Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ Is it safe to like Times and Times New Roman yet?

  The Tyranny of the Default is among my favourite infosec lessons. It doesn’t matter if you can disable a destructive feature, or enable a protection, or fix a bug. The majority don’t change their operating environments, so anything that’s not the default isn’t used. People who should know better fall afoul 🐓 of this truth constantly, and we all live with the consequences.

  [...]

  This sucked if you were a fan of Times as a font. What if you thought it was elegant, timeless, maybe even classy? I suspect the late-2000s web design obsession with any serif font that wasn’t Times was born in part due to wanting it, but not its associated stigma. Sure, Comic Sans was bad, but at least the budding typesetter changed it.

• Kyle Ford ☛ Growing Up Browncoat – House of Kyle

  22 (!) years ago I was lucky enough to be put in charge of the website for Fox’s upcoming sci-fi show Firefly from creator Joss Whedon (who was then on a hot streak after Buffy and Angel).

  While it sadly met the same fate as many other beloved Fox shows of that era, we were able to do some pretty interesting stuff on the web side of the house, including one of the first official show blogs, which was an early attempt at bringing online fans right into the production process through on-set interviews and frequent diary-style “breaking news” updates.

• Alex Ewerlöf ☛ You should never be responsible for what you don't control

  One of my favorite sentences to say during Service Level Workshops is:

  You should never be responsible for what you don't control

  That is because metrics usually aggregate a bunch of variables, not all of which are in your control.

• Kev Quirk ☛ Building an Archive of My First Blog

  A couple of years later, when I was writing about the design history of this site, I re-visited my little Blogger site. It was still there, but most of the images were broken. I assume Google must have changed something over the years to do that, as I hadn't deleted anything.

  Thinking it was miraculous that the site was still alive, and Google hadn't actually killed Blogger yet (because we all know they like to kill shit), I decided I'd replicate the site as best I can and host it myself.

• University of Michigan ☛ George Gershwin’s first musical rediscovered after nearly a century

  “La, La, Lucille,” based on the book by Fred Jackson, was George Gershwin’s first complete score, written when he was just 21 years old. The production opened on Broadway in May 1919 and toured the Northeast in 1920 and California in 1922.

• Pravesh Koirala ☛ 100 pages vs 11 words.

  The answer is not immediately obvious. Indeed, word problems in these forms are not only long-winded but also prone to misinterpretation. I may have wanted to ask you something but you may have understood (and answered) something else entirely. Moreover, I may have misspecified what I originally wanted to ask. All in all, this seems like a rather unfortunate way of asking questions of such nature. What if I change it to something like this instead:

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Passing Star Altered Earth's Orbit, Scientists Say

    A passing star which blew past our solar system nearly 3 million years ago could have altered the Earth's orbit, researchers found.

    The study, published last week in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggests that these so-called "stellar encounters" could play a bigger role in the Earth's orbital and even environmental evolution than previously believed.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Lab-grown diamonds put natural gems under pressure

    Man-made gems are reshaping the $89 billion global diamond jewelry market, especially in the west Indian city of Surat where 90 percent of the world's diamonds are cut and polished.

    In Smit Patel's gleaming lab, technicians drop crystal diamond "seed" slices into reactors mimicking the extreme pressure far underground.

• Education

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Kitchen Essentials: An Interview with Alicia Wise of CLOCKSS - The Scholarly Kitchen

    Continuing our Kitchen Essentials series of interviews with leaders of infrastructure organizations, this week we are speaking with leaders of preservation initiatives.Today we’re hearing from Alicia Wise, Executive Director of the CLOCKSS Archive, the digital archive for academic publishers and research libraries.

  • [Old] Eugene H Spafford ☛ Spaf's "Firsts"

    In part, as Professor Spafford has been working in computing for so long, he (often working with his students) has been responsible for a number of "firsts" that have found their way into common terminology and practice but that many people do not associate with him. Here is a partial list.

• Hardware

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Throwing lithography a curve: Research introduces mask wafer co-optimization method

    Reporting their work in the Journal of Micro/Nanopatterning, Materials, and Metrology, the team at D2S, Inc. invented a method called mask wafer co-optimization (MWCO) with three insights: the mask writer and the wafer scanner are both low-pass filters; overlapping shots guided by mask/wafer simulation can create curvilinear shapes with fewer shots; by targeting the wafer pattern, instead of the mask pattern, one can create much simpler shots to print the correct wafer pattern. By using this double simulation, wafer print quality is iteratively optimized while manipulating VSB shot edges to produce rectilinear target mask shapes that are known to be writable on a VSB writer, with a known and acceptable shot count.

