● 08.02.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 02/08/2023: GNU Spotlight and More Microsoft Breaches

Posted in News Roundup at 9:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install a Debian 12 (Bookworm) Minimal Server

• This tutorial shows how to install a Debian 12 – Bookworm – minimal server in detail with many screenshots. The purpose of this guide is to provide a minimal setup that can be used as the basis for our other Debian 12 tutorials here at howtoforge.com.

=> ↺ Earthly ☛ Mastering Linux Networking Commands: A Comprehensive Guide

• This article aims to equip you with the knowledge and skills required to utilize Linux networking commands proficiently. By the end of this article, you will have a comprehensive understanding of Linux networking commands and how to leverage them effectively. Whether you are a Linux enthusiast, system administrator, or network engineer.

=> ↺ Dedoimedo ☛ Steam, Linux, how to scale UI on large (2K, 4K) displays

• As you well know, I really liked Steam. I also like Linux. I also like to try to use Steam on Linux as much as possible. About two years back, I started my de-Windowsification process, as I realized there’s no future in playing the cat-and-idiot game with Windows 11, online account nonsense, ads and such. But to be able to migrate away, Steam must pop pop pop on Linux. Super green, it must be.

• The journey is going mega-good, but recently I encountered a wee problem. I got myself a new laptop, one Slimbook Executive, and it has a 3K display – 2880x1800px, stretched over just 14 inches. With 1:1 pixel resolution, anything rendered on the screen is too tiny, Steam UI included. Indeed, Steam does not seem to obey my Kubuntu Plasma 1.75x scaling factor, and no toggle in the Settings menu seems to help. Now, let me show you how you can make Steam actually obey your desktop scaling. This will make the interface bigger and more usable on small-size large-resolution displays. After me.

=> ↺ LinuxTechi ☛ How to Install Minikube on RHEL 9 Step-by-Step

=> ↺ Linux Handbook ☛ Proxmox Series #3: Creating Containers in Proxmox

• In the earlier chapters of the Proxmox series, you learned to install Proxmox and create new virtual machines in it.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ It’s FOSS ☛ EasyOS: An Experimental Distro With Unique Qualities

• Dubbed the “new paradigm” for a Linux distribution by its creator, EasyOS is a pretty unique distro that blends the best of Puppy Linux and Quirky, a variant of Puppy.

• EasyOS’s development began back in 2017, when its creator, Barry Kauler, came back after a break from his involvement in Puppy Linux.

• Over the years, EasyOS has had plenty of releases, and with this article, we aim to show you what this distro is all about.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ CNX Software ☛ Firefly AIO-1684XQ motherboard features BM1684X AI SoC with up to 32 TOPS for video analytics, computer vision

• The specifications are quite similar to the company’s Firefly EC-A1684XJD4 FD edge AI computer minus the enclosure and support for HDMI output and WiFi. Since there’s no video output, I’d assume there must be a web-based control interface to configure the BM1684X motherboard and monitor up to 16 video streams.

• Documentation specific to the AIO-1684XQ motherboard does not seem available yet, but the wiki for the Core-1684JD4 system-on-module, the little brother of the Core-1684XJD4 used there, indicates support for Debian 9 and Ubuntu 20.04. Programming is done through the Sophon3 SDK with support for Caffe, Darknet, MXNet, ONNX, PyTorch, PaddlePaddle, and TensorFlow frameworks, and that leverages open-source projects such as OpenCV and FFmpeg.

=> ↺ Linux Gizmos ☛ DEBIX dev board runs on Linux and Windows IoT Enterprise

• DEBIX introduced yesterday a development board based on the NXP i.MX 8M Plus quad-core processor with a 2.3 TOPS NPU. The DEBIX SOM A I/O Board is presented as a solution for industrial control, IoT connectivity and multimedia applications.

=> ↺ Ubuntu ☛ Reducing latency in industrial systems with Real-time Ubuntu on Intel SoCs

• Delivering a comprehensive real-time solution for industrial systems requires careful work at every layer of the stack. Since standalone hardware or software components are not sufficient, Canonical and Intel have joined forces to deliver an out-of-the-box real-time solution. This solution is now generally available on Intel Core processors.

