Leftovers

• The Guardian UK ☛ The hell and horror of cow attacks: ‘I told my husband to leave me to die’

  Gilmore had to learn to walk again; she can no longer ride a bike and has aches, pains and scars. “I’ll never be a swimsuit model again,” she says, laughing. But she considers herself lucky: the surgeon told her she would have died if she had been alone when it happened. She was luckier than Brian Bellhouse, who was killed by cows in 2017, and Malcolm Flynn, David Clark and Michael Holmes, who were all killed in 2020 (Holmes’ wife Teresa was paralysed from the waist down in the incident), or Kathy McKellar and Huw Evans, who were killed in 2022.

• Robert Birming ☛ Blog Post Ideas Galore

  Of course, this setup doesn't suit all types of blogs. But I dare say that it's an approach that works for the majority of bloggers.

• Data Swamp ☛ Self-hosting at home and privacy

  You may self-host services at home, but you need to think about the potential drawbacks for your privacy.

  Let's explore what kind of information could be extracted from self-hosting, especially when you use a domain name.

• Lou Plummer ☛ On Working

  I am a bit conflicted when it comes to the subject of work and having a work ethic. On one hand, I live in the least unionized state in America and retired from a career as a state employee where we were forbidden by law from engaging in collective bargaining, a law that was created to stop white and black workers in Charlotte from organizing together back in the 1950s. On the other hand, I believe in not being a burden on my co-workers and in the benefits of taking on hard tasks.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Will This Killer Asteroid Hit Earth in 2029? Scientists Say They'll Know for Sure by 2027

    Fortunately, Apophis — ominously named after the ancient Egyptian deity of Chaos — isn't considered big enough to wipe out human civilization outright, but it's certainly big enough to obliterate an entire city. But the real killer, most likely, will be the wait: we can't rule out the possibility of an impact until 2027, according to the study.

• Education

  • Crooked Timber ☛ We or They ?

    Like most academics these days, I spend a lot of time filling in online forms. Mostly, this is just an annoyance but occasionally I get something out of it. A recent survey in which the higher-ups tried to get an idea of how the workforce was feeling, asked the question “Do you think of the University as We or They?”.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Overcoming study abroad FOMO

    These questions and the reasoning that accompanies them are well-intentioned, but aimless. As the traditional college experience is limited to just four years, no one can have it all. Choosing to tudy abroad for a semester, or even a year, will always involve trade-offs. Accepting this fact does not make this dilemma any easier, though.

  • France24 ☛ Why so many French teachers are calling it quits

    French teachers are quitting in record numbers, overwhelmed by low pay, crowded classrooms and increasing demands. Despite successive reforms by previous governments, staffing shortages persist. And leaving the profession is often a difficult process. With the announcement of a new education minister just around the corner, will France’s public education crisis finally ease up?

  • The Atlantic ☛ Saving the Idea of the University at Dartmouth

    Universities must be places where different ideas and opinions lead to personal growth, scientific breakthroughs, and new knowledge. But when a group of students takes over a building or establishes an encampment on shared campus grounds and declares that this shared educational space belongs to only one ideological view, the power and potential of the university dies—just as it would if a president, administrators, or faculty members imposed their personal politics as the position of the institution.

    This isn’t just my opinion. As a scientist, I prefer to rely on the data—and this is what the research tells us.

• Hardware

  • Fixing the volume control in an Alesis M1Active 330 USB Speaker System

    Still, no movement. Let's look again from the inside! Oh ffs, there are six more screws inside, holding the front. Away with them! Just need a very long PH1 screwdriver.

    Now you can slowly remove the part of the front where the potentiometer is. Be careful, the top tweeter is mounted to the front, not the main case and so is the headphone jack, without an obvious way to detach it. But you can move away the front far enough to remove the small PCB with the potentiometer and the LED.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ America’s future advantage depends on quick adoption of advanced tech

    While many aspects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resemble World War I — trenches, barbed wires, heavy exchanges of artillery — the innovative use of drones has been game-changing. Unmanned systems are altering the character of warfare, and the ongoing integration of AI and robotics will further accelerate this dramatic shift. It is why these were my top modernization objectives during my tenure as Army secretary and secretary of defense.

  • India Times ☛ Nvidia holds the key to the market. But is it worth this much?

    Nvidia, a leading designer of advanced AI chips, has seen its stock rise nearly 150% in the past year, significantly boosting the S&P 500 index. Despite impressive earnings, recent market reactions suggest investors' expectations have grown too high. The future of AI and Nvidia's role in it remain crucial questions for the market.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ AI bears fruit: Apple slowly infuses AI into iPhones, OpenAI debuts first Strawberry models

    Indeed, hardware is an increasing concern for scaling up AI, as our writer Mark Albertson outlined after his visit to the AI Hardware and Edge AI Summit in San Jose.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Register UK ☛ FDA OKs Apple's AirPods Pro 2 as hearing aids

    The HAF software will test a user's existing hearing and set the AirPods amplification of surrounding sounds to compensate for hearing loss. It was clinically tested on 118 subjects and found to be as effective as a normal hearing aid that requires a prescription, as long as the level of hearing loss isn't severe, according to the FDA.

