Links 28/11/2023: New Zealand's Big Tobacco Pivot and Google Mass-Deleting Accounts
Contents
- Leftovers
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
- Monopolies
- Gemini* and Gopher
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Leftovers
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India Times ☛ Cyber Monday marks the year's biggest online shopping day in the US
Even though e-commerce is now part and parcel of our everyday lives and much of the holiday shopping season, Cyber Monday -- a term coined back in 2005 by the National Retail Federation -- continues to be the biggest online shopping day of the year, thanks to the deals and the hype the industry has created to fuel it.
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Education
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Pete Warden ☛ Stanford CS PhD Course Choices for Winter 2024
This will be a *very* niche post, but since there are around 100 other second year Stanford CS PhD students facing the same search problem, I thought I’d post my notes here in case they’ll be helpful. I make no guarantees about the accuracy of these results, I may well have fat-fingered some search terms, but let me know if you spot a mistake. I’ve indexed all 2xx and 3xx level courses in the first three breadth sections (since I already had the fourth covered), and I didn’t check 1xx because they tend to be more foundational. For what it’s worth, I’m most excited about CS 224N – Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning, and hope I can get signed up once enrollment opens.
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Hardware
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The Register UK ☛ Server shipments to fall 20% this year, but AI means vendors still raking it in
Server unit shipments for 2023 could crash by up to 20 percent on last year, despite revenue growing. The cause is hyper heterogeneous computing which is driving up the silicon content of systems, according to Omdia.
Datacenters are being reshaped by the demands of AI, as The Register has reported previously. This shift has led to a call for fewer but more highly configured and costlier systems, hence revenue continuing to rise.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ No single solution to stop student suicide, Hong Kong’s John Lee says, but ‘character building’ may help
A recent rise in student suicides in Hong Kong has no universal remedy and and a collective societal effort is required to protect youth mental health, Chief Executive John Lee has said. However, he added that some students had “a tendency of not seeking help” and causing themselves harm.
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France24 ☛ Incoming New Zealand govt to abandon anti-smoking laws
New Zealand's incoming conservative government will jettison world-leading measures to stub out smoking, new Prime Minister Christopher Luxon confirmed Monday, in a move described by health campaigners as a "huge win for the tobacco industry".
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EuroNews ☛ 'Win for tobacco': New Zealand to abandon first of its kind smoking ban as new government sworn in
New Zealand's new government plans to repeal restrictions approved last year, a unique initiative that sought to stop the next generation smoking.
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BBC ☛ New Zealand smoking ban: Health experts criticise new government's shock reversal
Health experts have strongly criticised the sudden reversal.
"We are appalled and disgusted... this is an incredibly retrograde step on world-leading, absolutely excellent health measures," said Prof Richard Edwards, a tobacco control researcher and public health expert at the University of Otago.
"Most health groups in New Zealand are appalled by what the government's done and are calling on them to backtrack," he told the BBC.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ New Zealand's new PM to scrap 'generational smoking ban'
The chopped amendments include the generational ban, nicotine level curbs and the reduction in sales outlets.
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YLE ☛ Air purifier use at daycare centres cut kids' sick days by a third, study's early findings say
The initial results from the first year of research are promising, according to researcher Enni Sanmark, from HUS Helsinki University Hospital.
"Children were clearly less sick in daycare centres where air purification devices were used — down by around 30 percent," Sanmark explained.
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The BMJ publishes another biased “investigation” that promotes antivax narratives
Thanksgiving—as well as the break I took over the four day weekend—is over. So I’ll start this post by noting, as I did the last time I wrote about this topic in a major way, that The British Medical Journal (now The BMJ) is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world that also has a history of publishing some excellent investigative journalism. For instance, well over a decade ago, it was The BMJ that published investigative journalist Brian Deer’s reports recounting the strong evidence indicating that Andrew Wakefield’s case series published in The Lancet in 1998 that linked the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism had been based on fraud. As most of our readers know, Wakefield’s study launched the modern iteration of the antivaccine movement and is, as I like to say, the study that launched a thousand quackeries directed at autistic children to “cure” them of their “vaccine-induced autism.” The headline of Deer’s accompanying commentary after his account of how the “case against the MMR was fixed” even referred to Wakefield’s study as “Piltdown medicine“, after the infamous Piltdown Man fraud.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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El País ☛ Google will start deleting ‘inactive’ accounts in December. Here’s what you need to know
If you have an account that’s deemed “inactive” and at risk for deletion, you should receive notices from Google sent to the email affiliated with that account and its recovery address (if one exits). But if you’re still catching up on this new policy — and want to ensure that your content on Google Drive, Docs, Gmail and more is saved — here’s what you need to know.
