GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice Conference 2024 – First batch of videos online! [Ed: Outsourcing videos to a competitor, but also PeerTube for a change! That's good.]

    We’ve uploaded the first batch of videos from the recent LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024! (Apologies for the video stutter in a few places – which was beyond our control.) This is just the beginning, with many more still to come (and PeerTube versions too).

Leftovers

• Michal Zelazny ☛ Dreams

  Dreams are meant to be realized, but it’s not that simple. Not every possibility can be seized; not every dream can be fulfilled. It’s hard for me to envision a day when I could become a writer and earn enough to live by my dream. I can’t see it happening today, nor do I expect to see it tomorrow, next year, or even in a decade. This dream seems meant to be left in the dark.

• Jeff Triplett ☛ Please publish and share more

  You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

• James G ☛ The long view of a blog

  When I am writing a blog post, I am exploring what’s on my mind today. It may be a new idea that I have been thinking about over the last few hours or days, an elaboration of a topic I have explored in my writing in the past, or a new way of thinking about something that I have struggled to understand or explain in the past. Indeed, ideas are rarely thought of on the day: they are the result of many experiences that came before; of thinking and rethinking, playing, discussing, exploring.

• Rob Knight ☛ WeblogPoMo AMA

  There may have been some misunderstanding with how to source the questions so I'm doing some I asked for on Mastodon and some that other people have posted about.

• Robert Birming ☛ The Upsides of English Blogging

  I enjoy blogging in English because of all the opportunities it opens up in terms of platforms, services, and communication. In Swedish, the options are very limited if you want full language support (basically only WordPress has it, and I don't want to go back there).

• Seth Godin ☛ The problem with ‘very’

  If removing an amplifier like ‘very’ makes the message clearer or consistent, why not simply skip it?

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Neanderthals Buried Their Dead, But In Strangely Different Ways

    However, Neanderthals tended to bury their dead deeper in caves, whereas H. sapiens were buried in cave entrances or rock shelters. What's more, H. sapiens skeletons were usually in something like a fetal position, whereas Neanderthal skeletons were discovered in any one of a variety of arrangements.

    The differences don't stop there either. Neanderthal burials made greater use of rocks – perhaps as rudimentary gravestones – while H. sapiens burials featured more decorative items, including ochre and shells, that the Neanderthals didn't include.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Not too big, not too small: Why modern humans are the ideal size for speed

    But my colleagues and I have taken a key step towards solving this mystery. By using a scaleable, virtual model of the human body, we were able to explore the movement of the limbs and muscles, find out what limits speed, and gain important insights into the evolution of the human form over thousands of years. The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Deep sea rocks suggest oxygen can be made without photosynthesis, deepening the mystery of life

    The authors of a recent publication in Nature Geoscience were collecting samples from deep ocean sediments to determine the rate of oxygen consumption at the seafloor through things like organisms or sediments that can react with oxygen. But in several of their experiments, they actually found oxygen was increasing as opposed to decreasing as they would have expected. This left them questioning how this oxygen was being produced.

  • Futurism ☛ Physicist Says There's Another Universe Hiding Behind the Big Bang

    Extrapolating our universe backward in time through the Big Bang, "we found its mirror image, a pre-bang universe in which (relative to us) time runs backward and antiparticles outnumber particles," Turok wrote.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Runes prove Elfdalian is distinct ancient Nordic language, say researchers

    Elfdalian is traditionally spoken in a small part of the region of Dalarna, known as Älvdalen in Swedish and Övdaln in Elfdalian. But using linguistic and archeological data, including runes, Elfdalian experts have tracked the language back to the last phase of ancient Nordic – spoken across Scandinavia between the sixth and eighth centuries.

    They believe it was imported to hunter-gatherers in the Swedish region of Dalarna from farmers based in the region of Uppland, which became an international base for trade, who started adopting the language. At the time, the hunter-gatherers of Dalarna spoke a language referred to by linguists as “paleo north Scandinavian”.

• Career/Education

  • SBS ☛ Do libraries still matter in the age of the [Internet]?

    Libraries date back thousands of years. And while, in an increasingly digital age, it'd be easy to assume that physical libraries have lost some of their importance.

    But Elysa Dennis, manager of Yellamundie Library and museum services for Liverpool Council in Sydney, said it couldn't be further from the truth; they're "bigger and more popular than ever".

