Leftovers

• Robert Birming ☛ Life's on the Wire

  For the same reason, we continue to blog even if no one reads our posts. We continue to write even though it's an expense without any income. We blog because it's a part of us, because it's something we love to do.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Humans Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes on The Tibetan Plateau

    Beall and her team made a study of 417 women between the ages of 46 and 86 years who have lived all their lives in Nepal above altitudes of around 3,500 meters (11,480 feet). The researchers recorded the number of live births, ranging between 0 and 14 per woman for an average of 5.2, as well as health and physical information and measurements.

• Education

  • Crooked Timber ☛ The death of the book, again

    Are these differences cultural and path-dependent, or do they reflect fundamentally different ways of undertaking and communicating research. I can see arguments for both views, but I’ll leave that up for discussion. Regardless, it seems likely that the shift away from books will continue. Fields where books have been the traditional way of communicating will either have to change, or to treat book reading as a research skill that can’t be assumed and needs to be taught/inculcated.

  • Bert Hubert ☛ A bit about me

    The common thread through these disparate things is that most of them involve explaining stuff really well, in hopes that this either just plain makes people happy (or perhaps less afraid), or that this can engender change.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Antivaxxers easily see through RFK Jr.’s MAHA con

    [Orac note: Well, my talk is done, and it appears to have been well-received. Unfortunately, as far as I know, it’s not available on YouTube or elsewhere. Believe it or not, I think things are finally settling down to a new chaotic normal, to the point where I’m ready to get back to blogging. I’ll see what I can do this week. In the meantime, enjoy (I hope) this post about RFK Jr. and how easily antivaxxers see through his MAHA con.]

  • Harvard University ☛ Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Lays Off 87 Workers in Restructuring Effort

    The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard announced on Oct. 10 that it laid off 87 employees as part of a strategic restructuring.

    Of the impacted employees, 75 were part of the Data Sciences Platform and IT departments. The other 12 employees who were laid off occupy administrative positions at the Broad Institute.

    Broad Institute Director Todd R. Golub wrote in an email to staff members that “the rapid pace of technological and scientific change requires us to retool to stay ahead of the field.”

  • Science News ☛ Megafire smoke may dampen California’s nut harvests

    When thick wildfire smoke blanketed California’s Central Valley in the late summer of 2020 and 2021, it blocked access to crucial sunlight. The disruption limited how much energy orchard trees stored over the winter, researchers report October 2 in Nature Plants. In the year following a megafire, some almond orchards saw up to a 60 percent decrease in nut harvests. This alerted scientists to an understudied effect of wildfire smoke in the state that produces 80 percent of the world’s almonds.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Crooked Timber ☛ The Whirlpool of the Artificial

    There are many processes now subsumed under the term “Artificial Intelligence.” The reason we’re talking about it now, though, is that the websites are doing things we never thought websites could do. The pixels of our devices light up like never before. Techno-optimists believe that we’re nowhere close to the limit, that websites will continue to dazzle us — and I hope that this reframing helps put AI in perspective.

    Because the first step in the “Artificial Intelligence” process is most important: the creation of an artificial world in which this non-human intelligence can operate.

  • NL Times ☛ Bilthoven hospital first in the Netherlands to use AI to assess mammograms

    The Alexander Monro Hospital (AMZ) in Bilthoven is the first in the Netherlands to use artificial intelligence (AI) when assessing mammograms. Various studies in recent years have shown that AI can detect breast cancer earlier than radiologists can, De Telegraaf reports.

  • The Scotsman ☛ Silent Crime: scams that target kids playing video games

    They may try to get players to buy fake versions of in-game currency and leave them out of pocket. Or they may even try to steal your personal information.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • US News And World Report ☛ FTC's Rule Banning Fake Online Reviews Goes Into Effect

      A federal rule banning fake online reviews is now in effect.