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Defence/Aggression
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RFERL ☛ Pakistani Army Claims Suicide Attack A Day Earlier Carried Out By Afghan National
Pakistan's military said on November 27 that an Afghan national carried out a suicide attack a day earlier on a security forces convoy that killed two civilians and injured several others.
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New York Times ☛ U.S. Navy Rescues Central Park From Pirate Attack in Gulf of Aden
The United States says the episode is unrelated to regional tensions, though it is still investigating the firing of two missiles at the Navy ship involved in the rescue.
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NYPost ☛ Pro-Israel teacher hides in Queens high school as ‘radicalized’ students riot: ‘They want her fired’
“The teacher was seen holding a sign of Israel, like supporting it,” a senior told The Post this week.
“A bunch of kids decided to make a group chat, expose her, talk about it, and then talk about starting a riot.”
Hundreds of kids flooded into hallways and ran amok, chanting, jumping, shouting, and waving Palestinian flags or banners.
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The Age AU ☛ Teens face trial accused of aiding beheading of teacher Samuel Paty
Six teenagers have gone on trial in Paris over accusations they were connected to the killing of Samuel Paty, a history teacher whose beheading by an Islamic extremist in 2020 inflicted lasting trauma on France.
Most of the defendants, former middle-school students at the school where Paty taught, are accused of helping the killer identify and track the teacher, although they are not believed to have known that he intended to kill.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ How asylum-seekers [sic] pay to cross Russian-Finnish border
It's relatively easy to find information online about how to enter Finland from Russia without valid papers. For example, a search of the encrypted messaging service Telegram turned up several Arabic-language chats with users sharing their experiences.
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Greece ☛ Recep Tayyip Erdogan preparing for a lifetime in power
Experienced analysts remind us that many of Erdogan’s revisionist policies regarding Greece and the “Blue Homeland” theory, the Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and the decision to acquire the S-400 missile system became prominently emphasized following his alliance with Devlet Bahceli’s nationalist MHP party and his election to the presidency in 2018 with the backing of nationalists. Bahceli has also expressed the perspective of Turkey potentially leaving NATO in numerous speeches.
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Defence Web ☛ Democracy builds resilience against organised crime – GITOC
Resilience against organised crime is created by democracy and its institutions, whilst armed conflict feeds greater levels of criminality in Africa, the newly-released ENACT Organised Crime Index report for Africa has found.
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France24 ☛ Sierra Leone authorities searching for attackers who targeted military barracks, prison
Sierra Leone's president said most of the leaders of weekend attacks on the nation’s main military barracks and prisons had been arrested, though the capital remained tense on Monday with many streets empty after a 24-hour curfew was relaxed to a dusk-to-dawn lockdown.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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NL Times ☛ Digital records of 400,000 Dutch people forced to work for Nazi Germany to be unveil
The Dutch National Archive will release information on Wednesday about over 400,000 Dutch citizens who were forced to work in Germany during the Second World War. The collection, established by the Dutch Red Cross after the war, was digitized with the help of volunteers over approximately one and a half years. It will be searchable by name and include details on employers, places of residence, marriages, and grave locations, all accessible online.
The collection will be available on the Dutch National Archives website from Wednesday, featuring profiles of 400,000 Dutch individuals who were working in Germany. Due to privacy laws, only information about deceased individuals can be accessed.
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Environment
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Hanno Boeck ☛ A Newsletter about Climate Change and Industrial Decarbonization
Noticing that my old blog still gets considerable traffic and has a substantial number of people accessing its feeds, I thought I should announce a project I recently started.
When discussing climate change and solutions, we often consider actions like replacing coal power plants with clean energy sources. But while these are important, they are the easy part. There is a whole range of emission sources that are much harder to avoid.
Over a decade ago, I covered climate change for a German online publication. Due to the carbon capture and storage debate, I learned that some industrial processes have emissions that cannot be easily avoided. The largest and most well-known examples are steelmaking, where coal chemically reduces iron oxide to iron, and cement production, which uses carbon-containing minerals as an input material.