  • Wired ☛ An ER Doctor’s Cure for America’s Gun Epidemic

    I’m a gun-owning emergency physician, a father, and the cousin of a man who was shot to death. If it wasn’t for the National Rifle Association declaring in 2018 that physicians, like me, should “stay in their lane” and keep quiet about the toll of this plague, I wouldn’t have written about this subject. Yet gun violence consumes my life. I see victims of gun violence from family tragedies—children, adolescents, and adults—almost every day.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Futurism ☛ "Self-Driving" Cars Have a Dirty Secret

    It's only been relatively recently, following several high profile debacles in the autonomous driving industry, that industry leaders, like Waymo this May, have acknowledged the role of human technicians.

    And according to the NYT, none of these companies have shared just how many of these remote-technicians they employ, or how often they depend on them. In short, we don't know how deep this practice goes — and it's possible that the smoothest "self-driving" experiences out there are substantially undergirded by hidden human drivers.

  • New York Times ☛ See How Humans Help Self-Driving Cars Navigate City Streets

    Inside companies like Zoox, this kind of human assistance is taken for granted. Outside such companies, few realize that autonomous vehicles are not completely autonomous.

    For years, companies avoided mentioning the remote assistance provided to their self-driving cars. The illusion of complete autonomy helped to draw attention to their technology and encourage venture capitalists to invest the billions of dollars needed to build increasingly effective autonomous vehicles.

  • The Register UK ☛ MongoDB CEO: If AI hype were the dotcom boom, it is 1996

    Quite where we are on the analogy with the dotcom boom and bust remains open to question. The CEO is correct in saying that as of 1996, Netscape Navigator – the browser which quickly dominated the nascent worldwide web – was a couple of years old, more or less. Amazon and eBay had also been formed in the previous two years.

    Of course, the early dotcom era didn't end well. In early 2000, the Nasdaq Composite stock market index peaked after gaining 400 percent in the previous five years. It then went into a thundering crash, losing nearly two-thirds of its value in a year.

    Whether we're heading for the same kind of crash, Ittycheria did not say. Still, he maintained people tend to "overestimate the impact of a new platform or technology in the short term but underestimate it in the long term."

  • The Register UK ☛ AI firms agree to fight deepfake nudes in White House pledge

    This is the second time in a little over a year that big-name players in the AI space have made voluntary concessions to the Biden administration, and the trend isn't restricted to the US.

  • Riccardo Mori ☛ It’s Lowtime — Observations on Apple’s September event

    You’ll find very little here in terms of tech specs or feature breakdowns. You can find this kind of information in many other sites, starting from Apple’s own site. My impressions and observations are of a more general nature and, spoiler alert, are admittedly affected by the undercurrent of disappointment I’ve been feeling about Apple for a while.

  • The Hindu ☛ Husband kills wife for using social media in Delhi’s Razapur

    After enquiring further into the matter, it was revealed that his wife used to be more active on social media, which triggered an argument and led to this incident.

  • The Record ☛ Multiple attacks forces CISA to order agencies to upgrade or remove end-of-life Ivanti appliance

    The technology company updated an advisory on Friday warning that a “limited number of customers” were breached through the exploitation of CVE-2024-8190.

    The bug was announced on Tuesday and effects Ivanti’s Cloud Service Appliance (CSA) — a tool that provides secure communication over the internet and acts as a center point for managed devices and central consoles are connected.

  • Jorin ☛ Advance of AI

    We must raise awareness about the challenges accompanying AI technology advancements. It’s crucial to educate people on both the promises and risks of AI. We should also urge governments and organizations to support those at risk of being left behind and to keep potential bad actors in check.

    The most crucial task now isn’t to hastily improve and integrate AI into every aspect of life. Instead, we should focus on humans rather than machines.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ From spy cams to deepfake porn: fury in South Korea as women targeted again

    The National police agency said this week that it was investigating 513 cases of deepfake pornography – in which the faces of real women and girls are digitally superimposed on to a body without their knowledge or consent. That represents a 70% jump in cases in just 40 days, the Yonhap news agency said, underlining the country’s struggle to rein in the use of digital technology to sexually abuse women and girls.

  • EuroGamer ☛ Penny's Big Breakaway studio Evening Star announces another half a dozen layoffs

    CTO Hunter Bridges announced the redundancies on X/Twitter, saying, "this isn't a choice we wanted to make", but "due to volatile market conditions in the games industry and operational realities of our business, Evening Star is having to part ways with six team members".

  • Evening Star, the Studio Behind Penny’s Big Breakaway, Announces Six Layoffs

    Evening Star, the studio behind Penny’s Big Breakaway, has announced layoffs that will affect six team members. Chief Technology Officer Hunter Bridges shared the news on X/Twitter and expressed deep regret over the decision, stating, “This isn’t a choice we wanted to make.” Bridges attributed the layoffs to the “volatile market conditions in the games industry” and the company’s operational challenges, which ultimately led to this difficult move.

  • The CWA responds to Microsoft layoffs

    The Communications Workers of America union (CWA) has responded to Microsoft's recent decision to axe 650 jobs as "extremely disappointing".

    In their statement, the CWA pointed out that as one of the world's most successful corporations, Microsoft should be in a position to have a sustainable employee model.

    The statement read: "While we would hope that a company like Microsoft with $88 Billion in profits last year could achieve long term success without destroying the livelihoods of 650 of our colleagues, heartless layoffs like these have become all too common.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Verge ☛ Meta fed its AI on almost everything you’ve posted publicly since 2007

      Meta has acknowledged that all text and photos that adult Facebook and Instagram users have publicly published since 2007 have been fed into its artificial intelligence models. Australia’s ABC News reports that Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, initially rejected claims about user data from 2007 being leveraged for AI training during a local government inquiry about AI adoption before relenting after additional questioning.