  • LRT ☛ Forgotten by sons, remembered by grandsons: renaissance of the Yiddish language

    In recent years, however, Yiddish has experienced a revival, in keeping with the “third-generation interest” principle formulated in 1938 by the American historian Marcus Lee Hansen: what the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.

• Hardware

  • VOA News ☛ Robot retrieves first melted fuel from Fukushima nuclear reactor

    A remote-controlled robot has safely returned with a tiny piece of melted fuel it collected from inside one of three damaged reactors at the tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant for the first time since the 2011 meltdown.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Broken Promise of USB-C

      People think the shape of the plug is the only thing that matters in a cable. It does matter: If you can’t plug the thing in, it’s useless. But the mere joining of a cable’s end with its matching socket is just the threshold challenge, and one that leads to other woes. In fact, a bunch of cables that look the same—with matching plugs that fit the same-size holes—may all do different things. This is the second circle of our cable hell: My USB-C may not be the same as yours. And the USB-C you bought two years ago may not be the same as the one you got today. And that means it might not do what you now assume it can.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Scheerpost ☛ ‘MAGA Abortion Bans Kill Women’: Pregnant Texas Teen Dead After Care Denied

    Fails told the reporters that she still thought the doctors were obligated to do everything they could to save Crain, even if it meant losing the pregnancy, but they seemed more concerned with the fetal heartbeat. “I know it sounds selfish, and God knows I would rather have both of them, but if I had to choose,” she said, “I would have chosen my daughter.”

    Although a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), requires emergency departments that accept Medicare to provide patients with “necessary stabilizing treatment,” which the Biden-Harris administration argues includes abortions, The Associated Pressrevealed in August that over 100 patients nationwide have been “turned away or negligently treated since 2022.”

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Research Finds That Even Its Best Models Give Wrong Answers a Wild Proportion of the Time

    OpenAI has released a new benchmark, dubbed "SimpleQA," that's designed to measure the accuracy of the output of its own and competing artificial intelligence models.

    In doing so, the AI company has revealed just how bad its latest models are at providing correct answers. In its own tests, its cutting edge o1-preview model, which was released last month, scored an abysmal 42.7 percent success rate on the new benchmark.

    In other words, even the cream of the crop of recently announced large language models (LLMs) is far more likely to provide an outright incorrect answer than a right one — a concerning indictment, especially as the tech is starting to pervade many aspects of our everyday lives.

  • The Record ☛ Google uses large language model to discover real-world vulnerability

    Researchers at Google said on Friday that they have discovered the first vulnerability using a large language model.

    In a blog post, Google said it believes the bug is the first public example of an AI tool finding a previously unknown exploitable memory-safety issue in widely used real-world software.

  • APNIC ☛ Using honeybuckets to characterize cloud storage scanning in the wild

    Cloud storage services like Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage offer reliable, scalable, and easy-to-deploy storage to anyone who can pay. Clients simply name a storage ‘bucket’ and set its access control, making the service widely popular — Amazon S3 hosted over 100 trillion files in 2021. However, this flexibility introduces risks. The confidentiality of each bucket is not governed by traditional enterprise security mechanisms, but by proper access control configuration by the bucket operator.

  • Pete Brown ☛ Make things better with ducks

    Like, they could literally be saying “Maybe we should use ducks to make that easier” and it would be no less practical a suggestion.

  • India Times ☛ What is silent firing companies are using for workforce automation and reduction with AI?

    Unlike traditional layoff procedures, silent firing sidesteps direct termination, creating an environment that erodes an employee's motivation and sense of belonging. Recently, companies have begun using this tactic to quietly replace employees with AI-powered solutions. While AI’s integration into the workplace has long been forecasted, the trend of silent firing to accelerate this shift is causing alarm across industries.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ Singapore to increase road capacity by GPS tracking vehicles

      Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA) estimated last week that by tracking all vehicles with GPS it will be able to increase road capacity by 20,000 over the next few years.

