Leftovers

• Brandon ☛ RSS from the Past

  The majority of my blog reading in 2016 was retro in nature. I was active retro blogging for many years, with the peak being around 2010-2017. It seems like those still retro blogging are just recycling the same content over and over, or creating content just to stay active and I really feel like there isn't much left to say about the topic. It's weird, I'm almost nostalgic for the heyday of retro blogging. So, I'm nostalgic about writing about a time I was nostalgic for. Yea... that makes my brain hurt.

  Well, this was a fun detour on my way to cleaning up my RSS Feeds, but I just realized that Feedly doesn't seem to have an option (or at least not one easily found) to import my feeds, so all-in-all this was a total waste of my time. :) So, I did what I should have done and just reinstalled NetNewsWire and what do you know, all my feeds were showing up ready to be cleaned up.

• Derek Sivers ☛ walk and talk

  One of my favorite authors invited me to walk 100 kilometers (62 miles) through northern Thailand for seven days, ending in Chiang Mai. Walking with us were ten other smart interesting people, including five other authors whose work I’ve loved for years. It’s a “Walk and Talk”.

• James G ☛ Advent of Technical Writing: Internal Dry Run

  I like this methodology because you get to see how someone who is not involved in a project uses it. Indeed, it is better if a team member runs into an issue with your documentation than it is a customer.

• Science

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Gigantic Wave in Pacific Ocean Was Most Extreme 'Rogue Wave' on Record

    The four-story wall of water was finally confirmed in February 2022 as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded at the time.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Imagining a million versus billion

    Did you know a million seconds is about 12 days, and a (short scale) billion seconds is 31 years!?

  • Chris ☛ Lessons From Evolution

    One of the inspiring things I’ve found in the book is the incredible change of perspective Darwin brought to the scientific community, in multiple ways. Let’s start with the power of selection.

• Education

  • Trail Of Bits ☛ Say hello to the next chapter of the Testing Handbook!

    In this latest addition to the Testing Handbook, we describe how to set up CodeQL locally and create a CodeQL database for your project. We’ll walk you through the process of writing and running custom queries and show you how to unit test and debug them. We’ll also guide you on integrating CodeQL into your existing CI/CD pipeline through GitHub code scanning. Finally, we’ve included a set of references to the official CodeQL documentation and third-party blog posts to help you find relevant, up-to-date information on all things CodeQL. Whether you’re an experienced CodeQL user or just getting started, our Testing Handbook is your entry point for harnessing the full power of CodeQL.

  • Neil Selwyn ☛ Presenting a recursive view of the ‘future school’ (field notes)

    All told, this group presentation exercise highlighted the constraining and homogenising effect of thinking about the future of education through the medium of PowerPoint, Canva, generative AI and web-searches for existing ‘future schools’ content. The use of these online tools to illustrate the students’ initial ideas resulted in the regurgitation of ‘future’ tropes around education. In contrast to the Day 2 activities that we led by butcher’s paper, sticky notes, provocation cards and group discussions, the Day 3 presentations turned out to be a frustratingly restrictive – rather than expansive – exercise.

    This all leads to a rather old-fashioned conclusion … if we want young people to think expansively and differently about the future of schooling in an age of emerging technology, perhaps there is value in encouraging them to stay offline for as long as possible?

  • [Old] Fabian Sanglard ☛ Game Engine Black Book DOOM

    From November 2017 to November 2018, it took one year to complete. Both John Carmack and Dave Taylor kindly wrote forewords. The result is 427 pages, full color, to describe in great detail the PCs of the era (Intel 80486, VESA Local BUS, Dos Extenders, Watcom Compiler, ...), the NeXT hardware (and especially the NeXTStation TurboColor), the engine, and the console ports to the Jaguar, Sega 32X, Super Nintendo, Sony Playstation, 3DO, and Sega Saturn.

• Hardware

  • IT Wire ☛ Australian smartphone shipments down in 3Q for fourth straight quarter

    Australian smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2023 fell by 9.3% year-on-year, the technology analyst firm IDC says, adding that the 1.81 million units shipped marked a fourth consecutive quarter of declines.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • BBC ☛ Imported US sweets with illegal ingredients seized

    She said some of the products can be on the UK market legitimately if they comply with food standards but those found on the raid were "American branded and not destined for the UK".

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Do women go through a second puberty?

    A paper published in 2022 offers some insight into the situation: In a study of over 13,000 participants, researchers set out to track how a person's weight changes over the course of a decade based on age, sex and race.

  • The Scotsman ☛ Trading Standards warning over US sweets with links to cancer made popular on TikTok

    But now, Trading Standards has warned that imported American confectionery such as Jolly Ranchers, Swedish Fish and Mountain Dew have been found in the UK - containing illegal additives with links to hyperactivity and cancer in children.

    The Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI) warned that the products, often known under the term “American Candy”, are growing in popularity in Britain due to social media. They are now widely available on UK high streets in dedicated stores and smaller convenience shops which have started stocking the items.

  • Reason ☛ Texas's Ban on TikTok Use by Government Employees on Government Computers Upheld

    From Coalition for Independent Technology Research v. Abbott, decided today by Judge Robert Pitman (W.D. Tex.): [...]

  • Free Law Project ☛ Coalition for Independent Technology Research v. Abbott [PDF]

    Accordingly, IT IS ORDERED that Defendant Abbott is DISMISSED from the case.

    IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that Defendants’ motion to dismiss, (Dkt. 21), is GRANTED. Plaintiff’s claims are dismissed without prejudice. Plaintiff does not seek leave to amend its complaint. (Resp., Dkt. 29).

    IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that Plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction, (Dkt. 20), is MOOT.

