Leftovers

• Robert Birming ☛ The Unforeseen

  It's so much unnecessary time and energy that we spend trying to predict what hasn't happened yet. Things we can't possibly know in advance.

  Of course, it's good and even necessary to plan certain things in advance. To do your research and prepare. But it easily gets out of hand or is used when it doesn't serve any sensible purpose.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Marshmallow Longtermism

  My latest column for Locus Magazine is "Marshmallow Longtermism"; it's a reflection on how conservatives self-mythologize as the standards-bearers for deferred gratification and making hard trade-offs, but are utterly lacking in these traits when it comes to climate change and inequality: [...]

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ What’s up with blogging challenges?

  I do still occasionally ask myself the same question Loren ponders: is a blog post written for the sake of meeting an arbitrary goal better than not writing it at all. For my own posts, I aim to keep a certain level of meaningful stuff – whatever that means – and try to avoid posting just for the sake of posting.

  But the fact is that for example, last month when I wrote about Python’s standard library, the individual posts were lighter and shorter because there were so many of them to write. But another reality is that I might not have written them at all if I didn’t decide to do it as part of Blaugust. And I learned a lot, I ended up having great discussions with fellow Python developers, people learned new things from my posts and I think it was definitely a net positive over all.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Elderly Woman Never Realized Her Doorstop Was Worth More Than a Million Dollars

    An elderly woman in Romania was using a seven-pound rock as a doorstop for decades — which later turned out to be one of the largest known amber nuggets in the world.

  • El País ☛ Elderly Romanian woman used amber nugget worth over $1 million as a doorstop for decades

    The extraordinary fossil resin caught the eye of a relative of the homeowner, who died two years after the fall of the communist dictatorship in 1989. Having inherited what he first considered to be just a rock, he examined the piece of amber more closely and deduced that it could be a semi-precious stone of great value. And he was right. He sold the unique find to the Romanian state, which promptly classified the piece as a national treasure.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ RF safety experiments - Meat & Pickles demonstrate foldback

    Observations: The hot dog did, indeed, produce copious noise through plasma-air interaction. It did an excellent job demodulating the AM signal into audible sound, and the entire hot dog was heated to around 80°C—which is luckily a safe internal temperature for eating.

• Education

  • Internet Archive ☛ Internet Archive Responds to Appellate Opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive

    We are disappointed in today’s opinion about the Internet Archive’s digital lending of books that are available electronically elsewhere. We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books.

  • SANS ☛ Scans for Moodle Learning Platform Following Recent Update

    On August 10th, the popular learning platform "Moodle" released an update fixing CVE-2024-43425. RedTeam Pentesting found the vulnerability and published a detailed blog post late last week. The blog post demonstrates in detail how a user with the "trainer" role could execute arbitrary code on the server. A trainer would have to publish a "calculated question". These questions are generated dynamically by evaluating a formula. Sadly, the formula was evaluated using PHP's "eval" command. As pointed out by RedTeam Pentesting, "eval" is a very dangerous command to use and should be avoided if at all possible. This applies not only to PHP but to most languages (also see my video about command injection vulnerabilities). As I usually say: "eval is only one letter away from evil".

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Hardware features I wish could come back

    Headphone jacks. I know phone manufacturers switched to Bluetooth so they could sell you another consumable with irreplaceable batteries. But some of us love our wired headphones, and don’t want yet another dongle to lose.

  • Terence Eden ☛ Some thoughts on the YubiKey EUCLEAK Vulnerability

    It looks like everyone's favourite FIDO token provider might have an unpatchable vulnerability! Much Sturm und Drang from the usual sources. But how bad is it really? Not so bad - but it does expose some weaknesses in the very idea of having physical tokens.

  • Matt Zagaja ☛ Yubikey is the Digital Seat Belt We Need Today

    Hardware security keys are small devices that plug into a computer or smart phone and provide a strong physical form of two-factor authentication. This technology is proven, and widely supported by Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Unlike software based solutions they are virtually impervious to phishing attacks and remote hacking attempts. Yet despite their effectiveness companies resist using them due to perceived inconvenience or cost.

  • Hackaday ☛ How Sony Mastered The Transistor

    When you think of Sony, you probably think of a technology company that’s been around forever. However, as [Asianometry] points out, it really formed in the tough years after World War II. The two people behind the company’s formation were an interesting pair. One of them was a visionary engineer and one was a consummate businessman.

  • Windows Central ☛ Intel's missed AI opportunity might prompt it to pump the brakes on its $32 billion Magdeburg project and sell Altera to keep the lights on

    Aside from the inevitable 15,000 layoffs in devastating cost cuts and missed partnership and investment with OpenAI in the AI landscape, Intel can't seem to free itself from the tangled web of drastic operational cost cuts.

    According to a new report by Reuters, top executives at the firm, including Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, are slated to present a new plan to the board of directors. The said plan will include a new expenditure roadmap, with significant budget cuts allocated to businesses and departments that aren't necessarily thriving.

