Leftovers

• James G ☛ Growth

  The leaves are growing through the blossom on the two trees near my flat. As I gaze out the window, I see the occasional petal fall. On the ground, there are many petals. The ground is a sea of pink, interspersed with the dark green of the grass on which the petals lay.

  The fall of the blossom leaves me feeling melancoly. I love the pink colour, and it will soon be gone. With that said, there is so much joy to come with the burgeoning spring, and summer: warmth, the melodic birdsong, the sound of trees when the wind blows, the presence of green everywhere, seeing people going for a leisurely run in the evenings, the sun setting.

• Brandon ☛ The Easiest Way to Start Blogging

  So, you’re interesting in blogging but don’t know where to start?

  I’ve put together this list of blogging platforms that do not require any knowledge of coding or markdown. For the most part you can be up and writing within just a few minutes.

• Idiomdrottning ☛ The redundant pages in paper calendars

  But that consistent copying ability is a pretty big “if”. I often mess up. I’m gonna keep trying a little while longer, since I’m noticing that I’m messing this up less and less the more I practice, but a more foolproof approach would’ve been to just non-redundantly use it for something else. A habit, a writing plan, I dunno. For now I’m gonna stick to the plan: food stuff goes in monthly, rest of life goes in weekly and redundantly summarized on yearly.

• Andreas ☛ 82MHz

  Still, I felt a bit weird writing in a foreign language, like I was pretending to be someone or something I wasn’t… so I duplicated the website in my native language German with the intention of writing posts in German and then translating them (with the help of online translation services) into English. I did that for a while, but it was pretty tedious because I was always going over the English translation and rewriting it so it would sound a bit more like me, so after a while I abandoned this approach and went back to posting only in English.

• Lykolux ☛ Keeping the email storage under 10MB

  To facilitate exchanges, I have a category for draft emails and one for sent emails. This allows me to quickly find the latest things done outside of receiving emails. There are often no drafts, because the mails are quickly sent. However, “sent” e-mails remain in the mailbox for a long time, until I clean them out after 3 months.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Film Plant 'Talking' to Its Neighbor, And The Video Is Incredible

    Imperceptible to us, plants are surrounded by a fine mist of airborne compounds that they use to communicate and protect themselves. Kind of like smells, these compounds repel hungry herbivores and warn neighboring plants of incoming assailants.

    Scientists have known about these plant defenses since the 1980s, detecting them in over 80 plant species since then. More recently, a team of Japanese researchers deployed real-time imaging techniques to reveal how plants receive and respond to these aerial alarms.

  • Science Alert ☛ Strange Blobs Deep Within Earth May Have Created Plate Tectonics

    Unraveling a planetary mystery.

  • Science Alert ☛ Amazingly Detailed Images Reveal a Single Cubic Millimeter of Human Brain in 3D

    This is not only stunning, it's useful.

• Hardware

  • Bee to the blossom, moth to the flame; Each to his passion; what's in a name?

    We have been very fortunate to receive a donated server to replace the previous every few years and the very generous folks at Collabora continue to provide hosting for it.

    Recently I replaced the server for the third time. We once again were given a replacement by Huw Jones in the form of a SuperServer 6017R-TDAF system with dual Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge E5-2680v2 processors. There were even rack rails!

    The project bought some NVMe drives and an adaptor cards and I attempted to arrange to swap out the server in January.

  • Hackaday ☛ The ZX Spectrum Takes To The Airwaves Again

    A perk of writing for Hackaday comes in the vast breadth of experience represented by our fellow writers. Through our colleague [Voja Antonić] for example we’ve gained an unparalleled insight into the cutting edge of 8-bit computing in 1980s Yugoslavia, of his Galaksija home computer, and of software being broadcast over [Zoran Modli]’s Ventilator 202 radio show.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ U.S. to triple overall chip production by 2032, but still remain world's fifth-largest supplier

    SIA expects U.S. semiconductor production capacities to grow at the highest pace in the world thanks to CHIPS and Science Act.

  • The Verge ☛ Intel and motherboard makers disagree on how to stabilize your crashing i9 CPU

    Motherboard makers aren’t explicitly saying their updates fix the problems with Intel’s chips, but turning on the baseline profile setting seemed to accomplish what users were already doing on their own: downclocking them. While that may introduce more stability, it also costs some performance.

  • Luke Harris ☛ Went through my networking bin

    Months after the move, we’re still downsizing. While the two gigantic bins full of unorganized cables were dealt with years ago, remnants of my cable hoarding persist in a myriad of small shoe bins and two 26-liter bins. One of them holds all my networking stuff. I went through it today and tossed out all the CAT-5 cables and a questionable CAT-8 cable.

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Rob Knight ☛ Every Phone I've Ever Owned

      By my count I've had 18 different phones since 2002. In my mind, there are three distinct eras in terms of the type of phones and where I was in my life. Sadly, I don't have any of these any more. Sounds like a fun project to track them all down though.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ Alarming Study Finds 99% of Fake Painkillers Tested Contain Fentanyl

    The deadly crisis continues.

  • India Times ☛ Neuralink says implant had issues after first human surgery

    In the weeks following the January surgery on patient Noland Arbaugh, some of the electrode-studded threads that sit in the brain tissue began to retract from that tissue, the company said, resulting in the device not working properly.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Site36 ☛ New problem with German military Webex chats: The Cyber Force cannot rule out information leaks

  • Fortune ☛ Microsoft employees stunned after it shuttered multiple Xbox video-game studios

    The sudden closure of several video-game studios at Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox division was the result of a widespread cost-cutting initiative that still isn’t finished.

    This week, Xbox began offering voluntary severance agreements to producers, quality assurance testers and other staff at ZeniMax, which it purchased in 2020 for $7.5 billion, according to people familiar with the company’s plans. Others across the Xbox organization have been told that more cuts are on the way.

