Leftovers

• RIPE ☛ Language Support and Community-Sourced Translations

  One of the most frequent requests we receive from our community is for translated content. Whether it's during member support interactions, on mailing lists, in survey responses, or at events—especially those held far from our headquarters in Amsterdam—the need for content in languages beyond English is clear. We've heard you, so we’re taking some important steps that can help us take our translation efforts to the next level.

• Lou Plummer ☛ Online Communities of the Past and Present

  Although I used a local BBS and AOL chat rooms back in the day, the first online community I ever found a home in was at Epinions, a dotcom company that paid you to write reviews of commercial goods, including books and albums. You could use HTML to dress up what you wrote, so there was a small but satisfying thrill in learning how to be good at that. As usual, they had an off-topic category too, where you could write about whatever you wanted, and I contributed there all the time. People could follow you and send you private messages. I eventually outgrew it, but I tried to find a guy from there recently, after 27 years, and I succeeded because he's still using the same unique username.

• Chris McLeod ☛ Positive (but Unsatisfactory) Resolutions

  Yesterday was stressful, not going to lie. I had a lot of questions about how I’d found myself in the predicament. I was being chased for a debt that wasn’t mine, where I was specifically told someone had talked to a debt agency, given my details, and “passed security validation” with them. It was now on me to prove I wasn’t related to the debt in question. As the facts I’d been given and questions started to roll around me head, it seemed more and more likely I was the victim of identity theft/fraud.

• Science

  • Rlang ☛ Mastering Mathematics in C Programming: A Beginner’s Guide

    When starting your journey in C programming, understanding how to perform mathematical operations is fundamental. Whether you’re calculating simple arithmetic or complex mathematical expressions, C provides powerful tools and operators to handle numbers effectively. This comprehensive guide will walk you through everything you need to know about doing math in C.

  • Arduino ☛ Using Arduino UNO to sync a visual neuroscience lab

    For example, in the Rompani Lab, a visual neuroscience laboratory at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Rome, the recording system (a two-photon microscope) needs to communicate with the visual stimulation system (composed of two screens) that are used to show visual stimuli while recording neural activity. To synchronize these systems efficiently, they turned to an Arduino UNO Rev3. “Its simplicity, reliability, and ease of integration made it an ideal tool for handling the timing and communication between different devices in the lab,” says Pietro Micheli, PhD student at EMBL Rome.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Amateur Mathematician Discovers the Largest Known Prime Number, With More Than 41 Million Digits

    To find M136279841, Durant used the GIMPS software and a supercomputer made up of thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) that were spread across 24 data centers in 17 countries. This effectively ended “the 28-year reign of ordinary personal computers finding these huge prime numbers,” per the statement. GPUs can process large amounts of information simultaneously, so they are also used in artificial intelligence computing.

• Education

  • Seth Godin ☛ Full circle with myopia

    Strategy myopia is task focused. It’s based on a desire to get a guaranteed result for specified effort. It involves meetings and plans and powerpoints. Strategy myopia afflicts people who prioritize tactics over the hard work of finding a worthwhile strategy in the first place.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Signal Processing Shenanigans: The Createc SC 01 Pocket Oscilloscope

    If you’re passionate about signal processing and retro tech, you’ll want to check out the Createc SC 01, a quirky handheld oscilloscope that recently caught the eye of [Thomas Scherrer] from OZ2CPU Teardown. This device, cheekily dubbed a “signal computer,” promises to be both intriguing and, perhaps, frustrating. You can view [Thomas]’ original teardown video here.

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ My on the go solution with iPad and Raspberry Pi

    My Macbook Pro is in shambles. Its battery lasts about 60 seconds at best, half of the keys don’t work properly and the touchbar is in eternal disco mode. Therefore, it’s not much of a laptop anymore. It still works great so I use it at home docked to a display with keyboard and mouse but taking it to a cafe or library with me isn’t really feasible. To remain productive on the road, I had to figure out budget friendly solutions.

    Everything below can be done with a proper laptop much easier and with better ergonomics. So I wouldn’t switch a laptop into this system if I had a choice but due to budgetary restrictions, buying a new laptop is not an option currently.

  • Jonathan Dowland ☛ Jonathan Dowland: Why hardware synths?

    Russell wrote a great comment on my last post (thanks!):

    What benefits do these things offer when a general purpose computer can do so many things nowadays? Is there a USB keyboard that you can connect to a laptop or phone to do these things? I presume that all recent phones have the compute power to do all the synthesis you need if you have the right software. Is it just a lack of software and infrastructure for doing it on laptops/phones that makes synthesisers still viable?

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Pro Publica ☛ EviCore, the Company Helping U.S. Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Treatments

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Talk, don’t worry alone

    All in all not a great time right now but one thing I’m learning is to talk. I don’t burden others with my issues but through counselling advice and friends I’m realising that talking and getting it out there does help. It’s not a relief or weight off my shoulders but getting another perspective on a life situation can help. Maybe it feels like the end of the world for you but talking it out you start to see other viewpoints.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • India Times ☛ Anthropic: Anthropic releases AI to automate mouse clicks for coders

    The capability is tailored to software developers and represents a move toward AI agents, programs that require little human intervention to carry out multi-step actions. Researchers have touted agents as a frontier for AI development beyond chatbots, which easily conjure prose or computer code though not actions.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ The algorithms around us

    In his new book Devil in the Stack, Andrew Smith confronts the fact that “computer code is seeping unchallenged and at an accelerating rate into every area of our existence.” As a technology journalist covering the rise of phenomena like Amazon and Bitcoin, he had grown curious about the “haunting alien logic” behind them. So, like Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, he set out to see how the sausage gets made—in this case, by learning to code himself.

