Leftovers

• [Old] Project Gutenberg ☛ Rip Van Winkle by Washington

  "Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving is a short story written in the early 19th century. This tale belongs to the genre of American folklore and fantasy, reflecting on themes of change, identity, and the passage of time. Set against the backdrop of the post-Revolutionary War period, it offers a poignant exploration of individual transformation amidst societal shifts. The story follows Rip Van Winkle, a good-natured yet lazy man living in a small village at the foot of the Kaatskill Mountains. Tired of his domineering wife, Rip escapes into the mountains where he encounters a group of mysterious figures playing ninepins and drinking from a keg. After partaking in their drink, Rip falls asleep and awakens twenty years later to find that the world and his village have changed dramatically. His wife has died, the American Revolution has occurred, and the once-familiar faces are replaced by strangers. Ultimately, the tale highlights themes of nostalgia and the inevitability of change, as Rip must reconcile his past with the new reality of his existence. Through the humorous and fantastical journey of Rip, Irving captures the essence of the American spirit and the complexities of personal identity in a transforming society. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

• Vintage Everyday ☛ Rin Tin Tin, the World War I Dog Who Became a Hollywood Star, and His Popularity Helped Save Warner Bros.

  Ten months after the break, the leg was healed and Rin Tin Tin was entered in a show for German Shepherd dogs in Los Angeles. Rin Tin Tin had learned to leap great heights. At the dog show while making a winning leap, he was filmed by Duncan's acquaintance Charley Jones, who had just developed a slow-motion camera. Seeing his dog being filmed, Duncan became convinced Rin Tin Tin could become the next Strongheart, a successful film dog that lived in his own full-sized stucco bungalow with its own street address in the Hollywood Hills, separate from the mansion of his owners, who lived a street away next to Roy Rogers. Duncan later wrote, “I was so excited over the film idea that I found myself thinking of it night and day.”

• Molly White ☛ Caroline Ellison: A woman with agency or a helpless pawn?

  However, low self-esteem and the desperation for a boyfriend’s approval hardly excuse stealing billions of dollars from people, and it is surprising to me to see this level of leniency. Certainly some of it was also thanks to her cooperation and assistance with the investigation, prosecution, and bankruptcy proceedings, but it seems that a lot of the decision came down to the story that she was merely a helpless pawn in Bankman-Fried’s machinations, rather than a human being with agency and a moral compass.

• Lou Plummer ☛ Learning Languages and Connecting Across Cultures

  Languages aside, one of my favorite aspects of the IndieWeb experience is its internationalism. I wake up very early in the morning, and one of my favorite things to do is see what my European friends are discussing. I’m still trying to figure out the best times to connect with friends in Australia, New Zealand, or anywhere in Asia. In real life, I’ve only spent a few weeks in non-English-speaking countries, but I look back on my experiences in France and Italy with fondness. Most people I met navigated the language barriers with grace, and I can only hope that my Italian or French doppelgängers feel the same way. Language may be a barrier, but it’s also a bridge to understanding and connecting with people from all walks of life. Here’s to more conversations across cultures!

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ 12th anniversary of hamatti.org

  There’s an old trope that when a software developer writes a new blog post, they first rewrite their whole website from scratch. It’s not completely untrue either: some people blog so rarely that when they decide to get back into blogging, they want to remake their site, then publish that one post and never get back to blogging. I’ve definitely been guilty of that in my early days of blogging.

• Derek Kędziora ☛ Aboriginal art in New York

  This may well be the best thing I’ve seen in New York thus far. The energy of such a multi-cultural city makes it possible to bump into stuff like this, and, honestly, Amsterdam feels sleepy and provincial in comparison.

• Chris Hannah ☛ Off to China

  One benefit of it being a work trip, is that it's 100% company funded, and I get to travel around multiple locations in China. Two of them being Hangzhou and Shanghai, where my work has big offices, so I get to meet up with some colleagues that I haven't met in person, even after working together for many years. And the other being Guilin, where we are spending the weekend. We will be going to visit some incredible pillar-shaped mountains, which is where I've read, James Cameron filmed some of Avatar.

• [Repeat] Jim Nielsen ☛ Putting the “Person” in “Personal Website”

  Isn’t it crappy how basic human activities like singing, dancing, and making art have been turned into skills instead of being recognized as behaviors? The point of doing these things has become to get good at them. But they should be recognized as things humans do innately, like how birds sing or bees make hives.

  I thought about that for a minute, then decided: making websites should be the same!

• RTL ☛ Centenarian: Jimmy Carter: president, global mediator, Nobel laureate

  But as the years passed, a more nuanced image of Carter has emerged, one that took in his post-presidential activities and reassessed achievements like the brokering of a peace deal between Israel and Egypt.

  He placed human rights and social justice at the core of his tenure as the 39th president of the United States.