  ‘It’s a nightmare' https://headtopics.com/uk/prey-mega-fan-ends-2-559-day-streak-of-updates-after-studio-52271069

  • Head Topics ☛ Prey mega fan ends 2,559 day streak of updates after studio shuts down

    One fan preyed for a sequel but that looks increasingly unlikely now ‘It’s a nightmare,’ says gamer who spent seven years updating Prey fans on a possible sequel, as developer Arkane Austin closes its doors. The devastating trend of job cuts in the video games industry hasn’t slowed down at all this year, with the most recent stint of layoffs seeing Microsoft closing Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango Gameworks, mobile developer Alpha Dog, and Redfall and Prey maker Arkane Austin.

  • Thomas Rigby ☛ Quoting Julian Oliver on deadbots

    "Rather than such software being the fruit of recommendations from therapists and psychologists, to meet real needs, tech is instead forced upon the vulnerable by a predatory market."
    - Julian Oliver

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ How Criminals Are Using Generative AI

    There’s a new report on how criminals are using generative AI tools: [...]

  • Trend Micro ☛ Back to the Hype: An Update on How Cybercriminals Are Using GenAI - Security News

    Compared to eight months ago, our conclusions have not changed: While criminals are still taking advantage of the possibilities that ChatGPT and other LLMs offer, we remain skeptical of the advanced AI-powered malware scenarios that several media outlets seemed to dread back then. We want to explore the matter further and pick apart the details that make this a fascinating topic.

  • Tripwire ☛ FBI Warns US Retailers That Cybercriminals Are Targeting Their Gift Card Systems

    The FBI has issued a warning to US retailers about a financially-motivated malicious hacking ring that has been targeting employees with phishing attacks in an attempt to create fraudulent gift cards.

  • David Rosenthal ☛ Elon Musk: Threat Or Menace? Part 5

    Source Much of this series has been based on the outstanding reporting of the Washington Post, and the team's Trisha Thadani is back with Lawsuits test Tesla claim that drivers are solely responsible for crashes. My main concern all along has been that Musk's irresponsible hyping of his flawed technology is not just killing his credulous customers, but much more seriously innocent bystanders who had no say in the matter. The article includes video of: [...]

  • Federal News Network ☛ Former Navy pilot brings data to tactical edge for warfighters in flight

    Today, Fuse’s products run on both Navy and Air Force platforms, including on the B-52, the B-1 Bomber, unmanned aircraft, helicopters and maritime unmanned surface vehicles. And Lee expects that Fuse will become a $100 million company within the next couple of years. Inc. Magazine named Fuse to its 2024 list of the pacific region’s fastest-growing private companies.

  • Futurism ☛ Self-Driving Tesla Almost Crashes Head-on Into Police Car

    A Tesla owner had a terrifying run-in on May 3 while driving down a country road with his vehicle's so-called "Full Self-Driving" feature turned on.

    Dashcam footage from the user, who goes by FixorFkit and shared the video on X-formerly-Twitter, shows the vehicle crossing the median and veering into the opposite lane to avoid a cyclist — just as a cop car was approaching from the other direction.

    Thanks to a quick intervention, he managed to narrowly avoid a collision.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT

    Ben continues in his thread, "[The moderator crackdown is] just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you."

    Harsh words, but words that ring true with fellow Stack Overflow users who are joining the post protest. Users are also asking why ChatGPT could not simply share the source of the answers it will dispense in this new partnership, both citing its sources and adding credibility to the tool. Of course, this would reveal how the sausage of LLMs is made, and would not look like the shiny, super-smart generative AI assistant of the future promised to users and investors.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Federal News Network ☛ USPS loses out on millions of dollars from one postage counterfeiter

      Federal prosecutors are wrapping up one of the biggest counterfeit postage cases in years. A Los Angeles-area woman pleaded guilty to defrauding the Postal Service out of more than $150 million, using counterfeit postage to mail tens of millions of packages. The revenue USPS lost from this one case is greater than all the counterfeit postage losses its law enforcement arm, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, saw over the past four years combined. The defendant in this case ran a package shipping business that delivered parcels to China-based logistics businesses. She faces a maximum 10-year federal prison sentence.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • IT Wire ☛ Australian MPs advised to carry burner phones when visiting India

      Burner phones are cheap devices that are used by people who do not want to be tracked. They are used by drug dealers, among others, and are often thrown away after being used just once.

      India has long been considered as a friendly nation by Australia, but in recent months the subcontinental giant has shown that it has designs well beyond its own borders.

    • El País ☛ The ‘Ghostbusters project’ or how Facebook planned to spy on Snapchat users

      The documents outline a complex monitoring scheme using cyberespionage techniques. The project was based on the technology of Onavo, a VPN (virtual private network) application acquired by Facebook in 2013. Deepak Daswani, a cybersecurity and hacking consultant, explains that user traffic would have passed through servers that acted as intermediaries. “At a conceptual level, this would be a man-in-the-middle attack, because the VPN service is placed in the middle, between the user traffic and Snapchat. And it can decrypt a certain amount of information,” he explains.

    • Wired ☛ Top FBI Official Urges Agents to Use Warrantless Wiretaps on US Soil

      Known as Section 702, the program is controversial for having been misused by the FBI to target US protesters, journalists, and even a sitting member of Congress. US lawmakers, nevertheless, voted to extend the program in April for an additional two years, while codifying a slew of procedures that the FBI claims is working to stop the abuse.

      Obtained by WIRED, an April 20 email authored by FBI deputy director Paul Abbate to employees states: “To continue to demonstrate why tools like this are essential to our mission, we need to use them, while also holding ourselves accountable for doing so properly and in compliance with legal requirements.” [Emphasis his.]

    • [Repeat] Scoop News Group ☛ Top spy official releases principles on intel agency use of info bought from data brokers

      The U.S. spy chief on Wednesday published its policies for how intelligence agencies collect and use information from data brokers, but a prominent Hill critic says the guidance doesn’t address a key point about what kind of information it can or can’t obtain.