    In a surprising turn of events, the changes will also impact Intel's programmable chip unit Altera, which it can no longer support due to budget constraints. The Magdeburg chip fab project set Intel back up to $32 billion. But as it now seems, the project might be canceled or put on pause as Intel restrategizes. Reports indicate that Magdeburg's local government might decide to take on the project if Intel pulls out.

  • Reuters ☛ Intel's Dow status under threat as struggling chipmaker's shares plunge

    Intel was one of the first two tech companies to join the Dow Jones Industrial Average during the late-'90s dot-com boom, along with Microsoft. Now, a slump in Intel's share price could cost the American chipmaker its place in the blue-chip index.

  • Intel’s next-gen chip manufacturing process reportedly hits snag after failing crucial tests

    Intel’s been trying to recapture its glory days and establish itself, once again, as a leading chipmaker. However, this dream has run into a major snag. The company’s next-gen manufacturing process, currently referred to as 18A, has reportedly failed crucial tests, according to Reuters.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Elle Macpherson’s breast cancer: Another example of how antivax and quackery are inseparable

    I rarely mention supermodels or vacuous pop culture figures on this blog, not so much because I am unaware of them—although the older I get the less aware of many of them I become—but rather because they are so uninteresting to me. As a result, I tend only to mention such celebrities when they become involved in topics relevant to this blog. So it has been with supermodel Elle Macpherson. The one and only time, until now, that I’ve ever written a post about her was in 2018, when it was widely reported that she was dating Andrew Wakefield, the granddaddy of the 21st century antivax movement, in particular the flavor of the movement that has demonized the MMR vaccine as causing autism. I also noted at the time that she ran a business called Welleco, which, as the name implies, sells a lot of beauty products, but also “wellness” products, including supplements, and, more interesting to me, “alkaline” quackery that very much resembles that of Robert O. Young, a frequent topic of this blog years ago for his cancer quackery. Basically, I likened Welleco to Goop, but more of a one trick pony version in that it didn’t sell the wide variety of nonsense and quackery that Goop sells.

  • Science Alert ☛ 60% of Earth's Food Crops Aren't Being Visited by Enough Pollinators

    Some of our favorite food crops around the world aren't reaching their full potential because of fewer visits from the insects that pollinate them, a new study has found.

    Insects that provide the crucial service of pollination are declining en masse, and that has serious consequences for the world's food crops, 75 percent of which depend at least partially – if not entirely – on insect pollination.

  • 404 Media ☛ ‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine

    Laufer is the chief spokesperson of Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist collective that has spent the last few years teaching people how to make DIY versions of expensive pharmaceuticals at a tiny fraction of the cost. Four Thieves Vinegar Collective call what they do “right to repair for your body.”

  • Derek Kędziora ☛ Toxicity

    And hence pop culture nudges people to extreme, simplistic solutions to the complexities of life and human relationships. What I like about these sorts of long, in-depth essays is that this theme is repeatedly examined from different angles without any real attempt to say what’s the right conclusion.

  • Vox ☛ The best kitchen organization tips approved by chefs

    As someone with a cooking background — my father has been a chef for 35 years, my mother’s side of the family runs a spice business, and I grew up running around commercial kitchens and worked for a year as a line cook, in addition to writing a book on spices — I find myself deeply disturbed by fridgescaping. It is, I believe, the culmination of a series of trends that serve to alienate people from food. It removes all the labor, the mess, the physicality, and the pleasure inherent in eating, and replaces it with public performance. There are better ways to organize a kitchen, techniques that can improve functionality and prioritize goals like reducing food waste — and, yes, that could even lead to eating more fruits and vegetables.

  • Michigan News ☛ Dear Annie: Staying off Snapchat helped my mental health as a teen - mlive.com

    Besides, anyone who pressures you for not having Snapchat probably doesn’t have the greatest intentions. Stay safe and off Snapchat; you’ll find your people. High school can be difficult, but as someone who’s almost done, here’s some advice: [...]

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Techdirt ☛ AI Checkers Forcing Kids To Write Like A Robot To Avoid Being Called A Robot

    Later in the day, the kid came by with their school-issued Chromebook, which has Grammarly Pro pre-installed. The students are encouraged to use it to improve their writing. One thing that the tool has is an “AI Checker” in which it tries to determine if the submitted text was written by AI.

    This is similar to “plagiarism checkers” that have been around for a few decades. In fact, Grammarly’s “check” covers both AI and plagiarism (or so it says). Those systems have always had problems, especially around false positives. And it seems that the AI checkers are (unsurprisingly) worse**.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Musician Indicted Over Alleged $10M Streaming Fraud Scheme

    And in 2017, Smith in an email allegedly relayed “that he had 52 cloud services accounts, and each of those accounts had 20 Bot Accounts on the Streaming Platforms, for a total of 1,040 Bot Accounts.

    “He further wrote that each Bot Account could stream approximately 636 songs per day,” the indictment proceeds, “and so in total SMITH could generate approximately 661,440 streams per day. SMITH estimated that the average royalty per stream was half of one cent, which would have meant daily royalties of $3,307.20, monthly royalties of $99,216, and annual royalties of $1,207,128.”