      The Federal Trade Commission issued the rule in August banning the sale or purchase of online reviews. The rule, which went into effect Monday, allows the agency to seek civil penalties against those who knowingly violate it.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ U.S. Border Surveillance Towers Have Always Been Broken

      Except, this isn't a bombshell. What should actually be shocking is that Congressional leaders are acting shocked, like those who recently sent a letter about the towers to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. These revelations simply reiterate what people who have been watching border technology have known for decades: Surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico border is a wasteful endeavor that is ill-equipped to respond to an ill-defined problem.

      Yet, after years of bipartisan recognition that these programs were straight-up boondoggles, there seems to be a competition among political leaders to throw the most money at programs that continue to fail.

      Official oversight reports about the failures, repeated breakages, and general ineffectiveness of these camera towers have been public since at least the mid-2000s. So why haven't border security agencies confronted the problem in the last 25 years? One reason is that these cameras are largely political theater; the technology dazzles publicly, then fizzles quietly. Meanwhile, communities that should be thriving at the border are treated like a laboratory for tech companies looking to cash in on often exaggerated—if not fabricated—homeland security threats.

    • 404 Media ☛ Lawsuit Argues Warrantless Use of Flock Surveillance Cameras Is Unconstitutional

      A civil liberties organization has filed a federal lawsuit in Virginia arguing that widespread surveillance enabled by Flock, a company that sells networks of automated license plate readers, is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.

    • uni Columbia ☛ Regardless of Frontiers: The First Amendment and the Exchange of Ideas Across Borders | Knight First Amendment Institute

      Today, the U.S. government uses its authority over the border to justify the surveillance of social media, the interrogation of travelers about their political and religious views, the warrantless search of travelers’ laptops and cellphones, the imposition of limits on Americans’ right to engage with foreign speakers and to access foreign communications platforms, and the suspension of the constitutional rules that would ordinarily apply to the surveillance of Americans’ emails and telephone calls. Panelists will consider these practices and their implications from a range of perspectives, including theoretical, doctrinal, historical, and empirical.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Dissenter ☛ Barreling Toward War With Iran Is More Concerning Than A National Security Leak

  • Hackaday ☛ Nuclear Tomb Must Survive

    It is hard to imagine that much we built today will be used ten years from now, much less in a hundred. It is hard to make things that last through the ages, which is why we are fascinated with things like ancient pyramids in Mexico, Egypt, and China. However, even the oldest Egyptian pyramid is only about 5,000 years old. [Mark Piesing] at the BBC visited a site that is supposed to lock up nuclear waste for 100,000 years.

  • International Business Times ☛ US Company Accidentally Hires North Korean For Remote Work, Gets Blackmailed When They Try To Fire Him

    A major security breach occurred when a US company unknowingly hired a North Korean IT worker who, after being fired, stole sensitive data and demanded a ransom. The FBI has warned that thousands of North Korean hackers disguise themselves as legitimate remote workers in the US to siphon money back to their government.

  • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Non-violence as a societal value

    So, for those from countries where, paradoxically, routinely arming police makes people feel safe, a short history of Iceland’s path from being one of the more brutal and violent nations in Europe to being a largely pacifist one.

  • The Hill ☛ Trump's plan to replace federal workers with loyalists

    The plan is spelled out in Project 2025 (which Trump says he has “nothing to do with,” despite his ties to many of the project’s authors) and a bill in the House of Representatives, the Public Service Reform Act. It would allow the president or his appointees to fire any federal worker “for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all.” Employees would have no right to appeal, even if fired because they refused to break a law or execute an unethical order.

  • The Hill ☛ Jim Messina says Donald Trump will try to steal election after Nov. 5

    Messina argued Trump has shown what he will do after the election by filing various lawsuits in battleground states that target early voting and voter rolls.

    “That is a precursor to what they are going to do after the election. They are going to try to set up a way to steal this election to get some of these crazy cases to their favorite United States Supreme Court,” Messina said.

