Leftovers

• Lou Plummer ☛ When You Cuss in Front of Your Mama, You Can't Take it Back

  I gave folks a chuckle yesterday when I commented that I, an almost 60-year-old man with multiple grandchildren can't cuss on my blog anymore because my mama reads it now. I mean, I can sort of cuss, maybe a damn or a hell, but f-bombs are definitely off the table. There were damns and hells in To Kill a Mockingbird, so I'm going with them being part of the vernacular, but I'm just going to have to find a way to express strong emotion without acting like I'm living in the barracks again.

• Dhole Moments ☛ My Furry Blog is NOT an Opportunity to Develop Your Brand

  The dollar amount attached to these offers is, in practice, irrelevant. I wouldn’t sell out for any price, after all.

  Having said that, the fact that these unsolicited offers are as cheap as they are also makes me feel kind of insulted.

  You advertising parasites really think $100 (or less) is going to compel me to sell out? I’m not a middle school kid arguing for a bigger allowance. I have a career and pay a mortgage.

  Give me some credit for fucks sake.

• Greg Morris ☛ Instagram ruined all your photos

  This is something I have seen in the camera rolls of many of my friends. They no longer capture and post snapshots of their lives; instead, their Instagram feeds resemble those of low-key influencers. Everything is polished and perfect (well, as perfect as they can make it) with image upon image of nothingness.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ Digital Trees

  What’s intriguing to me about trees is their return on investment (ROI).

  It takes years, even decades, to grow a tree to the point where you feel like you get to reap its benefits.

  Because of this, many trees end up being cultivated more for others than for ourselves. They can be a living embodiment of giving over extracting.

  With the web going the way it is — what with AI and its extractive penchant, poisoning the well from which it sprang — it makes me wonder: what are the “trees” of the web? Undoubtedly many (metaphorical) trees on the web were planted by others but we enjoy their fruits.

• Lee Peterson ☛ Why has my blogging traffic grown in the last year?

  I’m not overanalysing this but I think it’s interesting that this has happened to a blog in 2023/4. I’ll certainly be hanging in there with this project.

• Education

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Advice on faculty job application letters — Crooked Timber

    One of my biggest pieces of advice is for candidates to show rather than tell committee members about their accomplishments. I always cringe when I read things like “I am a leading researcher in the area of” (especially since most of these positions are for junior scholars, but I don’t like to see this even from a senior scholar). Rather than stating that “I’m a very accomplished scholar,” applicants should list their tangible accomplishments such as “I have published in x, I have won award y, I currently hold competitive fellowship z.”

  • University of Michigan ☛ Why language students should study abroad

    Studying abroad positively impacts academic performance not just in language proficiency, but also across various academic areas. Research indicates that students who study abroad often achieve higher academic outcomes than students who stay on campus. This improvement stems from the practical application of language skills in real-world settings, complementing traditional classroom learning.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Conversation ☛ Honey bees vote to decide on nest sites – why we should listen

    Swarming honey bees send out scouts to find suitable nests, measure them for fitness against a list of criteria such as height off the ground, volume, entrance size, and entrance location. They communicate this information to the rest of the scouts. Then the scouts engage in a voting system to select the best one and move the entire swarm sometimes over a kilometre to the new nest.

  • CBC ☛ Beekeeper looks for answers after 1.2 million bees suddenly drop dead in Lively, Ont.

    "It was an acute kill, which is most likely from some type of chemical used in the area," she said. A woman looking into her beehive. Lalonde has been keeping bees for about a decade and says she's never experienced such a dramatic loss. (Aya Dufour/CBC)

    What that chemical could be and where it comes from are questions that can only be answered through necropsies and the testing of samples in labs.

  • The Register UK ☛ MIT's bionic leg upgrade has amputees walking like the wind

    MIT professor Hugh Herr – himself an amputee – worked with colleagues to develop a technique to build a neuroprosthetic interface during or after amputation to control prosthetic limbs and provide feedback from the bionic prosthesis to the brain.

  • Wired ☛ Sexist Myths Are a Danger to Health

    Of course, sex differences do exist in aspects of health, such as reproductive health and physiology. However, what research suggests is that, in most cases, the health-related difference between men and women—from disease symptoms to drug efficacy—is really quite marginal. “The differences that do exist are down to gender,” Saini says. “Differences in the way people are treated and thought about and the assumptions we make about them.” That, according to Saini, is what explains many of the failures when it comes to women’s health.

