Leftovers

• Old VCR ☛ prior-art-dept.: The hierarchical hypermedia world of Hyper-G

  Because Hyper-G is a stateful protocol, enveloping the backend is a process providing the session layer called hgserver (no relation to Mercurial). This talks directly to other Hyper-G servers (using TCP port 418), and also directly to clients with port 418 as a control connection and a dynamically assigned port number for document transfer (not unlike FTP). Since links are bidirectional, Hyper-G servers contact other Hyper-G servers to let them know a link has been made (or, possibly, removed), and then those servers will send them updates.

• Howard Oakley ☛ Paintings of Dante’s Inferno: 1 To the gates of Hell

  Dante’s Inferno opens just before dawn on Good Friday in 1300, when the author is in mid-life, and wandering lost in a dark wood.

• Career/Education

  • CS Monitor ☛ Social media self-control among students

    With a new academic year due to start in the United States, states and districts are seeking to manage students’ cellphone use during the school day. Proposals range from developing usage guidelines to implementing outright bans.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ If I ran my life

    For the final post in the series, I want to turn inward and ask a more personal question. Knowing what I know now, with all the experiences I have, how would I run my own life?

    The question might seem absurd, but here’s what I mean. Our lives are a product of a combination of our experiences, our context, decisions we make for ourselves, and decisions that are made for us: they evolve naturally as we live. We have the ability to design aspects of how we live, but others fall into place in ways that aren’t fully in our control. That’s not bad: it’s how life works, no matter how intentionally we travel through it.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • [Old] US National Library of Medicine ☛ Effect of forest bathing trips on human immune function

    These findings indicate that forest bathing trips increase NK activity, which was mediated by increases in the number of NK cells and the levels of intracellular anti-cancer proteins (Fig. 10). Phytoncides released from trees and the decreased production of stress hormones may partially contribute to the increased NK activity.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ CISA to release long-buried US telco security report

    The release of an unclassified, three-year-old document sounds like a minor deal. But this report has been the bane of US Senator Ron Wyden's (D-OR) existence for years, and has put the nomination of would-be CISA boss Sean Plankey in limbo for months.

  • Terence Eden ☛ I’m never going back to Matrix

    It was dead. Even among the most seasoned geeks on the planet, most people preferred to use other services like Signal, Telegram, and Slack. Why? Because those other tools actually work.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Google's new AI trick is killing the web

      Then again, to describe those billions as “users”, as parent company Alphabet did when announcing its quarterly earnings last week, is perhaps disingenuous. No one consciously uses AI Overviews — it’s just there when users perform a regular search on Google, something billions of them have done several times a day for two decades.

      That’s one key advantage Google has over its competitors: people already associate the service with finding things out. The company has every right to capitalise on that reputation, one it built off the back of genuine innovation and quality (though, admittedly, it was later solidified with illegal multibillion-dollar deals to prevent competition).

    • India Times ☛ With AI plan, Trump keeps chipping away at a foundational environmental law

      And that meant taking aim at the National Environmental Policy Act - a 55-year-old, bedrock law aimed at protecting the environment though a process that requires agencies to consider a project's possible impacts and allows the public to be heard before a project is approved. Data centers, demanding vast amounts of energy and water, have aroused strong opposition in some communities.

  • Social Control Media

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Women politicians receive more identity-based attacks on social media than men, study finds

      This study used a machine learning approach to analyze over 23 million tweets addressed to politicians in Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, to determine the degree of incivility that female politicians face. Women in politics frequently report serious online harassment, yet the extent of this harassment and how it compares to harassment experienced by men remains understudied, or has been assessed in surveys with varying response rates. This new research aims to address this gap.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Minnesota governor activates National Guard after cyberattack on state capital

      Saint Paul, the state’s capital, is home to more than 300,000 people — making it one of the largest U.S. cities to face a cyberattack in 2025.

      Mayor Melvin Carter said during a press conference on Tuesday that the city is most concerned about the data it holds on government employees, arguing that the city does not carry much information on city residents.