• [Old] Zig ☛ Migrating from AWS to Self-Hosting

  In this story, however, we take the opposite approach.

  ziglang.org used to be hosted on Amazon S3 + CloudFront, but as it became more expensive to run due to increased traffic, we have migrated to a one-computer solution for the website and tarball hosting.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ A Colossal Solar Flare Just Triggered a Radio Blackout on Earth

    A huge solar flare caused a radio blackout on Earth yesterday, according to Spaceweather.com.

    The event, which saw a huge amount of electromagnetic radiation being slung our way by the Sun, clocked in as a powerful X-level solar flare and was deemed by experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to be the second-strongest of the year so far. The radio blackouts occurred over Hawaii and other areas of the Pacific.

  • India Times ☛ Venus Mission: Venus Mission to take off in March 2028, carry 19 payloads

    Being developed at a cost of Rs 1,236 crore by the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), the VOM will explore the planet's atmosphere, surface, and its interaction with the Sun. Key scientific objectives include examining dust in the Venusian atmosphere, mapping its surface topography in high resolution, studying the solar X-ray spectrum near Venus, analyzing Venusian airglow, and investigating sub-surface characteristics, said the space agency on Tuesday.

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ Analysis of DME signals

    You might remember that back in July I made a recording of the DME ground-to-air and air-to-ground frequencies for a nearby VOR-DME station. In that post, I performed a preliminary analysis of the recording. I mentioned that I was interested in measuring the delay between the signals received directly from the aircraft and the ground transponder replies, and match these to the aircraft trajectories. This post is focused on that kind of study. I will present a GNU Radio out-of-tree module gr-dme that I have written to detect and measure DME pulses, and show a Jupyter notebook where I match aircraft pulses with their corresponding ground transponder replies and compare the delays to those calculated from the aircraft positions given in ADS-B data.

• Education

  • Andrea Contino ☛ IndieWeb Carnival: multilingualism in a global Web - Go With The Flow

    Riccardo is Italian, just like me, and while reading the introduction to the topic, I couldn't help but smile:

    "I invite you to write about your experience with foreign/artificial languages; about the role of multilingualism in a predominantly English-speaking Web; about how your daily life is affected by multiple languages; and anything you come up with that can be interesting in this discussion."

  • [Old] Anthropology for Kids ☛ 5 Types of Bullshit Job (Graeber) [PDF]

    “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

• Hardware

  • The Drone Girl ☛ Hoverfly Spectre tethered drone earns Green UAS clearance

    Big news for the cybersecurity side of the drone industry. There’s now a tethered drone with Green UAS clearance — and it’s made in America. In September 2024, the Hoverfly Spectre became the first tethered drone to earn the critical certification that confirms its secure and NDAA compliant, via the Green UAS Certification.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Army tool uses a drop of blood to diagnose traumatic brain injuries

    The Analyzer Traumatic Brain Injury program is a test developed by the Army in conjunction with Abbott Laboratories. With one drop of blood, the ATBI device can detect early indications of a potential TBI within 15 minutes, researchers said.

  • SBS ☛ Parent groups seek blanket ban on child social media use

    Representatives from three parenting groups appeared before the inquiry including The Heads Up Alliance founder Dany Elachi, who said children were not equipped to navigate challenges posed by social media.

    "We believe the gold standard is 18 years of age," he said.

    "Parents urge our lawmakers to ignore the naysayers, those same ones who tried to stand in the way of school mobile phone bans in recent years."

  • SBS ☛ Your phone carries a dirty secret, and it could be a biosecurity risk

    On average Australians use their phones for around five hours per day for work, entertainment and communications, and this number has been rising.

    It’s a worrying trend for scientists such as Dr Lotti Tajouri from Queensland's Bond University.

    "Mobile phones act as contaminated mobile petri dishes," he said.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Wired ☛ Hacking Generative AI for Fun and Profit

    After coming up with a goal, coders on the team were able to create a word embedding—a mathematical representation of words and their meanings—of Arxiv AI papers using the OpenAI API. This made it possible to analyze the data to find papers relevant to a particular term, and to explore relationships between different areas of research.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft pulls the plug on HoloLens 2

    A representative of a company specializing in virtual and augmented reality applications who spoke to The Reg said he was surprised at the announcement. Not because it is a shock HoloLens 2 is gone, he told us, but rather that he'd thought it had been canned years ago. After all, in 2022, HoloLens boss Alex Kipman left Microsoft. Many believed the writing was on the wall after the device largely didn't feature at that year's Build event.

  • Terence Eden ☛ GitHub’s Copilot lies about its own documentation. So why would I trust it with my code?

    In the early part of the 20th Century, there was a fad for "Radium". The magical, radioactive substance that glowed in the dark. The market had decided that Radium was The Next Big Thing and tried to shove it into every product. There were radioactive toys, radioactive medicines, radioactive chocolate bars, and a hundred other products.

    The results weren't pretty.

  • [Repeat] Bruce Schneier ☛ Hacking ChatGPT by Planting False Memories into Its Data

    This vulnerability hacks a feature that allows ChatGPT to have long-term memory, where it uses information from past conversations to inform future conversations with that same user. A researcher found that he could use that feature to plant “false memories” into that context window that could subvert the model.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ Living with(out) notarization

    When an app is being launched for the first time on that Mac, if it has been put into quarantine with a quarantine extended attribute, Gatekeeper will check whether it has been notarized. If it has, then its launch will progress to further checks such as those of XProtect. If it hasn’t been notarized, then macOS will warn you of that, and halt its launch.