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Finance
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La Quadature Du Net ☛ Scoring of welfare beneficiaries: the indecency of CAF's algorithm now undeniable
After more than a year of mobilization against the CAF’s – the family branch of the french welfare system – practices of scoring welfare beneficiaries alongside the Stop Contrôles and Changer de Cap collectives1You can contact them at stop.controles@protonmail.com and contact@changerdecap.net., and after having detailed how the CAF’s algorithm works and its political framework, we are today publishing the source code of this scoring algorithm. We also invite you to consult here our presentation page on the use of similar algorithms within other administrations.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Omicron Limited ☛ Study finds your profile picture plays a significant role in whether you get hired
"We analyzed six months of data from Freelancer.com and found that, above and beyond demographics and beauty, there is a strong correlation between simply looking the part and perceived job performance," said the researchers. "As part of our research, we analyzed 63,014 'completed' jobs that were posted online, which collectively received just over 2 million applications from 160,014 freelancers. The data was collected between January and June 2018."
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BW Businessworld Media Pvt Ltd ☛ TikTok Parent ByteDance To Lay off Hundreds Of Employees In Gaming Subsidiary
TikTok owner ByteDance is set to lay off hundreds of employees in its gaming unit, Nuverse, a decision attributed to robust and growing competition in the video gaming sector, according to a Reuters media report.
Nuverse, a video game producer, is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.
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Quartz ☛ Meta's spokesperson is a wanted man in Russia
The reason Stone was added to the list wasn’t explicitly stated in the TASS story, which cited data from the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. The authorities only said that he’s “wanted under an article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.”
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Kansas Reflector ☛ How U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson helped derail a fight against election lies
Moments later, Mayorkas testified that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a unit of DHS whose activities were part of the case, focuses on fighting disinformation from foreign adversaries — speech that would likely enjoy fewer First Amendment protections than speech by Americans.
But Johnson was ready.
“No, sir,” Johnson said. “The court determined you and all of your cohorts made no distinction between domestic speech and foreign speech. So don’t stand there under oath and tell me that you only focused on … foreign actors. That’s not true.”
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Gizmodo ☛ Sports Illustrated Allegedly Dupes Readers With Fake AI-Created Writers
The parent company that owns the storied and once-lauded magazine Sports Illustrated has been shoveling more AI slop into its readers’ eyeballs. Instead of telling its audience the garbled, nonsensical AI-created content was crafted by a chatbot, the company has tried to smuggle the fake content to readers with bogus writers sporting AI-generated headshots.
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The Register UK ☛ X/Twitter booted out of Australia's disinformation-fighting club
As the group explained in an open letter to X, "recent changes to your user-reporting systems may have left Australian users unable to report electoral misinformation weeks away from a referendum." Reset.Tech described the inability to report such material as "extremely concerning" given the referendum was near.
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Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Is Suddenly Expanding Into Long-Form Video
After turning the social control media world on its head and flocking users toward short-form video, Fentanylware (TikTok) is now aggressively expanding into its competitors’ space with long-form video.
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Techdirt ☛ Republicans Want To Block Broadband Funding To Schools That Refuse To Implement Easily Bypassed TikTok Bans [Ed: Techdirt still abetting and batting for Pooh-tin, failing to grasp the real severity of this problem]
We’ve noted how the GOP’s obsession with TikTok is… weird and superficial. Guys like Ted Cruz or Brendan Carr will suffer absolute embolisms about TikTok (and TikTok only) to get on cable news where they’ll be portrayed as good faith privacy reformers. While simultaneously refusing to pass a privacy law or regulate dodgy data brokers (who routinely sell consumer data to everyone, including Chinese intelligence).
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Craig Murray ☛ Banned Books
At Saturday’s great march in support of Palestine in London, police arrested members of the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist-Leninist (CPGBML) for having a pamphlet on sale on their stall.
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Reason ☛ USC Professor Put on Remote Teaching After Saying Hamas Should Be Killed
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) (Jessie Appleby) wrote about this last week (as did the Academic Freedom Alliance): [...]
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The Fire ☛ University of Southern California relegates professor to remote teaching for expressing anti-Hamas sentiments
The University of Southern California has barred economics professor John Strauss from teaching on campus for the rest of the semester in response to anti-Hamas remarks he made to pro-Palestinian protesters last week. Strauss will finish out the semester teaching courses on Zoom.