  • [Old] uni Cambridge ☛ The Hammer of Witches

    The Malleus Maleficarum, first published in 1486–7, is the standard medieval text on witchcraft and it remained in print throughout the early modern period. Its descriptions of the evil acts of witches and the ways to exterminate them continue to contribute to our knowledge of early modern law, religion and society. Mackay's highly acclaimed translation, based on his extensive research and detailed analysis of the Latin text, is the only complete English version available, and the most reliable. Now available in a single volume, this key text is at last accessible to students and scholars of medieval history and literature. With detailed explanatory notes and a guide to further reading, this volume offers a unique insight into the fifteenth-century mind and its sense of sin, punishment and retribution.

  • US News And World Report ☛ How Handing a Child a Screen During a Tantrum Could Backfire Long-Term

    "If parents regularly offer a digital device to their child to calm them or to stop a tantrum, the child won't learn to regulate their emotions," said first author Veronika Konok, of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. "This leads to more severe emotion-regulation problems, specifically anger management problems, later in life."

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • IGN ☛ Tales of Kenzera: Zau Developer Surgent Studios Hit With Layoffs

    Tales of Kenzera: Zau developer Surgent Studios has been hit with a round of layoffs, the studio confirmed in a statement on X/Twitter on Tuesday.

  • EFF ☛ Podcast Episode: Fighting Enshittification

  • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Lockdown Mode for Apple devices

    Back in September 2023 the libwebp vulnerability (also known as BLASTPASS) was being actively exploited to target a journalist's mobile device. After reading the report from Citizen Lab I learned about an iOS feature called "Lockdown Mode" for Apple devices.

    I've been running Lockdown Mode for almost a year now, and at the time I promised a write-up of my experience with the feature, so here it is!

  • Citizen Lab ☛ BLASTPASS: NSO Group iPhone Zero-Click, Zero-Day Exploit Captured in the Wild - The Citizen Lab

    Last week, while checking the device of an individual employed by a Washington DC-based civil society organization with international offices, Citizen Lab found an actively exploited zero-click vulnerability being used to deliver NSO Group’s Pegasus mercenary spyware.

  • Rob Knight ☛ As If Perplexity Didn’t Suck Enough They’re Also Hotlinking Images

    So not only can't they be trusted to follow the de facto rules about scraping websites, they're also hotlinking? Can they not spare any of the millions of dollars they've raised to actually cache the images they're serving up. "Might as well just use someone else's bandwidth". Dickheads.

    Ben offers a solution to this for nginx, replacing any request for an image from them with an image stating "perplexity just tried to steal my image and my bandwidth": [...]

  • NVISO Labs ☛ The End of Passwords? Embrace the Future with Passkeys.

    After its creation in 2013, the FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) alliance paved the way in 2018 for the introduction of FIDO2 keys. The size of USB sticks, they safely store a certificate, allowing authentication on any kind of device (laptops, smartphones, etc.) These are also known as YubiKeys (the most famous product leveraging this technology). These products have a good reputation and a reasonable adoption among users and institutions aware of the dangers of using passwords.

    But while this key offers one of the best protections available on the market, the need to buy and manage a separate token is a showstopper for many individuals, although the daily use of passwords is ubiquitous. Passkeys offer a much better alternative.

    So, why am I so enthusiastic about passkeys? Because they solve all the issues associated with passwords for both security professionals and everyday users.

  • Manton Reece ☛ Dark forest of the web

    I agree with these statements in isolation. Maybe what we disagree on is whether AI is inherently destructive to the web, so all AI bots should be stopped, or whether we can more narrowly minimize AI slop from spreading.

    Even without AI, Google referrers to blogs have also been going down, with Nilay Patel arguing that we are heading to Google Zero. In other words, Google is already taking more from the web than they are giving back.

  • The Atlantic ☛ We Need to Control AI Agents Now

    This particular event may not have involved AI, but it’s easy to imagine that an AI agent could soon be used to goad a person into following each of the steps in the Harvard extortion case, with a minimum of prompting and guidance. More worrying, such threats can easily scale far beyond what a single malicious person could manage alone; imagine whoever was behind the Harvard plot being able to enact it in hundreds or thousands of towns, all at once. The act doesn’t have to be as dramatic as a bomb threat. It could just be something like keeping an eye out for a particular person joining social media or job sites and to immediately and tirelessly post replies and reviews disparaging them.

  • RTL ☛ Layoffs and site closures: 'Google is broken': How an algorithm tweak cost livelihoods

    HouseFresh used to get around 4,000 referrals from Google search a day, but this has since collapsed to around 200.

    The dropoff in business has been so bad that Navarro said she had been advised to shutter the site and start over with a new domain name.

  • The Record ☛ China’s ‘Velvet Ant’ hackers caught exploiting new zero-day in Cisco devices

    A newly identified zero-day vulnerability affecting a popular line of Cisco devices was used in an April attack by state-backed hackers from China.