      “The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007 unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private,” Green Party senator David Shoebridge pushed in the inquiry. “That’s the reality, isn’t it?”

    • Hindustan Times ☛ ‘Why didn’t you stop her’: Man claims ‘creepy girl’ filmed foreigner without his consent in Delhi Metro

      A third commented, “I have started wearing masks on the metro because whenever someone's phone camera is pointing towards me, I feel like they are recording me. Maybe they aren't, but these days you can never be sure.” A fourth wrote, “I had a friend who actually recorded guys on whom she had a crush on. Like literally on the street she would take out her phone and record I didn't like it and told her many times that it's not right. I even deleted most of the videos after she took them.”

    • The Washington Post ☛ Apple drops its lawsuit against Israeli spyware giant NSO, maker of Pegasus

      A redacted version of the filing in San Francisco federal court cited a July article in the Guardian, which reported that Israeli officials had taken files from NSO’s headquarters. The newspaper said the officials asked an Israeli court to keep the action secret even from those involved in an earlier, still-pending hacking suit against NSO filed by Meta’s WhatsApp. Israeli ministry of justice communications that were hacked showed that officials were concerned about sensitive information reaching Americans, the newspaper said.

    • NYOB ☛ noyb WIN: Belgian DPA “settlement” turned into proper legal orders on deceptive cookie banners

      Following several noyb complaints from 2023, the Belgian data protection authority has ordered four major Belgian news sites to bring their cookie banners into GDPR compliance. Specifically, De Standaard, Het Nieuwsblad, Het Belang van Limburg and Gazet van Antwerpen must add a “reject” button to the first layer of their cookie banners. In addition, the news sites have been ordered to change the currently misleading colour scheme of the buttons used. If the controller (Mediahuis) failes to comply, it faces a penalty of €50,000 per day per website.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Pro Publica ☛ After Apalachee Shooting, How Should Georgia Respond to Threats?

  • El País ☛ Owner of company that spied on Assange for the CIA was collaborating with Spain’s secret service

    David Morales, director of the Spanish security company UC Global SL that spied on Julian Assange for the CIA during his stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, was also a collaborator of Spain’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI), according to emails found on the electronic devices seized by the police after his arrest in southern Spain in September 2019.

    In addition to this documentary evidence, to which EL PAÍS has had access, three sources with ties to the Spanish intelligence services and collaborators of Morales have confirmed that the former military man worked on different operations for the Spanish intelligence services. “Relax, I am with God, with the one here (CNI) and the one there (CIA),” he confessed to a person he trusted who warned him of the risks of this activity. An official spokesperson for the CNI declined to answer questions from this newspaper.

    The evidence linking the former marine to the CNI has appeared in new dumps of his mobile phones, and was not included in the first copy that the police gave to the judge who has been investigating the case for five years. Morales’ relationship with the Spanish intelligence service, and the evidence that suggests that information about the Wikileaks founder’s meetings with his lawyers was given to the CIA, add a new dimension to a case that has escalated to a New York court, where victims of the espionage have sued former CIA director Mike Pompeo. Assange, now free, spent 12 years in prison for leaking more than 250,000 classified documents from the U.S. State Department in November 2010. EL PAÍS was one of the media outlets that participated in the concerted effort to publish these documents.

  • ANF News ☛ 2024-09-13 [Older] Iranian forces arrest mother of slain protester ahead of uprising anniversary

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2024-09-12 [Older] Oil Kills: Inside the International Uprising Disrupting the Aviation Industry

  • Defence Web ☛ 2024-09-09 [Older] Moving memorial to heroic but doomed Warsaw Uprising and SAAF airlift

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-09-12 [Older] North Korea Shows First Photos of Banned Uranium Enrichment Site

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-09-12 [Older] Brothers Charged With Assaulting New York Times Photographer During Capitol Riot

  • El País ☛ The women from all walks of life who rebelled against the Nazis

    The women who fought in the resistance ranged from daughters of bankers and high-ranking military officers to teachers, secretaries, illustrators and domestic workers; from trade unionists, anarchists, communists, and socialists to Catholics, Protestants and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The exhibition includes 32 portraits representative of this diversity, while the Frauen im Widerstand website offers access to another 300, with photographs and preserved documentation including letters, postcards, or the court sentences against those who were arrested.

    They were all united in their opposition to National Socialism, which sought to confine them to a life of subjugation. “National Socialist ideology reduced women to the role of mothers and housewives,” said State Secretary for Culture Claudia Roth at the inauguration of the exhibition: “They were supposed to stay away from politics, have children and raise them, and take care of the family. Leadership positions in the state, party, economy and society were reserved for men.” The exhibition displays propaganda from the Nazi era that extols the figure of the housewife and women’s work in factories, which became necessary when the men were at the front.

  • The Age AU ☛ Trump can’t accept his poor debate. So he’s spiralled into conspiracy theories

    Former president Donald Trump has long inhabited a bizarre world of his own creation. He rewrites history - or makes it up entirely - to aggrandise himself, denigrate others and spread the basest of lies.

    It keeps getting worse.

  • VOA News ☛ In Belarus, the native language is vanishing as Russian takes prominence

    Belarusians like Mikalay are experiencing a new wave of Russification as Moscow expands its economic, political and cultural dominance to overtake the identity of its neighbor.