  • The Strategist ☛ Australia's defence is lost in a fog of strategic failure and a lack of imagination

    There are two sets of external changes shaping Australia’s defence problem. First, new groupings of states are emerging—with some firepower to boot—that prioritise different values to us. On values we share—say, the continued survival of the state—they are often interpreted differently. Australia might look to the multilateral rules-based order to shore up support for our right to exist. Another state might view this order as a legacy system that is not willing to facilitate the transfer of power to rising states. Problems ensue.

  • The Strategist ☛ World War I was the crucible of air power. Ukraine looks the same for drones

    But we seem to be seeing a new kind of air battle—lower, slower at close quarters and in a physical environment where fighter aircraft cannot intervene affordably or effectively. Could it be that Ukraine is to small unmanned systems what World War I was to aircraft?

  • NBC ☛ Pennsylvania Gov. Shapiro: Law enforcement should 'take a look at' Elon Musk voter payments

    Questions about the legality of these cash payments abounded on Saturday night, as election law experts pointed to various provisions in federal law that prohibited making cash payments to voters.

    Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project and an NBC News election law analyst, called the payments “clearly illegal” in a post on his website Saturday night.

    He pointed to a federal law, 52 U.S.C. 10307(c), which says that any individual who “pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk May Be in Serious Trouble for Paying Voters in Swing States

    But as it turns out, there's a reason you never hear about wealthy activists paying voters directly for support: legal experts have been quick to call the lawfulness of the billionaire Trump acolyte's seven-figure handouts into question, with objections centering on one important stipulation of Musk's offer: that in order to receive a check, you have to be registered to vote in the state of Pennsylvania.

    This means that Musk's offer is incentivizing folks who aren't registered to make sure they get registered. And that, argues University of California, Los Angeles Law School political science professor Rick Hasen, crosses a legal red line.

  • Associated Press ☛ Musk offers voters $1 million a day to sign PAC petition backing the Constitution. Is that legal?

    Michael Kang, an election law professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, said the context of the giveaway so close to Election Day makes it harder to make the case that the effort is anything but a incentivizing people to register to vote.

    “It’s not quite the same as paying someone to vote, but you’re getting close enough that we worry about its legality,” Kang said.

  • Vox ☛ Elon Musk’s $1 million-a-day giveaway, explained | Vox

    But even if the DOJ decides to go after Musk for this — and there is no guarantee that it will — the issue likely won’t be resolved before November 5, in part to avoid any perception on the part of the federal government that the DOJ is meddling in the election.

  • New Republic ☛ Republicans Are Cheating. Again. But Now It’s Worse Than Ever.

    This has been true in most elections in recent American history, as I’ll detail below. But let’s start with a few examples from this election.

  • NPR ☛ Gov. Shapiro calls Musk's $1M offer to Pennsylvania voters 'deeply concerning'

    "If you look at the conditions, you must be a registered voter," Hasen said. "And so this is essentially a lottery that's open only to people who register to vote. So it’s either an incentive for someone to vote or it’s a reward. And either way, it violates federal law."

    He calls Musk's actions "clearly illegal" because it violates statute 52 U.S.C. 10307(c) and the Department of Justice’s election manual.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Does Elon Musk’s $1 million sweepstakes run afoul of the federal prohibition on paying voters?

    “It is illegal to give out money on the condition that recipients register as voters,” said Adav Noti, executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “As the terms of this ‘contest’ to win $1 million require the recipient to be a registered voter in one of seven swing states (or to register if they have not already), the offer violates federal law and is subject to civil or criminal enforcement by the Department of Justice.”

    Paul Schiff Berman, a law professor at The George Washington University, said Musk’s offer is likely illegal under the Voting Rights Enforcement section of Title 52 of the U.S. Code. The law says, “Whoever … pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years.”

  • International Business Times ☛ What Is Elon Musk's Petition, Why Is He Giving $1 Million Dollars Away And Is This Legal: Everything You Should Know

    So far, no formal legal action has been taken against Musk or his PAC. However, election law experts have noted that the giveaway could face scrutiny from state and federal officials as the election draws closer. Michael Kang, an election law professor at Northwestern University, pointed out that while the petition does not directly violate campaign finance laws, the proximity to the election and the fact that only registered voters can participate create legal risks. "It's not quite the same as paying someone to vote, but you're getting close enough that we worry about its legality," Kang told HuffPost.