  • Steve Kirsch’s New Zealand “mother of all revelations” about COVID-19 vaccines fizzles

    Earlier this month, tech bro turned rabidest of rabid antivaxxers Steve Kirsch finally gave a talk that he had been hyping for a couple of weeks as the “definitive” evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are not just deadly, but so deadly that, by his estimation, they’ve killed well over 13 million people. He also made a big deal of giving the talk at MIT in the auditorium that had been named after him before he had turned into a raving antivax conspiracy theorist peddling pseudoscience who has become so proud of his status as “misinformation superspreader” that he had a T-shirt made featuring that saying.

  • YLE ☛ Tuesday's papers: Reservists' fitness, green poison and Covid common sense

    Finnish news outlets explore cryptic calls to keep fit, loyalty cards and ask if Covid tests are a must this Christmas.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Number of Covid-19 cases in Malaysia nearly doubles in a week

    72.9% of the variants of concern detected were of the Omicron variant.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Indonesia on high alert as Covid-19 cases rise; thermal scanners installed at Jakarta airport

    There has been a rise in Covid-19 cases in countries, including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.

  • Latvia ☛ Over 500 Covid patients in Latvia's hospitals

    Currently, the infection rate with Covid-19 is high in Latvia, as evidenced by the number of patients in hospitals, said the director of the Department of Risk Analysis and Prevention of the Disease Prevention and Control Center (SPKC), epidemiologist Jurijs Perevoščikovs, in an interview with Latvian Television December 11.

  • Dr. John Campbell Gets COVID-19 4+ Years After It Started

    This new video more or less echoes our experience, first with negative tests and a few uncomfortable things (nothing major).

  • In Latest Week on Record, 12.01% Increase in Deaths Across England and Wales 4 Years After COVID-19 Started

    Having just repeatedly refreshed this page in pursuit of the latest numbers (usually due 9:30AM every Tuesday), I can finally see that in Week 48 the number of recorded deaths in England and Wales is 11,385.

  • In 2023, Across England and Wales, About 55,000 More Deaths Than Before COVID-19

    I‘ve checked the latest numbers released today (12 December 2023) by ONS, which almost every week publishes “[p]rovisional counts of the number of deaths registered in England and Wales, by age, sex and region, in the latest weeks for which data are available. Includes the most up-to-date figures available for deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19).”

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Mondo2000 ☛ The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard

    Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed, the bigger perspective of the “Why” connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another?

    I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to wisdom.

    This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Food for Thought: What Are We Feeding LLMs, and How Will this Impact Humanity?

    On the contrary, Software 2.0, written in abstract languages like neural network weights, is less friendly to humans. This software doesn’t involve human-written code due to its impractically high number of weights (tens to hundreds of billions of numbers in a matrix). Instead, we set goals on desired behavior and give it computational resources to learn towards these goals. We can’t debug the output, and we have very little detailed understanding of how it works. It’s a whole new paradigm in software development that is rapidly escaping beyond narrow, bounded contexts into the broad.

    In other words, we don’t “program” Software 2.0 as we do 1.0. Rather, we “train” it. In 1.0, we explicitly write software, algorithm by algorithm into features and components. The properties and capabilities of the system are exactly those we have “programmed” in. In 2.0, we provide the data and compute, and the model learns on its own, building its own internal structures in ways we don’t yet really understand. The properties and capabilities of 2.0 systems are emergent, much like how properties emerge in complex systems in nature.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Neritam ☛ Israel police uses NSO’s Pegasus to spy on citizens

      Israel police uses NSO’s Pegasus spyware to remotely hack phones of Israeli citizens, control them and extract information from them, Calcalist has revealed. Among those who had their phones broken into by police are mayors, leaders of political protests against former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former governmental employees, and a person close to a senior politician. Calcalist learned that the hacking wasn’t done under court supervision, and police didn’t request a search or bugging warrant to conduct the surveillance. There is also no supervision on the data being collected, the way police use it, and how it distributes it to other investigative agencies, like the Israel Securities Authority and the Tax Authority.

    • Vice Media Group ☛ 'Eyes Everywhere': Congress Is About to Vote to Expand Mass Surveillance of Americans, Experts Warn

      The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Reform and Reauthorization Act would be the “biggest expansion of surveillance inside the United States since the Patriot Act,” which was implemented in the wake of the 9/11 attack to combat terrorism, said Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

• Defence/Aggression

  • New York Times ☛ Judge Upholds Texas TikTok Ban on Government Devices

    In his decision, Judge Robert L. Pitman of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas said he agreed that the ban had prevented public university faculty from using state-provided devices and networks to research and teach about TikTok, but found that it was a “reasonable restriction” in light of Texas’ concerns about data privacy.

  • Axios ☛ Pew: Many teens use social media "almost constantly"

    Most teens use TikTok (63%), Snapchat (60%) and Instagram (59%), but use of Facebook (33%) and Twitter (20%) is declining.

    [...]

    51% of U.S. teenagers spend at least four hours daily on social media, Gallup found, with the heaviest users being older teens and girls.

  • US News And World Report ☛ TikTok to Invest $1.5 Billion in Indonesia's GoTo

    Under the deal, Tokopedia will purchase TikTok Shop assets worth $340 million, while TikTok will buy a 75.01% stake in GoTo's PT Tokopedia via a new share issuance worth $840 million, according to a stock exchange filing by GoTo.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ COP28 Climate Summit President Has ‘Direct Conflict of Interest,’ Al Gore Says

    The former vice president made the comments on CNN’s State of the Union after visiting the COP28 Climate Change Conference and in reaction to remarks made by conference president Sultan al-Jaber, CEO of UAE state oil company ADNOC. al-Jaber said at an event last month that there is “no science” behind the calls for a phase out of fossil fuels to prevent 1.5 degrees Celsius of global temperature increases. al-Jaber has said the comments were “misinterpreted,” but experts told The Guardian that his words are “incredibly concerning” and “verging on climate denial.”