    Cisco and cybersecurity firm Sygnia published advisories on Monday about CVE-2024-20399 — a vulnerability affecting the Cisco NX-OS software used for the Nexus-series switches that connect devices on a network.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ Texas adult content ID law challenge heads to Supreme Court

      The appeal to SCOTUS was filed in April by groups headed by the Free Speech Coalition, the trade association that represents the American skin-flick industry. The coalition's submission came after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in March the age verification component of the Texas law could stand, while striking down the legislation's requirement for health warnings to be displayed with adult content on the grounds they were unconstitutionally compelled speech.

      The Supreme Court today announced [PDF] it would hear the case, Free Speech Coalition, et al v. Paxton, at a future date.

    • DNA Lounge ☛ DNA Lounge: 2-Jul-2024 (Tue): Wherein the techbros want to sell your security cameras back to you, again

      I was briefly quoted in this article, so I'll share the full comments I made to the reporter. (Ever notice that when your first reaction to something is "OMG I don't want to talk about this" you end up talking a lot? No? Maybe it's just me.)

    • The Walrus ☛ I Don’t Want to Pay for Things with My Face

      Drunk on data, businesses now want more access to our bodies in the physical realm. And while they’ll use carrots, like promotions, special offers, and the promise of breezier shopping experiences to get us on board with facial recognition, I’m more worried about the sticks.

    • International Business Times ☛ Palantir's Year-long Rally Gains Momentum After Expanding Partnership with Voyager Space

      The partnership expands on a June 20 deal between Palantir and Starlab Space, a joint venture led by Voyager Space and Airbus, where the AI systems maker will exclusively supply software data management solutions for the planned Starlab commercial space station.

  • Confidentiality

    • Terence Eden ☛ How random are TOTP codes?

      There are about 30 million seconds in a year. TOTP codes change every 30 seconds. Which means, in a year, you'll see about a million of them: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Record ☛ UN urges Russia to ‘immediately’ cease interference in European satellites

    Earlier this month, the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) received a series of complaints from Ukraine, France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Luxembourg about the Kremlin’s alleged satellite interference that has affected GPS signals and television channels.

    The ITU reviewed these complaints and published a document Monday calling the practice “extremely worrisome and unacceptable.”

  • The Hill ☛ Supreme Court crowns the president king

    Stripped of the legal gobbledygook, the court has crowned the president king, decapitated the administrative state and said that bribing a public official is okay so long as the money changes hands after the official act.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Supreme Court Rules Hitler Immune from Prosecution for Burning Down Reichstag, Seizing Absolute Power — Crooked Timber

    So let us set aside the law, which has nothing to do with how the Court majority arrived at its opinion. I am here to explore the majority’s mindset, which leads it down the path to utter lawlessness, and opens the door to dictatorship. Justice Roberts disparages this worry as overblown, much as Hindenburg imagined that Hitler was a mere blowhard, no real danger to the Republic. Never mind that Trump, like Hitler, habitually announces his malign intentions in advance–that he will not honor any election that does not place him in office, that he will abuse the powers of the President to wreak vengeance on his enemies, that he will rule as a dictator (on “day one,”–but now the Court has granted him a license for at least a 4-year term). Such announcements are the only times when it is prudent to take Trump at his word.

  • Michael Burkhardt ☛ Republicans Want Us to Have a King

    The Supreme Court rendered its decision in TRUMP v. UNITED STATES today.

    It doesn’t bode well.

  • Deseret Media ☛ Trump hush money sentencing delayed to September, weeks before election | KSL.com

    Justice Juan Merchan pushed back the sentencing date so he can weigh the former U.S. president's argument he should have been immune from prosecution under Monday's landmark Supreme Court ruling that presidents cannot be criminally prosecuted for official acts.

  • CS Monitor ☛ US will pay for flights to remove Panama migrants, deterring migration

    The deal is “designed to jointly reduce the number of migrants being cruelly smuggled through the Darién, usually en route to the United States,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ US, Panama sign deal to curb migration across the Darien Gap

    Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino, who took office on Monday, told people in his first speech as president that he would seek international assistance to find solutions to what he described a costly "humanitarian and environmental crisis."

    Minutes later, Mulino's new foreign minister signed a memorandum of understanding with the US to "allow the closing off of the passing of illegal immigrants through the Darien," Panama's government said.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Doris Allen, Army analyst who predicted the Tết Offensive, dies

    Dr. Doris Allen died June 11 at 97. Though her warnings prior to Tết went unheeded, her example led to a massive re-evaluation of how the Army used intelligence and she retired as a legend in the field in 1980. Today, NCO awards are named after her and she is in the Army Intelligence hall of fame.