  • Daniel Miessler ☛ Deutsch, DARSA, and AI

    My brain is currently exploding from this conversation I just had with my AI named DARSA. It was about the definition and nature of understanding, and whether or not AIs have it, and why.

    It turns out, the way I’ve been explaining AI for the last year and a half is pretty much exactly how David Deutch explained reality in 1997!

    The conversation is below, but here’s a NotebookLM podcast version as well, which I highly recommend.

  • Inter IKEA Systgems B V ☛ IKEA Introduces Matter support for the DIRIGERA Hub – IKEA Global

    Matter is the smart home industry’s new standard that allows smart products to connect and work together seamlessly, no matter which brand they’re from. As the first step in adopting Matter, the DIRIGERA hub will be updated to become a Matter Bridge, enabling it to support any Matter-enabled system. This update will allow all IKEA smart products based on Zigbee – the protocol powering IKEA’s smart products since 2012 – to communicate with other Matter-supported devices and platforms, further enhancing the convenience and accessibility of the smart home experience.

  • Abin Simon ☛ Go talk to the LLM

    Here is a list of all the different tools that I use on a daily basis that make use of LLMs under the hood. I'm not going to go into the details of how they work, but I'll give a brief overview of what they do and how I use them.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Verge ☛ Amazon’s Ring just doubled the price of its alarm monitoring service for grandfathered customers

      Did you, like me, buy a Ring Alarm system for your home because it offered the most affordable professional 24/7 monitoring around, at just $10 a month or $100 a year? Then I expect you — like me — just got an email stating you’ll now pay twice as much starting the next time you renew.

    • The Record ☛ Northern Ireland police fined for data breach exposing secret identities of officers

      The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has been fined £750,000 ($1 million) by the United Kingdom’s data protection regulator after accidentally revealing the identities of all of its officers and staff, potentially exposing them to terrorist and criminal groups and “leaving many fearing for their safety.”

    • New York Times ☛ Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?

      That’s because “contact sync,” as the feature is known by some developers, has played a critical role in the growth of many social and messaging apps for the past two decades. It’s how apps like Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat were able to find their footing, by quickly connecting millions of iPhone users to people they already knew, and suggesting other users for them to follow. That early momentum helped kick-start their viral growth, propelling them to the top of the App Store charts.

    • TechCrunch ☛ iOS 18 cracks down on apps asking for full address book access

      iOS apps that build their own social networks on the back of users’ address books may soon become a thing of the past. In iOS 18, Apple is cracking down on the social apps that ask users’ permission to access their contacts — something social apps often do to connect users with their friends or make suggestions for who to follow. Now, Apple is adding a new two-step permissions pop-up screen that will first ask users to allow or deny access to their contacts, as before, and then, if the user allows access, will allow them to choose which contacts they want to share, if not all.

    • Six Colors ☛ Turning Meta’s smart glasses into instant people identifiers

      It’s really creepy stuff. Nguyen and Ardayfio aren’t releasing the tech behind it, but most of this system is built on top of publicly available information from online databases and LLMs that anyone can use. The pair have also detailed the places you can go to try and opt out of some these databases (but there are a lot of them and not all of them make it easy).

  • Confidentiality

    • The Washington Post ☛ AI assistants may be sharing your work secrets with clients, co-workers

      Researcher and engineer Alex Bilzerian said on X last week that, after a Zoom meeting with some venture capital investors, he got an automated email from Otter.ai, a transcription service with an “AI meeting assistant.” The email contained a transcript of the meeting — including the part that happened after Bilzerian logged off, when the investors discussed their firm’s strategic failures and cooked metrics, he told The Washington Post via direct message on X.

      The investors, whom he would not name, “profusely apologized” once he brought it to their attention, but the damage was already done. That post-meeting chatter made Bilzerian decide to kill the deal, he said.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Military.com ☛ Army Testing Robot Dogs Armed with Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Rifles in Middle East

    The Army has sent at least one "robot dog" armed with an artificial intelligence-enabled gun turret to the Middle East for testing as a fresh counter-drone capability for U.S. service members, service officials confirmed.

    Photos published to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service last week show a Ghost Robotics Vision 60 Quadrupedal-Unmanned Ground Vehicle, or Q-UGV, armed with what appears to be an AR-15/M16-pattern rifle on rotating turret undergoing "rehearsals" at the Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center in Saudi Arabia in mid-September as part of a recent counter-unmanned aerial system exercise.

  • Futurism ☛ The US Army Is Testing Killer Robot Dogs With AI-Powered Rifles in the Middle East

    Manufactured by the newly Korean-owned firm Ghost Robotics, the pioneering maker of gun-toting robot canines, the AI-enhanced machine was described by a branch spokesperson as one of "several" pieces of machinery to be part of its anti-drone arsenal.