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ xAI Colossus supercomputer with 100K H100 GPUs comes online — Musk lays out plans to double GPU count to 200K with 50K H100 and 50K H200

    Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) has brought the world's most powerful training system online. The Colossus supercomputer uses as many as 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs for training and is set to expand with another 50,000 Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs in the coming months.

  • The Verge ☛ Despite free speech claims, X has suppressed content on behalf of Turkey and India

    Elon Musk is a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist.” He’s declared himself so committed to the unfettered, open exchange of ideas that he’s said the only way X would let a government suppress speech on its platform is “at gunpoint.” All of this explains why Musk recently allowed X to be banned in Brazil rather than comply with the country’s mandate that the social media platform block certain accounts.

    It does far less to explain Musk’s history of doing that very thing in other countries — often at the behest of right-wing or authoritarian regimes.

  • The Verge ☛ X wins block on part of California’s content moderation law

    The appeals court has now overturned this decision. The decision says the law’s requirements are “more extensive than necessary to serve the State’s purported goal of requiring social media companies to be transparent about their content-moderation policies.”

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Soldier's arrest highlights issue of AI-created explicit material

    An Alaska soldier was arrested last month on charges related to possessing child sexual abuse material and allegedly creating thousands of those images using artificial intelligence. There is no federal or military law that outright criminalizes the use of AI to create explicit materials but military justice system lawyers say that the Department of Defense has other methods to hold service members accountable.

  • Michał Sapka ☛ Multi OS life is terrible

    But this is not the computer I use the most. For 8 hours a day, I am forced to macOS. It’s a system that used to be good, but each version is getting progressively worse. But it also removes all power from now. It should be the IT department I am fighting with, not Tim Cook!

  • The Register UK ☛ Starlink does a 180, decides to block X in Brazil after all

    Starlink had previously informed Brazil's regulator that it would not obey the order, according to local media. However, the resistance was short lived, and Starlink has now confirmed posted that it is getting into line.

  • VOA News ☛ Musk's Starlink will comply with judge's order to block X in Brazil

    In a statement posted on X, Starlink said it will heed Justice Alexandre de Moraes' order despite him having frozen the company's assets. Previously, it informally told the telecommunications regulator that it would not comply until de Moraes reversed course.

  • Axios ☛ Brazil X ban upheld by supreme court after Musk refuses to comply with law

    Why it matters: The unanimous ruling by the five justices comes as Musk accuses Brazil's top judge of acting as a "dictator" for suspending X in Latin America's largest nation over misinformation concerns and for failing to appoint a legal representative for the social media platform in the country.

  • IGN ☛ Until Dawn Remake Developer Ballistic Moon Acknowledges 'Significant' Layoffs

    A LinkedIn post from the studio said it was "profoundly sorry" for the layoffs that appeared to affect at least 11 members of staff at the studio, though an exact number is unclear and Ballistic Moon did not respond to IGN's request for comment.

    "It is with deep regret and a heavy heart that we must make the tough decision to significantly sale down our team to secure the future of our studio," Ballistic Moon said. "This comes after our development of Until Dawn for PS5 and PC."

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Security Week ☛ White House Addresses BGP Vulnerabilities in New Internet Routing Security Roadmap

      The US government wants to help prevent such incidents and the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) has now released a roadmap to enhance internet routing security, which focuses on improving BGP security, particularly through the adoption of Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI).

      The cybersecurity industry has long proposed RPKI as a solution for securing BGP routing and significant progress has been made over the past years.

    • Security Week ☛ Crypto Vulnerability Allows Cloning of YubiKey Security Keys

      YubiKey security keys can be cloned using a side-channel attack that leverages a vulnerability in a third-party cryptographic library.

      The attack, dubbed Eucleak, has been demonstrated by NinjaLab, a company focusing on the security of cryptographic implementations. Yubico, the company that develops YubiKey, has published a security advisory in response to the findings.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Record ☛ European data privacy watchdog closes case against X over its Grok AI bot

      Europe’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) formally closed proceedings against X on Wednesday after the social media platform agreed to permanently stop processing personal data gleaned from European users to feed the company’s Grok artificial intelligence chatbot.

      The decision follows a DPC appeal to Ireland’s High Court last month after which X initially agreed to abandon its Grok model training.

    • PC World ☛ Recall 2.0? Microsoft plans another AI feature that scans everything

      The negative feedback that came crashing down on Windows Recall apparently hasn’t gotten through to Microsoft because another AI feature has appeared in Windows 11 that does a lot of the same stuff.

    • Sora News 24 ☛ Japan set to introduce new entry system for foreign tourists | SoraNews24 -Japan News-

      Travelling to Japan as a tourist has been a breeze for visitors from 71 visa-exempt countries and regions, as there’s no requirement to obtain a short-stay visa at a local embassy prior to travel. However, that’s all set to change in the future, as the Japanese government has announced plans to introduce a new travel authorisation system which will require visitors to declare personal information online in order to enter the country.

