’s release. He was arrested three times between 2008 and 2012 before finally escaping Tibet in 2014.

  • The Hill ☛ Saudi Arabia wants the Indian Premier League: Why is there no discussion of ‘sportswashing’?

    The rather quiet response from western politicians is telling of several things as they relate to Saudi Arabia on the global stage.

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian Mother's 13-Year Sentence For Protesting Son's Death During Unrest Confirmed

    An Iranian appeals court has upheld a 13-year prison sentence handed to Mahsa Yazdani, the mother of a young man killed during the last year's nationwide unrest, after being convicted on charges including "propaganda against the system" and "insulting the leader" for comments she made on social media over the killing of her son by government forces.

  • RFA ☛ Three imprisoned Vietnamese activists given human rights awards

    The three recipients are Tran Van Bang, born in 1961, Y Wo Nie, born in 1970, and independent journalist Le Trong Hung, born in 1979, according to Saturday’s announcement.

  • El País ☛ WeWork: How the party ended at the company that was going to revolutionize the office

    WeWork’s business plan was all wrong. It banked on the exponential growth of a tech company when it was in fact made from brick and mortar. But we’re not talking about a fraud on the scale of cryptocurrency platform FTX, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried is facing a 110-year sentence, or blood testing company Theranos, whose creator Elizabeth Holmes is serving nine years and seven months in a prison in Bryan, Texas. “As disruptive as it may have seemed, WeWork is a traditional company, a plain old office rental firm. It doesn’t become tech just because it is linked to an app,” says entrepreneur Luis Cabiedes. “It’s the same as a company that delivers pizza. And the money [that flooded in] turned out not to be enough to create a competitive advantage. It doesn’t matter if you keep adding and adding capital.”

  • The Nation ☛ Abortion Wins Elections for Democrats. What Should Advocates Demand in Return?

    If abortion were a 2024 presidential candidate, it would wipe the floor with Donald Trump. On November 7, abortion helped Democrats take back the Virginia House, keep the Kentucky governorship, and secure a Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat. In Ohio, 57 percent of voters approved enshrining abortion access in the state Constitution; it was the seventh time abortion has faced a direct vote since Dobbs and the seventh time it’s won.

  • Techdirt ☛ The Man Decides He Doesn’t Like Being Hassled, Issues Tickets To Reporter For ‘Hampering’ City Employees With His Questions

    Some city officials in Illinois are now engaged in a round of “How Can I Get Sued?” Sounds like fun, but Calumet City officials might do well to remember the only way to win is not to play.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Hackaday ☛ A Camera That Signs Off Your Pictures

    We’ll admit we’ve kicked around the idea of a camera that digitally signs a picture so you could prove it hasn’t been altered and things like the time and place the photo was taken for years. Apparently, products are starting to hit the market, and Spectrum reports on a Leica that, though it will set you back nearly $10,000, can produce pictures with cryptographic signatures.

  • Techdirt ☛ Canada Inches Closer To ‘Right To Repair’ Reform

    Right to repair reform continues to have a moment here in the U.S., with four states (California, Minnesota, New York, and recently Maine) having passed state level protections. The goal: to fight repair monopolies and make it easier and more affordable to repair the technology you own, whether it’s your car, game console, cell phone, CPAP machine, or tractor.

• Monopolies

  • The Register UK ☛ Europe says Adobe's $20B buy of Figma will kill competition

    Updated The European Commission says Adobe's proposed $20 billion purchase of web-first design collaboration startup Figma will harm competition in the region unless the pair devise remedies to resolve this.

    The transaction would represent the most expensive sale of a privately owned software company in history, and was flagged as a concern by 16 member states of the European Union in February, such is the lack of credible alternatives to Adobe on the market.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ ‘Fake open platform’: Epic Games takes aim at Android

    Sweeney, who founded the company that makes the blockbuster Fortnite, took the witness stand on Monday in San Francisco federal court to reinforce his claims that Google Play policies are unlawful and allow Google to maintain a monopoly in the Android mobile-app distribution market.