  • The Verge ☛ TikTok oral arguments will weigh security risks against free speech

    On September 16th, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hear oral arguments for TikTok v. Garland, TikTok’s First Amendment challenge to legislation that it claims amounts to a ban. It’s a fight not just about free speech but whether the Department of Justice can make a case using classified material that its opponent can’t review or argue against. The government argues TikTok is a clear national security threat but says that revealing why would be a threat, too.

  • RFA ☛ More Rohingya are arriving in Bangladesh, as Rakhine state burns

    “They used the poor law-and-order situation as an advantage,” Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner Mohammed Mizanur Rahman told BenarNews, referring to the chaotic and lawless atmosphere in Bangladesh before and after the Sheikh Hasina government fell in early August.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Children and young teenagers could be banned from using social media, minister says

    Children in the UK could potentially be banned from using social media because of the harm it’s causing to their health and mental health, a minister has suggested.

    Technology secretary Peter Kyle has vowed to look closely at what happens in Australia, where the government plans to introduce a bill barring children from using platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Military experts suspect sabotage at Andøya

    The jammer was set up on a local mountain top by researchers from the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) before the weekend. When the researchers returned on Sunday, it turned out that the connecting cable had been cut.

    “The cable was destroyed. We have indications that this was not an accident but a deliberate action,” says Anders Rødningsby, chief researcher at FFI.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ L.A. County sheriff's sergeant demoted for 'gossip'

    Data shows demotions are not common, and her case has sparked controversy within the ranks of the department. This week Gonzalez told The Times she plans to appeal to the L.A. County Civil Service Commission.

    “My actions in 2021 were made in good faith,” she said. “The investigation against me was a complete fraud based on reporting LASD management of illegal employment practices and corruption.”

• Environment

  • Futurism ☛ Microsoft Secretly Selling AI to Fossil Fuel Companies While Bragging About Environmental Progress

    While projecting an image of sustainability, Microsoft has secretly been selling bespoke AI services to fossil fuel giants and claiming it can help them make even more money while killing the climate.

  • TruthOut ☛ Fracking Company Is Selected to Receive Federal Environmental Justice Funding

    CNX Resources has committed over 2,000 environmental violations since 2004.

  • Wired ☛ AI Has Helped Shein Become Fast Fashion’s Biggest Polluter

    But climate advocates and researchers say the company’s lightning-fast manufacturing practices and online-only business model are inherently emissions-heavy — and that the use of AI software to catalyze these operations could be cranking up its emissions. Those concerns were amplified by Shein’s third annual sustainability report, released late last month, which showed the company nearly doubled its carbon dioxide emissions between 2022 and 2023.

  • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Has a California lab discovered the holy grail of plastic recycling?

    The group has devised a catalytic recycling process that breaks apart the chains of some of the more commonly used plastics — polyethylene and polypropylene — in such a way that the building blocks of those plastics can be used again. In some cases, with more than 90% efficiency.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Ocean Is Too Crowded

    According to Karissa Lear, an aquatic ecologist at Australia’s Murdoch University, it’s common for many marine species to stick to specific habitats and only seldom venture beyond them. That is especially true for many juvenile animals, she says, which are small and vulnerable to predation. This timidness can cause unexpectedly big problems for marine species, especially when infrastructure gets in the way.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Soy foam product seen as safer firefighting alternative to ‘forever chemicals’

    “While PFAS contamination is bad and something that we’re sorting through, it’s very effective as a firefighting foam. And folks whose lives have been saved by it likely appreciate that,” Adam Driscoll of Minneapolis-based Barr Engineering told a North Dakota conference of the Air and Waste Management Association in Bismarck last week. “That’s the difficult decision that folks are wrestling with at the moment.”

    But one alternative may be a foam based out of soybeans that is completely biodegradable.

  • France24 ☛ What Greenland’s nine-day mega-tsunami tells us about climate change

    A seismic signal heard across the world last September for nine days has been traced back to a trapped tsunami triggered by a landslide in the remote fjords of Greenland. Climate scientists say that the collapse seems to have been set off by melting glaciers – a phenomenon that is more and more common in the face of the man-made climate crisis.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • DeSmog ☛ Nigel Farage Goes on Pro-Fossil Fuel Rant at Fundraiser for Climate Denial Group

    • RTL ☛ Environmental impact: AI is 'accelerating the climate crisis,' expert warns

      The language models on which the programs are based require enormous computing capacities to train on billions of data points, necessitating powerful servers.

      Then there's the energy used to respond to each individual user's requests.

      Instead of simply extracting information, "like a search engine would do to find the capital of a country, for example," AI programs "generate new information," making the whole thing "much more energy-intensive," she explains.

      According to the International Energy Agency, the combined AI and the cryptocurrency sectors consumed nearly 460 terawatt hours of electricity in 2022 -- two percent of total global production.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ AI learns to slow down and smell the melting planet

      In general, based on the few tests I’ve done, it takes over 10 times as much work to get an answer, which translates to significantly more to time to answer, more tokens, and we can assume greater power consumption.

      How much more power? AI is not a green technology. OpenAI’s founder, Sam Altman, has invested US$375-million into a nuclear fusion start-up; Amazon is investing in nuclear; and Google and Microsoft are working together to find and build new energy sources. Thanks to AI, IT infrastructure’s power usage is expected to triple by 2030.