    In that same interview, the Army spox declined to elaborate more on the robot dog specifically — but the sheer thought of having a robot dog use an AI-enhanced rifle has us concerned in all sorts of ways.

  • RFA ☛ INTERVIEW: Trump ‘would love to see his friend Kim Jong Un again’

    Bolton resigned in September of 2019 and went on to write a controversial book the following year detailing his time advising the president.

    RFA Korean journalist Lee Sangmin recently interviewed Bolton, asking him to share his thoughts on North Korea’s nuclear program, the likelihood of another meeting between U.S. and North Korean officials, and how another Trump presidency might affect U.S. policy on North Korea.

    The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

  • CBC ☛ The planet is warming at a record pace. So why are many companies retreating from their climate targets?

    Volvo, Shell, Air New Zealand among companies that have abandoned previous environmental pledges

  • The Moscow Times ☛ EU Moves to Sanction Russia Over Hybrid Attacks - The Moscow Times

    In recent months, authorities in several EU countries — including Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — have reported uncovering plots or incidents, including arson attacks, masterminded by Moscow.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Children who joined 7-Eleven flash mob turned in by their parents

    From July 12 to Sept. 20, kids on bicycles swarmed 7-Eleven stores in groups of 20 to 40. The LAPD responded to 14 reports of flash mobs primarily made up of teenagers wearing hoodies over their heads or simply smiling as they grabbed armfuls of items off the shelves. Some wore masks or T-shirts pulled over their faces, according to still images taken from the surveillance footage inside the stores.

  • The Atlantic ☛ J. D. Vance Reinvents Himself Again

    I’ve known Vance for 15 years. In that time, I’ve witnessed many reinventions of the Vance story, heard many different retellings of who he is and what he believes. Last night, he debuted one more retelling. His performance of the role was well executed. The script was almost entirely fiction. Yet theater reviews aside, three issues of substance stayed with me.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ ‘Make them riot’ in Detroit. Trump 2020 election case marked by new allegations

    Trump pressured a top Republican to spread false claims about Michigan voting machines after the election, according to new filing

    A Trump campaign employee allegedly ‘sought to create chaos’ in Detroit as allies tried to block absentee ballot counting

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Pentagon taps commercial vendors for low-cost, throwaway drones

    The Defense Innovation Unit released a solicitation this week for one-way, uncrewed aerial systems that can fly at ranges of 50 to 300 kilometers in low-bandwidth, GPS-denied environments.

  • teleSUR ☛ Migration Crisis: More than 30,000 People Have Arrived Irregulary to Spain by the Sea of Canary Islands

    The irregular arrival of migrants by sea to the Spanish islands of the Canary Islands (Atlantic) has risen in the last fortnight, reaching 4,050 people, bringing the number to 30,808 since the beginning of the year, according to official data published on Tuesday.

  • ADF ☛ Niger-Iran Uranium Deal Raises Fears of Nuclear Proliferation

    In its most recent quarterly report, the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated that Iran has more than 5,700 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium that could be converted rapidly to weapons-grade material.

    “Iran would only need a couple of weeks to produce that weapons-grade material, but probably much longer — a year or more — to build an actual bomb it could deliver,” Eric Brewer, deputy vice president of the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, told The Associated Press.

    According to the agency, Iran’s current quantity of enriched uranium could make multiple bombs.

  • Techdirt ☛ Ohio Sheriff Tells People To Write Down Addresses Of People With Kamala Harris Signs In Their Yard

    He’s asking the followers of his government-related page to engage in something that sure looks a whole lot like voter intimidation. The implicit request is that these addresses be shared with the sheriff. On top of that, there’s the use of the word “locusts” to describe immigrants, suggesting they’re an elemental force that only seeks to destroy and, more importantly, incapable of doing anything other than acting instinctively.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Journalist Who Cried Treason

    The obsession that would overtake Craig Unger’s life, get him labeled a member of the “tinfoil-hat brigade,” and nearly destroy his career as an investigative reporter took root on an April morning in 1991. Scanning The New York Times and drinking his coffee, he came upon an op-ed detailing a treasonous plot that had sabotaged Jimmy Carter’s reelection efforts a decade earlier—a plot that would become known, somewhat ironically, as the October surprise.

    Gary Sick, a former Iran specialist on the National Security Council, was alleging that during the 1980 presidential campaign, while more than 50 Americans were being held hostage in Iran, Ronald Reagan’s team made a backroom arms deal with the new Islamic Republic to delay the hostages’ release until after the election. Carter, bedeviled by the international fiasco, would be denied the narrative he needed to save his sinking chances—an October surprise, that is—and Reagan could announce the Americans’ freedom just after he was sworn in (which he went on to do).

• Environment

  • EcoWatch ☛ 'Existential Threat': Tuvalu’s Fight to Survive, Even If It Sinks

    By 2050. It’s estimated that about half of the country will be underwater. By 2100, that number would be 95%. Tuvalu is extremely susceptible to rising seas due to its small size and low elevation, which is just about two meters above sea level on average.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • YLE ☛ Helsinki proceeds with plan to ban cars from Central Station area

      Cars will be banned from the area in front of Helsinki Central Railway Station under a plan to convert the neighbourhood into a haven for pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users.