    • Techdirt ☛ Cops Are Starting To Tow Away Teslas To ‘Secure’ Recordings Captured By The Cars’ Cameras

      Tesla’s vehicles carry more cameras than most. Added to the cars as a way to protect owners — either by documenting their theft as it occurs or providing recordings of accidents — they’ve become just another way for investigators to collect evidence in criminal cases. The car doesn’t actually have to be involved in the criminal act. It just has to be within eyeshot (so to speak) of the criminal act.

    • CBC ☛ Clearview AI faces $45.6M fine in the Netherlands for 'illegal database' of faces

      The Dutch data protection watchdog on Tuesday issued facial recognition startup Clearview AI with a fine of 30.5 million euros ($45.6 million Cdn) over its creation of what the agency called an "illegal database" of billions of photos of faces.

      The Netherlands' Data Protection Agency, or DPA, also warned Dutch companies that using Clearview's services is also banned.

  • Confidentiality

    • Teleport ☛ Securing Infrastructure in Healthcare: Reducing Breaches and Building

      Telehealth and remote patient monitoring solutions enable healthcare providers to deliver care beyond traditional clinical settings. However, developing and deploying these digital healthcare solutions involves navigating complex challenges, particularly regarding data privacy and regulatory compliance. Ensuring adherence to HIPAA regulations while securely managing remote infrastructure adds layers of complexity for healthcare IT, security, and engineering teams.

      In this blog, we will explore some common challenges digital healthcare technology companies face when developing and deploying health tech products. We will use a fictional example to illustrate the many technical and compliance hurdles that organizations must overcome. We will then document how Teleport’s innovative solution for secure infrastructure access simplifies the process, improving engineering productivity, enhancing security, and simplifying compliance audits.

    • SequoiaPGP ☛ Sequoia PGP: Out and About

      Over the past few months, we’ve attended a number of conferences. In addition to hearing from a lot of people who had helpful feedback and fresh ideas, we’ve also held several presentations.

      In this post, I summarize our talks, and link to recordings when they are available. I also report on the OpenPGP Email Summit, which is a yearly gathering of some people from the OpenPGP community. (If you are interested in the so-called LibrePGP / OpenPGP schism, read on.)

      At the end, I list where you can meet us in person in the near future. (Spoiler: at Datenspuren in Dresden in September, and IETF 121 in Dublin in November.)

• Defence/Aggression

  • JURIST ☛ US charges Hamas leader Sinwar with terrorism offenses over October 7 attacks

    The complaint asserted that, in the course of the October 7 attacks, Hamas murdered 260 civilians during a music festival at the Re’im kibbutz. It also documented the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri, where it says Hamas killed approximately 108 victims and took an unknown number to be held hostage in Gaza. The US Justice Department also recounted Hamas attacks on the Kfar Aza, Nir Oz, Holit, Zikim, Kerem Shalom, and Sufa kibbutzim. The complaint said all attacks resulted in the death of at least one US citizen. The total number of civilians killed during the attacks reached at least 815.

  • The Hill ☛ ABC releases Trump, Harris debate rules

    Former President Trump and Vice President Harris have agreed to the rules set by ABC News for their first debate next week, the network announced Wednesday.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Swing states prepare for a showdown over certifying votes in November

    There is broad concern that despite the checks and balances built into the voting system, Republican members of state and county boards tasked with certifying elections will be driven by conspiracy theories and refuse to fulfill their roles if former President Donald Trump loses again.

    Last month, the Georgia State Election Board passed new rules that would allow county canvassing boards to conduct their own investigations before certifying election results. State and national Democrats have sued the state board over the rules.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Russia hits Ukraine’s grid: ‘Everyone is an electrician now’

    A barrage of 100 missiles and 100 drones August 26, for example, targeted electricity distribution substations across the country. In June, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia’s spring targeting of Ukraine’s grid had already destroyed half the country’s power generation capacity – a rate of destruction that continues to far outstrip Ukraine’s ability to make repairs.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Meta’s Oversight Board says ‘from the river to the sea’ isn’t hate speech

    Meta’s Oversight Board, an independent collection of academics, experts and lawyers who oversee thorny content decisions on the platform, said posts they examined using the phrase didn’t violate the company’s rules against hate speech, inciting violence or praising dangerous organizations.

  • The Verge ☛ Russia is trying to meddle with the US election again, Biden administration says

    In a series of actions across the government on Wednesday, several agencies sought to crack down on alleged disinformation campaigns targeting the November election. The government alleges that Russian actors operated websites and social media accounts that spread propaganda furthering Russian interests and even created fake social media personas to comment on posts to make their efforts more believable. In one of the alleged influence campaigns, Russian-controlled media outlet RT financed a Tennessee company that gained millions of views on videos posted to YouTube, according to the US. The announcements came as the Justice Department hosted a task force meeting on election threats.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Right-Wing Influencers Were Duped to Work for Covert Russian Influence Operation, US Says

    An indictment filed Wednesday alleges a media company linked to six conservative influencers — including well-known personalities Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson — was secretly funded by Russian state media employees to churn out English-language videos that were “often consistent” with the Kremlin's “interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition" to Russian interests, like its war in Ukraine.