  • The Record ☛ Wisconsin sued over voting system’s allegedly weak cyber protections

    The portal, known as MyVote, is a statewide system used for voter registration and absentee ballot requests. It allows anyone to seek an absentee ballot by providing nothing but a name and a birthdate and then request the ballots to be sent to any address without verification, the lawsuit says.

    The complainants are also asking a Wisconsin federal court to order the WEC to perform a security audit to find voting fraud that the system may already have enabled before continuing to rely on the platform, the lawsuit says.

  • Wired ☛ A Trump Win Could Unleash Dangerous AI

    Trump’s election to a second term would dramatically reshape—and possibly cripple—efforts to protect Americans from the many dangers of poorly designed artificial intelligence, including misinformation, discrimination, and the poisoning of algorithms used in technology like autonomous vehicles.

  • Daniel Miessler ☛ AI Isn't the Thing. It's the Thing That Enables the Thing

    I think people are confused about how money will be won and lost with AI. Most "AI businesses" will get crushed because only so much tooling is needed. So that will be a crash.

    But there will be a far bigger boom from new companies creating new things using AI.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Yahoo News adds deepfakes protection from McAfee as election nears

    The 2024 U.S. presidential campaign has featured some notable deepfakes — AI-powered impersonations of candidates that sought to mislead voters or demean the candidates being targeted. Thanks to Elon Musk’s retweet, one of those deepfakes has been viewed more than 143 million times.

  • New York Times ☛ Character.ai Faces Lawsuit After Teen’s Suicide

    But he developed an emotional attachment anyway. He texted the bot constantly, updating it dozens of times a day on his life and engaging in long role-playing dialogues.

    Some of their chats got romantic or sexual. But other times, Dany just acted like a friend — a judgment-free sounding board he could count on to listen supportively and give good advice, who rarely broke character and always texted back.

  • The Verge ☛ Character.AI and Google sued after chatbot-obsessed teen’s death

    A lawsuit has been filed against Character.AI, its founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and Google in the wake of a teenager’s death, alleging wrongful death, negligence, deceptive trade practices, and product liability. Filed by the teen’s mother, Megan Garcia, it claims the platform for custom AI chatbots was “unreasonably dangerous” and lacked safety guardrails while being marketed to children.

  • Futurism ☛ Teen Dies by Suicide After Becoming Obsessed With AI Chatbot

    Setzer's exchanges with the AI ranged from sexually charged conversations — Futurism found last year that while Character.AI's user terms forbid users from engaging in sexual conversations with the AI bots, those safeguards can easily be sidestepped — to long, intimate discussions about Setzer's life and problems. In some instances, he told the AI that he was contemplating suicide, confiding in his companion that he thought "about killing myself sometimes" in order to "be free."

  • US News And World Report ☛ Mother Sues AI Chatbot Company Character.AI, Google Over Son's Suicide

    In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Orlando, Florida federal court, Megan Garcia said Character.AI targeted her son, Sewell Setzer, with "anthropomorphic, hypersexualized, and frighteningly realistic experiences".

    She said the company programmed its chatbot to "misrepresent itself as a real person, a licensed psychotherapist, and an adult lover, ultimately resulting in Sewell's desire to no longer live outside" of the world created by the service.

    The lawsuit also said he expressed thoughts of suicide to the chatbot, which the chatbot repeatedly brought up again.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Krebs On Security ☛ The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data

      Not long ago, the ability to digitally track someone’s daily movements just by knowing their home address, employer, or place of worship was considered a dangerous power that should remain only within the purview of nation states. But a new lawsuit in a likely constitutional battle over a New Jersey privacy law shows that anyone can now access this capability, thanks to a proliferation of commercial services that hoover up the digital exhaust emitted by widely-used mobile apps and websites.

    • The Dissenter ☛ After UK Police Raid, Journalist Asa Winstanley Focused On Stopping 'Digital Strip-Search' Of His Devices

    • Meduza ☛ Crowdsourcing Telegram ‘transparency reports’ to map the network’s claimed compliance with governments around the world

      In early October, a month after Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in Paris on charges related to the network’s alleged noncompliance with French state officials, researchers discovered an official bot that allows users to obtain “transparency reports” about the number of times Telegram fulfilled a local government’s requests for users’ IP addresses and/or phone numbers (and the number of affected users).

      Because the bot only provides data for the country in which the account demanding data is registered, mapping Telegram’s data sharing around the world has proved difficult. Last week, Human Rights Watch technologist Etienne Maynier and researcher Celso Bessa launched a crowdsourced effort relying largely on the Mastodon community to combine Telegram’s reports into a single spreadsheet.

    • VOA News ☛ Chinese official urges Apple to continue 'deepening' presence in China

      A top Chinese official has urged tech giant Apple to deepen its presence and investment in innovation in the world’s second largest economy at a time when supply chains and companies are shifting production and operations away from China.

      As U.S.-China geopolitical tensions simmer and tech competition between Beijing and Western countries intensifies, foreign investment in China shrunk in 2023 to its lowest level in three decades, according to government statistics.

    • Vox ☛ New FIDO Alliance guidance: Passkeys will replace passwords eventually. Here’s how to set them up.

      Passkeys promise to fix many of the problems passwords created. Thanks to FIDO and W3C, the consortium that manages the standards for the World Wide Web, there is now an agreed-upon workflow for passkeys to replace passwords entirely.