  • Dave Rupert ☛ A tale of three architectures

    t’s been a couple years of working full-time on Luro and we’ve travelled through at least three (or four?) different distinct architectures. If that sounds like a lot, I’d agree. It’s been educational to say the least.

    I think it’s interesting to think about how apps grow and adapt over years of contributions, so I thought I’d share how we evolved Luro. Each refactor and re-architecture was a considered choice involving the entire team and balancing business and customer needs at the time as well as maintaining new feature velocity.

    Here is the great retelling…

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ Zombie Deer Disease Is Spreading Through America. Here's Why It's a Concern.

    Prions are misfolded proteins that can cause normal proteins in the brain to misfold as well, leading to neurological degeneration. This unique feature makes prion diseases particularly concerning as they are notoriously resilient and can persist in the environment for years, resisting traditional disinfection methods such as formaldehyde, radiation and incineration at extreme temperatures.

    The spread of CWD poses significant ecological and potentially human health risks. While there is no conclusive evidence that CWD can directly infect humans, the possibility remains a point of concern.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Andre Franca ☛ I surrendered to Google

    I’m very upset these days. The web is really messed up. Can we really achieve even a little privacy? Some argue that it is a human right, but to me, privacy seems like a discussion for the elite, where only a few can afford this “luxury”, given the huge number of products we have to pay a premium price for in order to get a little privacy.

    Some time ago, I tried to de-google myself, but one of the few things I couldn’t give up was my dependency on YouTube. I follow a lot of journalistic content on the platform, as many media outlets are moving their content there.

  • The Register UK ☛ Wyze admits 13k users could've seen strangers' camera feeds

    Smart home security camera slinger Wyze is telling customers that a cybersecurity "incident" allowed thousands of users to see other people's camera feeds.

    Thanks to a helpful Reg reader who sent a customer email over to us, we know that around 13,000 Wyze users had the opportunity to view events captured by other users' cameras.

  • Gizmodo ☛ If You Own a Wyze Cam, Strangers Might Have Watched You on Friday

    In an email to victims, Wyze said the problem started with an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides the company’s cloud computing services. Wyze went on the blame the issue on a “third-party caching client library” that failed as its services came back online.

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Two Interesting Use Cases For LLMs

    I’ve openly proclaimed my dislike for current trends in AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) before: it’s being misused to genereate crap to put on the internet and the availability of hallucinated crap makes students’ learning painfully worse. So I’ve been wondering: can these ChatGPT-like systems be put to any real use? I think the answer is yes: here are two possibly interesting use cases.

  • Security

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • OpenRightsGroup ☛ MPs should reject powers to veto global privacy tools

        Open Rights Group has urged MPs to reject proposals that would enable the UK to secretly veto security updates that ensure our online interactions are safe and secure.

        [...]

        The UK already has some of the most intrusive surveillance laws found within a democratic state through the IPA Act. Last year, parliamentarians passed the Online Safety Act, which includes powers to allow Ofcom to order tech companies to scan everyone’s private messages, even though the Government has admitted that it is not technically feasible to do this without endangering everyone’s privacy. Last week, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) clarified that governments should not simply require that encryption is removed or limited in order to target criminals and thereby compromise everyone’s privacy. The Court ruled that doing so is not proportionate.

      • EDRI ☛ Mass surveillance and encryption backdoors have no future in Europe - European Digital Rights (EDRi)

        Today, 20 February, in a public consultation at the European Commission, the EDRi network calls on EU lawmakers to end all attempts to normalise dangerous surveillance practices that rip people off their safety and privacy online.

      • EDRI ☛ EDRi members to EU institutions and governments: mass surveillance and encryption backdoors have no future in Europe! [PDF]

        On 13 February, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a landmark ruling in the Podchasov v. Russia case confirming that indiscriminate retention of content and traffic data as well as encryption backdoors impair the very essence of the right to privacy and cannot be considered necessary in a democratic society.