    The court fight started in 2020 when Epic marketed Fortnite on Android and side-stepped the Google Play billing system and the 30% revenue cut it was taking from app developers.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Star Trek Fan Blog Triggers New Entry in Automattic's DMCA "Hall of Shame"

      For Star Trek fans, 'La Sirena' refers to the Kaplan F17 Speed Freighter that was prominently featured in the 'Picard' series. For people more interested in adult content, 'La Sirena' (69) is associated with a Venezuelan actress. The differences are clear but takedown company DMCA Piracy Prevention has trouble distinguishing between the two, which motivated Tumblr's parent company Automattic to add the outfit to its DMCA "Hall of Shame".

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Hollywood to UK Govt: Investigating Pirates "Increasingly Difficult"

      The UK government's Culture, Media and Sport Committee is conducting an inquiry into the challenges faced by the film and high-end television industry. Submissions by the Motion Picture Association and member studios praise the UK for its "gold standard" IP framework but then complain that it's becoming “increasingly difficult” to identify pirates using services in the UK.

    • Techdirt ☛ How The DMCA Is Being Weaponized Against E-Commerce Sites

      By contrast, recipients of takedown notices are often small businesses, or ordinary members of the public. They are unlikely to have any legal training yet must respond to a formal legal notification if they wish to send a counter-notice. The latter must include a statement ‘under penalty of perjury’ that the material was taken down by mistake. Many will quail at the thought that they risk being convicted of perjury, and this stands in stark contrast to the mere ‘good faith belief’ required from the sender of a takedown request. Consequently, most people will simply accept that their material is removed, even if it was legal, for instance under fair use.

      Takedown notices can be abused for purposes that have nothing to do with copyright. For example, they are a handy way to censor perfectly legitimate online material. The practice has become so common that an entire industry sector – reputation management – has evolved to take advantage of this trick. Online reputation management companies often use takedown notices as a way of intimidating sites in order to persuade them to remove material that is inconvenient for their clients.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Universal Music, Concord, and ABKCO Demand Preliminary Injunction in AI Infringement Suit: ‘Publishers Face Irreparable Harm if Anthropic’s Copying Is Not Enjoined’

      Additionally, the publishers are pushing for an order “precluding Anthropic from creating or using unauthorized copies of…lyrics to train future AI models.” Expanding upon the arguments in a memorandum, the entities behind the complaint reiterated particular instances of alleged infringement within Claude-generated answers and refuted the aforesaid fair-use argument.

      Moreover, the same alleged infringement “irreparably harms” the plaintiffs as well as their songwriters “by denying them control over their” works, failing to credit them in relevant Claude outputs, “associating their names with unauthorized derivatives” such as combined lyrics, and harming their professional relationships with properly licensed companies, according to the text.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ABDIURP Wordo: KHAKI

• Technology and Free Software

  • New phone...

    I’m pretty outspoken about wanting to avoid new electronics when I can. I’ve been using a phone that’s probably seven or eight years old at this point, and while it’s slow and buggy and lacks many of the newest bells and whistles, it still does what it needs to do.

    But. My phone plan is paid for by my father-in-law, who does *not* share my values, and he *insisted* on getting everyone new phones. Like, out of his own pocket. So... now I have a phone that’s less than a year old. Running the *current* version of Android. And it’s like night and day. It’s fast! It can run so many more things! And it just makes me *sad* that we as a people have somehow decided that we can’t just keep upgrading older electronics, because a lot of the limitations my old phone had were a result of it being stuck on Android 7. (My older-er phone, the MyTouch Q, is still on Android 2.4-something, and I don’t know if it would even physically be possible to upgrade it to Android 14, but damn it, I should at least be allowed to *try*.)

  • These Last Few Months

    In the last month, I have been in one of those periods of time when I'm not very communicative online or posting at all. Usually, this is because I shut down when I'm focusing on something that is driving my anxiety and the only way I know to handle it is to fixate until it gets resolved.

  • Luck in Technology

    Luck is a thing: one person will have no complaints about NFS, while others too many. Some of this might be lack of experience. Maybe the positive on NFS person has always used that one storage device that has always worked with their devices. Others have not been so lucky, and will actively work to remove NFS before it becomes a grand source of uncompensated overtime hours. Assuming you can get NFS working, especially across different operating systems or maybe there's a cheap network switch with an "improve network security" setting that breaks NFS. Given my experiences, I assume anyone with a positive view of NFS is lucky.