      From the user’s point of view, the passkey process is pretty easy. You just log on the old-fashioned way, with a password or a code or whatever, and then the website or platform will ask you if you want to set up a passkey. If you do, it will generate those two files — the lock and key, if you will — that make up the passkey. It will also prompt you to unlock your phone with your face, fingerprint, PIN, or swipe pattern, depending on your preferences. The passkey will then be associated with that device and stored in the cloud or in your password manager. The next time you go to log in, that site will go to see if you’ve got the key to fit its lock. If so, unlock your device, and you’re right back in. It takes maybe two seconds.

• Defence/Aggression

  • New Statesman ☛ The media is damaging public life by “sanewashing” Donald Trump

    It’s not as though he has ever tried to disguise his strategy. It was almost 40 years ago that Donald Trump said: “If you are a little different, or a little outrageous… the press is going to write about you.” He has been consistently outrageous ever since – and the press has consistently covered him.

    But this election has been slightly different. Cowed by criticism of their role in the 2016 campaign, many US news outfits have reduced the wall-to-wall coverage they afforded Trump previously and tempered their reporting – only to stand accused of a whole new set of failings. Chief among them is “sanewashing”, the idea that Trump’s rhetoric and behaviour is being toned down or neutralised. The political scientist Brian Klaas calls it “the banality of crazy”, as journalists, numbed by the awfulness of Trump’s words, fail to represent them to the public. Then there’s “bothsiderism”, the curse where reporters attempting to be objective fall into a mire of false equivalences. The truth, amid an ocean of fake news, is that a decade on from Trump’s first hint he might stand to be president, the media is still no closer to knowing how best to deal with him.

  • VOA News ☛ US warns ramped-up election influence efforts aim to stoke violence

    The latest declassified assessment, issued Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, comes just two weeks before voters head to the polls November 5 to choose a new president and vote on a series of statewide and local races and initiatives.

    “Foreign actors — particularly Russia, Iran and China — remain intent on fanning divisive narratives to divide Americans and undermine Americans’ confidence in the U.S. democratic system consistent with what they perceive to be in their interests,” according to the assessment.

    But it warns U.S. intelligence agencies are “increasingly confident” that Russia is starting to engage in plans “aimed at inciting violence.”

    It further assesses Iran also “may try to incite violence.”

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Veterans urge Americans against political violence ahead of election

    The Committee for Safe and Secure Elections created the PSA in response to increased threats against election officials leading up to the presidential election on Nov. 5.

    Violent threats have been on the rise since 2020, when former President Donald Trump began criticizing the people who administer elections and making unsubstantiated claims of fraud.

  • American Oversight ☛ Judge Orders Army to Release Report from Incident at Arlington Cemetery to American Oversight  - American Oversight

    A federal judge has granted American Oversight’s motion for a preliminary injunction in its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking public records related to an alleged August incident involving the Trump campaign at Arlington National Cemetery.

    Senior Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the U.S. Army to release non-exempt portions of the requested incident report or reports by Friday, Oct. 25, agreeing with American Oversight that there was a compelling public interest in sharing information with the public as soon as possible.

  • NPR ☛ Jailed reporters, silenced networks: What Trump says he'd do to the media if elected

    On the campaign trail and in interviews, Trump has suggested that if he regains the White House, he will exact vengeance on news outlets that anger him.

    More specifically, Trump has pledged to toss reporters in jail and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage he didn't like.

  • NDTV ☛ Airline Bomb Threats, Meity: Abetting Crime: Centre Blasts 'X' After 100 Flight Bomb Threats In A Week

    Joint Secretary Sanket S Bhondve chaired a virtual meeting with representatives of airlines and social media platforms such as X and Meta. The official said that the situation amounts to "X abetting crime" and questioned its representatives on the steps taken to stop such alarming rumours from spreading, sources have said.

    More than 120 flights operated by Indian carriers have received bomb threats over the past few days. Even yesterday, 30 flights operated by IndiGo, Vistara and Air India received such threats. The airlines said they followed standard operating procedures: authorities were alerted and security protocols were followed.

  • New York Times ☛ Harris Sharpens her Message on Trump

    Also, the U.S. said North Korea sent troops to aid Russia. Here’s the latest at the end of Wednesday.

  • New York Times ☛ Wednesday Briefing: Casting Doubts on the U.S. Election

    Plus, saving Japan’s most popular rice.

  • New York Times ☛ Despite Global Crises, Gas Prices Slide as U.S. Election Nears

    Fuel prices, which had soared after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have dropped to their lowest level since February.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • The Moscow Times ☛ U.S. Officials Confirm North Korea Sent Troops to Russia

      "We know that thousands of DPRK troops are in Russia to be trained. We don't know what their mission will be or if they'll go on to fight in Ukraine," the unnamed official said, using an abbreviation for North Korea's official name.

      "Russia is suffering extraordinary casualties on the battlefield every day. If Russia needs to turn to DPRK for manpower, that's a sign of desperation — not strength — on the part of the Kremlin," the official added.

    • Meduza ☛ The U.S. just confirmed North Korean troops are in Russia. Here’s what that means for the war in Ukraine.

      Meanwhile, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service reported that between October 8 and 13, North Korea had sent approximately 1,500 special forces soldiers to Russia, where they’re training in several cities across the Far East. Reportedly, they’ve been issued Russian uniforms and fake identification cards marking them as residents of eastern Russia. According to the National Intelligence Service, Pyongyang is preparing to send a total of 12,000 soldiers, including elite units, to assist Russia’s military operations.

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ China’s Pooh-tin Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi to hold first formal talks in 5 years in Russia

      Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Pooh-tin Jinping will hold their first bilateral meeting in five years Wednesday, Indian officials said, days after their countries reached a deal on their contested border.