      • Techdirt ☛ Section 702 Powers Back On The Ropes Thanks To Partisan Infighting

        Fortunately for all of us, the future of Section 702 remains in a particularly hellish limbo. As Dell Cameron reports for Wired, Republicans are going to war against other Republicans, limiting the chances of Section 702 moving forward without significant alteration.

      • Wired ☛ Leak of Russian ‘Threat’ Part of a Bid to Kill US Surveillance Reform, Sources Say

        The impetus for killing the deal, WIRED has learned, was an amendment that would end the government’s ability to pay US companies for information rather than serving them with a warrant. This includes location data collected from cell phones that are capable in many cases of tracking people’s physical whereabouts almost constantly. The data is purportedly gathered for advertising purposes but is collected by data brokers and frequently sold to US spies and police agencies instead.

      • Konstantin Tutsch ☛ A complete guide to Umami - self-hosted analytics

        Umami is a self-hostable analytics platform. Like Google Analytics, but privacy preserving, open-source and without extreme tracking. You can have a look at their website if you’re interested and want to learn more.

      • The Register UK ☛ Reported $60M Reddit deal to train AI models with user data

        Reddit has reportedly signed a $60 million deal with an unnamed AI biz to hand over user conversations for model training.

        The deal comes as Reddit looks to boost interest in its upcoming IPO. Reddit reportedly told prospective investors about the $60 million contract earlier this year, and indicated that its execs may repeat this type of content-sharing-for-model-training deal in the future.

      • Gizmodo ☛ Reddit Signs $60 Million Deal to Scrape Your Online Community for AI Parts: Report

        Reddit is reportedly weighing an IPO with a $5 billion valuation, despite only bringing in $800 million in revenue last year. Reddit is not profitable but has a rich valuation because its online communities offer a perfect training ground for AI models. However, licensing out your user base’s thoughts and ideas is not always reciprocated well. The most popular subreddits went dark in protest last year after users took issue with the company charging for access to its application programming interface (API), first announced in April of 2023.

      • Patrick Breyer ☛ Public »Going Dark« Consultation: Pirate MEPs call for an end to the undemocratic surveillance forge

        The EU High-Level Group (HLG) on access to data for effective law enforcement, also known as the #EUGoingDark group, is consulting non-governmental organisations today. Newly published documents confirm criticism by Pirate Party Members of the European Parliament.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • New York Times ☛ Middle East Crisis: Crew Abandons Cargo Ship After Houthi Missile Attack

      The U.S. military said an anti-ship missile launched from Yemen damaged the ship, the Rubymar.

    • France24 ☛ Rubymar cargo ship targeted by Yemen's Houthi rebels 'at risk of sinking'

      Yemen’s Houthis targeted the Rubymar cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden and it is now at risk of sinking, the group’s military spokesperson Yahya Sarea said in a statement on Monday.

    • New York Times ☛ U.S. Strike Killed Afghans Recruited to Fight for Iran

      Refugees who joined the largely overlooked Fatemiyoun Brigade to battle for Shiite Islam and escape crushing poverty had become a force in Tehran’s proxy wars.

    • RFA ☛ Airstrikes kill 6, including children, in Myanmar’s Kachin state

      Hundreds more are trapped in the surrounding villages, a rescue team said.

    • Defence Web ☛ Houthi missiles strike more merchant vessels in the Red Sea

      Three ships have become the latest targets for Houthi missiles in the Red Sea, with one vessel sustaining severe enough damage to warrant it being abandoned by its crew. The British-owned, Lebanese-operated bulk carrier MV Rubymar was on 18 February hit by the Houthis while transiting the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb.

    • JURIST ☛ European Commission launches formal proceedings against TikTok under Digital Services Act

      The Commissioner for Internal Market, Thierry Breton, declared that TikTok has a significant role to play in the protection of minors online. TikTok reaches millions of children all over the world, and the tools implemented so far, namely age verification tools that prevent children’s access to inappropriate content and risk management of addictive design or harmful content, are ineffective. The Commissioner asserts that official measures are needed to ensure that “proportionate action is taken to protect the physical and emotional well-being of young Europeans.”

    • UnHerd ☛ Islamism is exploiting Britain's political vacuum - UnHerd

      Way back in 2005, when I was an MP in the Netherlands, my party was strategising about the upcoming local elections. I belonged to the centre-right VVD, and we were particularly concerned about appealing to the nation’s growing migrant community. After much discussion, the leaders settled on Laetitia Griffith to represent us in Amsterdam. She was black and had roots in Suriname, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean. She could pull in the city’s Creole vote. More importantly, the VVD’s strategists thought she could win over some of the city’s Muslim population.