    • SANS ☛ Parasitic Sharepoint Exploits

      Last week, newly exploited SharePoint vulnerabilities took a lot of our attention. It is fair to assume that last Monday (July 21st), all exposed vulnerable SharePoint installs were exploited. Of course, there is nothing to prevent multiple exploitation of the same instance, and a lot of that certainly happened. But why exploit it yourself if you can just take advantage of backdoors left behind by prior exploits? A number of these backdoors were widely publicised. The initial backdoor "spinstall0.aspx", was frequently observed and Microsoft listed various variations of this filename [1].

      Since then, we have observed attempts to access these backdoors. The scans started a week ago, just as the exploits (and the name of the backdoors) became better known.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Washington Post ☛ How to opt out of TSA facial recognition at the airport

      I’ll explain your rights with facial recognition scans at security and other airport locations. Two years after a U.S. senator said he got pushback for opting out of TSA facial recognition, there remains evidence that the airport scans are optional on paper but not in practice.

      The TSA didn’t respond to my questions.

    • 404 Media ☛ UK Users Need to Post Selfie or Photo ID to View Reddit's r/IsraelCrimes, r/UkraineWarFootage

      Several Reddit communities dedicated to sharing news and media from conflicts around the world now require users in the UK to submit a photo ID or selfie in order to prove they are old enough to view “mature” content. The new age verification system is a result of the recently enacted Online Safety Act in the UK, which aims to protect children from certain types of content and hold platforms like Reddit accountable if they don’t.

    • The Record ☛ Wyden asks White House to scrutinize UK surveillance laws | The Record from Recorded Future News

      Wyden’s letter makes clear that his concerns extend beyond the specific request to Apple.

      U.K. surveillance laws could be used to “secretly force U.S. companies to store the data of U.S. users in the U.K., where it could then be seized by the U.K. government,” according to Wyden’s letter.

      The British government has not denied Wyden’s concerns about whether under its Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA) it can require such U.K.-based storage for newly created data belonging to U.S. users, the letter says.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Copilot Vision AI sends your data to Microsoft

      Microsoft swears the data won’t be kept “long term.” However long that is.

      Copilot Recall is on all the time, but Copilot Vision only switches on when you tell it. Or when you accidentally click on the glasses button.

    • TechRadar ☛ Europol doesn't only want an encryption backdoor, but also your metadata

      Europol’s 2025 Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) indicates E2EE (end-to-end encrypted) apps as an obstacle to investigations
      The report also calls for better rules on metadata collection and tracking

    • Michael Tsai ☛ UK Online Safety Act

      “Scope” seems to mean the scope of the Act itself, which is very broad. I guess Ofcom gets to decide what the truth is.

    • BoingBoing ☛ VPN use surging in UK after online censorship laws kick in

      The so-called "Online Safety Act" does prohibit VPN companies from disclosing that their services can be used to circumvent censorship, but did not otherwise regulate their use. The omnishambles at hand–nothing successfully blocked and everyday Britons learning en masse how to browse more privately–has already got local media vaguely suggesting a VPN ban is now on the table.

    • Wired ☛ Age Verification Laws Send VPN Use Soaring—and Threaten the Open Internet

      Experts had expected the surge, given that similar trends have been visible in other countries that have implemented age check laws. But as a new wave of age check regulations debuts, open [Internet] advocates warn that the uptick in use of circumvention tools in the UK is the latest example of how an escalating cat-and-mouse game can develop between people looking to anonymously access services online and governments seeking to enforce content restrictions.

    • The Register UK ☛ Publishers oppose W3C plan to kill third-party cookies

      Third-party cookies (3PCs) have long posed a privacy problem because they allow organizations with no relationship to web users to track their online browsing activities, often without legitimately obtained consent. While cookie-based tracking of this sort may not involve personally identifiable information (PII), it can be combined with other data sets to identify and profile people.

  • Confidentiality

    • 404 Media ☛ Tea User Files Class Action After Women’s Safety App Exposes Data

      A user of women’s dating safety app Tea has filed a class action lawsuit after the app repeatedly exposed users’ sensitive data, including selfies, photographs of IDs, and more than a million direct messages sent by users. Both data breaches were first revealed by 404 Media.