      The “Policy Framework for Commercially Available Information,” or CAI, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), describes the fundamental way the intelligence community will approach such data, when something is sensitive enough to warrant additional protections and more. It follows a flurry of government activity designed to address how feds use information from companies that harvest personal information on people and then sell it.

  • Confidentiality

    • Mullvad VPN ☛ Evaluating the impact of TunnelVision

      The desktop versions (Windows, macOS and Linux) of Mullvad's VPN app have firewall rules in place to block any traffic to public IPs outside the VPN tunnel. These effectively prevent both LocalNet and TunnelVision from allowing the attacker to get hold of plaintext traffic from the victim.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Democracy Now ☛ Indian PM Narendra Modi Runs on “Hatred and Demonization” of Muslims in World’s Largest Election

    Millions of voters in India are casting their ballots in the third of seven phases in the country’s mammoth general election. The election pits Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP party against an alliance of more than two dozen opposition parties led by the Indian National Congress. Modi has recently come under fire from opponents for referring to Muslims in India as “infiltrators,” but our guest, the award-winning Indian author and journalist Siddhartha Deb, points out that “the Hindu right, they’ve always been extreme,” using “genocidal language” to describe those who do not fit the ethnonationalist image of their “masculine, violent, patriarchal project” and modeling the vision for a Hindu supremacist state after Israel, with its “idea that a strong, muscular, militant majority that are the only people who have the right to [the] nation.” Deb, a professor at The New School, also discusses India’s growing inequality gap, U.S. politicians’ embrace of Modi, and faculty support for pro-Palestine student protests in the U.S.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Australia Targets Social Media With Parliamentary Probe

    Australia announced on Friday that it would hold a parliamentary inquiry to look into the negative impacts of social media platforms, saying they have significant reach and control over what Australians see online, with almost no scrutiny.

    The government has criticised social media platforms for not being quick enough to remove violent posts and seeks more oversight over content posted on Meta's Facebook, ByteDance's TikTok and Elon Musk-owned X.

  • The Nation ☛ The GOP Campaign to Sow Chaos at the Ballot Box Has Already Begun

    I’m sure Trump and her father-in-law want that. I’m sure they think that timely and legally cast votes should be discarded if the election officials aren’t able to tabulate them all by midnight on Election Day. Instead of counting all the votes, the Trump clan just wants enough votes to be counted for Trump to win, then have everybody go home.

  • New Republic ☛ Top New York Times Editor Offers Stunning Defense of Coverage of Trump

    The systemic-threat problem. A lot of media coverage obscures the purely systemic threat Trump poses. To take just one example, Trump is trying to delay his trials so he can cancel ongoing prosecutions of himself if he wins. Times pieces sometimes describe this fact in oddly neutral tones, without asking whether it poses a unique threat to the system’s validity by attempting to place Trump above the law entirely.

    The casual reader could easily infer that Trump’s gambit is tantamount to just another conventional legal strategy, and not see anything amiss with it. The Times could include more quotes explaining how abnormal this is, isolate Trump’s real aim in headlines far more often, and do more stand-alone pieces explaining why this would dramatically undermine the rule of law itself.

  • Defence Web ☛ Defections alone won’t break ISWAP terror group - defenceWeb

    Shekau’s death and JAS’ losses benefitted ISWAP, which seized the former’s territories, recruited some of its fighters, expanded outside its traditional north-east Nigeria base, and boosted its revenue generation. This cemented ISWAP’s position in the Islamic State franchise, making it one of the global terror group’s most successful affiliates. This is evidenced in ISWAP leader Abu Musab al-Barnawi’s reported ascension to Islamic State’s Shura Council.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Hindu population falls 7.8 pc between 1950-2015 in India, Muslims up 43.15 pc: EAC-PM paper

    The paper noted that the year 1950 is important as a baseline year for two major reasons. This was around the time that the international human rights framework under the aegis of the newly created United Nations began to take shape with minority rights and state responsibility for protection of minorities being mainstreamed in international law, the paper said.

  • The Hindu ☛ Hindu population share fell 7.8% between 1950-2015 in India, Muslims up 43.15%: EAC-PM paper

    The share of the Hindu population decreased by 7.82% between 1950 and 2015 in India, while that of Muslims increased by 43.15%, suggesting that there is a conducive environment in the country to foster diversity, said a recent working paper by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM).

  • [Repeat] Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Moves to Block 'Obviously Unconstitutional' Ban Bill

    Elsewhere in the all-encompassing action, the petitioners underscored the ostensibly global make-up of ByteDance’s ownership and team – “approximately 58 percent of ByteDance Ltd. is owned by global institutional investors (such as BlackRock, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group).”

  • RFERL ☛ 'One-Party Rule': Taliban Wages Crackdown On Political Parties

    The extremist group banned all political parties last year. But in recent months, the Taliban has clamped down on parties still deemed to be active.

  • VOA News ☛ Deradicalization programs in the spotlight after Australian teenager shot dead in Perth

    Authorities in Western Australia say the 16-year-old boy had been part of a program to counter online radicalization since he was 14.

    The teenage assailant had told associates in a text message that he was going “on the path of jihad tonight for the sake of Allah.”

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Oil Industry Pens Orders for Trump to Sign As Climate Experts Sound Alarm

    Politico spoke with a half-dozen lawyers and lobbyists within the fossil fuel industry who said executive orders were being drafted in case Trump is re-elected. The goal of the orders would be to roll back some of the Biden administration’s most progressive environmental regulations, such as halting natural gas export permits, slashing vehicle carbon emissions, and penalizing gas companies for methane leaks.

    Frank Maisano, a senior principal at government relations firm Bracewell, told Politico that “other than what Donald Trump says off the cuff, I don’t think [Trump’s campaign is] taking much advice on energy strategy.” While the ex-president routinely complains about gas prices and mocks clean-energy initiatives at his rallies, he otherwise fails to discuss environmental policy.