    • US News And World Report ☛ Yulia Navalnaya Urges West Not to Recognise Russia's March Election

      Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, has asked the European Union not to recognise Russia's March election, which is almost certain to give President Vladimir Putin another six-year term.

    • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok EU Investigation Kicks Off Under Digital Services Act

      The first of these areas concerns “systemic risks” stemming from “the design of TikTok’s system” and algorithms – and particularly how this algorithm could drive “behavioral addictions.” Moreover, “age verification tools used by TikTok to prevent access by minors to inappropriate content, may not be reasonable, proportionate and effective,” the Commission emphasized.

    • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

      • Meduza ☛ Dual U.S.-Russian citizen arrested in Russia for allegedly raising money for Ukrainian military — Meduza

      • Meduza ☛ Photographer Dmitry Markov has died Markov’s work sought to show a Russian identity and patriotism separate from that of the authorities — Meduza

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • TMZ ☛ Taylor Swift's Flight Tracker Doesn't Anticipate Legal Fight, Calls BS

      Now, Slater does say if there was any movement from Taylor's side -- namely, a lawsuit of some sort -- Sweeney's team would immediately respond with an anti-SLAPP motion ... a law that provides defendants a way to dismiss meritless lawsuits quickly.

    • [Repeat] Marcy Wheeler ☛ But Her Emails: How Trump Trained the GOP to Hate Rule of Law 1 - emptywheel

      Note: I haven’t quite finished spinning my Ball of Thread out of which I will explain how Trump trained the GOP to hate rule of law. But for a number of reasons — this great Heather Cox Richardson piece marking the Maidan anniversary and Paul Manafort’s role in it, the arrest of Alexander Smirnov in conjunction with a 2020 attempt, assisted by Bill Barr, to frame Joe Biden, and the heightened urgency of the fate of Ukraine — I thought I’d publish this now.

  • Environment

    • Futurism ☛ China Accused of Pumping Cyanide Into Ocean to Kill Life

      "These Chinese fishermen use cyanide," said BFAR spokesman Nazario Briguera during a press conference attended by the Star. "[T]hey intentionally destroy Bajo de Masinloc [the Spanish name for the shoal] to prevent Filipino fishing boats to fish in the area."

    • International Business Times ☛ Chinese Fishermen Accused of Poisoning Waters, Coral Reefs With Cyanide

      China claims the region as its own. Briguera has said that the Chinese fishermen used cyanide to "intentionally destroy Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal) to prevent Filipino fishing boats to fish in the area".

    • Futurism ☛ Russia's Space Nuke Could Destroy Orbit for Whole Planet, Germans Warn

      The destruction of everyone's satellites does seem to be the intended effect of the alleged weaponry, which per three anonymous sources who spoke to CNN last week would use some sort of massive energy blast to basically blast satellites into orbital dead weight.

    • Energy/Transportation

      • The Register UK ☛ Euro datacenter space in short supply thanks to hyperscalers

        Demand for datacenter space in Europe outstripped supply in 2023, with hyperscalers snapping up much of the available capacity and construction of new facilities hampered by difficulties in sourcing sufficient power and acquiring available land.

        According to a report from commercial real estate outfit CBRE, there was take-up of 601 MW of additional datacenter capacity across the 14 largest markets in Europe last year, but only 561 MW of new capacity was added during the twelve months. This is the second time in five years that take-up has exceeded new supply, the company said.

    • Wildlife/Nature

      • NL Times ☛ Video: Third baby African elephant born at Beekse Bergen safari park

        Baby elephant Tendai was born on Monday to Punda, the matriarch of the African elephants in Beekse Bergen. Tendai is Punda’s fifth calf. “Tendai means ‘grateful’ because we are so grateful for all the healthy happiness in the herd!” Beekse Bergen said on Tuesday.