      Kaivokatu would be closed to private motorists under the plan, with expanded provision for trams at the station and cars diverted to the esplanades, south of the station.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Michigan News ☛ Giant sequoia forest to be planted in Detroit neighborhood

      Giant sequoia seedlings are watched over by an older sequoia at the Arboretum Detroit tree nursery. These 100 seedlings were planted during spring 2024. They are expected to be part of a giant sequoia forest in Detroit's Poletown East neighborhood.Arboretum Detroit

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Washington Post ☛ OpenAI gets $6.6 billion in new funding, valuing company at $157 billion

    OpenAI’s new investors include chipmaker Nvidia; MGX, a new technology investment company from the United Arab Emirates; and SoftBank, the Japanese firm known for funneling exorbitant sums into WeWork and Uber as their valuations ballooned before later contracting. Existing investors also participated, including Microsoft, Khosla Ventures and New York investment firms Tiger Global Management and Thrive Capital, which led the round.

  • New York Times ☛ OpenAI Completes Deal That Values Company at $157 Billion

    The new fund-raising round, led by the investment firm Thrive Capital, values OpenAI at $157 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the deal. Microsoft, the chipmaker Nvidia, the tech conglomerate SoftBank, the United Arab Emirates investment firm MGX and others are also putting money into OpenAI.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ California AI Safety Bill Vetoed

    Governor Newsom has vetoed the state’s AI safety bill.

  • NL Times ☛ Netherlands won't back EU plan to monitor WhatsApp traffic for child sex abuse videos

    The Netherlands is still not joining the plans of the European Union to combat child sex abuse videos on WhatsApp. The proposals have been watered down to protect privacy, but this has still not been done enough for the Netherlands and several other EU countries. There is likely an insufficient number of countries backing the proposal at this time.

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Has Wiped Out a Shocking Amount of Twitter's Value In Less Than 2 Years

    That means the asset manager is now valuing the social media platform at just $9.4 billion, a far cry from the $44 billion Musk raised in debt and equity to acquire the company.

    The news highlights just how disastrous Musk's leadership has been for X. The company has been bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertising revenue as the mercurial CEO doubles down on turning the platform into a cesspool of disinformation and hate speech.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • VOA News ☛ Russian propaganda portrays Zelenskyy as supervillain

      The Kremlin's propaganda portrayal of Zelenskyy is the epitome of a disinformation tactic dubbed "projection" — that is when one side projects on the opposing side its own crimes and characteristics. In this case, Russia's President Vladimir Putin stands verifiably accused of committing all sorts of crimes that his propaganda machine projects onto Zelenskyy.

      Investigative journalists and fact-checkers, including VOA's, have been looking into the Kremlin's claims about the Ukrainian president and proving them false. Yet the Russian-cooked list of Zelenskyy's evil traits keeps growing.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Do these videos show Iran's attack on Israel?

      However, some videos didn't show the Tuesday attack but recycled older footage of unrelated events. DW's fact checking team has seen videos taken out of context repeatedly during escalating conflicts and looked into some of the most viral claims online relating to the attack.

    • The Nation ☛ Walz Defended Reality—Even as Vance Took Full Advantage of CBS’s Failure to Fact-Check

      In a debate where JD Vance lied and lied and lied, Tim Walz did double duty. In addition to making his own case, Walz had to defend the truth.

    • Vox ☛ Elon Musk’s — and Republicans’ — lies about immigrant and noncitizen voting, explained

      This past weekend, X owner Elon Musk elevated a false right-wing talking point about immigration, claiming Democrats were fast-tracking citizenship applications to rig elections in the party’s favor.

    • US Navy Times ☛ Iran-linked website targets vets with disinformation, think tank warns

      Leaders of a Washington think tank urged veterans this week not to trust information posted to the fake news website “Not Our War,” which the group claims is attempting to stir up antidemocratic sentiments among veteran voters ahead of the November presidential election.

      The website was one of nearly two dozen flagged in a recent report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research group focusing on foreign policy and national security. The group warned that Iranian operatives were trying to pass off the sites as legitimate news outlets and use the content to cast doubt on America’s democratic process.

    • The Scotsman ☛ How Donald Trump has become the 'Lord Haw Haw' of anti-Ukraine propaganda

      Joyce’s name is long forgotten, but he is still remembered as the infamous “Lord Haw-Haw”, the voice of the Nazis on radio broadcasts. One of Joyce’s reported remarks was that “the people of England will curse themselves for having preferred ruin from Churchill to peace from Hitler”. The man who invaded most of Europe was actually a man of peace, he asked his many listeners to believe, while Winston Churchill should be blamed for ‘choosing’ war.

    • Futurism ☛ Facebook Is Being Flooded With Gross AI-Generated Images of Hurricane Helene Devastation

      But instead of spreading vital information to those affected by the natural disaster, or at the very least sharing real photos of the destruction, the account is seemingly trying to use AI to cash in on all the attention the hurricane has been getting.