  • [Repeat] New Yorker ☛ A TikTok Ban Won’t Fix Social Media

    One funny thing about TikTok is that, for all its ubiquity in the news cycle and in discourse about social media, many of the concerned parties know little about it. A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center found that only thirty-three per cent of American adults say that they “ever use” TikTok; in contrast, eighty-three per cent say they use YouTube and sixty-eight per cent say they use Facebook. The survey also indicated that the TikTok demographic dramatically skews younger: sixty-two per cent of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds say they ever use TikTok, whereas ten per cent of those aged sixty-five and older reported that they ever use it. According to another estimate, more than two-thirds of TikTok’s monthly active users in the U.S. are under thirty-five years old. The majority of millennials whom I encounter open the app rarely, if ever, and confess to not really knowing what it’s like or how it works, in part because of its entrenched reputation as an app for the youth. Admitting that you use it, as I do, sometimes feels like saying that you watch Saturday-morning cartoons.

  • [Repeat] New York Times ☛ Pro-Trump PAC Joins TikTok Amid Fight Over Its Chinese Ownership

    But when House Republicans moved to force the sale of the app via legislation, Mr. Trump came out against the bill, saying that ByteDance’s ownership was still a national security threat but that a potential ban would anger young Americans.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • New York Times ☛ At Russia’s Victory Day Parade, Putin Keeps Ukraine in the Distance

      A fighter fly-past returned to Russia’s World War II commemorations, where President Vladimir V. Putin permitted himself a single reference to his “special military operation.”

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Russia’s Georgia strategy offers hints of Kremlin vision for Ukraine

      Russia's attempts to force Georgia back into the Kremlin orbit via political control offer a hint of Moscow's vision for a future settlement with a defeated Ukraine, writes Nicholas Chkhaidze.

    • France24 ☛ Zelensky fires bodyguard chief over foiled assassination plot

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday fired the head of the department responsible for his personal protection after two of its officers were detained this week over an alleged assassination plot.

    • France24 ☛ Olympic flame relay sets off in Marseille, offering 'solidarity' with Ukraine

      The Olympic torch relay began in Marseille on Thursday with the port city's football legend Basile Boli taking the flame in front of the iconic basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde before passing it on to a number of other celebrity sports stars including Ukrainian gymnast Mariia Vysochanska.

    • France24 ☛ China's Pooh-tin celebrates warm Hungary ties on last stop of Europe visit

      Chinese President Pooh-tin Jinping visited Hungary Thursday seeking a "new journey" with Beijing's closest European Union ally amid Beijing's divisions with the West over the Ukraine war and global trade.

    • France24 ☛ Has the war in Ukraine paved the way for a common European security policy?

      To support Ukraine in fighting Russia’s aggression, the EU moved fast and displayed unprecedented unity – a big challenge, considering that all foreign policy decisions must be made unanimously by member states. But what if change is coming to the EU?

    • LRT ☛ Lithuania sets example for EU – von der Leyen in Vilnius

      Lithuania’s support for Ukraine is an example for the rest of the EU, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Vilnius on Thursday as the nation marks the 20th anniversary of its EU membership.

    • RFERL ☛ German DM Says Allies Will Deliver Three Patriot Systems To Ukraine

      Three more High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, will be delivered to Ukraine by its Western allies, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius announced on May  9.

    • RFERL ☛ Zelenskiy Dismisses Head Of State Guards Amid Alleged Assassination Plot

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy dismissed the head of the state guards on May 9, two days after two of its members were accused of plotting to assassinate him.

    • RFERL ☛ Ukrainian Gymnast Leads EU Athletes In Paris Olympic Torch Relay

      Ukrainian gymnast Maria Vysochanska led a group of 27 athletes from the European Union through the streets of Marseille, France, on May 9 as part of the Olympic torch relay leading up to the Paris Olympics.

    • RFERL ☛ Ukrainian Ex-Military Commander Officially Becomes Envoy To U.K.

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy officially made Valeriy Zaluzhniy Kyiv’s ambassador to the U.K., after the general was removed from his position as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s military earlier this year.

    • RFERL ☛ Ukranian Civilians Killed, Energy Infrastructure Hit In Russian Strikes

      Fresh Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian and infrastructure targets overnight killed two people and caused serious damage to Ukraine's already battered energy infrastructure, regional officials and the military said on May 9.

    • RFERL ☛ Ukrainian Lawmakers Vote To Dismiss Agriculture Minister, Key Reconstruction Figure

      Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, voted on May 9 to dismiss Agriculture Minister Mykola Solskiy and the deputy prime minister for reconstruction, Oleksandr Kubrakov.

    • New York Times ☛ Ukraine Strikes Russian Oil Facilities, Including One Far Over the Border

      Analysts say Ukraine is trying to disrupt the Russian military’s logistical routes and combat operations by targeting the facilities that supply fuel for its tanks, ships and fighter jets.

    • Meduza ☛ ‘My fingers can’t feel the trigger but no one cares’ How Ukraine’s ‘partially fit’ soldiers ended up in ‘purgatory’ — Meduza

    • Latvia ☛ Balticom's TV channels temporarily hacked by Russian propaganda

      Due to a cyber attack, the Kremlin's propaganda content was temporarily seen on television channels broadcast by the communications operator Balticom, LETA reported May 9.

    • Latvia ☛ Pupils will be able to refuse to study Russian at school

      The Saeima has approved changes to the Law on Education in the final reading on May 9, allowing pupils to opt out of learning Russian as a second foreign language.