    “Can you explain why on earth a climate conference would be held in a major oil-producing country to begin with?” host Jake Tapper asked Gore.

  • Green Party UK ☛ Green Party reacts to COP28 draft text: 1.5C on life support

    “The absence of a phase out of fossil fuels in the draft text leaves the 1.5C target on life support. Calling on nations to reduce consumption and production of fossil fuels fails to treat climate breakdown as the emergency it is and leaves the planet on course for a hellish future.

    “As for climate inequality, it is clear that lobbyists from the wealthy fossil fuel industry and petrostates have been driving this summit, wielding way too much power and leaving vulnerable nations, women, young people and campaigners on the sidelines.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ COP28 draft deal fails to include fossil fuel 'phaseout'

    The hosts of the COP28 summit in Dubai presented a draft deal on Monday that stopped short of calling for the complete "phaseout" of carbon-emitting fossil fuels — the main drivers of climate change — that many countries have been demanding.

    The draft deal proposed options that would reduce the production and consumption of coal, oil and natural gas.

    At the same time, the writers of the draft put forward by the United Arab Emirates, which holds the COP28 presidency, had removed any mention of a "phaseout" that had been included in a previous draft.

  • Vox ☛ Pledges to slash methane pollution at COP28 are leaving out one big thing

    Negotiators from around the world meeting at the COP28 climate conference in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) last week agreed to put more money behind pledges to cut methane pollution. If met, these commitments would avert a significant amount of warming before the end of the decade. But that’s a big ”if,” especially since countries remain reluctant to tackle the biggest source of methane emissions.

  • BBC ☛ Why Wagner is winning hearts in the Central African Republic

    But according to a report by investigative group The Sentry, in that time Wagner has taken advantage of weak institutions and a weak army to perfect "a blueprint for state capture".

    "We've seen them focus on four pillars: political, economic, information, disinformation and propaganda - and the military," Nathalia Dukhan, a senior investigator at The Sentry who has spent many years reporting on the country, tells the BBC.

  • The Nation ☛ Elon Musk’s Real Threat to Democracy Isn’t What You Think

    Musk is also not a media mogul because of his appeal to a corps of angry young men who wish that they, too, could sire progeny in the double digits without commitment or consequence and command the attention of a fawning and gullible business and celebrity press.

    No, Musk is a central figure in the 21st century because he exercises an unusual new form of power over one of the most important resources in the communications ecosystem: satellite Internet connectivity. He can turn the digital tap on and off at will for millions of people. He can monitor the nature of Internet activity in sensitive places around the world if he chooses to—and has begun experimenting with that power in a host of troubling ways. And no one seems willing or able to hold him accountable.

  • RFERL ☛ 'The Hell With It': SpaceX CEO Musk Reverses Position On Funding Satellite Internet For Ukraine

    He issued the statement after CNN reported that SpaceX sent a letter to the Pentagon last month saying it could not continue to fund the Starlink service in Ukraine and that it may have to stop funding it unless the U.S. military gives the company tens of millions of dollars a month.

  • [Old] Business Insider ☛ Elon Musk shouldn't be able to 'determine the course of a war,' says Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof

    Bob Geldof, who organized the Live Aid charity concerts in the 1980s, said it was "just wrong" for Elon Musk to be able to "determine the course of a war."

  • [Old] Business Insider ☛ Elon Musk blocked Ukraine's access to Starlink near Crimea after speaking with Russian officials, biographer says

    SpaceX has admitted to limiting Ukraine's use of Starlink satellites for offensive military operations.

  • Axios ☛ COP28 climate summit teeters between historic agreement and failure

    Specifically, the U.S., European Union, Alliance of Small Island States and others have expressed opposition to the new draft, calling it far too weak on cutting fossil fuels.

    "The word 'phaseout' has been phased out," said Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

  • Vice Media Group ☛ Incredible: GOP Senator Doing More to Hamper U.S. Military Than Anyone In Living Memory

    Tubeverille’s partially relented on his blockade last week after a closed-door meeting with GOP senators. But only partially. The Alabama Senator is still stalling on civilian positions and promotions to four-star general or admiral. Many of those positions create a ripple effect through the chain of command, meaning that he’s still effectively preventing the Pentagon from doing its job.

  • France24 ☛ Dozens killed in Islamist militant attack on northwest Pakistan army base

    Islamist militants rammed an explosive-laden truck into a police station in northwest Pakistan on Tuesday, killing at least 24 people, two security officials said, the latest devastating attack in recent months claimed by a Pakistani Taliban group.

  • RFERL ☛ At Least 22 Security Personnel Killed In Attack In Northwest Pakistan

    A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb at the gates of a police station in northwestern Pakistan, killing 22 security personnel and wounding 34, officials said.

  • New York Times ☛ Tuesday Briefing: An Israeli Warning to Hezbollah

    Plus, the debate over who’s a “colonizer.”

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Russia has imported $100 million in ultimate luxury cars since Ukraine invasion, despite Western ban, new investigation shows — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Ukrainian commander says Russian army attempting to advance along entire front — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russian election authorities adopt resolution to hold presidential vote in annexed Ukrainian territories — Meduza

    • The Gray Zone ☛ Ukrainian trial demonstrates 2014 Maidan massacre was false flag

    • Meduza ☛ ‘It shouldn’t be like this’: The time and place of Putin’s reelection announcement seem to have caught some Kremlin insiders by surprise — Meduza

    • New York Times ☛ Zelensky Begins Aid Push in Washington, Casting Inaction as Win for Putin

      The Ukrainian president plans to meet with President Biden and lawmakers on Tuesday as chances of an aid deal in Congress have become increasingly bleak.

    • Meduza ☛ In third U.S. visit since start of full-scale war, Zelensky says U.S. delay in approving military aid encouraging to Putin — Meduza

    • The Straits Times ☛ Russian Deputy PM Novak to visit China this week

      Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, President Vladimir Putin's top oil and gas point man, will head a Russian delegation to China for participation in an inter governmental commission on energy, the government said on Monday.