  • NYPost ☛ 'Secret' Russian influence campaign paid $10M to prop up right-wing US commentators: indictment

    The Justice Department indicted two employees of the Russian state-controlled media outlet RT on Wednesday for acting as unregistered foreign agents and laundering $9.7 million in payments to a Tennessee media company to allegedly promote pro-Kremlin propaganda.

    The employees, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, 31, and Elena Afanasyeva, 27, are at large, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, after floating for almost a year the media entity that “posted nearly 2,000 videos that have garnered more than 16 million views on YouTube alone.”

  • The Record ☛ DOJ seizes dozens of domains used in Russian influence campaigns targeting swing states

    The campaign targeted specific populations and regions in the U.S. with content designed to inflame tensions, according to court documents. The actors used the now-seized domains to trick Americans into consuming and spreading alleged Russian propaganda, hiding the fact that the news was coming from the Russian government.

  • The Record ☛ US indicts two RT employees for alleged Russian disinformation effort

    The indictments are part of several actions the Justice Department announced on Wednesday aimed at disrupting Russian efforts to spread disinformation ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.

    The Justice Department indicted Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, 31, and Elena Afanasyeva, 27, on a range of charges revolving around their effort to continue RT’s work in the U.S. after the news outlet shut down its RT America arm in 2022.

  • Vox ☛ That Chase “money glitch” hack on Tiktok was just fraud

    TikTok probably can’t teach you to game the financial system like a rich person, but it might teach you crime.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Space Force to field sensors for tracking air, ground targets in 2030s

    The service has been working with the intelligence community to develop satellites that can perform the ground moving target indication, or GMTI, mission from space. In fact, the Space Force cleared the program to enter formal development late last month, according to a report from Breaking Defense.

  • New York Times ☛ TikTok Expands its Election Resources Ahead of November

    The efforts come as TikTok warily acknowledges that it has become a much bigger news [sic] source for millions of Americans ahead of the presidential election than it was in 2020. It joins other major tech companies like Meta, Google and X that must regularly grapple with how their platforms handle election-related content. But TikTok has an added layer of scrutiny, since it is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and faces a looming possibility that its app could be banned as soon as January, based on national security concerns.

  • VOA News ☛ China, Tanzania, Zambia sign initial agreement on key railway project

    In February, China proposed to spend $1 billion to rehabilitate the rail line through a public-private partnership model.

  • La Prensa Latina ☛ New Islamist attack causes dozens of deaths in Nigeria

    Islamist factions such as Boko Haram and its offshoot, Islamic State in West Africa, are active in eastern Nigeria, and insecurity has spread to areas in the center, north and northwest, raising alarms about the possible expansion of these terrorist and criminal networks.

  • Defence Web ☛ Growing danger of terrorist jailbreaks in West Africa

    This latest incident came two years after a similar ISWAP attack in Abuja, Nigeria – the 5 July 2022 Kuje jailbreak. In March this year, Nigeria’s House of Representatives held a hearing into the whereabouts of escapees from that attack, in which 879 prisoners, including 68 Boko Haram members, were freed. Some 544 are still at large.

  • ADF ☛ Islamic State’s Resurgence Threatens Somalia

    “The reported presence of multiple high-level leaders in Somalia and across Africa reflects Africa’s increasingly focal role in the IS global network,” analyst Liam Carr wrote in his June 20 critical threats assessment. “This includes the involvement of African-based affiliates and leaders in IS global operations, including funding external attacks and recruiting foreign fighters.”

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ What Mongolia’s decision to defy an international warrant for Putin’s arrest and welcome him with open arms means for the country and the Kremlin — Meduza

• Environment

  • Truthdig ☛ Can the U.S. Census Keep Up With Climate Displacement? - Truthdig

    In a portent of things to come, residents of Lake Charles, Louisiana, are still on the move four years after Hurricane Laura.

  • Lou Plummer ☛ Everyone Talks About the Weather

    I've had other close encounters with multiple hurricanes and other tornados as well as a close call or two when hiking and camping in winter weather. All of that happened during the run up to the kind of wild swings in weather that climate change is causing these days. I may be in the autumn of life, but I'm afraid I may well see things more terrible than what I have already experienced.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • DeSmog ☛ Fossil Fuel Lobbyists and Major Polluters to Sponsor Labour Conference Events

    • Nick Heer ☛ The Economist: Big, Heavy Cars Are Killing More People

      The results? According to the Economist, “if the heaviest tenth of vehicles in America’s fleet were downsized […] road fatalities in multi-car crashes — which totaled 19,081 in 2023 — could be reduced by 12%, or 2,300, without sacrificing the safety of any cars involved”.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Science News ☛ A nuclear clock prototype hints at ultraprecise timekeeping

      Nuclear clocks would keep time using a variety of the element thorium, called thorium-229. Most atomic nuclei make energy leaps that are too large to be triggered by a tabletop laser. But thorium-229 has two energy levels that are close enough to each other that the transition between those two levels could serve as a clock.