• Defence/Aggression

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Boss-politics antitrust and the MAGA crackup

    Victory is deadly to any coalition that agrees on what they want to destroy, and violently disagree on what they want to build. Once victory is attained, some of those groups are going to get what they want, which means other groups are going to absolutely eat shit. Worse (for Trumpism) is that his coalition's affect is purely libidinal, a roaring mob of ragged tribes of swivel-eyed loons who believe they are doing battle with the "deep state," "Jewish space-lasers" and "antifa super-soldiers," and are primed to see shadowy cabals everywhere: [...]

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ A Judge’s Conflict of Interest Over Jeffrey Epstein Documents

    Preska’s role in the saga is colored by the fact that her spouse is a partner at one of New York’s preeminent Wall Street law firms. Thomas Kavaler is a fifty-year veteran of Cahill Gordon & Reindel, a firm that, by its own description, “has thrived for a century by focusing on the most significant opportunities and complex challenges facing the top financial services firms and other multinational corporations.”

  • CS Monitor ☛ What 20 years of investigations tell us about the Epstein files

    Here are details about the investigations, and the ambiguities that have only grown more glaring over time.

• Environment

  • Common Dreams ☛ EU Bowing to Trump Pressure

    The EU and the U.S. have announced a new trade deal, ending months of a stand-off over tariffs. Under the new deal, the EU has given in to pressure from the Trump Administration to buy $750 billion worth of oil, gas and other energy products from the U.S. over the next three years in exchange for tariff relief.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Cheap Tricks for Hard Problems

    Fast forward a little further, and there is the looming and very real possibility of a national or global financial crisis precipitated by a rapid devaluation of hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars worth of real estate values. Basically: The insurance crisis, and the associated unwillingness of banks to write mortgages on homes that are effectively uninsurable, reaches a tipping point which causes there to be many more sellers of coastal and other exposed real estate than there are buyers; this causes rapid price drops; this results in both bankrupt homeowners and also in enormous financial losses for the banks holding the loans on all of that property; voila, financial crisis. The number of potential contributing factors to this process are beyond calculation, but the contours of it—and the fact that we are heading towards it—are easy to see. The scariest thing about this particular scenario, to me, is that the tipping point could be reached very fast, and it is impossible to predict what will precipitate it, and when. One big disaster could cause enough of a mental shift in enough homeowners to cause a stampede for the exits, the real estate equivalent of a bank run. Seen from this perspective, owning a home that is highly exposed to climate disaster risk is like holding a speculative asset that could blow up at any moment. Bitcoins and beach houses have more in common than you think.

  • YLE ☛ Heatwave warms inland waters to record-high temperatures

    The temperatures of North Savo's Lake Pielavesi and the Pielisjoki River reached record highs last week. On Sunday, the lake's surface temperature measured 26.3 degrees Celsius while the river's water reached 25.2 degrees.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • YLE ☛ Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death

      Helsinki has not recorded a single traffic fatality in the past 12 months, city and police officials confirmed this week.

  • Overpopulation

    • IranWire ☛ Iran’s Capital Faces ‘Day Zero’ Water Crisis as Dams Run Dry

      He said, “Although Iranians had managed to survive for thousands of years through groundwater management, modern development - accompanied by social structural changes, marked by growing public distrust toward rulers and various sectors of society - has brought the situation to a point where even if responsible officials give people the most realistic reasons and best suggestions for water conservation, most people have no interest in cooperation.”

    • NBC ☛ Iran shuts down in the face of blistering heat

      Officials are now warning that water supplies are dwindling in Tehran, which is estimated to have a population of over 9.5 million people.

      Water shortages and severe heat have led to unrest in Iran in the past. In 2021, street protests broke out in cities in the Khuzestan province in southwest Iran, as well as a handful of other cities, which were met with a violent crackdown by government security forces.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Report: Palo Alto Networks could acquire CyberArk for $20B+

    Palo Alto Networks Inc. is reportedly close to buying fellow cybersecurity provider CyberArk Software Ltd.