    • European Commission ☛ Statement by Commissioner for Transport Adina Vălean on the Poland–Ukraine border

      European Commission Statement Brussels, 11 Dec 2023 I welcome the re-opening of Dorohusk–Yahodyn border crossing point for freight transport, the most significant border crossing point between Poland and Ukraine [...]

    • PHR ☛ Russian Forces Target Health Care to Control Civilian Population in Ukraine’s Occupied Territories, New Evidence Suggests

      Russian authorities have systematically sought to target Ukraine’s health care system as a way to cement their control over the civilian population in Ukrainian territories under occupation, a new case study by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and partner organizations shows.

    • France24 ☛ Zelensky in Washington to try and rescue Ukraine aid package

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made an impassioned plea for continued US military support Monday in a Washington speech, warning that failure to help his country defeat Russian invasion is fulfilling the Kremlin's "dreams" of wrecking democracy in Europe.

    • France24 ☛ Ukraine says it shot down eight Russian missiles bound for Kyiv

      Ukraine shot down on Monday missiles launched by Russia in a strike on Kyiv, with at least four people injured by debris falling on several districts of the capital, officials said.

    • France24 ☛ Zelensky to meet Biden, Republicans amid warnings US aid for Ukraine will run out

      Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky will travel to Washington Tuesday to meet President Joe Biden and plead his case before Republicans balking at sending more money for his fight against Russia, amid warnings aid will run out in weeks.

    • LRT ☛ Baltic transport links insufficient, Rail Baltica must be sped up – Lithuanian president

      Efforts to assist Ukraine in exporting its agricultural products have exposed the Baltic countries’ insufficient transport capabilities, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said in Tallinn on Monday.

    • RFERL ☛ Zelenskiy Proposes European Defense Hub In Ukraine Ahead Of Crucial Meetings With Biden, U.S. Lawmakers

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is in Washington to meet with President Joe Biden and plead with U.S. lawmakers to continue critical military aid for his embattled country, has called for the creation of a European military hub in Ukraine.

    • RFERL ☛ EU Looks To Raise 15 Billion Euros From Frozen Russian Assets To Aid Ukraine

      The European Union on December 12 will unveil a plan to set aside profits generated from frozen Russian assets in the EU with the aim of eventually raising 15 billion euros ($16.1 billion) to benefit Ukraine, The Financial Times reported on December 11.

    • RFERL ☛ U.K. Sends Two Minehunters To Ukraine As Britain, Norway Seek To Bolster Kyiv's Navy

      Britain and Norway on December 11 announced they were banding together to bolster Ukraine's navy, saying strong maritime forces are critical to countering Russia's aggression and securing grain and steel shipments through the Black Sea.

    • RFERL ☛ European Union Targets Iran Drone Industry, Citing Russia's Use Against Ukraine

      The European Union on December 11 said it has imposed sanctions on six individuals and five entities it says are involved in Iran's “development and production of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) used in Russia's illegal war of aggression."

    • RFERL ☛ U.S. Air Force Moves To Discipline 15 Personnel Related To Leak Case Including Ukraine Data

      The U.S. Air Force moved to discipline 15 personnel over the leaking of classified military information allegedly by Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, the military said on December 11.

    • RFERL ☛ Russia Says 18 Arrested In Crimea Over Alleged Plan To Assassinate Russian-Installed Officials

      Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said on December 11 that its officers had arrested 18 people it alleges are pro-Ukrainian agents suspected of planning assassinations of Russian-installed officials in Ukraine's Russian-annexed Crimea.

    • RFERL ☛ Polish Truckers Lift Blockade At Ukraine Border Crossing

      A border crossing between Poland and Ukraine was reopened on December 11 after Polish truckers lifted their blockade and allowed the resumption of heavy traffic between the two countries, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said.

    • The Straits Times ☛ White House: Seeing increased missile, drone attacks by Russians in Ukraine

      Russia is increasing its missile and drone attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and the White House expects Moscow to target energy facilities as winter approaches, national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Monday.

    • New York Times ☛ U.S. and Ukraine Search for a New Strategy After Failed Counteroffensive

      President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in Washington at a critical moment, both on the battlefield and on Capitol Hill.

    • New York Times ☛ As Zelensky Heads to Washington, Russia Targets Kyiv With Missiles

      The Ukrainian leader will be appealing for more military support from the United States as an emboldened Russia steps up its attacks on his country.

    • New York Times ☛ Zelensky to Meet With Biden in Washington With U.S. Aid to Ukraine in Doubt

      Officials announced that the Ukrainian president would travel to Washington on Tuesday for a last-ditch lobbying effort with President Biden and members of Congress.

    • Meduza ☛ Putin makes first public appearance since announcing bid for fifth presidential term, visits shipyard for commissioning of nuclear submarines — Meduza

    • Latvia ☛ Discussions ongoing about banning Russian grain imports

      The ban on imports of Russian grain is being discussed at the European level after Latvia's suggestion. What companies import grain, does this production remain in Latvia, how does it affect the competitiveness of local farmers and how in turn would the ban affect the transport sector? Latvian Radio sought answers to these questions Decemebr 12.

    • Latvia ☛ Baltic presidents hope IOC will reconsider decision to accommodate aggressor states

      The Presidents of the three Baltic states voiced displeasure December 11 at a decision of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete at the Paris Olympic Games next year and expressed hopes that the decision will be reversed.

    • Latvia ☛ Security Service investigates potential electronics supply to Russia

      The State Security Service (VDD) has initiated criminal proceedings against representatives of a company registered in Latvia regarding the supply of electronic components for military use to Russia, the Service said December 11.