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Scheerpost ☛ Musk’s Lawsuit Is About Destroying Free Speech
The point of this lawsuit is to intimidate anyone who speaks out against antisemitism, white supremacy and other forms of bigotry.
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New Yorker ☛ When Your Own Book Gets Caught Up in the Censorship Wars
In May, 2021, Tennessee became one of the first states in the country to impose legal limits on class discussions about racism and white privilege. The law, passed by the Republican-dominated legislature, prohibits schools from teaching fourteen concepts, including that any individual is “inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously” and that “this state or the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist.” Our book examines the lingering effects of racist policies after Emancipation, in the housing system, the health-care system, the criminal-justice system, and others. It also traces the country’s measured progress toward a more just society, and the enduring patriotism of some of America’s most subjugated citizens—though not enough, it seemed, to avoid getting ensnared in the culture wars.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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International Business Times ☛ UK Government To Intervene In the Telegraph Takeover Deal As Tories Worry About the Newspaper's Operations
The Telegraph Media Group which owns the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph is up for sale to an Abu Dhabi-backed investment fund and the UK government is likely to intervene as it is worried about the newspaper's operations.
The UAE-backed fund, RedBird IMI, could influence the operations of The Daily Telegraph newspaper, making it not an effective source of impartial reporting.
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Press Gazette ☛ Condé Nast Britain’s chief business officer joins Google
Kingori will start work next year as Google’s managing director of tech, media and telecoms (TMT) for the UK, reporting to Debbie Weinstein, the vice president and managing director of Google UK and Ireland.
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CPJ ☛ ‘I’ll be killed if they find me’: Radio reporter Maxo Dorvil flees Haiti amid gang violence
Haitian radio journalist Maxo Dorvil fled the country on November 7, 2023, after reporting that he was shot at twice in less than two weeks near his home on the outskirts of the capital Port-au-Prince.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Shadowproof ☛ In Washington State, Prison Closure Divides Abolitionist Community
This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.
I board the transport in an orange jumpsuit, shackled and cuffed at the waist, one of many prisoners in exodus from the Washington State Reformatory.
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India Times ☛ Amazon agrees deal with most Spanish workers over Cyber Monday walkout
Amazon reached an agreement with most of its workers in Spain on Monday, avoiding the full impact of a planned one-hour strike per shift on one of the busiest online shopping days of the year, according to local union group CCOO and the company.
Around 20,000 warehouse and delivery workers at Amazon's Spanish unit had been urged to walk out to demand better pay and working conditions on the so-called Cyber Monday discount day, when retailers aim to boost Christmas gift buying.
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Gizmodo ☛ Sweden Caves to Tesla’s License Plate Demands in Union Fight
Yes, you heard that right. To explain, Sweden’s postal workers recently stopped delivering license plates to Tesla, making it impossible for the car company to supply them to vehicle owners and, as a result, making it quite difficult for the company to fulfill orders in the country. The workers at the post office, PostNord, were doing this as an act of solidarity with a group of Swedish workers who went on strike in October after Tesla refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement. The workers in question, a group of mechanics, are members of the prominent Swedish union IF Metall.
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The Register UK ☛ Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz
Tesla is suing the Swedish government to force it to take action against widespread strikes that have crippled the electric car maker's operations.
Tesla sued the Swedish Transport Agency Monday after employees affiliated with Sweden's public service union, Fackförbundent ST, stopped delivering mail, including license plates, to Tesla, local news sources reported Monday.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Rachel ☛ That time Verisign typo-squatted all of .com and .net
A little over 20 years ago, Verisign did something mighty evil: they effectively typosquatted every single unregistered domain in the .com and .net top-level domains. They could do this because they controlled those from the registry side of things, and it was trivial to slam something that would make it resolve.
Reactions from people like me who had systems to run and spam to block were swift and universally negative due to all of the collateral damage it caused. Here's one situation it created: sometimes you'd have a user who thought they were being clever, and they'd put something like "nospam" in the from address in their e-mail client. Thus, they'd try to send mail as luser@nospam-example.com instead of just @example.com.
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RIPE ☛ Computing Within Limits 2023
My goal in this article is to inform technical communities of the research presented at the LIMITS conference, and to invite those who work at the intersection of sustainable technology and climate justice to join RIPE and the IETF.