      The densely populated island state is moving from what it calls Electric Road Pricing (ERP) 1.0 to ERP 2.0. The first version used gantries – or automatic tolls – to charge drivers a fee through an in-car device when they used specific roadways during certain hours.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ A new president will be elected — but it may take some time to determine who wins

    Media figures and election officials are preparing Americans for the fact that we might have to wait some time to get an accurate call. As in 2020, they’re using metaphor to shape public expectations. But this year, they’re also explicitly trying to define the nation’s perceptions of time, in terms of which results count as on time or as delayed.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Eighty years after thousands of Greek Jews were murdered, Thessaloniki’s Holocaust museum is finally set to open

    More than 80 years have passed since the Third Reich’s war machine orchestrated the death convoys that would see an estimated 50,000 of the city’s men, women and children killed in Nazi concentration camps. It was a loss of life that destroyed one of the great centres of European Jewry – about 90% of Thessaloniki’s population was eradicated – paralleled only by Poland, where similar mortality rates also occurred. Before the Nazi occupation, Salonika, as it was then called, had been known as the “Mother of Israel”, a reflection of the community’s ancient roots in a Balkan metropolis where Jews far outnumbered Christians well after its incorporation into the Kingdom of Greece in 1912.

  • Axios ☛ Auschwitz Museum pressed to speak out on current conflicts

    The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial & Museum in Poland is facing pressure to weigh in on contemporary politics and current conflicts around race and ethnicity.

    Why it matters: The museum will mark in January the 80th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation by the Soviet Union as aging Holocaust survivors urge the world to recognize signs of potential genocides and racial violence, but the museum avoids addressing specific conflicts.

  • teleSUR ☛ U.S. Shields Polling Stations from Possible Political Violence on Election Tuesday

    After one of the most violent campaigns in U.S. history, all 50 states are reinforcing polling places to ensure that the elections on November 5th take place safely and to protect the physical integrity of election officials and voters from potential incidents of violence.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Mauritius orders ban on social media

    Mauritius’s communications regulator on Friday ordered all internet service providers to suspend access to social media platforms until 11 November, a day after the upcoming general election, as the country reels from a wiretapping scandal.

    Some 20 conversations involving politicians, police, lawyers, journalists and members of civil society have been leaked on social media since mid-October, media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Trump could claim victory no matter results, Harris camp says • Michigan Advance

    The senior official for the Democrat’s presidential campaign said Trump, the Republican candidate, would likely repeat his move in the 2020 election to claim he won the election even as results in key states remain unknown.

    “This should be no surprise, because he lies all the time and he wants to sow doubt about a loss that he anticipates is coming,” the senior official said. “He did this before. It failed.”

  • Vox ☛ Elon Musk: Why the Pentagon is so dependent on a CEO who talks to Putin | Vox

    If true, the story is a matter of concern not only because of Musk’s massive wealth and influence, but because he holds a “top secret” security clearance, as both the Pentagon and NASA have become deeply dependent on Musk’s company SpaceX for space launches and satellite [Internet].

  • The Korea Times ☛ Moldova in tense vote for EU future

    In messages sent to mobiles and even broadcast on supermarket loudspeakers, police have been telling people offered money for their votes to refuse.

    Police have reported a "massive phenomenon" of people receiving calls, emails, even death threats, to influence ballots. Prime Minister Dorin Recean has called it an "extreme attack... to create panic and fear so that people will be afraid to go out and vote."

  • VOA News ☛ US envoy sees some 'concerning signals' in Russia-China military cooperation in Arctic

    "The fact that they are working together in the Arctic has our attention," Sfraga, who was sworn in last month, told Reuters in a telephone interview from Alaska. "We are being both vigilant and diligent about this. We're watching very closely this evolution of their activity."

  • The Washington Post ☛ Gender is a big factor in what a TikTok user sees about politics and the election

    This fall, more than 800 American adults shared their TikTok viewing histories with The Post, opening a rare window on how the increasingly popular app presents political news. The Post found that female users received roughly 11 percent more content about Harris than men did, while men — even liberal ones — were more likely to be shown videos about Trump than women were.

  • RTL ☛ Foreign interference: Moldovans vote in tense election on EU future

    Moldovans were voting on Sunday in a tense presidential election runoff that could decide whether the ex-Soviet country continues on a pro-European path or tilts back toward Russia's influence.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Islamic Finance and Fintech in USA’s Financial Landscape

    The observant Muslims of the Middle East and Southeast Asia are no longer the only market for this industry, which now boasts thousands of institutions worldwide. Since the Sharia-compliant values of risk-sharing and social responsibility appeal to a varied clientele, it has effectively increased its market share across Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.