  • USMC ☛ One of last Marine Corps World War II Navajo Code Talkers dies at 107

    With Kinsel’s death, only two Navajo Code Talkers are still alive: Former Navajo Chairman Peter MacDonald and Thomas H. Begay.

  • VOA News ☛ One of the last Navajo Code Talkers from World War II dies at 107

    They confounded Japanese military cryptologists during World War II and participated in all assaults the Marines led in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945, including at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu and Iwo Jima.

    The Code Talkers sent thousands of messages without error on Japanese troop movements, battlefield tactics and other communications crucial to the war's ultimate outcome.

  • VOA News ☛ US writer Anne Applebaum calls for arms for Ukraine, accepts German peace prize 

    “If there is even a small chance that military defeat could help end this horrific cult of violence in Russia, just as military defeat once brought an end to the cult of violence in Germany, we should take it,” Applebaum said.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Leaked emails show how prison officials deliberately made Navalny’s life unbearable — and then tried to cover their tracks — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Yulia Navalnaya says she’s prepared to run for presidency if she’s able to return to Russia in future — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Meduza is 10! Meet the people who bring you the latest on Russia, every single day. How did they end up at Meduza in English? And what makes their work so interesting? — Meduza

• Environment

  • The Revelator ☛ Six Lessons From the World’s Deadliest Environmental Disaster

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Stripe acquires stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge

      The companies didn’t disclose the deal’s financial terms. However, a source told Forbes that Stripe is paying $1.1 billion for Bridge. That’s more than five times the valuation startup reportedly received following a funding round earlier this year.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Idaho is coming around on clean tech, approves first-ever solar farm on state land

      For the first time, the Idaho State Board of Land Commissioners has voted to approve a lease for a solar farm on state-owned property.

      At last Tuesday’s meeting in Boise, the board voted 3-1 in favor of leasing more than 11,000 acres of state endowment land to a PacifiCorp wind and solar project in southeast Idaho, near Idaho Falls in Bingham County. Dubbed Arco Wind and Solar, the clean energy farm will be mostly constructed on private land, particularly the wind portion. The entire project spans more than 32,000 acres in Bingham and Fremont counties.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Maine Morning Star ☛ The futures of right whales and lobstermen are entangled. Could high-tech gear help save them both?

      That meant his team had to rig up a tool that could slice the rope at a distance—essentially a crossbow with an arrow like a throwing star. Eventually, Wart came up for air close enough to Landry’s dinghy for him to get a single clean shot. He took a breath and fired. The whale immediately dove underwater again, leaving the team in suspense. A few minutes later, she popped back up, revealing the knife had cut right through the chunky rope.

      “You really have to want it. After dealing with this case for three years, we really wanted it,” Landry said, recalling the raucous cheers on the boat that day in 2010. Landry has been helping disentangle ocean animals from fishing gear and debris for more than two decades, but celebrations never last long in this job. Wart’s case is a rare bright spot in the pervasive problem of rope entanglements, one of the leading causes of death for whales.

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ A New Marine Sanctuary Off California Will Be Co-Managed by Indigenous Peoples

      The 4,500-square-mile-sanctuary protects at-risk species such as shorebirds, whales, dolphins, sea turtles and sea otters. Its official designation from the Biden-Harris administration this month came after more than a decade-long push from the Northern Chumash Tribal Council and conservation groups for a protected area.

      Now, the sanctuary is undergoing a legally required 45-day review period, but it’s expected to be finalized by December 15.