    • AntiWar ☛ The Best and The Brightest, Redux

    • RFERL ☛ Man Convicted Of Killing Russian Reformist Starovoitova Requests Transfer To Open Prison

      Vitaly Akishin, who was found guilty of murdering lawmaker Galina Starovoitova in 1998, has officially filed papers for a transfer to an open prison -- a dormitory-like facility -- after serving two-thirds of his sentence without violating the prison's internal order regulations.

    • The Straits Times ☛ Russia says it's working on major new agreement with Iran

      December 12, 2023 6:01 PM
      
      

      Russia and Iran will speed up work on a "major new interstate agreement", the Russian foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

    • The Straits Times ☛ South Korea urges Russia to help sanction North Korea over satellite, labour exports

      Russia should help impose new sanctions against North Korea over its recent launch of a spy satellite and enforce existing bans on the isolated country's labour exports, a senior South Korean official said on Tuesday.

    • France24 ☛ Russian opposition leader Navalny reportedly missing from prison system

      Allies of the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Monday that they had been unable to locate him for six days, and that he had likely been transferred to another facility.

    • JURIST ☛ Prominent Russia dissident Alexei Navalny missing from prison

      A spokesperson for Russian dissident Alexei Navalny said on social control media Monday that the activist has been missing within the prison system for six days. Spokesperson Kira Yarmysh said that Navalny’s team doesn’t “know where [he] is or what’s happening to him.”

    • LRT ☛ ‘We’re taking steps to ensure that Russia can never attack NATO’ – interview with US representative to NATO

      The Baltic states can rely on NATO’s Article 5 of collective defence regardless of who is in power in the US and other countries of the alliance, Julianne Smith, US Permanent Representative to NATO, says in an interview with LRT.lt.

    • LRT ☛ Baltic leaders expect IOC decision on Russian, Belarusian athletes to be reversed

      The three Baltic presidents said on Monday they expect the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) decision to allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete as neutrals at the 2024 Olympic Games to be reversed.

    • RFA ☛ Russia dusts off Soviet-era friendship with Laos

      Debt-ridden Laos looks not just to China but to Russia for international support amid economic woes.

    • RFERL ☛ Russia To Expel Families Of Uzbek Boys Who Put Out Eternal Flame In St. Petersburg

      Three Uzbek boys who extinguished the Eternal Flame at a monument in St. Petersburg are to be expelled together with their families, Russia's Interior Ministry has said.

    • YLE ☛ Parliament will not debate closure of Russia's Åland consulate

      A citizens' initiative calling on Finnish authorities to close the Russian consulate in Mariehamn received over 50,000 signatures, but will not be debated in parliament as it is outside the scope of such initiatives.

    • YLE ☛ Foreign policy specialist: Trump presidency could change Russia's attitude towards Finland

      FIIA senior researcher Charly Salonius-Pasternak says he does not consider it likely that Finland will face a military threat, but it is possible.

    • YLE ☛ FM Valtonen: Finland wants to gradually re-open border checkpoints

      The Finnish government is expected to make a decision early this week on whether to end or extend the closure of the Russian border.

    • Meduza ☛ Dmitry Medvedev says Russia will make ‘targeted changes’ to constitution — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russians restricted from traveling abroad now required to turn in passports to authorities — Meduza

• Environment

  • BBC ☛ The coloured stripes that explain climate change

    Unlike traditional data visualisations, the blanket’s pattern only features colours – and resembles a barcode more than a normal graph. "Some people switch off as soon as they see a graph, right?" says Highwood. In her blog, she shared instructions to replicate the blanket using yarn or other materials. "The craft version does something different. If you are physically reproducing the pattern, you are internalising the data, and there's more chance you'll feel that it's real."

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Idiomdrottning ☛ Energy is undercosted

      Energy is undercosted because transaction externalities like pollution and climate change aren’t fully factored in. If I buy a can of gas, I don’t have to pay for all of the cleanup of what happened when producing that gas and what will happen when I burn that gas.

      We currently as I write this in December 2023 don’t have the capability of dealing with all those PPMs of CO2E that we’ve blasted since the start of the industrial era.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Automakers rush to deliver affordable EVs amidst Chinese competition

      Notably, the surge in affordable EVs from China has heightened the competitive challenges faced by traditional automakers.

    • Reuters ☛ Fear of cheap Chinese EVs spurs automaker dash for affordable cars

      The rise of inexpensive Chinese electric vehicles has upped the pressure on legacy automakers who have turned to suppliers, from battery materials makers to chipmakers, to squeeze out costs and develop affordable EVs quicker than previously planned.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Deutsche Bahn bosses pick up bonuses as passengers suffer

      The trick, it appears, is to offset areas in which targets have been missed against other areas in which targets have been exceeded. It means that the basic salaries of the nine members of the executive will rise from a total of around €4 million to around €9 million in 2022.

      According to the report, Deutsche Bahn only slightly exceeded its own targets in the area of "women in leadership and employee satisfaction" in 2022. However, the bonus was up by 175%, says the report. The executive board members stand to rake in around €1.6 million for this target alone.

    • University of Michigan ☛ Study examines switching from fluorescent lamps to LEDs

      The study compared the costs of six replacement options — one fluorescent and five LED — for linear recessed lighting systems and found that LED products were 18%-44% more efficient than T8 fluorescent lamps. read the study

      Lighting is responsible for 11% of electricity use in commercial buildings and residential basements, garages and shops. Linear recessed lighting systems, which are also called linear fixtures or troffer lights, are among the largest opportunities for energy efficiency improvement, given their long operating hours.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ ‘Like a Dead Zone’: Undoing Decades of Environmental Harm on a California River

• Finance

  • Forbes ☛ 2023 Layoff Tracker: Hasbro Cuts 1,100 Employees

    Toy manufacturer Hasbro will cut 1,100 employees, according to an internal memo released Monday, making it the latest major U.S. company to reduce its head count this year (see Forbes’ layoff tracker from earlier this year here).