    • 404 Media ☛ Internal Emails Reveal How Hate Overwhelmed Springfield After Trump's Lies About Haitian Immigrants

      Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, told CNN that he has been willing to “create stories” about immigration in Springfield for media attention, which also came up at Tuesday’s vice presidential debate with Tim Walz.

    • Wired ☛ Pavel Durov Defends Telegram's Privacy Changes Amid User Unrest

      Yet since Durov’s arrest, Telegram has introduced a series of subtle changes. In late August, the company’s FAQ page read: “To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.” Now the phrase “user data” has been replaced with “user messages.” Telegram did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment asking what exactly this change means.

    • 404 Media ☛ Telegram Confirms it Gave U.S. User Data to the Cops

      The news is the first glimpse into Telegram’s policy shift around providing data to law enforcement agencies. Historically, Telegram has gained a reputation for not cooperating with the authorities on criminal investigations. After the arrest of Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov by French police in August, the company changed its privacy policy to expand data requests from only applying to terror cases to crimes more broadly.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • CPJ ☛ Cameroon ratchets up media censorship ahead of 2025 election

    After a month of seeing an empty television studio with the word “censored” splashed across the screen, Cameroonians are finally able to watch Équinoxe TV’s flagship Sunday politics show “Droit de Réponse” again.

  • CPJ ☛ Death threat sent to Serbian news agency Tanjug over Kosovo reporting

    The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Serbian authorities to swiftly complete their investigation into a death threat emailed to journalists at the privately owned news agency Tanjug over its reporting on Kosovo, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday. Authorities said they suspect the threat came from Albania.

  • VOA News ☛ 4 Russian journalists accused of working for Navalny group go on trial

    The trial, which is being held behind closed doors, is the latest step in the Kremlin's unrelenting crackdown on dissent that has reached unprecedented levels after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago. The authorities have targeted opposition figures, independent journalists, rights activists and ordinary Russians critical of the Kremlin with criminal and misdemeanor charges, jailing hundreds and prompting thousands to leave the country, fearing prosecution.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Russia places four journalists on trial for 'extremism'

    Russia on Wednesday opened the trial of four independent journalists who prosecutors say assisted the banned organizations of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

    The behind-closed-doors trial comes seven months after Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin's main opponent, died in an Arctic prison in circumstances that have not been fully explained.

  • ANF News ☛ Nobel Prize winners join campaign against executions in Iran

    The number of executions in Iran reached 853 in 2023, the highest recorded since 2015, marking a 48 percent increase from 2022 following the Jin, Jiyan Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom) uprising.

    Executions continued to increase into 2024, with at least 95 recorded by 20 March, according to Amnesty International.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Trial Opens for Russian Journalists in Navalny ‘Extremism’ Case

    Antonina Favorskaya, Konstantin Gabov, Sergei Karelin and Artyom Kriger, who have all reported on Navalny as journalists, were detained this spring and summer on charges of “participating in an extremist community.” They were accused of “collecting material, preparing and editing videos” for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) and the NavalnyLIVE YouTube channel.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘It could become a trigger’: Fearing public discontent, the Kremlin tells Russian state media not to report on its defense [sic] spending hike

    The Putin administration is worried the government’s new budget will “create a negative perception among citizens” and could lead to a decline in the government’s approval ratings, two sources close to the president’s political team told Meduza.

    Immediately after Bloomberg published an article on the planned defense spending increase on September 23, the Putin administration sent instructions to Russia’s state-backed and pro-Kremlin media telling them to ignore the report, the sources said. Two sources from these media outlets confirmed this to Meduza; one said that officials told reporters “not to touch this topic” because “the budget hasn’t been passed yet.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ The "Truth" about JD Vance

    Trump and Vance thrive on the fragmentation of America created by the collapse of the media. And so they treat the media as a performance of power.

    Vance attacked experts and the media over and over in yesterday’s debate, appealing instead to “common sense.” He appealed to and encouraged distrust in government. His attack on what he falsely termed “censorship” was a defense of the crackpots Trump mobilized to attack the Capitol on January 6 (and he made two implicit defenses of Russian disinformation along the way).

    The second most notable moment in the debate came when Vance complained that, “The rules were you weren’t going to fact check,” when he falsely claimed the Haitians in Springfield were undocumented. It was a tell. Vance and Trump need these false claims to sow division. They need these false claims to attack rationality.

  • El País ☛ Julian Assange’s uncertain future in a world he no longer recognizes: ‘It’s not simply the spooky sound of electric cars’

    “I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self-censorship,” he told the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights. “Where we once released important war crimes videos that stirred public debate, now every day, there are live-streamed horrors from the wars in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. Hundreds of journalists have been killed in Ukraine and Gaza combined. The impunity continues to mount… and it is unclear what we can do about it,” he added with concern.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Council Of Europe: Assange Was A Political Prisoner

    The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, or PACE, approved a resolution that states WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was prosecuted and detained in the United Kingdom as a political prisoner.

    Þórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir, the general rapporteur for political prisoners and an Icelandic parliamentarian who serves on the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, drafted the resolution, which passed by a vote of 88-13.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Where does Julian Assange go from here?

    The details of the plea deal he agreed which secured his release are unclear, although it lifted the charges he had faced under the US Espionage Act for publishing top secret files from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including evidence of potential war crimes.

    "I eventually chose freedom over an unrealisable justice," Assange told the lawmakers in Strasbourg explaining why he took the deal. "I want to be totally clear: I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today because I pled guilty to journalism."

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RFA ☛ Authorities transfer 200 Tibetan monastic students to state schools

    In early July, Radio Free Asia reported that authorities had closed down the Buddhist school of Lhamo Kirti Monastery in Dzoge county, known among locals as Taktsang Lhamo Kirti Monastery, affecting nearly 600 students. They also required parents to enroll their children in state-administered residential schools.

  • NL Times ☛ PostNL will likely be permitted to take an extra day to deliver mail from 2026

    The Cabinet wants to give Dutch mail delivery service PostNL permission to take an extra day to deliver letters. Currently, the company is supposed to get letterbox mail to the recipient within 24 hours, but that could rise to 48 hours starting in 2026, according to the proposal by Economic Affairs Minister Dirk Beljaarts.

  • The Verge ☛ Federal prosecutors still can’t get into Eric Adams’ cellphone

    Even if Adams’ excuse isn’t true (or if he happens to remember his password later on), he may not have to give that information to the police. Several courts have ruled that, even in instances where police have a warrant to search someone’s phone, the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination means investigators can’t compel a suspect to tell them their phone password. Phone passcodes are often considered a form of “testimonial” evidence because they require a person to reveal their thoughts. But if Face or Touch ID had been enabled on Adams’ device, the FBI potentially could have unlocked his phone with biometrics — which aren’t typically considered a form of testimonial evidence.

  • Wired ☛ Hurricane Helene Shows How Broken the US Insurance System Is

    “The property insurance market for homes was already a patchwork system that really doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Marlett says. “Now you’re adding in the last couple of years of economic uncertainty, inflation, climate change, population migration—it’s just an unbelievably bad combination happening all at once.”

  • The Record ☛ International police dismantle cybercrime group in West Africa

    The fraudsters used QR codes to direct victims to malicious websites that mimicked legitimate payment platforms, where they asked their victims to enter personal information such as login details and card numbers. To gain the trust of their targets, the hackers posed as buyers on small advertising websites or impersonated customer service agents.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ If you have ever used Uber Eats, you can't sue Uber when they crash one of their cars into you.

    Uber beats crash victims' attempt to try case in court instead of arbitration: [...]

  • Ars Technica ☛ Uber beats crash victims’ attempt to try case in court instead of arbitration

    A married couple can't sue Uber over severe injuries they suffered in a 2022 car accident because of a mandatory arbitration provision in the ride-sharing company's terms of use, according to a ruling issued by the New Jersey Superior Court appellate division.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ On Robert Owen and the History of Experiments in Living — Crooked Timber

    In what follows, I am not mostly interested in these features of experiments in living. But they do lurk in the background of what I am after.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Can You Ignore a Medical Bill?

    Yet when she started calling hospitals, doctor’s offices, and collection agencies, she realized that nobody could tell her what she was paying for and why she was being charged a certain amount. Some bills had been forgiven; some were miscoded. “I was like, I’m not going to just send you $500 for this random you-know-what,” she told me. “My takeaway was: Nobody knows what these bills are for.” So she did not pay them. She tossed new ones in the trash. She sent unknown numbers straight to voicemail. Getting on top of her debts meant ignoring them.

  • JURIST ☛ Coalition calls for Saudi Arabia's exclusion from upcoming UN Human Rights Council election

    They argue Saudi Arabia fails to meet the criteria set by UN General Assembly Resolution 60/251, which established the Human Rights Council. The resolution stipulates that member states must consider a candidate’s commitment to promoting and protecting human rights when voting. The resolution also requires Council members to fully cooperate with the Council and its mechanisms. According to critics, this is something Saudi Arabia has failed to do by consistently refusing to allow country visits by UN special procedures in an effort to isolate itself from international scrutiny. Allowing Saudi Arabia to secure a seat on the Human Rights Council would undermine both the standards expected of UN council members and the credibility of the worldwide governance institution.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Saudi fitness instructor stabbed in face while jailed over women’s rights posts

    A Saudi Arabian fitness instructor and influencer has been stabbed in the face in prison after being jailed in January for promoting women’s rights on social media.Manahel al-Otaibi, 30, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for “terrorist offences” in a secret trial that generated widespread criticism, with activists saying it showed the “hollowness” of Saudi progress in human rights.

  • [Repeat] RFA ☛ French museum blasted for using 'Xizang' in Tibet exhibits

    A French museum that replaced “Tibet”' with “Xizang” — a term promoted by the Chinese government but opposed by Tibetan advocates — said it would undo the change in its exhibits, following protests and petitions by Tibetans.