    • Off Guardian ☛ Immortal Regiment Cancelled: A massive victory for SAFETY in Russia

      Readers of the blog know that Russian authorities stay up late every night brainstorming ways to make things more safe and convenient. It’s their top priority. You might even say it’s what they crave.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Braw in CBC on Russia’s shadow fleet

      On May 9, Transatlantic Security Initiative senior fellow Elisabeth Braw was quoted in CBC on the Russian shadow fleet and its effect in circumventing the sanctions.   

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Syria holds the key to improved US-Turkey ties

      It is crucial that the United States and Turkey overcome their differences because the governments need to strengthen their alliance—especially as it concerns Syria. 

    • LRT ☛ Baltics, Poland, Finland sign pact on uniform sanctions implementation

      The heads of the customs authorities of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and Finland have signed an agreement on unifying measures to implement EU sanctions against Russia and Belarus.

    • LRT ☛ Lithuania’s Russians hold low-key Victory Day commemorations, decrying ‘war on monuments’

      As Russia celebrates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany on Thursday, some members of Lithuania’s Russian community visited cemeteries to honour Soviet soldiers who died in World War Two.

    • LRT ☛ Vilnius police on standby as Russian community marks Victory Day

      As Russia commemorates victory in World War Two on May 9, Vilnius Police will step up surveillance of public spaces and officers will be on standby at Antakalnis Cemetery to prevent any provocations.

    • RFERL ☛ Russian Constitutional Court Registers First Lawsuit Against Government Climate Policy

      Russia's Constitutional Court has registered its first lawsuit against the government over its climate policy.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ A brief update on Zuckerman vs. Meta

    I’m getting good practice this week talking about something complicated: the lawsuit the Knight First Amendment Institute and I filed against Meta a week ago today. On Sunday, the New York Times published a guest essay I wrote about the suit, and I dedicated my regular monthly column at Prospect to explaining loyal clients, the idea that we deserve internet tools that represent our interests as users, even when they conflict with what a powerful platform wants. (Cory Doctorow wrote a great piece yesterday on loyal clients that intersects with the Meta case and other ideas he and I have been following, including adversarial interoperability.)

  • Ted Unangst ☛ the chilling effect is coming from inside the house

    Big Stomper is out to get you. Better watch what you say, or you’ll get stomped.

    Of course, they won’t admit to stomping you. They’ll even deny it. Make it look like an accident or natural causes, an unfortunate rockslide. But you’ll be stomped just the same. All for speaking out about their misdeeds.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Looking Up an NYPD Officer’s Discipline Record? Many Are There One Day, Gone the Next.

    ProPublica has found the NYPD site for allowing the public to track officers’ misconduct is shockingly unreliable. Cases against officers frequently vanish from the site for days — sometimes weeks — at a time. The issue affects nearly all of the officers in the database, with discipline disappearing from the profiles of patrol officers all the way up to its most senior uniformed officer.

  • CBS ☛ Whistleblower from Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems speaks out on quality issues

    A former quality manager who blew the whistle on Spirit AeroSystems, a troubled Boeing supplier that builds the bulk of the 737 Max, says he was pressured to downplay problems he found while inspecting the plane's fuselages.

    For about a decade, Santiago Paredes worked at the end of the production line at the Spirit AeroSystems factory in Wichita, Kansas, doing final inspections on 737 fuselages before they were shipped to Boeing.

• Environment

  • CS Monitor ☛ Hail and tornadoes hit the midwest, southeast, and Michigan

    Tornadoes have touched down in a handful of states across the U.S. this week, including three in Michigan. Severe storms and massive hail have caused three deaths, dozens of injuries, extensive property damage, and left 135,000 without power.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Goodbye, mailbox

      I’ve noticed the parking spots in front of this mailbox are popular with SUV and American light truck drivers, which I’ve since been told are technically referred to as Wankpanzers. They’ve already done damage elsewhere in the suburb with their high bumpers and insecure drivers, so maybe a motorist drove their contraption into the mailbox and wrecked it.

    • Idiomdrottning ☛ Bus trouble

      If the busses had different numbers in different directions like I wish they did, for example 42 B vs 42 A, they could’ve told me to “take bus 42 B from stop Such-and-such and then get off at This-or-that” and I would’ve been right as rain but as it is, I need to make my way and ask all the smoking teenage girls in there to lean away while I stressedly and hurriedly scan all the bus stop tables (in both of the bus stops at Such-and-such) looking for which of them is gonna go past This-or-that.

      I go by bus often, and I have since late eighties, and I’ve wished for this feature for almost as long.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Why EV charging needs more than Tesla

      Tesla, the world’s largest EV maker, laid off its entire charging team last week.

      The timing of this move is absolutely baffling. We desperately need many more EV chargers to come online as quickly as possible, and Tesla has been a charging powerhouse. It’s in the midst of opening its charging network to other automakers and establishing its technology as the de facto standard in the US. Now, we’re already seeing new Supercharger sites canceled because of this move.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • New York Times ☛ Scientists Find an ‘Alphabet’ in Whale Songs

      In 2020, a team of marine biologists and computer scientists joined forces to analyze the click-clacking songs of sperm whales, the gray, block-shaped leviathans that swim in most of the world’s oceans. On Tuesday, the scientists reported that the whales use a much richer set of sounds than previously known, which they called a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.”

    • CS Monitor ☛ ‘Audubon as Artist’ shows his debt to classical European painters

      Audubon’s career culminated in the publication of the four-volume “Birds of America” published between 1827 and 1838.

  • Overpopulation

    • Wired ☛ City Trees Save Lives

      As urban populations are rising around the world, so are temperatures, putting ever more people in ever-hotter environments. “We’re primarily urban dwellers at this point,” says UCLA environmental researcher Edith de Guzman, coauthor of both studies and the cofounder and director of the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative. “We know that that’s problematic, because there’s a magnification of heat that occurs in those spaces, because of the preponderance of heat-retaining surfaces that then release that heat at night, when the body seeks to cool off.”