  • Robert Reich ☛ Billionaires Don’t Want You to Know About This Supreme Court Case

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Axios ☛ There's a big catch in the EU's landmark new AI law

    Because the law will not be in force until 2025, the EU will urge companies to begin voluntarily following the rules in the interim. But there are no penalties if they don't.

    The hiatus leaves plenty of room for the U.S. or others to undercut the EU's plans before they go into effect by, for instance, implementing less restrictive rules before Europe's kick in.

  • The Nation ☛ Socialism and Disney Are Incompatible

    If our call for transgression had been written in academic prose destined for obscure scholarly journals, we would surely have been ignored. But the style we chose for Para Leer al Pato Donald was as insolent, raucous, and carnivalesque as the Chilean revolution itself. We tried to write so that any mildly literate person would be able to understand us.

    Still, don’t imagine for a second that we weren’t surprised when the reaction to our book proved explosive. Assaults in the opposition press and media were to be expected, but assaults on my family and me were another matter. I was almost run over by a furious driver, screaming “Leave the Duck alone!” Our house was pelted with stones, while Chileans outside it cheered Donald Duck. Ominous phone calls promised worse. By mid-1973, my wife Angélica, our young son Rodrigo, and I had moved—temporarily, we hoped—to my parents’ house, which was where the military coup of September 11 found us.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Five things you need to know about the EU’s new AI Act

    It’s done. It’s over. Two and a half years after it was first introduced—after months of lobbying and political arm-wrestling, plus grueling final negotiations that took nearly 40 hours—EU lawmakers have reached a deal over the AI Act. It will be the world’s first sweeping AI law.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Why the EU AI Act was so hard to agree on

    To better understand the key sticking points and what’s next, I spoke with our senior AI reporter Melissa Heikkilä and Connor Dunlop, a policy expert at the Ada Lovelace Institute. I’ll warn it’s all pretty complex and it’s still a moving target; as Connor tells me, “The most surprising thing has been the level of drafting and redrafting across all three EU institutions,” which he describes as “unprecedented.” But here, with their help, I’ll do my best to answer some of the biggest questions.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Experts react: The EU made a deal on AI rules. But can regulators move at the speed of tech?

    Ahead of the curve or behind the times? That’s what some are asking just days after European Union (EU) policymakers reached a deal on the world’s first comprehensive artificial intelligence (AI) rules in the form of the AI Act. The law would subject AI technologies to different requirements, with “limited risk” AI systems being required to abide by transparency rules and AI tools with “unacceptable” risk being entirely banned from the EU. But the rules aren’t slated to come into effect until 2025. Will the legislation keep up with the explosion of AI tools or will it get stale? And will other countries follow soon? Our (human) experts gave us their takes below.

  • Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 188: Consumers, Competition or Corporate Cash Grab? – My Bill C-11 Appearance at the CRTC

    The CRTC just concluded a three week hearing on Bill C-11 with its primary focus on the prospect of mandating interim payments by Internet streaming services. The result was predictable as just about everyone made their way to Gatineau to make their case for cash. I appeared for the first time before the CRTC where argued that it should prioritize competition, consumer choice and affordability, recognizing that the emerging system brings with it risks of market exit or higher prices. This week’s Law Bytes episode goes inside the Commission hearing for my opening statement and exchanges with the panel of Commissioners.

  • The Nation ☛ Around the World, Authoritarians Are Rising

  • The Nation ☛ Hasn’t Kevin McCarthy Humiliated Himself Enough?

    Most Republicans who’ve had their careers destroyed by Donald Trump have denounced the twice-impeached former president. But not the man he once called “My Kevin.” Even as the former House speaker slinks out of Congress in humiliation this month, his leadership doomed by his attempts to kowtow to both Trump and the anti-Trumpers in his caucus, Kevin McCarthy says he’ll be voting for the ex-president next year.

  • New Yorker ☛ Liz Cheney: Donald Trump Should Go to Jail if Convicted

    Once a top Republican, Cheney is calling out her former colleagues in Congress—including Speaker Mike Johnson—for “enabling” a would-be dictator.

  • New York Times ☛ Rishi Sunak Faces One of His Toughest Weeks as U.K. Prime Minister

    The prime minister testified at an official inquiry into the Covid pandemic on Monday while also defending a flagship immigration policy from rebels in his own party.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • NPR ☛ Elon Musk allows controversial conspiracy theorist Alex Jones back on X

      Jones generated controversy for spreading false, wild conspiracies, claiming that a "New World Order" was sacrificing children on a California compound; that the U.S. government had "weather weapons" that triggered catastrophes like major floods; and that FBI Director Robert Mueller was a demon.

    • ABC ☛ Elon Musk restores X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones

      Jones repeatedly has said on his show that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators never happened and was staged in an effort to tighten gun laws.

      Relatives of many of the victims sued Jones in Connecticut and Texas, winning nearly $1.5 billion in judgments against him. In October, a judge ruled that Jones could not use bankruptcy protection to avoid paying more than $1.1 billon of that debt.

      Relatives of the school shooting victims testified at the trials about being harassed and threatened by Jones’ believers, who sent threats and even confronted the grieving families in person, accusing them of being “crisis actors” whose children never existed.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Study: Freedom of speech perceived as biggest human rights concern in Estonia

    Karmen Turk, a lawyer specializing in matters of human rights and free speech, said that the results suggest the environment in which people communicate is no longer under our control.

    "It is under the control of international businesses. And I believe it is this lack of control that causes people to feel some anxiety even if their own free speech is not restricted, but they can see other people's Facebook accounts closed or their access to certain content blocked," Turk explained.

  • France24 ☛ Renaissance nudes spark crisis at French school

    She said it was the "final straw" for teachers at the school, who had complained of a "very degraded climate" as well as a "lack of support" from management despite "several alerts".