    Last year, China decided to adopt the term “Xizang” in all its official documents to refer to “Tibet” — an example, activists say, of Beijing’s attempts to erase their linguistic and cultural heritage.

  • Techdirt ☛ Lawsuit: Cops Stood By While Elderly Woman Was Stabbed 68 Times; Cops: Hey, We Yelled At The House

    This is the worst kind of policing: officers who don’t feel it’s worth their effort, much less their time, to prevent or respond to a crime in (audible) progress. When confronted with their own laziness and (presumably) cowardice, the cops claimed they had zero chance of entering the house because the same metal gates they’d bypassed for other reasons were now the on-the-ground equivalence of… I don’t know… dealing with a foreign country with no extradition agreement in place.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Ruben Schade ☛ An October 2024 browser monoculture update

  Longer answer: I use about twelve sites daily for my current job, and I have about fifteen I use for most of what I call life admin. Seven of these no longer work in Firefox. That’s a success rate for my primary browser of 85%. Wow.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Epic Systems, a lethal health record monopolist

  At the core of Epic's value proposition is "upcoding," a form of billing fraud that is beloved of hospital administrators, including the "nonprofit" hospitals that generate vast fortunes that are somehow not characterized as profits. Here's a particularly egregious form of upcoding: back in 2020, the Poudre Valley Hospital in Ft Collins, CO locked all its doors except the ER entrance. Every patient entering the hospital, including those receiving absolutely routine care, was therefore processed as an "emergency."

• Privacy International ☛ Decoding vertical tech integrations: why do they matter? | Privacy International

  Companies controlling infrastructure can significantly influence service delivery, potentially creating barriers for new competitors.

  These companies often operate in regulatory grey areas, exploiting gaps to their advantage or ignoring existing regulations.

• Trademarks

  • The Register UK ☛ WordPress biz Automattic details WP Engine deal demands

    The proposed seven-year Trademark License Agreement [PDF] calls for WP Engine to pay eight percent of its gross revenue on a monthly basis to Automattic, or in the form of WordPress software development time contributed by salaried employees, or a combination of the two options.

  • Right of Publicity

    • Digital Music News ☛ ABBA Voyage Revenue Approached $138 Million in 2023

      Aniara Limited, the UK-based company behind London’s ABBA Voyage, just recently filed its complete 2023 financials. As mentioned, evidence was already suggesting solid commercial results for ABBA Voyage in 2023 (and the current year) – with other massive hologram shows possibly in the works to boot.

• Copyrights

  • FSF ☛ Free Software Supporter -- Issue 198, October 2024

    The pandemic-era National Emergency Library (NEL), an Internet Archive (IA) program, suffered a major blow after an appeals court ruled that the lending practices of the NEL were in violation of copyright law. Under the NEL program, more library users checked out digital copies than were permitted under the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology confining these materials. Following an intense legal battle between the IA and a coalition of large publishers, the IA was ultimately forced to remove over five hundred thousand books from the NEL. The IA isn't giving up yet, but it's going up against a massive hydra and could use your help to restore public access to the books that were taken, as well as preserve and distribute information far into the future. To learn more about DRM, visit https://defectivebydesign.org.

  • Walled Culture ☛ Where open access has failed to reform academic publishing, perhaps antitrust law will succeed

    The open access movement has been trying for over 20 years to promote the widest access to knowledge. Sadly, as numerous Walled Culture posts have chronicled, what should be a matter of social justice has been subverted by clever and cynical moves from the academic publishing industry in order to retain their fabulous profit margins. As a result, the open access movement has failed to deliver cost-free access to academic papers, or to ease the process of sharing knowledge, at least on the scale that it initially aimed for. That makes a completely different approach to tackling the problems of academic publishing, using US antitrust laws, extremely interesting.

  • Techdirt ☛ Taylor Swift: Singer, Songwriter, Copyright Innovator

    Swift’s long battle is well-known in the industry. But an article on the Harvard Law Today site from a few months back adds an important detail to this story that I have not seen reported anywhere else. It draws on comments made by Gary R. Greenstein, a “technology transactions partner” at Wilson Sonsini, one of the top US law firms. It concerns a common legal requirement in contracts to wait a certain number of years before artists are allowed to re-record an album: [...]

  • Harvard University ☛ How Taylor Swift changed the copyright game by remaking her own music - Harvard Law School

    Greenstein placed the Swift story in the larger context of music copyrights. In music, he explained, there are always two copyrights. The first is for the musical work itself, and this is usually controlled by the composer/songwriter, or by a publishing company acting on their behalf. The second is the “master,” the recorded performance of the work, and this is usually controlled by the label.

    Whenever a song is played in public, one or both of these entities gets paid. In many cases, there are multiple copyright holders — the Bruno Mars hit “Uptown Funk” has six authors — or multiple recordings of the same songs (he noted that Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” has hundreds). “From a licensing point of view, this can be a nightmare,” Greenstein said.