      Now, researchers have precisely determined the frequency of the light needed to set off that jump. It’s 2,020,407,384,335 kilohertz, Ye and colleagues report in the Sept. 5 Nature.

    • Science Alert ☛ A Surprising Number of Cats Want You to Play Fetch With Them

      In our newly published study, we found that more than 40% of cats described in our survey data played fetch, compared with almost 80% of dogs.

• Finance

  • August tech layoffs surpassed 26K, highest level since January

    Apple, IBM, Cisco, Dell and Intel were among 48 tech companies that announced a combined 26,024 staff reductions last month, according to layoffs.fyi, which tracks such data. More than 400 tech companies have announced job cuts since the start of the year, impacting over 130,000 workers. The highest monthly count was 34,107 in January.

  • India Times ☛ Over 27,000 tech employees loses job in August 2024: Intel, Cisco, IBM, Apple and others cuts thousands of jobs

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Pro Publica ☛ DOJ and Dane County, WI, Sheriff Reach Deal on Civil Rights Inquiry

  • Pro Publica ☛ Ginni Thomas Email Praised Group Opposing SCOTUS Reform

    Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses.

    Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”

  • Vox ☛ Nvidia’s historic stock losses, explained

    After news broke on Tuesday that the US Justice Department issued Nvidia a subpoena as part of an antitrust investigation, investors sold $279 billion worth of shares — amounting to 9.5 percent of the company’s stock. That sell-off is bad news for Nvidia, and it renews existing concerns about the strength of the AI sector and the US economy more broadly.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Rise of Big Tech Is Generating Economic Stagnation

    Silicon Valley hype presented the digital economy as a source of dynamic growth as well as a liberating force for workers. In reality, digital technology is facilitating brutal forms of exploitation while productivity and growth are slowing down.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Japan’s new entry system for foreign travellers

    The ESTA programme in the US always felt weird. The questions were clearly targeted at sussing out undesirable people from friendly countries, but those would be the exact actors who wouldn’t be truthful on such a form in the first place. I suppose it introduces a paper trail, but has anyone done a study confirming its effectiveness?

  • RationalWiki ☛ RationalWiki:Fundraiser

    RationalWiki faces a current legal situation raising long-term questions. Can we fend off a frivolous lawsuit, or will we be forced to give in and censor ourselves for lack of funds? And if we do give in and censor ourselves, what happens when others who object to our contents file more such lawsuits?

    Previously over the years, we've been lucky in that the lawsuits filed against us (far eclipsed by the threats of lawsuits never filed) failed to go anywhere due to being badly filed, not served, etc. This time however, someone actually paid for a lawyer to do the deed, and do it well enough that we need to respond. So we face the need to get legal assistance ourselves in order to stand up for ourselves.

  • Nick Heer ☛ RationalWiki Is Being Sued

    At the beginning of August, Nassim Haramein sued RationalWiki on charges of defamation, conspiracy, and invasion of privacy. Regardless of the merits of the suit — I write, trying not to fall afoul of an obviously litigious individual — RationalWiki is a small, volunteer-run operation and will need legal representation to avoid losing next week by default. The site is currently soliciting donations.

  • The Register UK ☛ Telegram apologizes to South Korea and takes down deepfakes

    The Commission expressed hopes that the incident would be a first step towards a productive relationship – one that includes Telegram providing it with an email hotline to facilitate rapid takedown requests.

  • YLE ☛ Telia plans 500 job cuts in Finland

    In a press release, the Stockholm-based company said that, following negotiations with employee representatives, it plans to reduce its workforce by around 3,000 people across all of its units and regions. Those regions include Finland, Sweden, Norway, Lithuania and Estonia. The firm currently employs around 4,000 people in Finland.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Intel could soon be kicked off the Dow Jones

    Analysts and investors said Intel was likely to be removed from the Dow, pointing to a near 60% decline in the company’s shares this year that has made it the worst performer on the index and left it with the lowest stock price on the price-weighted Dow.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • FAIR ☛ A Bookstore Brouhaha Confuses Whose Speech Is Being Curtailed

    Author and journalist Joshua Leifer is the latest scribe to be—allegedly—canceled. A talk for his new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, at a Brooklyn bookstore was canceled when a member of the store’s staff objected to Leifer being joined by a liberal rabbi who was also a Zionist, although still critical of Israel’s right-wing government (New York Times, 8/21/24).

  • CS Monitor ☛ Chinese Spamouflage accounts spread disinformation about US politics

    New research into Chinese disinformation networks targeting American voters shows Harlan’s claims were as fictitious as his profile picture, which analysts think was created using artificial intelligence.