  • American Oversight ☛ ‘A Dark Day for Democracy’: American Oversight Statement on Supreme Court Presidential Immunity Decision

    “Today is a dark day for American democracy. The Supreme Court’s ruling came after months of delay, revealing the greatest beneficiary of our two-tiered system of justice: Donald J. Trump. By sending this case back to the lower courts for further proceedings just months before the election, making it unlikely that he will face trial by November, the Court has effectively rewarded the former president with de facto immunity for his role in attempting to subvert the results of the 2020 election.

    “Our democracy depends on an informed electorate. Today’s decision deprives the public of critical information by preventing this case from immediately proceeding to trial, instead requiring the lower court to first determine which of Trump’s egregious actions fall within the parameters set forth by the Supreme Court. Voters deserve to have the benefit of a jury verdict before choosing their next president in November — the Court’s ruling likely made that impossible.”

  • El País ☛ Trump ruling would give presidents immunity to assassinate rivals, accept bribes and order coups, say liberal Supreme Court justices

    The dissenting opinion gives a bleak vision of the implications of Monday’s Supreme Court ruling. “The president of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution,” it argues.

    “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the president violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today,” it continues.

  • [Old] Counter Punch ☛ I Watched a Democracy Die. I Don’t Want to Do It Again.

    There has been some progress since then in creating a national consensus that the atrocities of the dictatorship must never again — nunca más — be tolerated. But today Chile’s radical right and more than a third of Chileans have expressed approval of the Pinochet regime.

    No consensus, therefore, has been reached about the coup itself, despite the efforts of Chile’s current president, Gabriel Boric. Mr. Boric, who is just 37 and an admirer of Mr. Allende, tried to have all political parties sign a joint statement that declared that under no circumstances can a military takeover ever be justified. Last week, the right-wing parties declined to sign the statement.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ ‘His death is on Tokayev’s conscience’: Who was Aidos Sadykov, the exiled Kazakhstani activist who died after an assassination attempt in Kyiv? — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ ‘You can’t breathe freely’: Conversations with locals reveal realities of life under Russian occupation in Ukraine’s Kherson region — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Pratik ☛ Quote-Mining for Your Narrative | Nerve Endings Firing Away

    In my past life, I used to run a website that got fairly popular in the blogging circles especially among Indians and people of Indian-origin so I fielded a lot of requests from the press for a quote on this new-fangled phenomenon that was called blogging. After a while, I realized how this game was played and choose to refuse all requests. They simply went to others and got the quotes they wanted. Even back then there were plenty of bloggers who wanted to be quoted by the press or wanted to join them so they gladly played along.

• Environment

  • Wired ☛ Hurricane Beryl Isn’t a Freak Storm—It’s the Exact Nightmare Meteorologists Predicted

    Experts knew that the ocean would be capable of supporting frightening storms this year. The only surprise is that Beryl formed so soon. This early-season storm could serve as an omen for any storms that form later this year.

  7

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Study finds one-third of Indonesia's deforested land left idle

    "Forest fires can be either intentional or accidental," said Parker. "Mechanical clearing, however, is not only intentional but can be time consuming and costly. Once we realized that more than half of idle areas were not created by fires, it led to a new question: why would people expend so much effort to clear forests then leave the land empty?"

    To answer this question, the researchers involved in the study, "Land in limbo: nearly one third of Indonesia's cleared old-growth forests left idle," used satellite imagery to examine the histories of deforested areas, both before and after clearing.

  • US News And World Report ☛ How the Hot Water That Fueled Hurricane Beryl Foretells a Scary Storm Season

    Beryl smashed various storm records even before its major hurricane level winds approached land. The powerful storm is acting more like monsters that form in the peak of hurricane season thanks mostly to water temperatures as hot or hotter than the region normally gets in September, five hurricane experts told The Associated Press.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-22 [Older] Germany's autobahn bridges falling apart

    • Bridge Michigan ☛ Michigan HOAs can’t ban solar panels under newly passed bill

      Those organizations sometimes prohibit residents from making home improvements that increase energy efficiency or reduce environmental impacts, such as solar panels, reflective roofing, rain barrels and electric vehicle charging stations.

      If Whitmer signs the bill, that would become illegal.

    • Terence Eden ☛ The complexity is the attraction – reflections on trying to use [cryptocurrency]

      Then I tried to withdraw the [cryptocurrency] into something useful. You know, money that I can use to buy goods and services. This, it turned out, was impossible.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ LAPD arrests man on suspicion of stealing bitcoin mining computers

      Police found what looked to be dozens of computer towers stacked in Thola’s cargo van and a public storage unit.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-22 [Older] Greece: 13 arrested after yacht fireworks spark wildfire

    • The Conversation ☛ Why cats meow at humans more than each other

      An acoustic analysis revealed a high-pitch component in these solicitation purrs, resembling a cry. This hidden cry taps into our innate sensitivity to distress sounds, making it nearly impossible for us to ignore.