    • Axios ☛ Electricity demand to skyrocket in U.S. amid data center boom: report

      The rise of artificial intelligence, as well as building and vehicle electrification trends tied to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, are poised to drive a rapid growth in U.S. electricity demand, according to a new report.

    • Futurism ☛ Trump's New [Cryptocurrency] Project Is a Type Linked to Organized Crime and Terrorism

      Now, on the back of recent promises to make America the "[cryptocurrency] capital of the world," Trump is prepping to publicly roll out a wildly dubious and ethically fraught new [cryptocurrency] project started by none other than his sons Eric and Donald Trump, Jr.

      The project is called World Liberty Financial (WLFI), and it centers on "stablecoins," or coins that creators claim are pegged to stable commodities or government currencies. In an X-formerly-Twitter thread posted last week, the WLFI team claimed their stablecoin would be pegged to the US dollar.

    • Matt Birchler ☛ Everyone says Chrome devastates Mac battery life, but does it? I tested for 36 hours to find out.

      I’ll say right here that I have spent 3 days running these tests over and over (and overnight!) to make sure the results I’m presenting are as accurate as possible. I’ve also noticed a decent level of variance from test to test, as well as that macOS may have a non-linear representation of battery life, so running the test at numerous battery levels was important to get more useful data.

    • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ AI likely to increase energy use and accelerate climate misinformation – report

      “It’s not like AI is ridding us of the internal combustion engine. People will be outraged to see how much more energy is being consumed by AI in the coming years, as well as how it will flood the zone with disinformation about climate change.”

      The burgeoning electricity demands of AI means that a doubling of data centers to help keep pace with the industry will cause an 80% increase in planet-heating emissions, even if there are measures to improve the energy efficiency of these centers, the new report states.

    • Security Week ☛ House Report Shows Chinese Cranes a Security Risk to US Ports

      The US is dangerously reliant on Chinese cranes in seaports, and the equipment represents a potential threat to US port infrastructure security, the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and House Committee on Homeland Security say.

      A joint report (PDF) released this week by the two committees focuses on Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries (ZPMC), a company owned and controlled by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which accounts for roughly 80% of the ship-to-shore (STS) port cranes operational in the US.

    • International Business Times ☛ 'Stay The F Away From Teslas': Man Forced To Sell $140K Tesla After It Refuses To Unlock Unless He Buys A New $26K Battery

      Unlike other cars, where you could open the doors or call a locksmith if you lost your keys, Tesla's doors require power from the battery to function. Unfortunately, Mario's battery wasn't just drained but completely dead, necessitating a replacement.

    • Herman Õunapuu ☛ My blog successfully survived a scheduled power outage :: ./techtipsy

      The planned power outage was communicated a week in advance and was supposed to take up to two hours. It ended up taking about 1 hour 20 minutes.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-09-11 [Older] Brazil's Lula Pledges to Finish Paving Road That Experts Say Could Worsen Amazon Deforestation

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Flowers use adjustable 'paint by numbers' petal designs to attract pollinators, researchers discover

      Patterns on the flowers of plants guide insects, like bees, to the center of the flower, where nectar and pollen await, enhancing the plant's chances of successful pollination. Despite their importance, surprisingly little is known about how these petal patterns form and how they have evolved into the vast diversity we see today, including spots, stripes, veins, and bullseyes.

  • Overpopulation

    • Wired ☛ South Sudan May See the First Permanent Mass Displacement Due to Climate Change

      Enormous floods have once again engulfed much of South Sudan, as record water levels in Lake Victoria flow downstream through the Nile. More than 700,000 people have been affected. Hundreds of thousands of people there were already forced from their homes by huge floods a few years ago and were yet to return before this new threat emerged.

      Now, there are concerns that these displaced communities may never be able to return to their lands. While weather extremes regularly displace whole communities in other parts of the world, this could be the first permanent mass displacement due to climate change.

    • US News And World Report ☛ Texas’ Battle Against Deer Disease Threatens Breeding Industry

      He is one of many Texas breeders who say their businesses are suffering due to chronic wasting disease, or CWD. True’s deer don’t have the disease, but it has infected deer owned by his neighbor, also a deer breeder. Under state rules, that means True can’t transport or sell his deer outside of the state-declared containment zone — and he says there are no potential customers inside that zone.

      The disease, which is easily transmissible through urine, feces, saliva, and blood, has been detected in Texas deer since 2012. Last year saw 153 positive cases in the state, and the number of cases this year reached 387 in August, most of them from the outbreak at the property next to True’s.

    • teleSUR ☛ Zimbabwe: 1000 Elephants Will be Sacrifice to Reduce the Hunger

      With this news, Zimbabwe followed in the footsteps of Namibia, which announced at the end of last August that it will slaughter 723 animals, including elephants, zebras, hippos and buffaloes, among others, to also alleviate drought-related hunger.

• Finance

  • International Business Times ☛ 2024-09-06 [Older] Albertsons And Kroger CEOs Push For Merger Saying It'll Allow Them To Lower Prices And Better Compete Against Walmart, Costco And Amazon

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-09-12 [Older] Amazon Boosts Pay for Subcontracted Delivery Drivers Amid Union Pressure

  • PwC Layoffs: 2.5% of U.S. Workforce to be Cut in Major Restructuring

    PwC Layoffs: PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), one of the world’s largest accounting and consulting firms, has announced a major restructuring plan that will lead to layoffs in its U.S. operations. According to reports, PwC plans to reduce its U.S. workforce by 2.5%, affecting around 1,800 employees. These layoffs are the first formal job cuts by PwC since 2009.