    As voters prepare to cast their ballots this fall, China has been making its own plans, cultivating networks of fake social media users designed to mimic Americans. Whoever or wherever he really is, Harlan is a small part of a larger effort by U.S. adversaries to use social media to influence and upend America’s political debate.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ concerned by Kazakhstan’s restrictive new media accreditation

    Press freedom advocates say the proposed changes are worrying given authorities’ monthslong denial of accreditation to dozens of journalists working for U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Kazakh service, known locally as Radio Azattyq, over a “false information” fine, as well as escalating use of administrative “false information” charges against domestic journalists.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • EFF ☛ U.S. Federal Employees: Plant Your Flag for Digital Freedoms Today!

    The CFC is the world’s largest and most successful annual charity campaign for U.S. federal employees and retirees. You can now make a pledge to support EFF’s lawyers, technologists, and activists in the fight for privacy and free speech online. Last year members of the CFC community raised nearly $34,000 to support digital civil liberties. 

  • [Repeat] Federal News Network ☛ Security in the age of telework continues to be a ‘shared responsibility’

    That fact makes a new study from the Interagency Security Committee on “Federal Mobile Workplace Security” especially pertinent for federal managers and rank-and-file employees alike. The study examines all aspects of security for the employee who takes their work outside the nominally safe confines of a federal office.

    As part of an executive order signed last fall, President Joe Biden directed the ISC to provide best practices on mobile workforce security. But Daryle Hernandez, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s lead for the ISC, said the study was also driven by agency demand for security best practices in the age of telework.

  • New York Times ☛ With New Taliban Manifesto, Afghan Women Fear the Worst

    Three years into its rule, the movement has codified its harsh Islamic decrees into law that now includes a ban on women’s voices in public.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Tackling food insecurity requires more than charity—governments must also act, say researchers

    Decades of research, exemplified by PROOF, the food insecurity research group at the University of Toronto, make it clear that food insecurity cannot be solved by relying on charity alone. Charity is important for helping vulnerable people.

    However, the root causes of food insecurity are systemic issues like inadequate income, social inequalities and insufficient social support; food donations alone fail to tackle these underlying problems.

  • Techdirt ☛ Appliance, Tractor, And Irrigation Companies Lobby Against Military ‘Right To Repair’ Reforms

    A 2021 bipartisan FTC report showcased how these claims are routinely false. In reality, right to repair reforms not only help make repair more affordable (a boon to military-funding taxpayers) but drive greater availability of manuals, parts, and tools, making tech safer.

  • [Old] 404 Media ☛ Appliance and Tractor Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair

    The anti-repair lobbying shows that manufacturers are still doing everything they can to retain lucrative service contracts and to kill any legislation that would threaten the repair monopolies many companies have been building for years.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • EFF ☛ EFF Calls For Release of Alexey Soldatov, "Father of the Russian Internet"

    In 1990, Soldatov led the Relcom computer network that made the first Soviet connection to the global internet. He also served as Russia’s Deputy Minister of Communications from 2008 to 2010.

    Soldatov was convicted on charges related to an alleged deal to transfer IP addresses to a foreign organization. He and his lawyers have denied the accusations. His family, many supporters, and Netzpolitik suggest that the accusations are politically motivated. Soldatov’s former business partner, Yevgeny Antipov, was also sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

    Soldatov was a trained nuclear scientist at Kurchatov nuclear research institute who, during the Soviet era, built the Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN), which was responsible for administering and allocating IP addresses in Russia from the early 1990s onwards. The  network RIPN created was called Relcom (RELiable COMmunication). During the 1991 KGB-led coup d’etat Relcom—unlike traditional media—remained uncensored. As his son, journalist Andrei Soldatov recalls, Alexey Soldatov insisted on keeping the lines open under all circumstances.

  • APNIC ☛ VPP with loopback-only OSPFv3: Part 2

    When I first built IPng Networks’ AS8298, I decided to use OSPF as an IPv4 and IPv6 Internal Gateway Protocol (IGP). Back in March 2024, I looked at two slightly different ways of doing this for IPng, notably against a backdrop of conserving IPv4 addresses. As the network grows, the little point-to-point transit networks between routers really start adding up.

  • APNIC ☛ 2024 APNIC Survey report released

    The 2024 APNIC Survey, conducted by independent research specialist, Survey Matters, has provided APNIC with valuable feedback from Members and the wider Internet community.

    A summary of the results will be presented at APNIC 58 during the APNIC Member Meeting on Friday, 6 September, and you can watch the presentation online (live or recording afterwards).

  • APNIC ☛ APNIC Survey

    The 2024 APNIC Survey was conducted from 12 June to 5 July 2024 by Survey Matters, an independent research agency engaged to conduct the survey on behalf of APNIC.

    The results of the APNIC Survey 2024 will be presented at APNIC 58.

    The APNIC Executive Council and Secretariat would like to thank everyone in the community who participated in the survey and interviews.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Register UK ☛ You had one job – and four US regulators will share info to check a merger didn't unfairly end it

  Tech companies are forever acquiring each other, but future buys will likely face more scrutiny after four US federal regulators decided to share data that they hope will help antitrust investigators assess whether an acquisition impacts labor markets – not just the market for tech.