  • El País ☛ Joseph Nye: ‘Trump could destroy the United States’ soft power’

    After a life spent between the academy and state (he was part of both the Carter and Clinton administrations), Nye is now retired. Nonetheless, he maintains an office at the Kennedy School from which he has been following the rollercoaster presidential campaign. He doesn’t hide his gloom over the possibility of a second Trump presidency. It would be a “disaster,” he says, bluntly. From Nye’s perspective, one of the biggest risks of Trump is that he could case irreversible harm to the United States’ soft power by mistreating and punishing its military and economic allies.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Male Pollsters Shocked - Shocked!! - When a Woman Pollster Discovers Women Voters

    The reason we’re seeing this herding is because Nate Silver has spent 16 years training pollsters to herd. It probably makes things worse that polling has become far more difficult, far more expensive, and far more important in shitty campaign coverage (not least because of Nate Silver). The herding is happening because, thanks to the early but not more recent success of Nate, political operatives know they can create a reality in poll averages.

    Well, ask and you shall receive, Nate, because Ann Selzer doesn’t herd. Last night, the Iowa pollster surprised everyone with a poll showing Kamala Harris ahead in Iowa.

• Environment

  • Omicron Limited ☛ 215 million hectares of forest—an area bigger than Mexico—could grow back by itself, if we can just leave it alone

    Globally, 65% of original tropical forest extent has been lost to make way for human development such as agriculture, roads, and urbanization. Deforestation has contributed to climate change and biodiversity loss.

    We've also lost a worrying amount of what researchers call "ecosystem services," meaning the benefits people derive from nature, such as clean water.

    Forest restoration is an important strategy for reversing the damage.

  • Nature ☛ Global potential for natural regeneration in deforested tropical regions | Nature

    Identifying areas where forests can recover effectively with minimal intervention is critical for achieving forest restoration at scale. Tree planting and extensive site preparation are popular strategies and can be effective, particularly when using locally adapted native tree species in mixtures13. However, implementing tree planting at large scales is prohibitively expensive, especially for developing nations, and only sometimes effectively helps native biodiversity to recover14. In areas where ecological conditions are such that forests can grow back on their own or with low-cost assistance, natural regeneration methods are less costly (for example, US$12–3,880 per ha compared with US$105–25,830 for forest restoration projects in the tropics and subtropics15) and often are more effective than full tree planting in terms of their long-term success rates and biodiversity outcomes3. Yet natural regeneration has been underused as a restoration strategy, in part because planners and implementers lack knowledge of where the process can occur and the time it will take to deliver socioeconomic and environmental benefits3.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Ancient mud reveals Australia's burning history over the past 130,000 years—and a way forward in current fire crisis

    Increased land management by Aboriginal people in southeastern Australia around 6,000 years ago cut forest shrub cover in half, according to our new study published in Science of fossil pollen trapped in ancient mud.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Earth's climate will keep changing long after humanity hits net-zero emissions. Our research shows why

    Our new study examined that question. Alarmingly, we found reaching net-zero in the next few decades will not bring an immediate end to the global heating problem. Earth's climate will change for many centuries to come.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Jason Becker ☛ AMA November Question 3 -- urban and transit policy

      The sprawling suburbs and exurbs of America were a huge mistake, and we should be living in denser, more walkable neighborhoods with sufficient public transit to cover many aspects of daily life.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Big Tech's staggering AI bill

      Capital expenditure of the four largest internet and software companies — Amazon.com, Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Google — is set to total well over US$200-billion (R3.5-trillion) this year, a record sum for the profligate collective. Executives from each company warned investors this week that their splurge will continue next year, or even ramp up.

  • Overpopulation

    • The Verge ☛ US immigration policy has a huge blind spot: climate change

      Joe Biden will leave office having taken more action on climate change, arguably, than any US president before him — but one pillar of his climate plan has fallen apart. Climate-driven disasters have displaced millions all over the world, an issue Biden acknowledged early in his term yet did little to address. But as climate change and migration are becoming increasingly intertwined, US policy is anything but prepared.

    • The Independent UK ☛ NYC declares a drought watch and asks residents to conserve water

      New York's mayor urged residents to take shorter showers, fix dripping faucets and otherwise conserve water, issuing a drought watch Saturday after a parched October here and in much of the United States.