    • Vox ☛ Mexico City, a city of 22 million, is running out of water

      Already, some households receive unusably contaminated water; at times, others receive none at all. It’s stoking tensions over obvious inequities: Who gets water and who doesn’t?

      The crisis is also leading Mexico City to siphon more from the underground aquifers on which the city sits, a decision that’s not just unsustainable without replenishment but also causes the ground to sink — at a rate of almost five inches each year, Ocampo said.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ California aquifers boosted by a wet year, recharge efforts

      A large portion of the gains, an estimated 4.1 million acre-feet, came through efforts that involved capturing water from rivers swollen by rains and snowmelt, and sending it to areas where the water percolated into the ground to recharge aquifers. The state said the amount of managed groundwater recharge that occurred was unprecedented, and nearly double the amount of water replenished during 2019, the prior wet year.

      Still, the increase in underground supplies follows much larger long-term declines, driven largely by chronic overpumping in agricultural areas. The gains only partially recouped the estimated losses of 14.3 million acre-feet of groundwater during the previous two years of severe drought, when farms relied heavily on wells and aquifer levels plummeted.

    • Associated Press ☛ California reports the first increase in groundwater supplies in 4 years

      For many years, Californians pumped groundwater from wells without measuring how much they were taking. But as some wells ran dry and land began sinking, the state enacted a law requiring local communities to start measuring and regulating groundwater pumping to ensure the basins would be sustainable for years to come.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Microsoft to shut Africa development centre in Nigeria

    It was not immediately clear how many people would be impacted.

  • International Business Times ☛ Former Google CEO Says US Is 'Two or Three Years Ahead' Of China in AI For These Reasons

    In a Bloomberg interview on Tuesday, Schmidt declared that the U.S. holds a solid two-to-three-year advantage over China in A.I. That's a significant lead in this field, he noted. Following his tenure as Google's CEO (2001-2011) and chairman (until 2015), Schmidt has deviated his focus to A.I. investment.

  • Greece ☛ A toothless watchdog, by design

    It is clear from the above that EU members do not take its Parliament seriously and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; member-states don’t take the EU Parliament seriously thus they do not send the best possible candidates to Brussels; as a result that body remains the least important of EU institutions. A body elected directly by the people of Europe has less powers than appointed EU bureaucrats.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Andrew Huberman's Misinformation on Cannabis Annoys Drug Experts

      The entire show, Grinspoon tells Rolling Stone, was not only full of “outdated anti-cannabis stereotypes” about users watching cartoons and gorging on pizza, but contained errors of fact. He takes issue, for example, with Huberman’s claim that cannabis will “almost always” cause memory deficits, including long-term memory problems. “It can sometimes transiently affect some types of short-term memory at high doses for some people,” Grinspoon says. “It doesn’t cause any long-term deficits.” He also adds that contrary to Huberman’s description, it “doesn’t ‘shut down the hippocampus,'” a component of the brain important for memory functions.

      Matthew Hill, a PhD in behavioral neuroscience and professor at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine who has studied the endocannabinoid system (a transmitter network in humans that is directly affected by cannabis) for more than two decades, had strong words for Huberman when he saw the video segment making the rounds on X. “Holy fucking shit, it is actually disturbing how inaccurate the overwhelming majority of what is said here is,” he tweeted.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • EFF ☛ No Country Should be Making Speech Rules for the World

    Unfortunately, governments, including democracies that care about the rule of law, too often lose sight of this simple proposition. That’s why EFF, represented by Johnson Winter Slattery, has moved to intervene in support of X, formerly known as Twitter’s legal challenge to a global takedown order from Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. The Commissioner ordered X and Meta to take down a post with a video of a stabbing in a church. X complied by geo-blocking the post so Australian users couldn’t access it, but it declined to block it elsewhere. The Commissioner asked an Australian court to order a global takedown.

    Our intervention calls the court’s attention to the important public interests at stake in this litigation, particularly for internet users who are not parties to the case but will nonetheless be affected by the precedent it sets. A ruling against X is effectively a declaration that an Australian court (or its eSafety Commissioner) can prevent internet users around the world from accessing something online, even if the law in their own country is quite different. In the United States, for example, the First Amendment guarantees that platforms generally have the right to decide what content they will host, and their users have a corollary right to receive it. 

    We’ve seen this movie before. In Google v Equustek, a company used a trade secret claim to persuade a Canadian court to order Google to delete search results linking to sites that contained allegedly infringing goods from Google.ca and all other Google domains, including Google.com and Google.co.uk. Google appealed, but both the British Columbia Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the order. The following year, a U.S. court held the ruling couldn’t be enforced against Google US. 

  • RFERL ☛ Iran Sentences Renowned Filmmaker To Flogging, Prison Sentence

    Iran’s judiciary has sentenced filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof to flogging and eight years in prison. [...]

  • [Repeat] RFA ☛ Facebook page administrator sentenced to 8 years for ‘anti-state’ posts

    The “Diary of Patriots” is a democracy advocacy page with 800,000 followers, and both administrators were found to have violated Article 117 of Vietnam’s penal code that prohibits “anti-state propaganda.”

    Rights groups say the law has been written to be intentionally vague so that it can be used as a tool by Hanoi to stifle dissent.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Security & Debian: Urgent: New Feed URLs after another WIPO censorship

    Here are the new feed URLs to replace the censored debian.news. Please URGENTLY change your browser or feed reader before the censors complete the theft of the debian.news domain and kill off this site like all the suicide cluster victims.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Josh Withers ☛ Vale Stan Hillard

    Born on March 11, 1947, Stan passed away this last week, and although the [Internet] leaves much to be imagined about Stan, his leadership, training, and guidance in the early days of my career were foundational and I wanted to honour his legacy by repeating what he taught me on my first day in front of a microphone, before which he’d taught me how to panel a radio show. I quoted Stan on this blog last year, but I share again to honour the mark Stan left on my life and career, and so the people at the back can hear it:

    "Imagine the audience are the stupidest people alive then treat them with the upmost respect."