  • Overpopulation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-22 [Older] Italy: Capri mayor blocks tourists amid water shortage

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-22 [Older] Kagame backs opposition ban as Rwanda election nears

  • Democracy Now ☛ “A King Above the Law”: Supreme Court Rules Presidents Have Broad Immunity from Prosecution

    In a historic decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled on Monday that presidents have broad immunity from prosecution. The 6-3 ruling by the court’s right-wing majority — including all three justices appointed by Trump — was issued on the final day of the Supreme Court’s term and just four months ahead of November’s presidential election. It will further delay Trump’s criminal trial for leading the January 6 insurrection. The ruling upends more than two centuries of legal precedent, for the first time shielding U.S. presidents from criminal accountability. “In one fell swoop, this court has essentially left the American people to the whims of the president of the United States — any president of the United States, but particularly Mr. Trump,” says Donald Sherman, executive director and chief counsel of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW. We also speak with Lisa Graves, executive director of the watchdog group True North Research, who says the Supreme Court’s conservative wing has left the country “unmoored from the rule of law” by adopting such an expansive view of presidential power. “This decision is the most reckless and dangerous decision ever issued by the U.S. Supreme Court,” says Graves.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Lula Visits Chomsky Recovering from Stroke: “You Are One of the Most Influential People in My Life”

    The world-renowned linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky was discharged from a São Paulo hospital in Brazil last month as he continues to recover from a stroke last year that impacted his ability to speak. His wife, Valeria Wasserman Chomsky, told a Brazilian newspaper he still follows the news and raises his left arm in anger when he sees images of Israel’s war on Gaza. False reports that Chomsky had died went viral online in June. We speak with historian Vijay Prashad, who co-authored his latest book with Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power, and was able to visit him twice while in Brazil. He describes Chomsky as “a beloved friend, adviser, confidant, in some ways the one who helped explain what was happening in the world for decades.” When Prashad was with Chomsky, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva also stopped by.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Vijay Prashad: Resource-Rich Congo Still Fighting for Its Own Wealth 64 Years After Independence

    On what would have been assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba’s 99th birthday, we speak with author and analyst Vijay Prashad, who has just published a lengthy article on Lumumba and the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s ongoing struggle for control over its own resources. Sunday marked the 64th anniversary of Lumumba’s historic speech marking his country’s independence from Belgium, in which he delivered a blistering critique of colonialism. Lumumba’s rise to become the first elected prime minister of Congo came after decades of brutal violence under Belgian rule and the extraction of vast wealth in rubber, ivory and other commodities from the country. Lumumba was assassinated soon after taking office in a plot involving the CIA and Belgium, leading to decades of dictatorship under Mobutu Sese Seko, wars, poverty and resource exploitation that continues to ravage the country to this day. “The issue of control over resources is fundamental,” says Prashad, director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. “The Congolese have never been able to put forward a national project around how to unite the people. … This has always been suborned by external intervention.”

  • Wired ☛ The Tech Crash Course That Trains US Diplomats to Spot Threats

    In addition, because virtually every global challenge—from trade to climate—has a tech aspect, all US diplomats need to be conversant in the topic. “You’re going to have meetings where a country is talking about a trade import issue or complaining about a climate problem, and suddenly there’s a tech connection,” says Justin Sherman, a tech and geopolitics expert who runs Global Cyber Strategies, a Washington, DC, research and advisory firm.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Upcoming Book on AI and Democracy

    This isn’t a book about deep fakes, or misinformation. This is a book about what happens when AI writes laws, adjudicates disputes, audits bureaucratic actions, assists in political strategy, and advises citizens on what candidates and issues to support. It’s a book that tries to look into what an AI-assisted democratic system might look like, and then at how to best ensure that we make use of the good parts while avoiding the bad parts.

    This is what I talked about in my RSA Conference speech last month, which you can both watch and read. (You can also read earlier attempts at this idea.)

  • The Strategist ☛ Why young Europeans are embracing the far right

    Europe’s swing to the right has led many politicians to harden their positions on such issues as immigration. But young voters’ growing support for xenophobic, anti-EU, and ultra-conservative parties is driven less by anti-immigrant sentiment than by a powerful sense of betrayal by establishment politicians. As older generations, who have lived economically secure lives, consume a growing share of government budgets through generous pensions and health care, young Europeans grapple with a cost-of-living crisis and dwindling economic prospects.

  • India Times ☛ Microsoft consolidates retail channels in China

    Microsoft is consolidating its retail channels in mainland China, the firm said in response to media reports that it is closing its network of authorised physical retailers in the world's second-largest economy.

    Microsoft did not confirm or deny the closures and did not comment on the number of authorised stores that would be impacted by the consolidation, in response to a request for comment from Reuters.