      A drought watch is the first of three potential levels of water-saving directives, and Adams pitched it in a social media video as a step to try to ward off the possibility of a worse shortage in the United States' most populous city.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Pro Publica ☛ Watch: How Immigration Changed Del Rio, Texas

  • Pro Publica ☛ Shifting Immigration Opinions in Del Rio, Texas, Are Disrupting Local Politics

  • The Age AU ☛ US election 2024: Dates, polls, times, results - everything to know

    In a tight race like this, counting can continue well past election night, and we might not know the winner for several days.

  • India Times ☛ Warren Buffett: Warren Buffett is sitting on over $325 billion cash as Berkshire Hathaway keeps selling Apple stock

    Berkshire said it sold off more Apple shares in the third quarter after halving its massive investment in the iPhone maker last quarter. The stake valued at $69.9 billion at the end of September remains Berkshire's biggest single investment, but it has been cut drastically since the end of last year when it was worth $174.3 billion.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Pakistan-based social media posts falsely claimed Home Minister Amit Shah's name put on Interpol's ‘wanted list’

      The claim went viral amid India’s strained diplomatic ties with Canada, and the latter’s Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister David Morrison recently alleging that Shah ordered a campaign of violence, intimidation and intelligence-gathering targeting Sikh separatists inside Canada. New Delhi has vehemently rejected the references made by Morrison about Shah and warned that such "absurd and baseless" allegations will have serious consequences for bilateral ties.

    • The Record ☛ Rep. Yvette Clarke on AI-fueled disinformation: ‘We have not protected ourselves in time for this election cycle’

      With election day around the corner, Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York’s 9th congressional district says artificial intelligence and deepfakes are being used to spread disinformation on a massive scale — and inaction from social media platforms and lawmakers has made the situation worse.

      “Not enough Americans are knowledgeable about the fact that, unfortunately, our ecosystem is the Wild West,” said Clarke, who serves as vice chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has a Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, as well as the House Homeland Security Committee. “You can disrupt an election, you can disrupt voting. There are a whole host of ways in which this technology can be used to subvert the democratic process.”

      Recorded Future News in September sat down with Clarke, who has sponsored dozens of cybersecurity-focused bills, about the recent nation-state attacks on both presidential campaigns, the rise of AI-fueled disinformation and ransomware attacks on local governments.

      This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

    • New York Times ☛ Polish Radio Station Uses A.I. to Interview Dead Nobel Laureate

      The station used artificial intelligence to generate the recent interview — a dramatic and, to many, outrageous example of technology replacing humans, even dead ones.

    • The Register UK ☛ Fake job postings proliferate in layoff-hit tech industry

      According to those two reports, the reasons companies post ghost jobs are, frankly, insidious. While some ghost posts are about collating a list of outside talent for future roles or making it appear like a company is growing when it isn't, the other justifications basically boil down to torturing employees into working harder.

      Resume Builder found that 63 percent of hiring managers posted ghost jobs to signal to overworked employees that relief was on the way, while 62 percent said they did it to make employees feel replaceable. MyPerfectResume found similar justifications, in addition to maintaining a presence on job boards while not hiring, "assess how difficult it would be to replace certain employees," and "make the company look viable during a hiring freeze."

    • New York Times ☛ How Elon Musk’s X Account Dominates the Platform Ahead of the Election

      All of his posts have traveled further and resounded more widely than ever as Mr. Musk’s X account has come to dominate the platform, effectively making him the host of his own social media site. His account is the most popular on X by a significant margin, with more than 202 million followers. It drives the platform’s daily conversation and nudges discussion to the right, according to independent research and an analysis by The Times. And engagement with his posts — including likes and reposts — has doubled over the past year, according to X’s metrics.

    • RFA ☛ North Korea sends military to inspect homes for working propaganda speakers

      The North Korean Army’s main anti-socialism inspection division is going door to door in the northern province of Ryanggang to make sure that hardwired propaganda speakers installed in each home are in working order, residents told Radio Free Asia.

      The speakers deliver messages from the local government and play propaganda songs, and residents are told that they are critical in emergencies, including during wartime.

    • NPR ☛ An influencer thought someone dropping off ballots was ‘suspect.’ It was the postman

      The video then zoomed in for a closeup of the postal worker’s face. As of Nov. 2, it had nearly six million views.