    • The Straits Times ☛ Xi and Modi discuss Ukraine war with Putin as Brics considers expansion

      Over 30 states want to join Brics but it is important to be balanced in any expansion, said Putin.

    • New York Times ☛ At BRICS Summit, One of Putin’s Guests Stands Out: Turkey’s President

      President Vladimir V. Putin, hoping to prove he is not the pariah that the West has tried to make him, this week welcomed leaders from China, India and Iran, among other nations. Then, there was the NATO member.

    • New York Times ☛ A Modi-Xi Meeting Could Signal a Thaw Between India and China

      A meeting between the two leaders comes just two days after they settled a tense border dispute in the Himalayas. But experts said their long-term geopolitical rivalry would persist.

    • New York Times ☛ Putin Welcomes Pooh-tin and Other World Leaders to Russia for BRICS Summit

      The Russian leader wants to cast himself as a global statesman, even as the U.S. and its Western allies try to isolate him.

    • Latvia ☛ Thousands of trucks still waiting at Latvia's border with Russia

      It has been well over 2 and a half years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the European Union (EU) has already introduced 14 different sanctions packages against the aggressor country.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ North Korean troops are in Russia. Here’s why.

      The United States has confirmed that North Korean troops are in Russia to aid the Kremlin in its war on Ukraine. Atlantic Council experts share their insights.

    • France24 ☛ From isolation to battlefield: North Korean troops could face reality shock in Ukraine

      The US and NATO on Wednesday confirmed that hundreds, possibly thousands, of North Korean troops have been deployed to Russia, raising fears they are headed to fight in Ukraine. Experts warn it could backfire, as their exposure to the outside world and realization they will serve as “cannon fodder” may spur what Kim Jong-un fears most: defections.

    • France24 ☛ US says evidence shows North Korea has troops in Russia for Ukraine war

      The United States said for the first time on Wednesday that it had seen evidence of North Korean troops in Russia, and South Korean lawmakers said about 3,000 soldiers had been sent to support the Kremlin's war in Ukraine with more to follow.

    • LRT ☛ Lithuania allocates €1m to support Ukraine’s integration into EU

      Lithuanian government has allocated 1 million euros to support Ukraine’s integration into the European Union.

    • LRT ☛ Two Lithuanians stripped of citizenship for fighting with Russian army in Ukraine

      Two more Lithuanians fighting on the Russian side in Ukraine have been stripped of their citizenship.

    Russia only attacks a weaker opponent and NATO is not signalling strength, James Sherr, an expert at the Estonian International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS), told LRT.lt in an exclusive interview.

  • RFERL ☛ G7 Moves Forward With $50 Billion Loan For Ukraine Backed By Frozen Russian Assets

    The Group of Seven (G7) leading industrialized nations are moving ahead with a $50 billion loan package for Ukraine, and the U.S. contribution of $20 billion will be split between economic and military support, a White House official said on October 23.

  • RFERL ☛ North Korea Sent Troops To Russia, Says U.S. Defense Chief

    U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on October 23 that there is evidence North Korea has sent troops to Russia, calling it a “next step” after Pyongyang provided Moscow with arms.

  • RFERL ☛ Russia Unleashes Fresh Wave Of Drone Strikes On Ukraine

    Russia launched another series of intense drone and missile strikes on Ukraine as Britain announced that it had completed the training of 200 Ukrainian pilots who will fly F-16 fighter jets provided by Kyiv's Western allies.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Explainer: What can the UN do if North Korea sends troops to Ukraine?

    White House said the move is in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

  • The Straits Times ☛ North Korea has sent 3,000 troops to Russia for Ukraine war, South Korean lawmakers say

    Pyongyang had promised to provide a total around 10,000 troops.

  • New York Times ☛ China May Chafe as North Korea Sends Soldiers to Fight Ukraine

    North Korea’s decision to dispatch troops to help Russia subdue Ukraine may put another Kremlin ally, China, in a tough spot diplomatically.

  • New York Times ☛ U.S. Says North Korean Troops Are in Russia to Aid Fight Against Ukraine

    Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III called the situation “very, very serious,” though he said that what the soldiers were doing in Russia was “left to be seen.”

  • New York Times ☛ What Is North Korea’s Role in the Russia-Ukraine War?

    North Korea’s supply of munitions has already been critical to the Russian war effort. Now, its troops appear to be poised to join the fight in Ukraine.

  • New York Times ☛ Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Andriy Kostin, Resigns Amid Draft Evasion Scandal

    The prosecutor general stepped down after accusations that hundreds of officials obtained fake disability certificates. There have been no public allegations that he was involved in the scheme.

  • New York Times ☛ G7 Finalizes $50 Billion Ukraine Loan Backed by Russian Assets

    The economic lifeline is expected to be disbursed by the end of the year.

  • New York Times ☛ The UK and Germany Agree on New Defense Pact as Russia Threat Rises

    The two governments said they will coordinate more on defense, with British and German troops conducting joint military exercises on NATO’s eastern border.

  • New York Times ☛ U.S. to Give Ukraine Millions to Build More Long-Range Drones

    The move, confirmed by a Pentagon official, is in line with a U.S. policy change aimed at shoring up Ukraine’s ability to fight the war against Russia with its own weapons.

  • New York Times ☛ U.S. and Europe Agree to Finalize $50 Billion Ukraine Loan Backed by Russian Assets

    Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said an agreement was close. She also rebuked China’s lending practices and called for more debt relief.

  • New York Times ☛ Russia’s Warming Arctic Is a Climate Threat. War Has Shut Scientists Out of It.

    Climate science has been stymied as Russia continues its war in Ukraine. The stalled work threatens to leave the West without a clear picture of how fast the Earth is heating up.