  • [Old] Philip Greenspun ☛ How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates

    William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III.

    In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars.

  • [Repeat] New York Times ☛ Supreme Court Declines to Rule on Social Media Laws in Florida and Texas

    The state laws differ in their details. Florida’s prevents the platforms from permanently barring candidates for political office in the state, while Texas’ prohibits the platforms from removing any content based on a user’s viewpoint.

    The justices unanimously agreed to return the cases to lower courts for analysis. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority, noted that neither lower appeals courts had properly analyzed the First Amendment challenges to the Florida and Texas laws.

  • Michał Woźniak ☛ Effective CSAM filters are impossible because what CSAM is depends on context

    The information necessary to tell whether or not it is CSAM is not available in the file being shared. It is impossible to tell it apart by any kind of technical means based on the file alone. The current debate about filtering child sexual exploitation materials (CSAM) on end-to-end encrypted messaging services, like all previous such debates (of which there were many), mostly ignores this basic point.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • India Times ☛ Google to require disclosures for digitally altered content in election ads

      Google said on Monday it would make it mandatory for advertisers to disclose election ads that use digitally altered content to depict real or realistic-looking people or events, its latest step to battle election misinformation.

    • 404 Media ☛ 'Local Residents' Terrorizing City Council Meetings Were Actually Overseas, Feds Allege

      In May, the U.S. Department of Justice charged a Syrian man living in Albania as one of the orchestrators of a series of “Zoom Bombings” in which people terrorized city council proceedings in Fresno, California with racist and antisemitic threats, white nationalist propaganda, and hateful rhetoric during the “public comment” portion of public meetings over Zoom, according to court records. The criminal complaint states that the leaders of this group lived in Albania and the United Arab Emirates, and that they organized in part with American teenagers over a Roblox-owned chat app called Guilded.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-06-22 [Older] Iran overturns death penalty for rapper Toomaj Salehi

  • Michigan News ☛ Judge dismisses Facebook defamation lawsuit against Flint council president - mlive.com

    A federal judge has dismissed a defamation lawsuit that a law firm filed against Flint City Council President Ladel Lewis and others because of comments they made about it on Facebook.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Myanmar journalist Htet Aung sentenced to 5 years in prison under counterterrorism law

    “The 5-year sentencing of Development Media Group reporter Htet Aung on bogus terrorism charges is Myanmar’s latest outrage against the free press and should be immediately reversed,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Myanmar’s junta must stop harassing and jailing journalists for merely doing their jobs by reporting the news.”

  • [Old] Stanford University ☛ Introduction | Journalism in the Digital Age

    The fact of the matter is that democracy requires informed citizens. No governing body can be expected to operate well without knowledge of the issues on which it is to rule, and rule by the people entails that the people should be informed. In a representative democracy, the role of the press is twofold: it both informs citizens and sets up a feedback loop between the government and voters. The press makes the actions of the government known to the public, and voters who disapprove of current trends in policy can take corrective action in the next election. Without the press, the feedback loop is broken and the government is no longer accountable to the people. The press is therefore of the utmost importance in a representative democracy.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Democracy’s warning signs flash ‘emergency’ as newsrooms shudder in Kansas and nationwide

    “And that representation and accountability rely on voters having access to information about the status of problems and the efforts of elected officials to solve those problems,” she said. “Staff cuts and corporatization of newspaper ownership structures, they’ve had a big impact on the information available to voters. As reporting capacity has declined, so has coverage of politics.”

  • Gannett ☛ MTV News archives deleted; over two decades of articles gone

    The archives contained work from the news site's founding in 1996 that documented the rise of multiple stars and genres.

    The music channel's news operation was shut down in 2023 as a part of a round of layoffs conducted by parent company Paramount. The layoffs cut 25% of jobs from companies owned by Paramount.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Techdirt ☛ Vermont Man Who Cursed At, Flipped Off Cop Scores Settlement From The State

    It’s not like case law isn’t pretty much completely established at this point. Flipping the bird to a cop is protected speech. So is complaining, however profanely, about your recent experience with said officer.

    The precedent is everywhere. Obviously, cops will never be happy when someone they stop or address responds with one finger salutes and/or insulting verbiage. But being unhappy is not the same thing as probable cause for an arrest. “Contempt of cop” is not a crime. But try convincing cops of that fact. It’s impossible.

  • WTOP Radio ☛ He flipped off a trooper and got charged. Now Vermont is on the hook for $175,000

    “While our client is pleased with this outcome, this incident should never have happened in the first place,” said Hillary Rich, staff attorney for the ACLU of Vermont, in a statement. “Police need to respect everyone’s First Amendment rights — even for things they consider offensive or insulting.”

    The Vermont State Police did not have a comment on the settlement. Vermont did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the deal.