  • Nick Heer ☛ That Pew Report Is Sure Looking Like a Foundational Text, Unfortunately

    I will continue to harp on this report. I think it is going to be foundational, yet I do not think it is robust enough to sustain the number of articles and conclusions that will be derived from it. The same is also true of a lot of third-party research into Google’s search engine. A decline of 30% in click-through rates is significant, but 70% is catastrophic. It is hard to see how these are both valid results.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Tom Lehrer shut up far too early

    So even by the time that I, aged 12, had become an ardent fan of his work, Lehrer was already a thing of the past. He had won a place to study mathematics at Harvard aged only 15. After less than a decade of showbiz fame, he became a teacher at that great university. A few years after that, he forsook composing and performing satirical songs; he stayed on at Harvard for ever. I notice that none of his obituaries had anything to say about his maths classes. It is hard to imagine they were not funny.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Big Tech Is Under Legal Fire in Trump’s Second Term

    After Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the Big Tech firms continue to be battered by antitrust lawsuits stemming from prior administrations. The cases could even lead to the forced breakup of some of the tech giants.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Verge ☛ YouTube tells creators they can drop more F-bombs

    YouTube will continue to limit monetization if you use moderate or strong profanity in titles or thumbnails. Videos with a “high frequency” of strong profanity are also still a “violation” of YouTube’s advertiser-friendly content guidelines, Kavanagh says. “You have to pick and choose your fucks carefully.”

  • Nick Heer ☛ Subreddits with War Media Are Caught in the U.K. Age Verification Law

    Contrary to the beliefs of one moderator of one of these subreddits, this does not seem to be motivated by burying evidence of the atrocities of war. This is the predictable overreach of Reddit choosing to require age verification to view any “not safe for work” subreddit, because of course Reddit is not going to be sensitive to context. It is not right; it is what is least expensive because it requires little additional moderation or underlying technical changes. Reddit could implement different types of NSFW labelling, but that also increases its risk of legal liability if something is improperly labelled.

  • ANF News ☛ 20 people executed in Iran in one week

    According to the statement, 20 people were executed last week in prisons in Eastern Kurdistan and Iran.

    The Campaign reported that a total of 1,477 people have been executed during Masoud Pezeshkian’s presidency so far.

  • Techdirt ☛ FCC To Install A ‘Bias Monitor’ At New CBS To Ensure Network Kisses Trump’s Ass

    Last week Trump’s FCC lackey, Brendan Carr, quickly set about rubber stamping approval for the $8 billion CBS Skyance merger, now that CBS execs paid their $16 million bribe to the king.

    One of the key merger conditions to net approval was the installation of a sort of FCC “bias ombudsman,” who’ll be installed at CBS to ensure that the new network is appropriately feckless when it comes to criticizing our buffoonish orange king. Making the rounds on right wing propaganda networks last week, Carr ironically insisted this was necessary in order to restore trust in U.S. journalism: [...]

  • US News And World Report ☛ Harvard to Comply With Trump Administration Demand to Turn Over Employment Forms

    Rights advocates have raised concerns over free speech, due process and academic freedom.

    Harvard said that, for now, it was not sharing records with the government for people employed in roles only available to students as it was determining if such a request complied with privacy protection requirements.

  • Techdirt ☛ Oh My God, TAKE IT DOWN Kills Parody

    Despite this well-established pattern of silencing dissent, lawmakers handed him the Take It Down Act: a sweeping censorship weapon he has openly vowed to wield against his critics.

    Recently, South Park fired back in its first new episode in years, with a bold, refreshing, and unapologetically crude parody of the Christian “He Gets Us” campaign—featuring a deepfaked, fully nude Donald Trump wandering the desert as a solemn narrator asks, “When things heat up, who will deliver us from temptation?” The “public service announcement” ends with a glowing political endorsement from Trump’s wide-eyed, “teeny tiny penis.”

    It’s brilliant satire that cuts right to the heart of American political delusion. It’s also potentially criminal under the law Trump championed. Welcome to the new reality: mocking the President with AI could now land you in prison.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Axios ☛ Which public TV and radio stations most rely on federal funds

    Driving the news: For hundreds of stations with available data, CPB grants made up about 10.3% of U.S. public TV stations' overall funding as of fiscal 2023, and 4.1% for radio stations.

    That share is much greater for some specific stations.

  • ANF News ☛ Release of journalist Umed Beroşkî postponed for six months

    Beroşkî had posted on Facebook on July 23, 2024, reporting that Mela Nezîr had been detained by officials at Zîrkan Prison but was never taken to the facility. Following this post, prison authorities filed a complaint against Beroşkî, accusing him of “defamation.”