  • RTE ☛ Teachers stop work at French school after nude painting shown to class

    Education Minister Gabriel Attal visited the Jacques-Cartier middle school in Issou, west of Paris, today but left without making a statement.

  • Off Guardian ☛ Bah Humbug: The Police State Wants Us To Be a Nation of Snowflakes

    Now, even the ability to think for oneself is in danger of extinction.

    As Rod Serling, creator of the classic sci-fi series Twilight Zone and one of the most insightful commentators on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles but won’t be able to think.”

    We face an immense threat in our society from this drive to obliterate our history and traditions in order to erect a saccharine view of reality. In the process, we are creating a schizophrenic world for our children to grow up in, and it is neither healthy nor will it produce the kind of people who will be able to face the challenges of a future ruled by a totalitarian regime.

  • The Scotsman ☛ Fears over safety of Putin critic Alexey Navalny missing for six days after failing to appear in court by video link

    The prison where he is being held claims to have an ongoing power cut. However, his spokespeople warned that he had taken ill in prison last week and they had not been able to contact him since.

  • New York Times ☛ Russian Opposition Leader Navalny Misses Court Date, Raising Alarm Among Supporters

    The Russian opposition leader had been scheduled to appear before a district court via a video link on Monday. His spokeswoman said his allies had not heard from him for more than five days.

  • Reason ☛ Campus Speech Restrictions Come Back To Bite Universities

    Plus: A listener asks if there is any place libertarians can go to start their own country or city state.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Craig Murray ☛ Attacking Journalists as Terrorists

    In the modern world, access to your electronics – and it is a criminal offence under the Terrorism Act not to hand over access codes to the police when your electronics are confiscated – allows the police to trawl through your entire private life. Most of us access over 90% of our correspondence, all of our financial information, and much of our social relationships, online.

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Court Confirms RFE/RL's Kurmasheva To Remain In Custody

    The Supreme Court of Russia's Tatarstan region on December 12 confirmed a lower court's decision to hold veteran RFE/RL journalist Alsu Kurmasheva in custody but reduced her detention term by one day, until February 4.

  • Meduza ☛ Detained Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva facing new charges, investigated for ‘fakes’ against the Russian army for 2022 book — Meduza

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Manuel Matuzović ☛ Template for accessibility guidelines

    When creating this template, I had the six most common WCAG failures in mind, but also what processes take place when you collaborate with other people. Nothing is set in stone and it should be adapted in consultation with your colleagues, because accessibility is a group effort! More on that in Prependix.

    As a reference, I refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, as they are popular and well documented. However, you are free to include a different one or more in this template, depending on your location and the requirements that need to be met.

  • NPR ☛ Iran blocks Mahsa Amini's family from collecting a human rights prize in her name

    According to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), Amini's father, mother and brother were prevented from boarding a flight at Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport on Saturday. They were informed they were banned from traveling and their passports were then confiscated by security forces.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Tesla Has Bitten Off More Than It Can Chew by Picking a Fight With Swedish Unions

    If either side caves, it will have profound impacts across Sweden. If the unions lose, it might spell the end of the Swedish norm-based labor market system of high unionization rates, sectoral bargaining, and few regulations (there is, for example, no minimum wage in Sweden as most employers simply pay the wages agreed in negotiations with the unions). If Tesla loses, it will be the first union with which the company has been forced to negotiate.

    Recognizing these stakes, several other sectors have started sympathy strikes. The transport workers are now refusing to unload Teslas in Swedish ports, the construction workers are not doing repair work on Tesla facilities, and the postal workers are not delivering mail, including license plates to Tesla. The latter strike was branded as “insane” by Elon Musk on Twitter/X.

  • Michigan News ☛ Judge closes Flint water case against former Michigan governor

    The dismissal order, signed by Gennessee District Judge William Crawford, tells authorities to destroy records related to Snyder’s initial processing by police in 2021, including fingerprints and booking photo. Assistant Attorney General Chris Kessel also signed the court filing.

  • CSIS ☛ The Evolving and Incompletely Realized Human Right to Water

    Codifying water as a human right helps to guide policy development and implementation, provides global standards and objectives to frame government responsibilities and evaluate outcomes, and facilitates accountability by empowering rights holders to identify and claim their rights. Agenda 2030, the global development framework agreed by the United Nations in 2015, explicitly sets the Sustainable Development Goals within a vision “to realize the human rights of all.” Reaffirming the commitment to ensuring the human right to water, Sustainable Development Goal 6 seeks to achieve universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2030.

    Since 2015, an additional 687 million people have gained safe drinking water services. Yet the world still falls far short of realizing the goal of universal access. In 2022, 2.2 billion people worldwide remained without safely managed drinking water and 3.5 billion did not have safely managed sanitation. Women, children, and marginalized populations, such as those living in informal urban settlements, are particularly impacted by the lack of safe water and sanitation.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Feds teleworking overseas got a pay raise. State Dept. honors an employee who made it happen

    Some federal employees are taking remote work to a whole new level — holding government jobs while living overseas.

    They’re called Domestic Employees Teleworking Overseas (DETOs). Most are the spouses of military and Foreign Service officers.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Like something from the Middle Ages’: Russia may stop short of a total ban, but its anti-abortion turn has just begun — Meduza

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Foreign Ministry Summons Danish Ambassador Over His Statements In Media

    The Russian Foreign Ministry said on December 11 that it summoned the Danish ambassador to Moscow, Jacob Henningsen, over his statements in the Danish media on the operations of foreign companies in the Russian Federation.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Verge ☛ Netflix is back, after an outage knocked many people offline for a few hours

    Netflix didn’t comment on anything specific behind the outage, although any issues getting to your TV shows and movies are getting even more frustrating as the prices for subscription streaming services continue to rise.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• New York Times ☛ Google Loses Antitrust Court Battle With Makers of Fortnite Video Game

  The jury in San Francisco found that Epic, the maker of the hit game Fortnite, proved that Google had maintained a monopoly in the smartphone app store market and engaged in anticompetitive conduct that harmed the videogame maker.