  • Latvia ☛ Two accused of espionage for Russia

    On October 21, the State Security Service (VDD) requested the Prosecutor's Office to prosecute two persons for collecting restricted information with the intention to transfer it to the Russian Federation, the VDD said in a statement.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Russia is directly and indirectly meddling in Georgia’s upcoming election

    In parliamentary elections on October 26, Georgians will face a choice between a pro-Western political opposition and the Kremlin-friendly ruling party.

  • JURIST ☛ ECHR rules Russia ‘foreign agent’ law violated convention rights

    The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) unanimously ruled on Tuesday that Russia’s “foreign agent” law violates key rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights. The court ordered Russia to compensate the applicants between 5,500 and 10,000 euros for non-pecuniary damage, along with additional costs.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuania removes power lines with Russia, Belarus from list of strategic facilities

    As the Baltic states move closer to synchronising their electricity grids with the continental European system next February, the Lithuanian government decided on Wednesday to remove power transmission lines with Russia and Belarus from the list of facilities and assets important to national security.

  • RFA ☛ Russia pays North Korean soldiers about $2,000 a month: South’s spy agency

    The agency also detected signs of large-scale recruitment of Korean interpreters within the Russian army.

  • RFERL ☛ Moldovan President, Opponent Agree On Debate Ahead Of Runoff

    Incumbent Moldovan President Maia Sandu and Russian-backed candidate Alexandr Stoianoglo have agreed to hold a public election debate on October 27 ahead of a tense November 3 presidential runoff amid warnings of continued Russian interference.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Modi and Pooh-tin agree to resolve differences, boost India-China ties

    The two leaders met on the sidelines of the Brics summit in Russia for their first formal talks in five years.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Senior Hamas official arrives in Russia, RIA reports

    A senior member of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that controls Gaza, Mousa Abu Marzouk has arrived in Moscow on a planned visit, Russian state-run news agency RIA Novosti reported on Wednesday, citing a diplomatic source.

  • New York Times ☛ Why It’s Getting Harder to Fly to China

    European carriers are enduring higher costs because they have to avoid Russian airspace, while a sluggish economy and geopolitical tensions are hurting business travel to China.

  • JURIST ☛ ECHR rules Russia ‘foreign agent’ law violates convention rights

    The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) unanimously ruled on Tuesday that Russia’s “foreign agent” law violates key rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights. The court ordered Russia to compensate the applicants between 5,500 and 10,000 euros for non-pecuniary damage, along with additional costs.

  • LRT ☛ Belarusian man sentenced for attempt to set fire to Minsk embassy in Vilnius

    The Vilnius Regional Court has sentenced a Belarusian citizen to prison time for attempting to destroy property in a dangerous way and to escape from custody, the Prosecutor General’s Office said on Wednesday.

  • RFERL ☛ Belarus Sets First Presidential Election Since Mass Unrest For January

    Belarus lawmakers have set a presidential election for January 26, the first presidential vote since balloting in 2020 triggered mass unrest after authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka was declared the winner despite claims the vote was rigged.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘I hope she breaks free from the electoral fixation’: Russian public figures react to Yulia Navalnaya’s statement on future presidential run — Meduza

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Truthdig ☛ Whistleblower: Trump Media Company Betrays ’America First' by Outsourcing Jobs - Truthdig

  An internal whistleblower complaint at Trump Media calls for CEO Devin Nunes to be fired, alleging he has “severely” mismanaged the company and opened it to “substantial risk of legal action” from regulators, according to a copy reviewed by ProPublica.

Environment

• Pro Publica ☛ The Plastics Industry’s Wish List for a Second Trump Administration

• DeSmog ☛ 'Terrifying': Leak Shows Industry Plot to Worsen Methane Emissions — If Trump Wins

  A key oil and gas industry group has devised a plan to dismantle Biden-era climate regulations, including on methane emissions, according to an investigation published Friday in The Washington Post.

  The American Exploration and Production Council, a trade group of 30 oil and gas producers, aims to reverse a series of regulations the Biden administration has made, including the institution of a methane fee, the Post reported, based on AXPC documents that were leaked to Fieldnotes, a climate research group.

• The Washington Post ☛ Oil trade group aligned with Trump drafts plans targeting climate rules

  The lobbying blueprint takes particular aim at a new tax on emissions of methane, a gas that the International Energy Agency (IEA) says is responsible for nearly a third of human-caused global warming. The documents show the relative amounts of natural gas, including methane, burned by nine of 19 AXPC member companies that responded to an internal survey are increasing — in many cases sharply. After this article was published online, AXPC said 11 other member companies had eliminated such emissions.

• Harvard University ☛ Plastics in our bodies. What does that mean for our health?

  “Ingestion is the primary route of exposure, and we are consuming about 5 grams of micronanoplastics per week; that’s the equivalent of a credit card,” said Philip Demokritou, the founding director of the Environmental Health Nanoscience Laboratory and the Center for Nanotechnology and Nanotoxicology at the School of Public Health.

  We’re “drowning” in plastic exposure, according to Don Ingber, the founding director of the Wyss Institute and a professor both in the Medical School and School of Engineering. From the synthetic clothes we wear to wildfire smoke, it’s nearly impossible to escape. And our bodies can’t fully break plastics down. This is especially alarming as research has found plastic in nearly every bodily organ.

• Hakai Magazine ☛ Is Deforestation Supercharging Cyclones?

  In a January 2024 study that’s under revision, Makarieva and coauthor Andrei Nefiodov, who is also a researcher at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, analyze historic and modeled cyclones in an attempt to prove that cyclonic winds are similarly driven by water’s change from gas to liquid. They find that atmospheric pressure drops (the signature of intensifying cyclonic storms) at approximately the same rate that rain falls. This is a clue that rain may be a hidden force behind storm intensification.