  The four regulators are the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Antitrust division, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Department of Labor (DOL), and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The quartet on Wednesday issued memorandum of understanding (MOU) [PDF] detailing their renewed collaboration, which will mean that the DOL and NLRB (the labor-related agencies) will make experts available to the FTC and DOJ (the antitrust agencies) to "provide technical assistance, as well as additional information and data," for the latter's M&A inquiries.

• Open Web Advocacy ☛ Apple appears to mislead UK Regulator over deceptive default browser user interface - Open Web Advocacy

  TLDR: Apple seems to have tried to mislead the UK regulator that a deceptive pattern they had previously implemented for picking default browsers, in fact, never existed.

• Copyrights

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ What to know about the Disney blackout on DirecTV

    More than 10 million DirecTV and U-Verse video customers were swept up in the feud when DirecTV lost its rights to carry Disney programming — including Disney-owned ABC television stations.

    The two companies had been negotiating at DirecTV’s El Segundo headquarters for weeks, but failed to agree on a new licensing deal by the Sept. 1 deadline.

  • New York Times ☛ Internet Archive Loses Court Appeal in Fight Over Online Lending Library

    A federal court ruled against the Internet Archive in March 2023, and the archive removed many works from its online library of books. It appealed the decision last September.

    A final appeal could potentially be taken to the Supreme Court. In a statement, the Internet Archive said it was “reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend and preserve books.”

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Internet Archive Loses Appeal of Book Publishers Copyright Case

    The book publishers — Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House — sued the Internet Archive in June 2020 after the Internet Archive launched its “National Emergency Library.” By that point, the Archive had been scanning and lending book online on a one-to-one, owned-to-loan basis for years. The National Emergency Library, however, removed those restrictions to make texts more widely available as schools and libraries closed during the pandemic.

    While the National Emergency Library prompted the suit, the district and appeals court rulings pertain to the Archive’s controlled digital lending program as a whole. The appeals court said that Open Library didn’t meet the standards necessary for fair use protections, saying there was “nothing transformative about the IA’s use” of these books, or its controlled digital lending program, because “its digital copies serve the same purpose as the originals.”

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Internet Archive loses appeal, court rules e-book lending is copyright infringement

    The online digital library Internet Archive today lost its appeal to lend out scanned e-books without the approval of publishers.

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected the nonprofit’s claim in a lawsuit with a coalition of book publishers that its digitized library of books can legally operate under the fair use doctrine.

  • Wired ☛ The Internet Archive Loses Its Appeal of a Major Copyright Case

    In March 2020, the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, launched a program called the National Emergency Library, or NEL. Library closures caused by the pandemic had left students, researchers, and readers unable to access millions of books, and the Internet Archive has said it was responding to calls from regular people and other librarians to help those at home get access to the books they needed.

    The NEL was an offshoot of an ongoing digital lending project called the Open Library, in which the Internet Archive scans physical copies of library books and lets people check out the digital copies as though they’re regular reading material instead of ebooks. The Open Library lent the books to one person at a time—but the NEL removed this ratio rule, instead letting large numbers of people borrow each scanned book at once.

  • Ars Technica ☛ Internet Archive’s e-book lending is not fair use, appeals court rules

    Judges for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday rejected the Internet Archive (IA) argument that its controlled digital lending—which allows only one person to borrow each scanned e-book at a time—was a transformative fair use that worked like a traditional library and did not violate copyright law.

    As Judge Beth Robinson wrote in the decision, because the IA's digital copies of books did not "provide criticism, commentary, or information about the originals" or alter the original books to add "something new," the court concluded that the IA's use of publishers' books was not transformative, hobbling the organization's fair use defense.

  • Wired ☛ A New Group Is Trying to Make AI Data Licensing Ethical

    The DPA advocates for an opt-in system, meaning that data can be used only after consent is explicitly given by creators and rights holders. This represents a significant departure from the way most major AI companies operate. Some have developed their own opt-out systems, which put the burden on data owners to pull their work on a case-by-case basis. Others offer no opt-outs whatsoever.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ UFC & MLB Join Pirate IPTV Blocking as Broadcasters Collaborate to Cut Costs

    Major sports rightsholders and broadcasters in Canada have selected UK-based site-blocking veterans Friend MTS to carry out all pirate IPTV blocking under a Federal Court injunction obtained during the summer. The fact that NHL, NBA, and Premier League streams will be blocked by major Canadian ISPs was widely reported. Yet, with significantly less fanfare, it appears that the UFC and MLB have also entered the blocking arena.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ TorrentGalaxy is Back Online & Uploads Resume

    This weekend, popular torrent site TorrentGalaxy went 'offline' displaying an image that some interpreted as a farewell message. Today the site returned and uploads at third-party sites resumed simultaneously. This is the second time in a few weeks that the site has gone through this mysterious cycle. The main question that remains: Why?