      County officials in Pennsylvania confirmed to local news outlets that the man filmed in the video was an acting postmaster, doing his job. After the video went online, he began receiving threats.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • JURIST ☛ 29 children in Nigeria likely facing the death penalty following months of political unrest and protests

    29 children in Nigeria are facing a looming death penalty after being charged with acts of felony including treason, destruction of property, public disturbance and mutiny. These children, aged between fourteen and seventeen years, are among the 76 people who were rounded up by the police and arraigned in court on Friday after participating in protests against the cost of living that have been going on in Nigeria since August.

  • Meduza ☛ Moscow prosecutors open administrative case against Meduza’s resident Kremlin expert

    Moscow prosecutors have opened a case against journalist Andrey Pertsev, charging Meduza’s political analyst with the misdemeanor offense of participating in the activities of an “undesirable organization” (in this case, Meduza’s activities). Pertsev, who writes for Meduza about Russia’s Kremlin and elite politics, called the charges an “occupational hazard.”

  • France24 ☛ Iran arrests female student who stripped to protest dress code

    Iranian authorities on Saturday arrested a female student who staged a solo protest by stripping to her underwear in public. Reports indicate the action aimed to highlight the oppressive enforcement of Iran's dress code, which mandates women wear a headscarf and loose-fitting clothing in public.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Iran student strips in protest over strict hijab dress code laws

    Her act of resistance began after a confrontation inside Azad University’s science and research centre on Saturday, when security forces physically attacked the student because she was not wearing a headscarf.

    In response to having her clothes torn, she chose to remove her remaining garments as a protest, according to Iranian student social media news channel, the Amir Kabir newsletter and witnesses who spoke to The Telegraph.

    Multiple witnesses confirmed her subsequent detention by the authorities. Video footage showed security officers abducting her from the campus.

  • VOA News ☛ Iran arrests female student who stripped to protest harassment

    Iranian authorities arrested a female student Saturday after she staged a solo protest against harassment by stripping to her underwear outside her university, reports said.

    The woman, who has not been identified, had been harassed inside the prestigious Tehran Azad University of Science and Research by members of the Basij militia who ripped her headscarf and clothes, according to reports by several news outlets and social media channels outside Iran.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Iran arrests woman who stripped in protest at ‘abusive’ dress code policing

    Amnesty International has called on authorities in Iran to “immediately and unconditionally” release a female student who was arrested after stripping to her underwear in what the organisation described as a public protest against harassment relating to the country’s strict dress code.

    The incident took place after the woman, who has not been identified, reportedly had a confrontation with members of the Basij paramilitary force who ripped her headscarf and tore at her clothes inside Tehran’s prestigious Islamic Azad University.

  • ANF News ☛ Sister of protester killed in ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’ uprising sentenced to one year in prison

    Solmaz Hassanzadeh, the sister of Mohammad Hassanzadeh, a protester killed during the 'Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’ (Woman, Life, Freedom) anti-government uprising in Bukan, West Azerbaijan Province, has been sentenced to one year in prison on charges of “propaganda against the state”, the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) reported.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • US News And World Report ☛ US Believes Iranian-American Journalist Is Detained in Iran, AP Reports

    The imprisonment of Valizadeh was acknowledged to the Associated Press by the U.S. State Department, the news agency said.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Trump Fantasizes About Reporters Being Shot

    Does this rhetoric matter to voters? It certainly ought to. Persecuting journalists is what autocrats do—and yet Trump’s many boosters on the right, who claim to care deeply about free speech, seem resolutely unmoved. However, his campaign has tried to clean up today’s offending remarks, something that his team rarely bothers to do. (The most recent major example was after the comedian Tony Hinchliffe called Puerto Rico “an island of garbage” while warming up the crowd at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend.)

  • VOA News ☛ Exclusive: US says it is looking into case of American jailed in Iran

    The Iran-based human rights group Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI) and the U.S.-based media rights group Committee to Protect Journalists reported in mid-October that Valizadeh had been held in Tehran's Evin prison without access to a lawyer since his arrest. The reports cited two sources: one close to Valizadeh's family, and one who previously worked with Valizadeh.

  • France24 ☛ US says Iranian-American journalist detained in Iran amid rising tensions

    The imprisonment of Reza Valizadeh, acknowledged to The Associated Press by the U.S. State Department, came as Iran marked the 45th anniversary of the American Embassy takeover and hostage crisis on Sunday. It also followed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatening both Israel and the U.S. the day before with "a crushing response” as long-range B-52 bombers reached the Middle East in an attempt to deter Tehran.