  Google could be forced to alter its Play Store rules, allowing other companies to offer competing app stores and making it easier for developers to avoid the cut it collects from in-app purchases.

• The Register UK ☛ Epic decision sees jury find Google's Play store is illegal monopoly

  In Sweeney's telling, the jurors heard "evidence that Google was willing to pay billions of dollars to stifle alternative app stores by paying developers to abandon their own store efforts and direct distribution plans, and offering highly lucrative agreements with device manufacturers in exchange for excluding competing app stores."

• Axios ☛ Epic Games wins lawsuit against Google's Play Store

  "[The jury] decided Google has an illegal tie between its Google Play app store and its Google Play Billing payment services, too, and that its distribution agreement, Project Hug, deals with game developers and deals with OEMs were anticompetitive too."

• IT Wire ☛ Epic Games prevails in anti-trust suit against Google

  Fortnite creator Epic Games has won an anti-trust case against Surveillance Giant Google which it filed three years ago, claiming that the app store policies of the latter violated anti-trust laws both at the US federal level and in California state.

• The Verge ☛ Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight

  Three years after Fortnite-maker Epic Games sued Apple and Google for allegedly running illegal app store monopolies, Epic has a win. The jury in Epic v. Google has just delivered its verdict — and it found that Google turned its Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service into an illegal monopoly.

• Patents

  • Kangaroo Courts

    • Unified Patents ☛ Stasit smartphone patent monopoly reexam granted

      On December 1, 2023, less than one month after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding a substantial new question of patentability on all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,855,723, owned and asserted by Stasit, LLC, an NPE. The ‘723 patent monopoly is directed to smartphones that can mask notifications of incoming calls and text messages for certain unauthorized numbers during certain times and only logging a record of those temporally unauthorized communications on a password protected log, while allowing incoming communications from authorized numbers to be handled normally (regular notification and logging on the general log).

• Copyrights

  • Creative Commons ☛ On Openness & Copyright, EU AI Act Final Version Appears to Include Promising Changes

    Throughout the last year, Creative Commons has actively engaged in the EU’s development of an AI Act. We welcomed its overall approach, focused on ensuring high-risk systems that use AI are trustworthy and safe. At the same time, we had concerns about the way it might impede better sharing and collaboration on the development of AI systems, and we joined with a coalition of AI developers and advocates offering suggestions for how to improve it. Rather than advocating for blanket exemptions, we supported a graduated, tailored approach – differentiating merely creating, sharing, and doing limited testing of new tools, versus offering a commercial service or otherwise putting powerful AI models into service, particularly at broad scale and impact.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Don't Fuel the Copyright Troll Fire, Supreme Court Hears

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has warned the U.S. Supreme Court that the copyright troll problem could worsen if rightsholders are able to claim damages beyond the three-year statute of limitations. The Supreme Court should strengthen judicial safeguards instead, to ensure that the trolls stay under their bridge.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Piracy Shield: IPTV Blocking Orders Apply to All DNS & VPN Providers

    A document detailing technical requirements of Italy's Piracy Shield anti-piracy system confirms that ISPs are not alone in being required to block pirate IPTV services. All VPN and open DNS services must also comply with blocking orders, including through accreditation to the Piracy Shield platform. Google has already agreed to dynamically deindex sites and remove infringing adverts.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • Oh my god it's actually done

      I did it. I made it through my first term as faculty.

      I will never have a schedule like this again. Next term is going to feel wild because I not only won't have to commute between two campuses across either end of the city on public transit *but also* I actually have two online classes and only one in-person. So I'm only commuting to the campus I can walk to (it's a three mile walk but, like, for me that's still within the limits of Fun Walking) and it's in the middle of the day not "early in the morning" or "late at night" like this term.

    • 🔤SpellBinding: EIMRSTX Wordo: PUCKS

    • Hey mister Buddhist feign man, write a post for me

      Now you got me wondering whether I sound/read pseudo-Buddhist. Probably. I mean, anything's possible in the realm of others interpreting what they're convinced themselves they're seeing.

  • Games

    • The Quest Queue

      It’s a blorb principle to prep out a region to explore before play starts, and there are many DMs out there that have managed to do that.

      Personally, I’ve gotten overwhelmed everytime I’ve tried to do that, except when using those big modules where all that work is ready-made, but even them can feel too small.

      I don’t want to expand randomly as we go either, because if everything is randomly rolled as you go along, where’s the agency? South becomes the same as north becomes the same as west because wherever you go, the dice are furnishing for you, so the choice about where to go matters less.

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Cell phones on 3G are bleeding-edge, that's far as it goes

      I continually reflect on how big of a deal it would actually be, long term, to lose the last 20 years of IT progress.

      [...]

      Social media as we know it simply didn't exist; IRC and things like AIM ruled the day; MySpace was brand new.

      Google wasn't, actually, very evil at all. Yet. Youtube didn't exist.

      Windows XP was in its prime.

      Oh, take me back. Things suck now.

    • Programming

      • Some thoughts on unit testing from inside an assembler

        I've been writing some new 6809 assembly code as well as going back to some existing projects, trying out the “unit test” feature from my 6809 assembler [1]. I will admit that running “unit tests” from the assembler is wonderful! It cuts debugging time since the feedback loop goes from “edit code, assemble, load into emulator, run, edit code” to “edit code, assemble, edit code,” which makes it more likely I'll use the feature. Also nice is that when I'm done with the testing, I change the backend and the testing code is no longer part of the program. Yes, the tests still reside in the source code, but they're ignored if not required.