• Finance

  • TikTok Lays Off Hundreds Amid Shift to AI-Driven Content Moderation [Ed: Nothing to do with "AI", just computerised or based on text analysis]

    The layoffs are part of a broader plan by TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, to enhance its moderation operations. The company uses a combination of human moderators and automated systems to detect and remove content that violates its guidelines. A TikTok spokesperson stated that the layoffs aim to strengthen the platform’s global moderation model.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI and the SEC Whistleblower Program - Schneier on Security

    Unfortunately, the program has resulted in a new industry of private de facto regulatory enforcers. Legal scholar Alexander Platt has shown how the SEC’s whistleblower program has effectively privatized a huge portion of financial regulatory enforcement. There is a role for publicly sourced information in securities regulatory enforcement, just as there has been in litigation for antitrust and other areas of the law. But the SEC program, and a similar one at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has created a market distortion replete with perverse incentives. Like the tax farmers of history, the interests of the whistleblowers don’t match those of the government.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Retiring the US debt would retire the US dollar

    The Secret IRS Files revealed the fact that many of America's oligarchs pay no tax at all. Some of them even get subsidies intended for poor families, like Jeff Bezos, whose tax affairs are so scammy that he was able to claim to be among the working poor and receive a federal Child Tax Credit, a $4,000 gift from the American public to one of the richest men who ever lived: [...]

  • Alex Gaynor ☛ Risky Business · Alex Gaynor

    Risk management is about an investment of resources now, to reduce the possibility of outcomes that are substantially worse later. And so we can integrate over time and say what the costs and benefits of some risk management approach will be (with varying degrees of precision). However, this also means that on a short time scale, almost any risk management investment has a poor return-on-investment. Which means that a business may believe it has an incentive to ignore a risk, and behave in a way that’s irresponsible on even a modestly longer time horizon.

  • [Old] Pro Publica ☛ The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax

    ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.

    Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.

    [...]

    The results are stark. According to Forbes, those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Bill to modernize federal cloud procurement gets backing of leading trade group

    In a letter sent Monday to Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Reps. James Comer, R-Ky., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the Alliance for Digital Innovation threw its support behind the Federal Improvement in Technology Procurement Act (H.R. 9595), touting legislation that it said would remove “outdated barriers that prevent agencies from accessing the latest commercial cloud-based technologies from companies of all sizes.”

    The FIT Procurement Act, introduced last month by Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., would help agencies better “meet the increasing demands of a digital-first world,” the letter stated.

  • IT Wire ☛ Nigerian Government and Ericsson sign MoU on 5G deployment

    The Nigerian Government has agreed to partner with Ericsson as a move toward deploying 5G connectivity in Nigeria.

  • The Drone Girl ☛ Department of the Interior scrambling after foreign-made drone ban

    With that, the agency simply stopped using drones for most operations aside from emergency operations, such as search and rescue, or firefighting. And in short, the policy — which came about as part of an ongoing effort to protect critical data from foreign surveillance risks — had largely negative effects. That includes rising costs, shrinking drone fleets and delays in essential land management activities such as wildfire monitoring, wildlife conservation and public safety.

    Here’s a deep dive into what happened once the Department of the Interior changed its drone policy to ban procurement of new DJI drones, as well as to stop their use for non-emergency purposes. And with that, here are some vital clues as to what might happen, should the government step up bans on Chinese-made drones going forward (which could very well happen).

  • Lou Plummer ☛ Civic Duties

    I will be glad when the election is settled. I expect there to be all kinds of controversy and dirty tricks from the other side. Another insurrection is certainly a possibility. They are losers but they don't lose gracefully.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Army aims for speed in new $10B software contract

    The Army wants to create a huge new ID/IQ contract to modernize the way it buys and builds software — and it’s not wasting any time. Just a few months after the idea was first announced, the service has already issued a request for information and two draft requests for proposals.

    It’s going to be a tight turnaround for potential bidders to submit their comments on the Army’s latest draft, issued on Oct. 11; the deadline is this Friday. After that, officials are planning one more draft RFP, and then an industry day on November 7 before the final version of the solicitation that vendors will bid on. That timeline is basically unheard of in the world of large federal ID/IQ contracts, which typically take the government years to plan and award.

  • VOA News ☛ Congressman rails at Hong Kong efforts to block US-based content

    Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), wrote to web services company Automattic on Monday to ensure the webpage belonging to Flow HK, an online media outlet founded by Hong Kong pro-democracy activists who are in exile, remains operational despite pressure from the Hong Kong police.