  • Adnan Siddiqi ☛ Introduction to trading for programmers

    Trading in simple language is all about buying securities: stocks, currencies, [cryptocurrencies], commodities, bonds, and derivatives. Traders can include individuals like you and me, financial institutions like banks, mortgage companies, investment banks, or institutional investors like hedge funds, insurance companies, and pension funds.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ X unlikely to fall under landmark EU tech rules

    Elon Musk's X social media platform is unlikely to be subjected to landmark EU tech rules which aim to rein in the power of Big Tech because it does not meet the rules' gatekeeper criteria, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said on Friday.

    The European Commission in May opened an investigation into X after the company rebutted earlier indications that it may have to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which imposes a list of dos and don'ts on Big Tech.

  • RTL ☛ After mounting criticism: Troubled Deutsche Bahn sells logistics unit to Danish group

    Troubled German rail operator Deutsche Bahn announced Friday the sale of its logistics unit Schenker to Danish group DSV for 14.3 billion euros ($15.8 billion) as it focuses on overhauling Germany's creaking train infrastructure.

    The state-owned German group, which has faced mounting criticism due to frequent train breakdowns and poor punctuality, said the deal would provide fresh investments into Europe's biggest economy and help pay down its monster debts.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • International Business Times ☛ 'That Looks As Fake As When NASA Did It': Conspiracy That SpaceX's First Commercial Spacewalk Is A Hoax Goes Viral

      Despite overwhelming evidence and decades of scientific proof confirming the legitimacy of space missions, conspiracy theories continue to gain traction. As with the Apollo landings, every claim against the Polaris Dawn mission has been debunked.

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Useful Idiots: DOJ Moves from Name-and-Shame to Name-and-Disrupt

      It appears that rolling out the indictment did two things. First, it laid out how this works, how a persona sets up an allegedly witting front, like Lauren Chen, to effectively recruit useful idiots on Russia’s behalf.

      But by unrolling the indictment last week, DOJ likely facilitated further investigation of the Tenet operation.

    • The Kent Stater ☛ Biden administration unveils new evidence of RT’s key role in Russian intelligence operations globally

      The State Department revealed declassified US intelligence findings that suggest RT is fully integrated into Russia’s intelligence operations around the world and announced it is launching a diplomatic campaign to provide countries with information about the risks associated with RT activities.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Blinken says Russian propaganda outlet runs intelligence operations

      Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Russian state media company RT is being deployed by the Kremlin to conduct cyberintelligence and covert influence operations across the globe as well as to help procure weapons for Russia’s war against Ukraine.

      State Department officials warned Friday that the newly exposed covert Russian disinformation operation to influence public opinion in the United States represents only a small fraction of Moscow’s efforts to undermine democracies globally through its state propaganda arm RT.

    • RFERL ☛ Russia's RT Network Working Directly With Kremlin To Spread Disinformation, U.S. Says

      U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States has gathered new evidence that exposes cooperation between RT and four other subsidiaries of the Rossia Segodnya media group, and it intends to warn other countries of the threat of the disinformation.

      In addition to RT, Rossia Segodnya operates RIA Novosti, TV-Novosti, Ruptly, and Sputnik, but the announcement on September 13 focused largely on RT. The outlet, formerly known as Russia Today, has previously been sanctioned for its work to allegedly spread Kremlin propaganda and disinformation.

    • The Independent UK ☛ Bomb threats and school closures in Springfield, Ohio after Trump’s migrant pet-eating lies spiral

      Still, despite the wave of condemnation from Ohio officials, the rumor has taken on a life of its own in Springfield, where a bomb threat on Thursday forced the evacuation of city hall and two schools.

    • CNN ☛ Springfield, Ohio: Fear and frustration as political debate seizes on growing Haitian population

      The state’s highest Republican official, Gov. Mike DeWine, also dismissed the rumor firmly on Wednesday, noting there was “no evidence of that at all,” and Springfield Mayor Rob Rue said Thursday the false claims are “hurting our citizens and hurting our community,” adding it’s “frustrating” that some of the rhetoric is coming from Vance, a Republican from Ohio.

      “Unfortunately right now, we have to focus on making sure this rhetoric is dispelled, that these rumors are just, they’re just not true. Springfield is a beautiful place, and your pets are safe in Springfield,” Rue told CNN’s Laura Coates.

    • NPR ☛ In Arizona, California and Nevada, Trump focuses on his favorite foil: immigrants

      In this border state, he continued to peddle false information about immigrant communities in Aurora, Colo., and Springfield, Ohio, just like he did in his first post-debate rally in Arizona.

      After bringing up debunked claims about immigrants in Tuesday's presidential debate, Trump spent much of his rally address in Tucson repeating false claims that legal Haitian migrants — who he falsely claims are illegal — are abducting and eating family pets.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • El País ☛ Nicaragua tightens control of social media to censor dissent

    The reform changes Article 1 of the Cyber Crime Law, which establishes prison terms for “those who promote or distribute false or misleading information that causes alarm, terror, or unease in the public.” While before, the law only addressed crimes committed “through information technology,” now it applies to “the use of social networks and cell phone applications.”