  The two physicists believe that, as rain falls, the resulting pressure vacuum pulls in wind, giving a cyclone its power. Rain “absolutely drives the hurricane,” Makarieva says. As Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida, she found that its intensification rate and rainfall conformed with the study’s model.

• Energy/Transportation

  • DeSmog ☛ Alberta’s ‘Scrap the Cap’ Attack Part of an ‘Endless Propaganda War,’ Say Critics

  • DeSmog ☛ Trump Megadonor Tim Dunn Has a Plan More Extreme Than Project 2025

  • DeSmog ☛ Tory MPs Join Fuel Tax Campaign Led by Reform UK Climate Science Denier

  • CBC ☛ Do bike lanes really cause more traffic congestion? Here's what the research says

    Studies from around the world show bike lanes ease congestion, reduce emissions and are a boon to businesses

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ Pebble Bed

    I still resent all those delayists who were like “we can keep blasting with impunity because we will have awesome nuclear power really soon” because during these past 25 years the Earth has gotten really messed up and it’s gonna get way worse while we’re trying to turn the ship around.

  • US Geological Survey ☛ Unlocking Arkansas' Hidden Treasure: USGS Uses Machine Learning to Show Large Lithium Potential in the Smackover Formation | U.S. Geological Survey

    Global demand for lithium, a critical mineral essential for battery production, has increased substantially in recent years. This trend is projected to persist as the transition from fossil fuels to electric and hybrid vehicles intensifies, underscoring the mineral's growing significance in energy technology advancements.

    The U.S. relies on imports for more than 25% of its lithium. The USGS estimates there is enough lithium brought to the surface in the oil and brine waste streams in southern Arkansas to cover current estimated U.S. lithium consumption. The low-end estimate of 5 million tons of lithium present in Smackover brines is also equivalent to more than nine times the International Energy Agency’s projection of global lithium demand for electric vehicles in 2030.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • The Revelator ☛ War Threatens Ukraine’s Unique Red Seaweed Fields. Here’s How Scientists Monitor Them From Afar

• Overpopulation

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ A Note from the Editor

    This issue is all about food, and more to the point, how we can use technology—high tech and low tech—to feed more people.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Pro Publica ☛ How Another Donald Trump Term Could Dismantle Federal Agencies

  In 2019, the administration of then-President Donald Trump announced plans to relocate the federal government’s largest land management agency from the nation’s capital to Grand Junction, Colorado, a city of about 65,000 people a four-hour drive from the nearest major airport.

  Trump had campaigned on a vow to “drain the swamp” and throughout his time in office voiced suspicions about the federal bureaucracy. Moving the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters out of Washington, which officially happened in August 2020, was a step toward fulfilling that promise.

• The Conversation ☛ California’s governor blocked landmark AI safety laws. Here’s why it’s such a key ruling for the future of AI worldwide

  What happens in California is so important because it is the home of Silicon Valley. Of the world’s top 50 AI companies, 32 are currently headquartered within the state. California’s legislature therefore has a unique role in efforts to ensure the safety of AI-based technology. But Newsom’s decision also reflects a deeper question: can innovation and safety truly coexist, or do we have to sacrifice one to advance the other?

• Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ A Second Trump Term Is a Threat to US Disaster Preparedness

    Parsons’s change of tone is remarkable, but the damage had already been done. The reason Parsons found “nothing there” is that the site was partially cleared of FEMA workers before his arrival due to safety concerns. The safety measures came amid threats from him and many others, including rumors of armed militia groups targeting FEMA personnel that led FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell to temporarily suspend door-to-door operations.

    Since FEMA’s creation during the Jimmy Carter administration, fringe conspiracy theories about “FEMA concentration camps” have figured into the worldview of far-right militia groups and commentators like Alex Jones. Facebook and other social media platforms have added fuel to the flames of right-wing FEMA paranoia.

    More recently, Trump’s lies about FEMA undoubtedly factor into online misinformation about the recovery efforts following the hurricanes that have impacted the United States within the last month. During his presidency, Trump routinely made false claims related to disaster assistance and politicized the disbursement of desperately needed funds.

  • The Washington Post ☛ American creating deep fakes targeting Harris works with Russian intel, documents show

    A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.

    The documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. Some of the payments were made after fake news sites he created began to have difficulty accessing Western artificial intelligence systems this spring and he needed an AI generator — a tool that can be prompted to create text, photos and video.

  • NPR ☛ U.S. intel officials say Russia is behind attempts to smear Tim Walz

    Russia was behind salacious false claims against Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz that circulated widely on social media last week, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

  • New York Times ☛ Russian Disinformation Efforts, Including Faked Walz Video, Could Continue After Nov. 5, Officials Say

    Foreign powers including Russia and Iran could move quickly right after the vote to undermine the democratic process, intelligence agencies warn.

  • France24 ☛ Tim Walz: Viral Russian deepfake falsely accuses him of sexual abuse

    US intelligence officials accuse Moscow of trying to disrupt the presidential election, after a deepfake video went viral smearing Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz with sexual abuse allegations during his time as a high school teacher. The video may be fabricated, but the name of the false victim matches a former student at Walz's high school -- though he confirmed he was never taught nor abused by Walz. France 24’s Vedika Bahl explains these false accusations in this episode of Truth or Fake.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Moscow Times ☛ Internet Service Disruptions Reported in Russia’s Kazan as BRICS Summit Kicks Off

  A resident of Kazan, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Moscow Times that he began having problems with internet connectivity late Monday night. Another resident reported problems with making payments by credit card, saying that some local restaurants are asking customers to pay in cash.