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RIPE ☛ Sanctions, Cyber Resilience and Other Hot Topics - Our EU Regulation Update November 2023
For more background on how and why the RIPE NCC follows EU regulation, as well as general trends currently driving EU policymaking, please see the first RIPE Labs article on the topic.
Since our last update in April, we've focused our attention on the following policy priorities: a legal exemption from EU sanctions to ensure the smooth operations and stability of the Internet, the final phase of negotiations on the Cyber Resilience Act, and a likely overhaul of telecoms rules, along with a few other developments along the way.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 186: Andy Kaplan-Myrth on the CRTC’s Last Ditch Attempt to Fix Canada’s Internet Competition Problem
For many years, Canadians have lamented the state of competition for Internet broadband services, pointing to concerns regarding price and lack of choice.
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The Verge ☛ The copyright fight over Fortnite dance moves is back on
The 9th Circuit panel agreed with the lower court that “choreography is composed of various elements that are unprotectable when viewed in isolation.” However, Judge Richard Paez wrote this week that referring to portions of choreography as “poses” was like calling music “just ‘notes.’” They also found that choreography can involve other elements like timing, use of space, and even the energy of the performance.
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Axios ☛ Hall and Oates lawsuit puts spotlight on secretive industry
Why it matters: The growth of streaming music — coupled with the increase in licensing opportunities in TV shows, movies and video games — is increasing the value of holding song rights and making them attractive investments.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Google Bans 'Downloader' Again Following Markscan DMCA Notice
Close to seven years online and after more than 50 million installs, in May 2023 Android app 'Downloader' was removed from Google Play following a baseless copyright complaint. The app was restored three weeks later by which time Downloader had lost almost half its userbase. A few hours ago, Google suspended Downloader again in response to a substantially deficient takedown notice filed by anti-piracy outfit Markscan.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Court: Clownflare is Liable for Pirate Site, But Not as a DNS Provider
The Cologne Higher Regional Court in Germany has confirmed that Clownflare's CDN must stop facilitating access to the (defunct) pirate music site DDL-Music. Failing to do so makes the company liable. The company doesn't have to take any measures on its public DNS resolver, however, since the Court ruled that the service operates in a purely passive, automatic and neutral manner.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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2023 Week 47: Status and Photos
A prominent bug has been discovered and fixed in the chess service on my capsule. The bug caused the main index page to not update correctly, and it prevented old chess matches and invitations from expiring. The matches themselves worked normally in the meantime. The bug has now been fixed.
We had our first snow of the season this weekend, and the first snow since we moved to our current address. Our neighborhood mostly consists of one-story houses with large open fields nearby, not dissimilar to how small towns looked in the mid-twentieth century. I was surprised at how picturesque the snow was, especially in the early morning light--the sight reminded me of a Norman Rockwell painting.
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Technology and Free Software
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Unit testing on an 8-bit CPU
I've been using my assembler [1] to write silly little programs for the Color Computer [2] (simulated [3]—easier than setting up my Color Computer, the first computer I owned as a kid). It took me entirely too long to locate a bug in a maze-drawing program I've been writing, and I want to do a deep dive on this.
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Thai pumpkin soup
Evy's at work, first daughter sings in the living room. "Oh ah no-no had a farm, ee-ah-ee-ah had a farm..."
She narrates "I'm a dinosaur. This is my bag! Cover me, ok? Where did my bag go mama? I think it's in here...I find it! Mama I'm gonna put it on your door ok? I'm going to the grocery store for babats. Oh! I open the bag. I'm very very short. I'm a beautiful kid. This is my stool step. Stool step!"
I bought a thai pumpkin from our friend Ruwen at farmer market. Her first son's first daughter's best friend. We swap kids one or two days a week.
Evy coached me making Thai pumpkin soup. We're sick and tired, which necessitates soup but decreases ability to follow written recipe.
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My wee Microadventures
I am a fan of the author Alastair Humphreys for many years now; he coined the term Microadventures [0], and I love the idea. Since I don't drive and rely on self-powered travel or public transport, I have been doing these every few months. In the last six months, though, I have been more active on this front, spending most weekends on day-long walks or cycles. I take my shortwave radio atop hills to see what I can find or my metal detector to secluded foreshores.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.