    According to critics, this is a death blow to the last bastion of freedom of expression and press that remains in Nicaragua and is not controlled by Ortega and Murillo: social media and the independent media that shares content on these platforms.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Trial Begins in Russia for Former Navalny Lawyers

    Navalny died in unclear circumstances at an Arctic prison colony in February, where he was serving a 19-year sentence for leading an "extremist" organization.

    Since his death, authorities in Russia have arrested journalists who covered his court hearings and added his wife Yulia Navalnaya to the country's list of "terrorists and extremists."

  • RFA ☛ Lao blogger who criticized failed response to flood freed from prison

    Houayheuang Xayabouly, also known as Mouay, was arrested in September 2019 after she criticized the government for delaying a rescue effort that had left residents of Champassak and Salavan provinces cut off by floodwaters.

    The condemnation was posted in a 17-minute-long Facebook Live video that was viewed 150,000 times.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • BIA Net ☛ Freedom of expression groups denounce death threats against journalist Murat Ağırel

    Twenty-three press and freedom of expression organizations from Turkey and around the world have issued a statement regarding the death threats made against investigative journalist Murat Ağırel.

  • El País ☛ [Repeat] Owner of company that spied on Assange for the CIA was collaborating with Spain’s secret service

    In addition to this documentary evidence, to which EL PAÍS has had access, three sources with ties to the Spanish intelligence services and collaborators of Morales have confirmed that the former military man worked on different operations for the Spanish intelligence services. “Relax, I am with God, with the one here (CNI) and the one there (CIA),” he confessed to a person he trusted who warned him of the risks of this activity. An official spokesperson for the CNI declined to answer questions from this newspaper.

  • VOA News ☛ Dozens of Hong Kong journalists threatened in harassment campaign, says HKJA

    Dozens of Hong Kong journalists and their families have been harassed and intimidated in the past three months, according to the chair of a local press club.

    The Hong Kong Journalists Association or HKJA said Friday it had tracked "systematic" and "organized" attacks on journalists from June to August this year.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Sun and Mail make journalist redundancies in US

    Over the past year to 18 months many news publishers have been hit by Google algorithm changes and Facebook’s move away from news, with falling advertising revenue often following. The current moment has been dubbed the end of the “traffic era”.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • El País ☛ The crime of being a woman in Afghanistan: ‘A Taliban can knock on your door at night, rape you, take you away and marry you’

    Mariam Safi, director of the Development Research and Policy Studies Organisation (DROPS), which conducts surveys and research on human rights in Afghanistan through a network of local collaborators, recalls that this is the first time that these rules — applied in practice by the Taliban since their first period in government (1996-2001) — have been written down in law. “It seems that these new rules have surprised the international community. Not us. We knew that the Taliban would not back down and that we had to be very firm with them. But the United Nations chose to bring them to the negotiating table to speak directly with them about the situation of women. It is clear that it did not work,” she explains to this newspaper in a telephone conversation from Toronto.

  • ANF News ☛ ‘Turkey’s attacks are intended to break the will of the people and depopulate the region’

    The Turkish state and affiliated mercenaries continue their attacks against Shehba and the Afrin region, which they occupied in January 2018. These attacks, which have been going on for more than six years, directly target the civilians living in the region. In an attack in September, 2 citizens were killed and 6 others were wounded.

  • DNA Lounge ☛ Wherein the techbros are here to "disrupt" ordering drinks at a bar

    I guess it's ok for the poors to attend the venues these guys want to go to, as long as they know their place and don't get in the way of their betters.

  • Scheerpost ☛ She Ate a Poppy Seed Salad Just Before Giving Birth. Then They Took Her Baby Away.

    If Horton had been tested under different circumstances — for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job — she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result.

    But as a mother giving birth, Horton had no such protections. The hospital quickly reported her to child welfare, and the next day, a social worker arrived to take baby Halle into protective custody.

  • RFA ☛ Prominent Tibetan Buddhist monk sentenced to 3 years in prison

    They accused him of possessing and republishing books from the exiled Tibetan community and for having contact with people outside the region when he was in charge of the library at Kirti Monastery in Ngaba county in southwest China’s Sichuan province.

    Chinese authorities consider it illegal for Tibetans inside Tibet to contact people outside the region and engage with the exiled Tibetan community or the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who China considers a “separatist.”

  • RFA ☛ EXCLUSIVE: Area where Buddhist monastery stood now under water

    Rising waters from a new dam in central China have submerged the area where a 135-year-old Tibetan Buddhist monastery once stood, as well as a nearby village, according to experts who viewed satellite photos and two sources inside Tibet.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-09-05 [Older] Rights groups criticize EU plans to strengthen Frontex

  • Gizmodo ☛ 2024-09-06 [Older] X/Twitter Exec Who Defended Restoring Account That Posted Child Sexual Abuse Material Leaves the Company

  • The Scotsman ☛ How sexual abuse survivors like me were harmed by rape crisis centre's adherence to trans ideology

    Wadhwa, who identifies as a trans woman, is heavily criticised in the report for a range of shortcomings, from a failure to set professional standards of behaviour to a chaotic approach in financial transparency and the safeguarding of staff and clients. Twenty-four hours after Ling's report was published Wadhwa stood down from the post. Not a moment too soon.

    But while Wadhwa has been responsible for the near-collapse of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, established in 1978 by second-wave feminists, the blame for this catastrophic failure of governance must be shared by Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS) and the politicians who agreed with Wadhwa’s view that sex is irrelevant, even in a service where sex matters more than anything.