  Mobile internet restrictions have been reported during previous high-level meetings attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent years.

• Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Denial of early release from prison ‘unfair,' Hong Kong man argues

  The High Court on Tuesday heard the first legal challenge against the newly enacted Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, known locally as Article 23. It was launched by Ma Chun-man, who is currently serving a five-year sentence for inciting secession under a separate security law Beijing imposed in 2020.

  Ma filed the judicial review of Article 23 after his early release from prison based on good conduct was axed on March 25 this year by the Commissioner of Correctional Services on national security grounds, two days after the law came into effect.

• VOA News ☛ Freedom House researcher explains how free freedom is on the net

  Global internet freedom has declined for the 14th straight year, according to Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net 2024 report. VOA’s Philip Alexiou spoke with Elizabeth Sutterlin, a researcher at the advocacy group, on October 21. Sutterlin outlined the various tactics used to crack down on online publishing, including imprisonment and violence. The interview centers on how these issues impact Africa. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.

• Techdirt ☛ Texas Censorship Board Declares Nonfiction Book To Be Fiction So It Can Bury History It Doesn’t Like

  People are censoring books all over the country, thanks mainly to a new wave of hatred encouraged and blessed by a failed businessman and marginal golfer who somehow managed to be elected president for a single term.

• Techdirt ☛ Florida Health Dept. Lawyer: I Quit Rather Than Carry Out DeSantis’ Censorship Threats

  The non-profit that bought the ad time sued, and the judge noted (quite easily) that this was about as obvious and blatant a violation of the First Amendment as anyone could remember.

  We noted in our original article that Wilson (whose signature appeared on the letter) had already resigned a day after the letter was sent. He told the media that his “conscience” couldn’t allow him to stay.

  Late last week, he went a step further and filed an affidavit with the court saying that Ron DeSantis’ office had drafted the letter and told him to send it, which he did. But he resigned when they asked him to follow through with more such letters and to retain lawyers to go after the TV stations who still ran the ad.

• Michigan Advance ☛ U of M alum’s Super PAC targets men, warning Project 2025 would ban porn

  Nowinski is referencing a section in the authoritarian policy plan prepared by the Heritage Foundation for a second Trump presidency that, among other things, calls for restricting access to reproductive health care, eliminating the Department of Education, and deploying the U.S. military against domestic protestors. However, one less-publicized proposal is to prohibit the creation and distribution of adult pornographic content.

  “Pornography should be outlawed,” states the forward of Project 2025. “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

  Nowinski says that’s a message that the mostly white, 20-somethings he is targeting have not heard.

• RFERL ☛ Taliban's 'Photo Ban' Will Be Impossible To Enforce, Afghan Photojournalist Says

  A photojournalist who worked in Afghanistan during the Taliban's 1996-2001 rule says the reinstated group's new ban on images of living things is unfeasible today.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The Nation ☛ Media Elites Are the Last People to Ask About the Future of Journalism

  Then there’s the question of timing: the lords of the press are holding forth on how their prestige outlets will survive at the precise moment they’re fucking up coverage of the 2024 election on an epic scale. Any intelligible understanding of the press’s role has to start with the mandate the country’s founders formalized in the First Amendment—the pivotal need to cultivate and sustain an informed citizenry. Not surprisingly, neither Klein nor her battery of 57 pop-up news managers have word one to say about this function of the press. That’s likely because a significant number of them are deeply enmeshed in normalizing the demented, fascistic candidacy of Donald Trump, and generally treating a critical election cycle as a glorified reality TV spectacle. Indeed, in an awkward karmic coincidence, New York unleashed its future-of-the-media package just as it officially severed ties with its star politics reporter, Olivia Nuzzi, for carrying out digital intimacies with Robert F. Kennedy, the antivax conspiracy impresario now shilling for Trump. (Nuzzi’s prior drinking bouts with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer or her fangirl worship of Ann Coulter weren’t dealbreakers for New York’s top brass, but that’s a sermon for another occasion.)

• NPR ☛ Trump has made more than 100 threats to prosecute or punish perceived enemies

  Journalists who decline to identify the sources of leaked information would also face imprisonment, Trump said.

  “If the reporter doesn't want to tell you, it's ‘bye-bye,’ the reporter goes to jail,” Trump said in 2022. He appeared to suggest that the reporter could also face sexual assault while in custody.

Civil Rights/Policing

• VOA News ☛ For Tibetan political leader, 'Middle Way' to autonomy is still core focus

  "Nothing is permanent. Even our life is not permanent. We are born, and we have to die. So even empires rise and fall. Governments rise and fall. Xi Jinping will also have to die. So, these are inevitable," said Tsering, leader of Tibet's exiled government, the Central Tibetan Administration.

  He said it casually, matter-of-factly, as if he wasn't talking about the potential downfall of the world's second-most powerful government and the inevitable death of its powerful leader.

  "China is going to change. It has to change. There is no other choice," Tsering told VOA last week on the sidelines of the Forum 2000 democracy conference in the Czech capital Prague.

• Techdirt ☛ New York PD Is Training Officers That Someone Saying ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Is Just ‘Excited Delirium’

  Four years ago, documents obtained by a public records requester showed the Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD was filling officers’ heads with disinformation — not only claiming “excited delirium” was a legitimate medical condition, but also that people who literally could not breathe due to officers’ restraint tactics were just informing officers of this so-called medical condition when they said they were having difficulty breathing. Listed among the “symptoms” of “excited delirium” were these: [...]