  • [Old] Newsweek ☛ Billionaires Are a Policy Failure That Must Be Addressed

    To make $1 billion, the average full-time American worker would need to work over 19,000 years. No human being needs or deserves 19,000 years' worth of money. It is time that we declare that no human being needs or deserves to be a billionaire in our world today.

  • Greece ☛ Traffic tickets to be issued electronically for violations in Athens and Thessaloniki

    The ticket will be sent within seconds to the gov.gr account of the offender, who will also be notified with SMS and email. For violations taking place in Athens, offenders will be able to pay electronically using a special code.

  • JURIST ☛ Afghanistan dispatch: parties to Doha discussions should push Taliban on women's rights, humanitarian aid access and inclusive governance

    Throughout this period, the international community has played a central coordinating role, hosting various meetings and serving as a mediator between the different factions. However, the path to stability in Afghanistan remains fragile and uncertain, given the deep-seated divisions and mistrust between the stakeholders involved.

    There are several key expectations one might have of Doha discussions.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • India Times ☛ New Zealand to press ahead with media content pay law

    The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, introduced last year by the previous Labour government, will be presented in Parliament with amendments to support "our local media companies to earn revenue for the news they produce", Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith said.

    The proposed changes would align it more closely with Australia's digital bargaining law, Goldsmith said.

  • The Register UK ☛ Supreme Court upends tech regulation rules

    The ruling has the potential to severely curtail the effectiveness of US regulators like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – and therefore to change the way the technology industry is regulated.

    The FTC, for example, is engaged in fights with Adobe over subscriptions, all the big AI players on antitrust, and is being challenged for abolishing that mainstay of Silicon Valley, the non-compete agreement. With Chevron dismissed, that last one could prove to be a test case for the new order of business.

    As for the FCC, many fear the whole issue of net neutrality could be up for grabs – again – if control of the issue is given to judges. Telcos aren't fond of the FCC, and could be expected to contest every fine and reprimand, just to establish new rules.

  • Stanford University ☛ It's Groundhog Day at the European Commission

    For the past two years, the European Commission has been pushing to radically change the internet and telecommunications market in the EU in order to benefit Europe’s largest telecom companies at the expense of innovation, net neutrality, and low broadband prices.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• India Times ☛ Nvidia set to face French antitrust charges

  Nvidia is set to be charged by the French antitrust regulator for allegedly anti-competitive practices, people with direct knowledge of the matter said, making it the first enforcer to act against the company.

• EDRI ☛ Apple must comply with the DMA, urges civil society call to European Commission

  We lastly argue that the DMA’s interoperability provisions provide the grounds for requiring Apple to allow independent operating systems on iPhones and iPads where people wish to install them. So far, this requirement has not been addressed by Apple at all.

  Apparently, the European Commission shares a number of our concerns already: So far, the official enforcement authority for the DMA has launched three independent investigations into Apple’s conduct and in one of them has issued preliminary findings that confirm that Apple’s app store rules are “in breach of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), as they prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content.”

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • [Old] Inside Towers ☛ Verizon, Ericsson Sued for 5G Patent Infringement - Inside Towers

      Procomm International Pte. Ltd. has sued Verizon and Ericsson for patent infringement in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Texas. Based in Singapore, Procomm said it is the sole owner of the patents in question. Its lawsuit claims that Verizon and Ericsson infringed its patents in the planning, designing, developing, testing, operating, and maintaining of Verizon’s 5G network.

    • The Register UK ☛ Verizon hit with whopping $847M patent infringement verdict

      Dallas-based non-practicing entity General Access, which acquired the patents from original inventor Raze Technologies, claims elements of Verizon's 5G wireless networks, smartphone hotspots, wireless home routers, and MiFi devices violate its intellectual property.

    • Bloomberg ☛ Verizon Must Pay $847 Million for Violating 5G, Hot Spot Patents

      Verizon Wireless must pay $847 million after a Texas federal jury determined Friday that elements of its 5G wireless networks, smartphone hot spots, wireless home routers, and MiFi devices infringe another company’s patented technology.

    • [Old] Domain Namewire ☛ Verizon applies for patent for using blockchain for domain names - Domain Name Wire | Domain Name News

      It seems that a key component of the invention Verizon is pitching is to use blockchain technology to replace the need for security certificates. Verizon explains: [...]

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Futurism ☛ YouTube Now Lets You Request the Removal of AI Content That Impersonates You

      Generative AI's potential to allow bad actors to effortlessly impersonate you is the stuff of nightmares. To combat this, YouTube, the world's largest video platform, is now giving people the ability to request the removal of AI-generated content that imitates their appearance or voice, expanding on its currently light guardrails for the technology.