    At the beginning of October, VOA revealed Flow HK to be the first overseas Hong Kong media website to be officially blocked within Hong Kong, but recent requests to remove the website internationally brought the original censorship inside China to a deeper level.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Cyble Inc ☛ U.S. Rule Targets Foreign Threats Exploiting Sensitive Data

      Disinformation is fueled by sensitive data, and the United States has learned some hard lessons in the build-up to this year’s presidential elections, where its adversaries have run rampant disinformation campaigns. So what is it doing about it? The U.S. is introducing a new rule that targets foreign threats exploiting sensitive data of its citizens.

      The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday, in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), proposed a significant initiative to protect Americans’ sensitive data from foreign adversaries. The rule, derived from President Biden’s Executive Order 14117, aims to curb the exploitation of U.S. data by countries identified as threats.

      The new proposal doesn’t impose sweeping changes immediately but instead seeks public feedback for refining the rule before it takes effect.

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Donald J. Trump, Cosplayer

      Trump is dressing up as a character. He is not actually working in fast food. A shut-down McDonald’s and a Fox News TV crew isn’t real but a stage and a production team for campaign propaganda.

      This is not the first time we’ve seen Trump cosplaying, either.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Election disinformation is getting more chaotic

      Earlier this month, as hurricanes ravaged parts of the Southeast, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Marjorie Taylor Greene were among those amplifying dangerous disinformation about the storms and recovery efforts. The ensuing social-media chaos, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey has written, was just a preview of what we may see on and after Election Day. I spoke with Elaine, who covers politics, about what makes this moment so ripe for conspiracy theories, the ways online campaigns shape the real world, and how this all could still escalate soon.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Moldova barely votes to stay with E.U. amid calls of Russian meddling

      In a tweet early Monday, Sandu said that “criminal groups, working with foreign forces,” had attempted to influence Moldovan elections using “tens of millions of euros, lies, and propaganda.”

      “We have clear evidence that these criminal groups aimed to buy 300,000 votes — a fraud of unprecedented scale,” she added. “Their objective was to undermine a democratic process. Their intention is to spread fear and panic in the society.”

    • Harvard University ☛ Misinformed about misinformation: On the polarizing discourse on misinformation and its consequences for the field

      The field of misinformation is facing several challenges, from attacks on academic freedom to polarizing discourse about the nature and extent of the problem for elections and digital well-being. However, we see this as an inflection point and an opportunity to chart a more informed and contextual research practice. To foster credible research and informed public policy, we argue that research on misinformation should be locally focused, self-reflexive, and interdisciplinary, addressing critical questions about what counts as misinformation and why it does, the vulnerabilities of specific communities, and the sociotechnical and sociopolitical conditions that shape information interpretation. By concentrating on when and how misinformation affects society, instead of whether, the field can provide more precise insights and contribute to productive discussions.

    • The Register UK ☛ China's Spamouflage trolls US Sen. Marco Rubio

      This is according to Clemson University researchers Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, who note that this isn't the first time that the Beijing-linked trolls have set their sights on Rubio. And if the 2022 election is any indication, we can expect a flood of content about the "unhinged" senator from Florida on November 5.

      Spamouflage, also tracked as "Dragonbridge," is the prolific, pro-People's Republic of China propaganda group that has been spreading fake news about American politics and politicians during the last two election cycles.

    • VOA News ☛ 'Garbage in, garbage out': AI fails to debunk disinformation, study finds

      When it comes to combating disinformation ahead of the U.S. presidential elections, artificial intelligence and chatbots are failing, a media research group has found.

      The latest audit by the research group NewsGuard found that generative AI tools struggle to effectively respond to false narratives.