• Washingon-Baltimore News Guild ☛ Military.com journalists vote unanimously to unionize - Washington-Baltimore News Guild

  Journalists at Military.com voted unanimously 10-0 to unionize in a balloting that was tallied last Thursday. They will join the Washington-Baltimore News Guild Local 32035 of The NewsGuild-CWA.

  The Military.com News Guild filed to form a union in August, seeking voluntary recognition from Monster Worldwide, the corporate owner that recently merged with Career Builder. The unionization effort came after workers at one of Military.com’s main competitors, Military Times, also unionized with the Washington-Baltimore News Guild (TNG-CWA) in June of this year as the Sightline Media Guild.

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ Forced Prison Labor Is on the Ballot

  It’s shocking for many of us to learn that forced labor is actually legal as punishment for a crime. Ballot measures in Nevada and California this Election Day would outlaw forced labor in prisons.

• New Yorker ☛ The Frightening Familiarity of Late-Nineties Office Photos

  It’s a little sad to open a book like “Office” today. Tunbjörk died in 2015, but the themes in his work only intensified as laptops, smartphones, and remote work helped to speed up and dehumanize our jobs. Tunbjörk was attempting to portray a new and uncomfortable reality about office life in the early two-thousands—one that demanded a reaction. Today, the alienation of hyper-connected office work feels neither novel nor strange. We’ve internalized a depressing reality in which new e-mails constantly refill our in-boxes and haunt every waking moment; we forget even to be upset about it. But perhaps Tunbjörk’s classic photo collection can help remind us that work doesn’t have to be this way. By emphasizing the strangeness of work in the Network Age, “Office” might help us rediscover a sense of urgency and possibility: our jobs don’t have to be frenetic and always on. We don’t have to bow before computers or squeeze ourselves into the spaces between the wires, like Tunbjörk’s subjects—or, for that matter, to quietly suffocate in our cubicles, like Judge’s characters. We still have the ability to demand something better.

• Kansas Reflector ☛ For too many police officers, suspects don't count as human. We all suffer the consequences.

  The legal process has not yet run its course. More courtroom days lay ahead.

  But that chilling verdict suggests that police can yank motorists from cars, kick and beat them to death — on camera — and half of the public still will say, “go and sin no more.” That verdict feels more inhuman than the beating to which Nichols ultimately succumbed.

• The Nation ☛ Everything Visible and Invisible About the War on Terror

  The War on Terror began with promises that nothing at home would change. Beck quotes George W. Bush telling Americans to “get back to work” and “get down to Disney World,” as well as Barack Obama’s later exhortation not to “give them the victory of changing how we go about living our lives.” In fact, everything about our lives changed: The war brought drone assassinations, a militarized southern border, and mass surveillance. Beck reminds us of another startling fact: 115 of the 148 mass shootings that have occurred since 1982 happened after 9/11. Of the 50 most deadly, all but nine have happened since that day. “The war on terror never ‘came home,’” Beck writes. “It started there.”

  The idea is not that the War on Terror explains everything but that it is routinely ignored in explanations of how things became the way they are. As Beck puts it, the most important story of the last two American decades isn’t political polarization or the culture wars. It’s “the story of an empire, a world-spanning political and economic system, that clawed its way to the top of the global power hierarchy and is now determined to imprison and kill as many people as it needs to in order to stay there.” For Homeland, the end of that story is as important as its beginning.

  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

• Omicron Limited ☛ Airbnb rentals linked to increased crime rates in London neighborhoods, finds study

  The latest research has revealed a positive association between the number of properties listed as Airbnb rentals and police-reported robberies and violent crimes in thousands of London neighborhoods between 2015 and 2018.

  In fact, a study from the University of Cambridge and the University of Pennsylvania suggests that a 10% increase in active Airbnb rentals in the city would correspond to an additional 1,000 robberies per year across London.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Reuters ☛ Telecom group sues to block FTC's 'click to cancel' rule

    An industry group representing cable and internet providers sued along with two others on Wednesday to block a U.S. Federal Trade Commission rule that requires companies to offer simple cancellation mechanisms for subscriptions. NCTA - The Internet & Television Association and groups representing the home security and online advertising industries said in papers filed with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans that the rule known as "click to cancel" oversteps the FTC's authority and was not supported by evidence.

  • The Verge ☛ Industry groups are suing the FTC to stop its click to cancel rule

    That’s “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion,” the Internet and Television Association, Electronic Security Association, and Interactive Advertising Bureau allege in their complaint filed with the US Fifth Circuit Appeals Court today. The groups — many of whose member companies profit from subscriptions that are easy to start and harder to stop — argue that the FTC is trying to “regulate consumer contracts for all companies in all industries and across all sectors of the economy.”

    Indeed, the rule applies to any automatically renewing subscription, whether it’s a gym membership or Amazon Prime, including free trials or those plans that ship you easy-to-cook dinners. The horror!

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Register UK ☛ IPv6 may already be irrelevant argues APNIC chief scientist

  Achieving scale rose to the top of to-do lists. Early mobile networks were built on IPv4, coupled with network address translation (NAT) to enable more devices to connect without requiring a unique IP address.

  Not every NAT implementation was the same, but network operators learned to live with that. The advent of Transport Layer Security in web servers also helped to keep NAT viable.

  Content providers, seeing the persistence of IPv4, didn't bother to adopt IPv6 – meaning network operators didn't need to, either.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Macworld ☛ M4 MacBook Air: Design, price, specs, release

  Apple surprised us with the release of the M4 chip in the iPad Pro in early May, barely six months after the M3 debuted in the MacBook Pro. These are the specs for the chip as announced: [...]