      • The Revelator ☛ The Monumental Effort to Replant the Klamath River Dam Reservoirs

  • Finance

    • France24 ☛ Paris's Eiffel Tower closes as workers go on strike over management

      The Eiffel Tower, one of the world's top tourist attractions, was closed Monday after staff went on strike, unions told AFP.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Democracy Now ☛ “Borders on Pathological”: Trump Must Pay $450 Million for Lying to Lenders in Fraud Case

      The legal setbacks facing leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are piling up. He now has 30 days to pay $450 million in fines and penalties from a civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. His two eldest sons face a two-year ban and were each ordered to pay $4 million. Trump says he plans to appeal the ruling, which he described as a “complete and total sham.” But the appeal is unlikely to succeed, says Russ Buettner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist whose reporting for The New York Times led to the state’s case. He lays out how records showed an “overwhelming pattern” of Trump’s businesses “lying to their lenders.” Buettner, who describes Trump as cash-poor, says the penalties will result in “a blow to his personal finances and his business finances that he really can’t handle at this point.”

    • Federal News Network ☛ What goes on at the TSA’s big operations center

      Nearly every moment a security issue takes place somewhere in the transportation system. Thousands of incidents each week get reported to the Transportation Security Administration’s big operations center in Herndon, Virginia. For more of what goes on there, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with Toby Punchard, supervisory air marshal in charge at the Transportation Security Operations Center.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Intel Foundry Services Head Stu Pann explains company's plan to build Arm chips, move more manufacturing to the U.S.

      IFS Direct Connect will generate plenty of news around new developments, but today, we have an interesting question and answer session with Stu Pann to discuss several of the latest IFS developments. Pann also spoke about some of the company’s not-yet-disclosed future plans -- but we’ll have to add those additional comments after the embargo lifts tomorrow.

    • [Old] NPR ☛ Timeline: The CIA Leak Case

      That revelation sparked a two-year-long investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald into who disclosed the covert agent's identity. In October 2005, Fitzgerald indicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then-chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, on charges of obstruction of justice, false statement and perjury in the CIA leak case. Libby resigned from his post and pleaded not guilty to the five counts against him. But a jury found Libby guilty on four of the five counts, convicting him of obstruction, perjury and lying to the FBI. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Texas’s Social-Media Law Is Dangerous. Striking It Down Could Be Worse.

      The arguments concern laws in Texas and Florida, passed in 2021, that if allowed to go into effect would largely prevent the biggest social-media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok, from moderating their content. The tech companies have challenged those laws—which stem from Republican complaints about “shadowbanning” and “censorship”—under the First Amendment, arguing that they have a constitutional right to allow, or not allow, whatever content they want. Because the laws would limit the platforms’ ability to police hate speech, conspiracy theories, and vaccine misinformation, many liberal organizations and Democratic officials have lined up to defend giant corporations that they otherwise tend to vilify. On the flip side, many conservative groups have taken a break from dismantling the administrative state to support the government’s power to regulate private businesses. Everyone’s bedfellows are strange.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • EFF ☛ Defending Access to the Decentralized Web

      Decentralized web technologies have the potential to make the internet more robust and efficient, supporting a new wave of innovation. However, the fundamental technologies and services that make it work are already being hit with overreaching legal threats.

      Exhibit A: the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). IPFS operates via a “distributed hash table,” essentially a way to look up the number (or “hash”) corresponding to a given file and see which network locations have chosen to offer the file. Using the hash, a machine then learns where to request the file from, and then retrieves it in pieces from those locations. IPFS gateways in particular perform these functions on behalf of a user who tells it what hash to retrieve the file for. It’s a conduit, like a traditional proxy server, virtual private network, or ISP.

    • PHR ☛ Alexei Navalny’s Death in Custody Must Be Independently and Effectively Investigated: PHR

      The 47-year-old Navalny died suddenly, according to the Federal Penitentiary Service, in the IK-3 penal colony of the subarctic Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District at 2:19 pm Moscow time on February 16, 2024.

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Apple Daily English was intended to garner int'l support, court hears

      Prosecutor Ivan Cheung on Tuesday presented text messages sent after May 10, 2020, concerning the media outlet’s addition of English content on its website.

      Cheung presented a text message from Lai in a WhatsApp group opened by Lai on May 10, 2020 with the name “English News.” Lai, on the same day, told senior management at the paper that a translation of an article penned by commentator Fung Hei-kin was “worth considering”.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Navalny widow account restored on X after brief suspension

      Social media site X, formerly Twitter, has restored the account of Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, after briefly suspending it. It is unclear why the account was suspended.

  • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

    • El País ☛ Julian Assange’s defense denounces ‘politically motivated’ case in bid to stop extradition to the US | International | EL PAÍS English

      The surroundings of the imposing neo-Gothic building that houses the Royal Courts of Justice in London are a regular scene of protests. The demonstration on Tuesday, however, exceeded expectations. “The world is watching,” Stella Assange, the wife of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange told hundreds of people gathered there. It is the legendary phrase chanted in 1968 by demonstrators protesting in Chicago against the Vietnam War. It was also meant as encouragement for the dozens of people who came to express their solidarity with Assange, like the Colombian citizen Daniela, who arrived first thing in the morning and kept holding up one of the now famous posters with the face of Assange, his mouth gagged by the American flag.

    • The Dissenter ☛ UK High Court Finally Hears Assange's Request For An Appeal

    • Reason ☛ Biden Administration's Prosecution of Julian Assange Would Set Alarming Free Speech Precedent

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been imprisoned in London for nearly five years, pending extradition to the United States so he can be prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act by publishing classified information. Since that amount of time behind bars is about the same as the four-to-six-year prison term that Justice Department lawyers have said Assange would be likely to serve if convicted, you might think the Biden administration would be ready to reconsider this case, especially since it poses an alarming threat to freedom of the press. Instead, the U.S. government's lawyers are back in London for yet another hearing, which Assange's attorneys describe as a last-ditch attempt to block his extradition.

    • CPJ ☛ CPJ warns Assange extradition would be blow to press freedom

      “Assange’s lengthy legal battle could come to an end if the U.S. Justice Department halted its dogged attempts to extradite the Wikileaks founder and dropped all charges against him,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg in New York. “Assange’s prosecution in the U.S. would have disastrous implications for press freedom both in the U.S. and globally.”

    • RFERL ☛ Imprisoned RFE/RL Journalist Ihar Losik Held Incommunicado For One Year

      Losik's parents say the last time they received a letter from their son, who was placed in a cell-type premises (PKT) where letters, parcels from relatives, and visitations are banned, was on February 20, 2023.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • BIA Net ☛ Ahmet Türk: 'I did not praise Erdoğan, he is the leader who caused the most suffering to Kurds'

      Ahmet Türk, the co-mayoral candidate of the DEM Party in Mardin, clarified his statements regarding President Erdoğan. Türk, who stated that Erdoğan is a leader who has taken control of all state institutions, and thus has the power to solve the Kurdish issue if he wants, also mentioned that he does not expect a new resolution process to start in the near future.

    • Xe's Blog ☛ Behind the scenes of "The Layoff"

      When I wrote "The Layoff", I was trying to write satire of the tech industry. It's not about AI, layoffs, or even the future when both of those are inevitably combined (let's face it, you know it's gonna happen, I know it's gonna happen, let's hope lawmakers prevent it from happening). It's about the absurdity of the tech industry and how tech workers are so essential yet so disposable that it's customary to have yearly purges where you get rid of them.

    • Pro Publica ☛ St. Louis Police Chief Receives $100K a Year From Local Group, Raising Concerns

      Robert Tracy’s appointment as St. Louis’ police chief came with a sweetener: In addition to a $175,000 annual salary from the city, a nonprofit organization made up of local business leaders pays him $100,000 a year more.

      The arrangement raised some questions at the time about whether the St. Louis Police Foundation’s money would influence Tracy’s approach to policing in a city with one of the nation’s highest rates of violent crime.

  • Digital Restrictions (DRM)

    • Gizmodo ☛ Disney Movie Club Is Ending Right When Physical Media Is Resurging

      Despite what Best Buy will tell you, physical media, including Blu-rays, is back in style—spurred along by the panic that comes when streamers remove content and a movie or TV show becomes suddenly very inaccessible. While most Disney content is readily available, there are a few difficult-to-snag titles, something the Disney Movie Club has helped fans circumvent for the past 23 years... until this summer.

    • The Wrap ☛ Disney Movie Club to Shutter This Summer

      But the Disney Movie Club served an essential, often overlooked secondary function, which was that they released hard-to-get and often forgotten films on physical media exclusively through the site. This means everything from movies that they probably could have made money on, like “A Goofy Movie,” to truly obscure treasures like “Blackbeard’s Ghost,” “The Boatniks” and, incredibly, “The Black Cauldron,” a mainline Walt Disney Animation Studios title only available through the Disney Movie Club. (“Strange World,” one of the more recent Disney Animation titles, was only available in 4K through the Club.)

  Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Digital Music News ☛ $539M Apple EU Fine to Be Announced in March, Report Says

    And in February of 2023, the Commission further zeroed in on streaming – and particularly the Cupertino-based business’s alleged practice of stopping developers “from informing iPhone and iPad users of alternative music subscription options at lower prices outside of the app.” It’s against this backdrop that the Apple Music operator is reportedly staring down a penalty “in the region of” €500 million (currently $538.9 million), according to the mentioned outlet, which cited “five people with direct knowledge of” the Spotify-spurred investigation.

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • Jonathan Faber ☛ Cetaphil Super Bowl LVIII commercial fair use of Taylor Swift?

        So with respect to Taylor Swift and the Right of Publicity, would it be actionable? Throughout the spot, the father and daughter seem not to be connected as each looks at their phones or have seemingly disparate interests. The numbers on the jerseys in the spot are 89 and 13, both of which need no explanation to Swifties or the Taylor Swift fanbase, as those numbers are immediately recognizable as connected to Swift (arguably even more so when used together). Numerous close-ups of friendship bracelets culminate in both the father and daughter wearing both friendship bracelets, and both wearing football jerseys in the Kansas City Chiefs colors, numbered 89 and 13. The father-daughter disconnect is remedied as the father wears friendship bracelets like his daughter, the daughter wears a jersey like her father, and they both sit down in front of the television presumably to watch the “game.”

  • Copyrights

    • Techdirt ☛ How Allowing Copyright On AI-Generated Works Could Destroy Creative Industries

      Generative AI continues to be the hot topic in the digital world – and beyond. A previous blog post noted that this has led to people finally asking the important question whether copyright is fit for the digital world. As far as AI is concerned, there are two sides to the question. The first is whether generative AI systems can be trained on copyright materials without the need for licensing. That has naturally dominated discussions, because many see an opportunity to impose what is effectively a copyright tax on generative AI. The other question is whether the output of generative AI systems can be copyrighted. As another Walled Post explained, the current situation is unclear. In the US, purely AI-generated art cannot currently be copyrighted and forms part of the public domain, but it may be possible to copyright works that include significant human input.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ 100s of Pirate Sites Go Dark as .TV Domains Placed on ServerHold

      At the time of writing, at least dozens but most likely hundreds of pirate sites are effectively down due to a domain issue at a single registrar. The problem seems to be isolated to sites using .TV domains registered at Sarek Oy in Finland, a registrar well known for its pirate-friendly policies. As things stand, hundreds of domains are completely devoid of DNS, resulting in one of the biggest mass blackouts in recent history.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Racing Driver Arrested as Police Target Thailand's Largest & Oldest Torrent Site

      On Monday, anti-piracy coalition ACE announced the shutdown of SiamBit, an 18-year-old torrent site said to have as many as 100,000 paying members, mostly from Thailand. While those details are unusual, the bigger picture is quite extraordinary. Four people arrested on suspicion of running the site include the suspected ringleader, a professional racing driver in his late thirties. Events show how an arrest in January triggered a domino effect leading right to his door.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Film Companies Seek 'Torrenting History' Related to Redditor

      Several film companies are continuing efforts to obtain piracy-related information in connection with Reddit users. While Reddit declined to comply with recent subpoenas for subscriber information, it handed over the personal details of one user last year. A new court filing sheds some light on the type of evidence being sought by the filmmakers, which includes BitTorrent activity and pirate site visits.

    • Ars Technica ☛ Court blocks $1 billion copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users’ piracy

      A federal appeals court today overturned a $1 billion piracy verdict that a jury handed down against cable Internet service provider Cox Communications in 2019. Judges rejected Sony's claim that Cox profited directly from copyright infringement committed by users of Cox's cable broadband network.

      Appeals court judges didn't let Cox off the hook entirely, but they vacated the damages award and ordered a new damages trial, which will presumably result in a significantly smaller amount to be paid to Sony and other copyright holders. Universal and Warner are also plaintiffs in the case.

      "We affirm the jury's finding of willful contributory infringement," said a unanimous decision by a three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. "But we reverse the vicarious liability verdict and remand for a new trial on damages because Cox did not profit from its subscribers' acts of infringement, a legal prerequisite for vicarious liability."