      In its latest audit of 10 leading chatbots, compiled in September, NewsGuard found that AI will repeat misinformation 18% of the time and offer a nonresponse 38.33% of the time — leading to a “fail rate” of almost 40%, according to NewsGuard.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • 404 Media ☛ Twitch Quietly Blocked New Users From Israel and Palestine Since October 7

    Twitch quietly blocked new users from creating new accounts on the live video streaming service since October 7, 2023 to prevent them from uploading “graphic material,” the company revealed late last night.

  • Futurism ☛ Intuit Begs Journalists to Delete Part of Interview With Its CEO

    Intuit, the financial tech giant behind TurboTax and Quickbooks, inexplicably demanded that The Verge completely delete a portion of editor-in-chief Nilay Patel's interview with its CEO, Sasan Goodarzi, because of — we are not kidding — "raised voices."

    According to Patel, Intuit was specifically mad about a section of the interview in which Patel asks Goodrazi about TurboTax's known history of pouring millions of dollars into intense lobbying efforts.

  • LRT ☛ Eighteen months in prison with no word from ailing Belarusian opposition figure

    Kalesnikava was an opposition activist who in 2020 became a prominent leader of protests demanding the resignation of strongman Alexander Lukashenko following a disputed presidential election. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison in September 2021.

    There has been no information on Kalesnikava for well over a year. Sources earlier this year told RFE/RL that she was placed in solitary confinement more than a year ago a violation of Belarusian law, which says the maximum period in solitary confinement is six months.

  • SFGate ☛ SFO passenger deplaned from Delta flight due to T-shirt

    “I said, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m a Marine Corps vet. I’m going to see my Marine sister. I’ve been in the Marine Corps for 22 years and worked for the Air Force for 15 years. I’m going to visit her,’” Banks said. “He said, ‘I don’t care about your service, and I don’t care about her service. The only way you’re going to get back on the plane is if you take it off right now.’”

    Banks also said that when she got back on the plane, she was forced to sit in the back instead of sitting in the seat she had paid for, which had extra legroom.

    Veteran suicides are at an all-time high, according to United Service Organizations.

  • Reuters ☛ Musk’s X likely to lose records appeal in Media Matters case, court says

    In a ruling , opens new tab on Sunday, the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a Texas federal judge’s order compelling the disclosure of donor information will be paused while Media Matters appeals it. “We doubt that X Corp. needs the identity of Media Matters’s every donor, big or small, to advance its theories,” the panel said, ruling that the information “could enable others to harass or intimidate Media Matters or its donors.”

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ MC5: The incendiary reign of America’s most radical rock band

    And so to Heavy Lifting. How do you recapture a band’s essence on record over half a century on from its previous album? “We cranked up the volume,” says Fagenson. “We’re older, we were sitting down, but the basic tracks had a certain reckless abandon to them.” This past weekend, MC5’s “musical excellence” was honoured by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the US.

    In an industry dripping with affected charisma, Hudson says Kramer never even had to try. He recalls Kramer and Iggy Pop coming to the studio when he was recording his debut solo album in 2010. These “two real f______ Detroit icons” just exuded natural coolness. “It just makes you think about all the people that try so hard to be that [and] how basically effortless it was for them,” he says.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • [Old] YLE ☛ Bäckman receives suspended sentence for stalking Yle reporter | Yle

    Known for his close ties to Russia, Bäckman repeatedly sent private messages to Aro on Facebook suggesting they meet up. He also published articles via Twitter and Facebook that the court ruled had mocked and belittled Aro.

    Bäckman tagged Aro in most of his Twitter posts, so that she would see them.

    The court therefore found that Bäckman’s communication with and writings about Aro via messages and public posts constituted stalking under Finland's Penal Code.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Techdirt ☛ Public Records Show Cops Are Obscuring Their Use Of Facial Recognition Tech In Criminal Cases

    The other option is the one detailed in this report by the Washington Post: don’t tell courts or defendants about the use of certain tech during criminal prosecutions. That’s the option a lot of cop shops are using, which means defendants are being deprived of their constitutional right to challenge the veracity of the evidence being used against them. The operative move for facial recognition tech — despite pretty much everyone being aware of its use and capabilities — appears to be “Don’t tell, or else someone will ask.”