      This change was quietly added in an update to YouTube's Privacy Guidelines last month, but wasn't reported until TechCrunch noticed it this week. YouTube considers cases where an AI is used "to alter or create synthetic content that looks or sounds like you" as a potential privacy violation, rather than as an issue of misinformation or copyright.

    • The Register UK ☛ YouTube confirms it'll pull AI fakes if you complain

      YouTube has enacted privacy guidelines that allow people to request the removal of AI-generated videos that mimic them.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ LaLiga Demands €450 After ISPs Log Subscribers' Visits to Pirate Servers

    This February, Spanish football league LaLiga obtained a court order that supposedly allowed it to pursue mere viewers of pirate IPTV. A local court soon clarified that viewers would not be targeted. However, letters from LaLiga's lawyers, demanding 450 euros to prevent legal action, run counter to those assurances. That the letters appear to rely on evidence supplied by Spanish ISPs, indicating which of their customers accessed specific 'pirate' servers, is of even greater concern.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate Streaming Giant FMovies Hasn't Updated in a Week

    FMovies is one of the most visited pirate sites in the world, streaming movies and TV series to the masses. Anti-piracy groups have had the operators in their sights for a while, but thus far the site has managed to survive. Today, FMovies remains online, but new releases have been noticeably absent for a while.

  • 404 Media ☛ Figma Disables AI App Design Tool After It Copied Apple’s Weather App

    The design tool Figma has disabled a newly launched AI-powered app design tool after a user showed that it was clearly copying Apple’s weather app.

  • Futurism ☛ Microsoft CEO of AI Says It's Fine to Steal Anything on the Open Web

    "I think that with respect to content that's already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the '90s has been that it is fair use," Suleyman told Sorkin. "Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been 'freeware,' if you like, that’s been the understanding."

    Of course, as The Verge points out, the US grants copyright protections the moment that a work is created. And as for the AI chief's "social contract," it's certainly worth noting that, up until November 2022, most people posting online didn't imagine that their pictures and videos, musings, and general creative, intellectual, personal, or otherwise output would become AI training materials.

    According to Suleyman, though? It's all just "freeware." Intellectual [sic] property [sic] who?

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ AI companies are finally being forced to cough up for training data

    But this moment also sets an interesting precedent for all of generative AI development. Thanks to the scarcity of high-quality data and the immense pressure and demand to build even bigger and better models, we’re in a rare moment where data owners actually have some leverage. The music industry’s lawsuit sends the loudest message yet: High-quality training data is not free.

    It will likely take a few years at least before we have legal clarity around copyright law, fair use, and AI training data. But the cases are already ushering in changes. OpenAI has been striking deals with news publishers such as Politico, the Atlantic, Time, the Financial Times, and others, and exchanging publishers’ news archives for money and citations. And YouTube announced in late June that it will offer licensing deals to top record labels in exchange for music for training.

  • MacStories Inc ☛ AI Companies Need to Be Regulated: An Open Letter to the U.S. Congress and European Parliament

    Over the past two years, we’ve witnessed the arrival of AI tools and services that often use human input without consent with the goal of faster and cheaper results. The fascination with maximization of profits above anything else isn’t a surprise in a capitalist industry, but it’s highly concerning nonetheless – especially since, this time around, the majority of these AI tools have been built on a foundation of non-consensual appropriation, also known as – quite simply – digital theft.

    As we’ve documented on MacStories and as other (and larger) publications also investigated, it’s become clear that foundation models of different LLMs have been trained on content sourced from the open web without requesting publishers’ permission upfront. These models can then power AI interfaces that can regurgitate similar content or provide answers with hidden citations that seldom prioritize driving traffic to publishers. As far as MacStories is concerned, this is limited to text scraped from our website, but we’re seeing this play out in other industries too, from design assets to photos, music, and more. And top it all off, publishers and creators whose content was appropriated for training or crawled for generative responses (or both) can’t even ask AI companies to be transparent about which parts of their content was used. It’s a black box where original content goes in and derivative slop comes out.

    We think this is all wrong.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • Motivation 6/...

      I'm not very moody these days

      Maybe it's because I watch a lot of entertainment stuff

      I'm not making fast progress, I think if I wasn't depressed the project would have been over a month ago.

      But anyways, I'm making *some* progress. It will be over at some point. Right?

    • Leaving Traces – Words on the Road

      Linkoping’s great son - Tage Danielsson - once explained, with his characteristic irony, that accidents in nuclear reactors are so extremely unlikely that they actually never happen. This is also how I feel to day: the probability of one day being able to participate at the inauguration of a statue of yourself is so small that I find it difficult to believe that it has happened. However, if it has happened, and if you make a visit to the statue, you should be able to see that it contains some inscriptions on the ground or roadway that the statue person is walking on. My topic now is to explain the meaning and the background of those inscriptions.