  • American Oversight ☛ American Oversight Launches Epstein Records Investigation, Seeks Details on DOJ and FBI Review of Investigative Holdings

    We’re seeking records following reports that FBI personnel were instructed to flag Epstein files for Trump references.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Futurism ☛ Man in Prison Gets Hired as Software Engineer at Silicon Valley Startup, Works Every Day From Cell

    In case you're wondering how a currently incarcerated inmate scored a cushy Silicon Valley job, you're not alone. Thorpe is allowed to work the job remotely from custody through an experimental program in Maine, the ultimate instance of remote work that transcends 30-foot barbed wire fences and a criminal record.

    Depending on how you look at it, it's either an optimistic story of redemption and meaningful rehabilitation or the ultimate captive employee.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ Two Michigan Men Hated Comcast. So They Built Their Own Broadband Alternative.

    Now locals can get much faster broadband at much lower prices, which is almost always the case when it comes to locally-owned broadband alternatives. Herman and Baciu’s new provider, PrimeOne, offers locals symmetrical 500Mbps for $75, 1 Gbps for $80, 2Gbps for $95, and 5Gbps for $110. Prices well ahead of what most Americans pay even in major tech-centric cities like Seattle.

  • IT Wire ☛ Europe-North Africa Medusa subsea cable to be powered by Nokia

    Designed as an open access system, the Medusa subsea cable will connect countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, and Egypt with high-capacity fibre-optic links, providing telecom providers to advanced connectivity services, enabling 5G, cloud infrastructure, and AI technologies.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• India Times ☛ Uber loses UK Supreme Court appeal over tax on rival apps

  Uber's rival taxi operators in England and Wales will not face a 20% VAT charge on their profit margins outside of London after the ride-hailing firm lost its appeal on Tuesday against a previous ruling.

• India Times ☛ Uber loses UK Supreme Court appeal over tax on rival apps

  Uber's rival taxi operators will not face a 20% tax charge on their profit margins outside of London after the United Kingdom's Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that private-hire operators do not enter into a contract with passengers.

• Copyrights

  • Wired ☛ The Real Demon Inside ChatGPT

    But ChatGPT and similar programs weren’t just trained on the [Internet]—they were trained on specific pieces of information presented in specific contexts. AI companies have been accused of trying to downplay this reality to avoid copyright lawsuits and promote the utility of their products, but traces of the original sources are often still lurking just beneath the surface. When the setting and backdrop are removed, however, the same language can appear more sinister than originally intended.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ The Risks of Pirate Site Blocking, Who Benefits, Who Pays, And at What Cost?

    With site-blocking legislation currently under discussion in the United States, a new report examines site blocking measures elsewhere in the world. Commissioned by Cloudflare, the report warns that a patchwork of measures risks disruption to the [Internet]'s global technical infrastructure. It also questions whether the claimed benefits are worth the risk in the bigger picture.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ 'Fair Use' Prevails as Library of Congress Wins DMCA Anti-Circumvention Battle

    Medical device associations behind a lawsuit challenging a Library of Congress exemption to the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, have failed to have the exemption ruled illegal. Motions for summary judgment from both sides went in favor of the defendants after a district court judge found that the exemption, granted for the maintenance and repair of medical devices, permits a non-infringing, transformative fair use.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Spotify using AI to make new music from dead artists without permission

    Trying to spoof the public with musical slurry created using a computer is one thing. Generating said slurry and flogging it as the work of a dead artist is some next-level fuckery. Spotify is treating its listeners like it thinks that they're stupid. If you must stream, consider moving to a company that doesn't abuse its clients. Better still, buy your music and download it to your devices. Your favourite artists will get a bigger chunk of the payout, and you won't be funding bullshit like this.

  • RFERL ☛ Armenia Is About To Put Its Ancient Manuscripts Online For Free

    Among columns of exhausted ethnic Armenians fleeing the mass killings carried out by Ottoman Turks beginning in 1915, some hid books or ancient documents inside their clothing. For many survivors, the easily hidden manuscripts were the only remnant of their nation that they were able to smuggle to safety.

    Thousands of those books and documents eventually arrived in modern Armenia where today they are held in the purpose-built Matenadaran, a storehouse for the country’s historic manuscripts. Many, however, remain in museums and private collections scattered throughout the world.