  • The Washington Post ☛ Police seldom disclose use of facial recognition despite false arrests

    In fact, the records show that officers often obscured their reliance on the software in public-facing reports, saying that they identified suspects “through investigative means” or that a human source such as a witness or police officer made the initial identification.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ The IPv6 transition

    The state of the transition to IPv6 within the public Internet continues to confound us. RFC 2460, the first complete specification of the IPv6 protocol, was published in December 1998, over 25 years ago. The entire point of IPv6 was to specify a successor protocol to IPv4 due to the prospect of depleting the IPv4 address pool. We depleted the pool of available IPv4 addresses more than a decade ago, yet the Internet is largely sustained through the use of IPv4. The transition to IPv6 has been underway for 25 years, and while the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses should have created a sense of urgency, we’ve been living with it for so long that we’ve become desensitized to the issue. It’s probably time to ask the question again: How much longer is this transition to IPv6 going to take?

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Norway, Germany put critical underwater infrastructure on NATO agenda

    "Hybrid attacks against critical underwater infrastructure pose a considerable threat to our economy, our communications, our energy supply," German Minister of Defence Boris Pistorius underlines in a meeting with Norway's Bjørn Arild Gram.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Futurism ☛ Nicolas Cage Warns Young Actors About AI

      Speaking at the 25th Newport Beach Film Festival on Sunday, the "Longlegs" star warned up-and-comers not to let their performances be manipulated with AI to create "employment based digital replicas" (EBDRs) — and no, not even in the limited terms described by new protections against the tech.

    • Deadline ☛ Nicolas Cage Urges Young Actors To Protect Themselves From AI

      Nicolas Cage took to the stage at the 25th Newport Beach Film Festival on Sunday to urge up-and-coming actors from giving into pressure from employers opting to use artificial intelligence to change or otherwise manipulate their performance.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ MPA's Piracy Claims are 'False' and 'Misleading', Streaming Platform Says

    Polish streaming service CDA has once again been accused of being a notorious piracy market by the Motion Picture Association (MPA). CDA sent a rebuttal to the US government, dismissing the claims as false and misleading. In addition, the company points out that the MPA was provided with a direct takedown tool but has never used it.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ 'Blade Runner 2049' producer sues Musk, Tesla, Warner Bros.

    The complaint accuses the Hollywood studio, Tesla and Musk of using artificial intelligence to generate an image resembling scenes from “Blade Runner 2049,” which Musk presented during a launch event for Tesla’s Cybercab on the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank. The livestreamed event took place Oct. 10 — shortly after Alcon said it denied a request from Warner Bros. Discovery to use a production photo from the sci-fi film to promote Tesla’s new product.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Perplexity Faces Copyright Suit from NY Post, Wall Street Journal

    Predictably, in light of the fresh complaint, the filing parties, having previously finalized a licensing pact with ChatGPT developer OpenAI via their parent, say they never received a response from Perplexity.

    Shifting to the actual copyright claims, the complaint contrasts previously filed actions against generative AIs (including Amazon-backed Anthropic, OpenAI, and more) by accusing Perplexity of infringement at several stages.

    First, the platform, often used to summarize news, allegedly “copied hundreds of thousands” of copyrighted Journal and Post articles without permission for its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) database. Taking aim at arguments made by other AI giants, the action rather directly claims the alleged practice isn’t transformative and doesn’t constitute fair use.

    In a nutshell, the RAG database, distinct from the much-discussed training process for large-language models, is said to house a continually updated (via web scraping) collection of information for use in AI-generated answers to user questions (including requests for breakdowns of articles, for example).

  • Digital Music News ☛ Penguin Random House Takes Strong Stance Against AI

    Penguin Random House has updated its wording on its copyright pages to better protect its authors’ intellectual property from AI uses. The language specifically addresses large language models (LLMs) and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

    A report from The Bookseller details these changes across all of its imprints globally confirming these new guidelines will appear “in imprint pages across our markets.” The new wording from these documents states, “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.”