  • Games

    • The Scotsman ☛ Why 'esports' are not sports, they are games

      However, if we may be permitted to demur on one point, please let’s not call this a sport or even an ‘esport’. It is a game, doubtless a good one, but a game nonetheless. Sitting on a couch or a specially designed gaming chair while rapidly moving your thumbs and fingers does not constitute any kind of sport, however skilfully it is done.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Zimbabwe ☛ What To Do When Starlink Is Congested In Your Area

    If Starlink tells you they’re at capacity in your area, it means their network cannot accommodate any additional devices at that moment.

  • Computers Are Bad ☛ the national warning system

    Previously on Deep Space Nine, we discussed the extensive and variable products that AT&T and telephone operating companies sold as private lines. One of the interesting properties of private line systems is that they can be ordered as four-wire. Internally, the telephone network handles calls as four-wire with separate talk and listen pairs (or at least, it did before digitization). For cost reasons, though, service to individual customers is virtually always two-wire, with talk and listen combined onto a single pair via hybrid transformers. Four-wire private lines are just about the only exception.

    Why? Well, one of the major advantages of four-wire service to the telephone instrument is that it avoids the echo and sidetone that normally occur within the hybrid transformers. On a call between two telephones, this effect is acceptable and even desirable. In conference systems, though, with many phones attached, echo accumulates until the line is almost unusable. Prior to the introduction of DSP technology to "clean up" the audio, multiparty conferences were a lot more limited than we take for granted today... except for the four-wire private line systems specifically built for large conference calls. The most notable of these is the National Warning System, or NAWAS, operated by AT&T for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• India Times ☛ Going once, going twice: Google's millisecond ad auctions are the focus of monopoly claim

  A trial under way in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, will determine if Google's ad tech stack constitutes an illegal monopoly. The first week has included a deep dive into exactly how Google's products work together to conduct behind-the-scenes electronic auctions that place ads in front of consumers in the blink of an eye.

  Online advertising has rapidly evolved. Fifteen or so years ago, if you saw an internet display ad, there was a pretty good chance it featured people dancing over their enthusiasm for low mortgage rates, and those ads were foisted on you whether you were looking at real estate or searching for baseball scores.

• India Times ☛ What are India's antitrust findings against Amazon, Flipkart

  Indian antitrust investigations have found that Amazon and Walmart's Flipkart violated local competition laws by giving preference to some sellers, prioritising certain listings, and steeply discounting products, hurting other companies.

  Here are the key findings of the Competition Commission of India (CCI), which are detailed in two reports that are not public but have been reviewed by Reuters.

• India Times ☛ Google knew publishers would dislike ad tech change that helped it profit

  Google's removal of the feature that publishers used to reduce their dependence on Google is a key piece of the case in which the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of states are seeking to show the company unfairly dominated markets for the technology that facilitates online advertising.

  The Justice Department showed emails and documents where Google employees discussed the company losing revenue because publishers were using their ability to set a higher minimum for bids from Google's AdX than for other exchanges.

• The Guardian UK ☛ How the EU’s landmark Apple tax ruling gave Ireland €13bn it didn’t want

  The court ruled that the European Commission was right to demand in 2016 that €13bn (£11bn) in “illegal” tax breaks for Apple should be repaid because it gave the iPhone-maker an unfair advantage.

  The 80-page judgment from Brussels left the Irish government with a massive windfall equivalent to about 14% of total annual public spending – revenue it did not want and had fought desperately to avoid, a paradox not even Jonathan Swift could have conjured.

• India Times ☛ Google: EU break-up order to Google unlikely for now

  EU antitrust officials are considering ordering Alphabet's Google to end anti-competitive practices in its adtech business, but will not order a breakup as they had previously warned, people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

  European Union regulators are due to issue a decision in the coming months after antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager last year threatened to break up Google's lucrative adtech business.

• Trademarks

  • IP Kat ☛ 2024-09-09 [Older] No rose without a thorn: L’Oréal could not prove fame of its LANCÔME rose device

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Seized Uptobox Servers Won't Be Returned, Requests Ruled Inadmissible

    Initially reported as technical issues, in September 2023 file-hosting platform Uptobox watched as its servers went offline. In reality, they were being taken away due to a criminal complaint filed by Hollywood, Canal+, Apple, Amazon, and other rightsholders. Since then, the owners of Uptobox have turned to the legal system, hoping to salvage whatever they can. On Thursday, a Paris court informed the defendants that their servers will not be returned.

  • [Old] Plagiarism Today ☛ Plagiarism in Pop Culture: WKRP in Cincinnati - Plagiarism Today

    The show centers on Andy Travis, the station’s program director, who is struggling to wrangle the incompetent and insane staff he has been tasked with turning around. That staff includes Dr. Johnny Fever, a disc jockey who was previously fired for saying the word “booger”, Les Nessman, an incompetent news director and Jennfier Marlowe, a blonde bombshell that serves as the station’s receptionist and, at times, its conscience.

    Since the show is based on a radio station, it makes sense that journalistic integrity would be a topic of focus. However, it wasn’t until nearly the end of the show’s run, in episode 18 of its fourth season, entitled Dear Liar, that plagiarism and fabrication became the focus.

    However, when it did, it became one of the most interesting and honest takes on plagiarism and fabrication to ever air on TV, even if the conclusion was less than satisfying.