    It’s my golden rule for broadcasting, publishing, posting, tweeting, threading, tooting, facebooking, gramming, or microblogging. Imagine for just one minute that the people reading this thing, or hearing it, and they have no idea what you’re talking about - explain it to them in a quick and simple way so they may understand and perhaps even engage.

  • US Navy Times ☛ He was first to report V-E Day — then he was fired for it

    The embargo was not, Kennedy learned, “for security reasons, which might have been an acceptable rationale, but for political reasons… It turned out that Russia’s leader, Joseph Stalin, wanted to stage a signing ceremony of his own to claim partial credit for the surrender, and U.S. officials were interested in helping him have his moment of glory,” according to an account in the Washington Post.

    After hearing that the German high command had broadcasted the surrender from its headquarters in Flensburg, Germany, on May 7, Kennedy bristled.

    “For five years you’ve been saying that the only reason for censorship was men’s lives. Now the war is over. I saw the surrender myself. Why can’t the story go?” he reportedly told a clerk at the hotel’s censor’s office.

  • [Old] NPR ☛ AP Apologizes For WWII-Era Firing Of Reporter : The Two-Way

    Military censors swore the journalists to secrecy, saying they couldn't report the surrender until given the OK by Allied commanders.

    But German officials went ahead and announced the news. So Kennedy took action.

  • VOA News ☛ Al Jazeera shutdown in Israel spells 'dark day for democracy,' say media groups

    Al Jazeera's main office in west Jerusalem and its office in east Jerusalem were closed and equipment confiscated. According to Reuters, the Israeli satellite service Yes displayed a message that read: "In accordance with the government decision, the Al Jazeera station's broadcasts have been stopped in Israel."

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Papers Please ☛ Office of Legal Counsel recognizes the right to travel

    In researching the law on the right to travel to obtain an abortion, we were pleased to notice an advisory opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that, although only in passing, explicitly acknowledges the right to travel.

    OLC is the division of the US Department of Justice that serves as the office legal advisor to the White House and all Executive Branch agencies of the federal government. OLC publishes only a handful public advisory opinions each year, so each of them is significant.

    In late 2022, the General Counsel of the US Postal Service asked OLC for advice on whether existing Federal laws (specifically the Comstock Act of 1873) should be interpreted as prohibiting the Postal Service from accepting packages containing abortion-inducing drugs.

  • Air Force Times ☛ Bodycam footage shows deputy shot airman seconds after opening door

    Crump said Wednesday that deputies burst into the wrong apartment while Fortson, an AC-130J gunner assigned to the 4th Special Operations Squadron at Hurlburt Field, talked over FaceTime with his girlfriend, who he said witnessed the incident.

  • Air Force Times ☛ Lawyer: Deputy who fatally shot Florida airman had wrong apartment

    Senior Airman Roger Fortson was home alone in his off-base apartment causing no trouble and FaceTiming with a woman when a Okaloosa County Sheriff’s deputy, responding to the wrong address for a disturbance, broke through his door and fatally shot him Friday, an attorney for the airman’s family said Wednesday.

  • Vox ☛ AI: How employers use automation to make our jobs worse

    While video calling isn’t bleeding-edge tech, the Zoom cashier captures what often happens when an industry integrates new tech into its business model: Jobs don’t really disappear, they just shrink, along with their paycheck, and this degradation is presented as the natural outcome of automation and technological progress. Modern tech has allowed more industries to chop up jobs into smaller parts and to send many of those parts to underpaid workers overseas. The offshoring of American jobs is most immediately associated with the exodus of manufacturing work that kicked into high gear in the 1980s, but a great deal of foreign outsourcing has occurred in the digital age: think social media content moderation, customer support, and even virtual personal assistants. Silicon Valley can still be summed up by the famous labeling found on Apple products: designed in California, assembled in China. (Or, these days, the Philippines.)

  • La Prensa Latina ☛ Finland’s Parliament restricts the right to strike

    The regulations, which will come into force as from July 1, regulate the fines to be imposed on workers participating in unauthorized protests and specify other measures.

  • RFA ☛ Students banned from speaking Tibetan in Sichuan schools

    Chinese authorities have banned students in schools in a Tibetan-populated area in China’s Sichuan province from speaking their native language when they communicate among themselves and with their teachers, two sources from inside Tibet said.

    Students and teachers at elementary, middle and high schools in Nyagchu county, or Yajiang in Chinese, are required to use only Mandarin to communicate, they said, insisting they not be identified for fear of their personal safety.

  • The Register UK ☛ Apple broke law by suppressing NYC union, says NLRB

    This is hardly Apple's first run-in with the NLRB in recent years. As the retail and tech worker labor movements gain steam, the number of Apple stores and shops seeking to unionize only grows with it.

    A number of Apple retail stores have tried to form unions, and several of those workers have alleged Apple attempted to throw a spanner in the works, with NLRB complaints contesting the tech company's behavior towards organizing workers in Atlanta, Kansas, Texas, and elsewhere. The iMaker has even been accused of forming its own decoy union in Ohio, and the board said last year that it "found merit" to allegations that Apple's internal behavior tended toward interfering with protected labor activities.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Red Sea internet cables still awaiting repair

    Full repairs to three submarine internet cables damaged in the Red Sea in February are being held up by disputes over who controls access to infrastructure in Yemeni waters.

  • The Register UK ☛ Why undersea cables need high-priority protection

    Something like 95 percent of international data flows through those submarine cables, at a time when shipping, military exercises, and more threatens those global pathways.

    Governments need to step up and do a better job boosting the resiliency of Earth's communications and connectivity systems, including these underwater links, Cailabs US President Jeff Huggins told The Register in an interview you can watch below.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Sec Lists ☛ Full Disclosure: Microsoft PlayReady - complete client identity compromise

    We have come up with two attack scenarios that make it possible to extract private ECC keys used by a PlayReady client (Windows SW DRM scenario) for the communication with a license server and identity purposes.