  • BIA Net ☛ Erdoğan sues İstanbul’s İmamoğlu for 1 million liras over criticism of district mayor’s arrest

    President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has filed a 1 million lira (~36,000 US dollars) lawsuit against İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, accusing him of defamation.

    The lawsuit follows İmamoğlu’s comments criticizing the government for the recent arrest of the mayor of İstanbul’s Esenyurt district on “terrorism” charges and replacement with a government-appointed trustee.

  • RFERL ☛ Afghan Journalists Fear Losing 'Last Remaining' Freedoms

    “By the time I reach the Pol-e Sorkh crossroad, which is about 15 minutes from the office, the editors and I go through several topics to make sure we pick a story that is important and interesting but at the same time is safe enough not to anger the authorities,” Barna says in describing her daily work.

    “We have many red lines. We have to avoid certain topics, and we have to tone down our criticism in order to survive under the Taliban,” she told RFE/RL by phone from Kabul. “Our work and lives are full of restrictions and the government continues to impose even more.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • VOA News ☛ VOA Interview: UN special rapporteur details Russia's state-sanctioned torture

    Mariana Katzarova, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Russia, reported Tuesday on the human rights situation in Russia at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, describing torture as Moscow's main tool of repression. In an interview with VOA, Katzarova detailed how the Russian government has turned brutality into the new norm and how Russians are persecuted for their anti-war views.

    This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

  • TMZ ☛ Police Beat the Crap out of Fans on Video at College Football Game

    Check out the footage ... two cops are going to town on two spectators, pulverizing them with their fists. A woman is seen freaking out, screaming at one officer, "Why are you punching him?"

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Steinar H Gunderson ☛ Ultimate rules as a service

    Since WFDF changed their ultimate rules web site to be less-than-ideal (in the name of putting everything into Wordpress…), I made my own, at urules.org. It was a fun journey; I've never fiddled with PWAs before, and I was a bit surprised how low-level it all was. I assumed that since my page is just a bunch of HTML files and ~100 lines of JS, I could just bundle that up—but no, that is something they expect a framework to do for you.

    The only primitive you get is seemingly that you can fire up your own background service worker (JS running in its own, locked-down context) and that gets to peek at every HTTP request done and possibly intercept it. So you can use a Web Cache (seemingly a separate concept from web local storage?), insert stuff into that, and then query it to intercept requests. It doesn't feel very elegant, perhaps?

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Bryan Lunduke ☛ Apple Removes Ability to Run Unsigned Apps in macOS 15.1

    Big Tech's war against "sideloading" continues. With Abusive Monopolist Microsoft and Surveillance Giant Google not far behind.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Patents

  • India Times ☛ Novartis: Novartis CEO 'very confident' on sales target, doesn't fear patent cliff

    Novartis expects to increase its annual sales by least 5% per year in the coming years, CEO Vas Narasimhan said in an interview on Saturday, with the pharmaceuticals giant having nothing to fear from the end of patent protection [sic] on some drugs.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Amazon's Indian Branch Targets Pirate Streaming Apps Hosted on GitHub

    Amazon is cracking down on pirate streaming apps that offer unauthorized access to Prime Video content. The company recently filed DMCA takedown notices with GitHub to remove APKs associated with popular apps such as PikaShow, Castle, and FlixFox. Interestingly, the takedown requests were made on behalf of Amazon Seller Services, an Indian subsidiary not typically linked to Amazon's streaming platform.

  • NPR ☛ A new copyright rule lets McDonald's fix its own broken ice cream machines

    A new exemption to a copyright law could pave the way for quicker repairs to the machines, sweetening the McFlurry maker's sour reputation.

    Before this week, most of the McDonald's ice cream makers could only be fixed through the machine’s manufacturer. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects the code embedded in the ice cream machines, made it illegal for third parties, like McDonald’s employees and franchisee owners, to break the digital locks installed by manufacturers.

  • USA ☛ Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies [PDF]

    In this final rule, the Librarian of Congress adopts exemptions to the provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) that prohibits circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. As required under the statute, the Register of Copyrights, following a public proceeding, submitted a recommendation to the Librarian of Congress (“Register’s Recommendation”) regarding proposed exemptions. After careful consideration, the Librarian adopts final regulations based on the Register’s Recommendation.