    More specifically, we successfully demonstrated the extraction of the following keys:
    - private signing key used to digitally sign license requests issued by PlayReady client,
    - private encryption key used to decrypt license responses received by the client (decrypt license blobs carrying encrypted content keys).

  • Patrick Breyer ☛ Expert opinion on the ‘killing’ of computer games: Pirates want clear EU rules against the arbitrary rendering inoperable of video games

    ‘There is a lack of clear EU consumer protection rules tackling the industry practice of game manufacturers selling popular games for profit, but reserving the right to arbitrarily render them unusable at any time and not even offering a refund of the purchase price. Although there is a general EU directive on ‘unfair terms in consumer contracts’, what is ‘unfair’ needs to be decided by the courts in every case. There is also an EU directive stipulating that digital content must be made available for the duration of the contract, but it does not protect against short-term termination and discontinuation of a game that has just been sold. The EU rules do not do justice to the cultural significance of games, which can bring together established communities of millions of players. We Pirates demand that the EU protect games as a cultural asset, prohibit manufacturers from killing games arbitrarily and, where they do discontinue games, the community should be allowed to take them over.’

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Verge ☛ Why Spotify is still fighting with Apple in Europe

  In March, the European Commission ruled against Apple in an antitrust action over App Store restrictions on music streaming services. In 2019, Spotify filed an antitrust complaint against Apple, claiming that the App Store’s cut of subscription fees — which can be up to 30 percent — stifled innovation and harmed consumer choice. The Commission ultimately agreed with Spotify on its anti-steering complaints and hit Apple with a €1.84 billion (about $2 billion) fine. It also determined that the company’s anti-steering rules are illegal and ordered Apple to allow music streaming services to “freely communicate with” their users “within their apps about available subscription options,” including linking to external subscription options.

• [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ Amazon purchase of Goodreads stuns book industry

  The acquisition, terms of which Amazon.com did not reveal, will close in the second quarter of this year. Goodreads, founded in 2007, has more than 16m members, who have added more than four books per second to their "want to read" shelves over the past 90 days, according to Amazon. The internet retailer's vice president of Kindle content, Russ Grandinetti, said the two sites "share a passion for reinventing reading".

• [Old] Business Insider ☛ What Amazon Really Paid for Goodreads

  Lastly, AllThingsD's Kara Swisher actually talked to some sources and asked them how much Amazon paid for Goodreads, which raised almost $3 million from angel investors and True Ventures. They told her the real number was $150 million.

• [Old] Book Riot ☛ Who Owns Goodreads? (And Why)

  In other words, Amazon owns Goodreads. While direct mentions of its parent company are scarce on Goodreads, Amazon’s fingerprints are all over the “world’s largest largest site for readers and book recommendations.”

  Let’s dive into why Amazon bought the book world’s biggest platform.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • CBC ☛ Fake photos, but make it fashion. Why the Met Gala pics are just the beginning of AI deception

      And while the AI photos swirling online of celebrities like Katy Perry and Rihanna might seem harmless, experts note that each instance of people being misled by generative AI underlines growing concerns around the misuse of this technology.

      It's particularly concerning regarding disinformation and the potential to carry out scams, identity theft or propaganda, and even election manipulation, they said.

    • Science Alert ☛ 'Deadbots' Could Be The Future of Advertising, Ethicists Warn, And We're Not Ready

      They argue chatbots that imitate deceased persons – sometimes called deadbots, griefbots, or ghostbots – pose several key social and ethical questions that we have yet to confront.

      Like, who owns a person's data after they die? What is the psychological effect on survivors? What can a deadbot be used for? And who can shut the bot down for good?

    • India Times ☛ Met Gala: Katy Perry and Rihanna didn't attend the Met Gala, but AI-generated images still fooled fans

      No, Katy Perry and Rihanna didn't attend the Met Gala this year. But that didn't stop AI-generated images from tricking some fans into thinking the stars made appearances on the steps of fashion's biggest night.

      Deepfake images depicting a handful of big names at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual fundraiser quickly spread online Monday and early Tuesday.

• Copyrights

  • Brandon ☛ Online Gentrification and Northern Exposure

    See, Northern Exposure wasn't available outside of DVD because of complex musical rights in the United States. So many 80's and 90's TV shows have had issues such as Moonlighting, The Drew Carey Show, and even Scrubs. The rights for music were not negotiated because TV shows didn't live past their original run/syndication, but as DVD was introduced and then streaming, these rights became complex and expensive. So, two years ago, the only way to see Northern Exposure with its original soundtrack was to import blu-rays or to set sail on the high seas.

  • The Conversation ☛ OpenAI’s content deal with the FT is an attempt to avoid more legal challenges – and an AI ‘data apocalypse’

    OpenAI’s new “strategic partnership” and licensing agreement with the Financial Times (FT) follows similar deals between the US tech company and publishers such as Associated Press, German media giant Axel Springer and French newspaper Le Monde.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Gaming Companies Want Cloudflare to Unmask Pirate Site Operator

    The Entertainment Software Association, which represents gaming giants including EA, Nintendo, Take-Two Interactive and Ubisoft, has set its eye on a Brazilian pirate site. The organization obtained a DMCA subpoena that requires Cloudflare to share names, addresses, and payment information related to the operator of tpd-games.org.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ New Piracy Blocking Order in Australia, Perhaps Congress Will Take a Look

    After facing criticism for its unusually high piracy rates, in 2016 Australia began blocking pirate sites. The latest injunction, targeting around three dozen streaming sites, was handed down by the Federal Court this week, mostly in favor of Hollywood, Netflix, and Apple. In all likelihood, Australia's blocking successes will be presented to Congress in 2024, in support of a site-blocking legislation drive in the U.S. But what does success actually look like?