• In this blog, we will delve deeper into how this combined Intel and Canonical stack delivers enterprise-grade performance for the time-bound workloads of industrial systems. The technologies we integrate with are Intel Time Coordinated Computing (Intel TCC) and IEEE 802.1 Time Sensitive Networking (TSN).

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi ☛ Explore the Raspberry Pi factory floor in Wales, UK

• The boxing-up robot is my personal favourite. I also reckon we need to name the pick-and-place robots you see at the 18 second mark. There are four of them, so we’ll need a theme that ties them together. Drop your ideas in the comments and I will declare a winner who will receive my gratitude as a prize; along with my solemn promise to pester our friends at Sony until they make plaques of the inappropriate names I liked best.

=> ↺ Olimex ☛ ESP32-SBC-FabGL How to work with the expander module GPIOs from FabGL library and apps

• In this post I will show you how you can work with the GPIO from the PC Emulator application and drive the GPIOs with QBASIC and TURBO PASCAL 7.0

=> ↺ DroidGazzette ☛ Vintage Apple-1 computer signed by Wozniak heads to auction

• The Steves originally thought of the Apple-1 as a bare circuit board they’d sell as a kit for electronics hobbyists to assemble. But then Jobs brought the idea to The Byte Shop in Mountain View, Calif., one of the world’s first personal computer stores. Seeking to make the magic machines accessible beyond the purview of hobbyists, owner Paul Terrell said he’d buy 50 of them if they came fully assembled, RR Auction said.

• Over 10 months, from 1976-1977, Jobs and Wozniak made about 200 of the Apple-1 computers and sold 175 of them. In June 1977 they brought out the Apple II, one of the first mass-produced microcomputer products ever launched, which revolutionized the nascent industry.

=> ↺ Andrew Hutchings ☛ Amiga 3000: Major Upgrades

• There is one more upgrade I want to do to this machine, and that is Ethernet. There is a lot to cover with that, and it is going to warrant a separate blog post. I’ll be writing more about this soon.

=> ↺ Andrew Hutchings ☛ Amiga 3000: I Was Wrong

• I recently posted about how the BFG9060 was causing my Amiga 3000’s SCSI port to become unstable. It turns out I was incorrect, here is the story.

=> ↺ Arduino ☛ Custom vacuum controller facilitates the construction of vacuum tubes

• Vacuum tubes used to be the building blocks of computation and the drivers of screaming guitar amplifiers, but they’re rare today — so rare that there are virtually no manufacturers producing new units. If you shop for vacuum tubes, most of what you’ll find is either used or NOS (new old stock). That has led to boutique vacuum tube manufacturing, but that is a substantial undertaking. To make the process just a little bit easier, Nick Poole created this custom vacuum controller.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

FSFE

=> ↺ FSF ☛ July GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Ten new GNU releases!

• Ten new GNU releases in the last month (as of July 27, 2023): [...]

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Miguel Young de la Sota ☛ A Gentle Introduction to LLVM IR

• Learning LLVM IR is similar, but it helps you understand what your compiler is doing to create highly optimized code. LLVM IR is very popular, and as such well-documented and reasonably well-specified, to the point that we can just treat it as a slightly weird programming language.

• In this article, I want to dig into what LLVM IR is and how to read it.

=> ↺ James G ☛ Brainstorming Webmention post discovery

• This post is a brainstorm and a call for discussion. As discussion advances, I may publish more blog posts on this topic. If I write more on this topic, I will add links to my writings at the beginning of this post for reference.

• I am working on a tool called webmemex.js that lets you see information about the incoming and outgoing links on a web page. I have developed a HTML component that retrieves Webmentions from any endpoint that supports the (non-standard) format returned by webmention.io, a popular Webmention server. The component uses the following syntax: [...]

=> ↺ Rlang ☛ Ensure R Language Reproducibility with dateback Package

• Sooner or later, most R programmers end up with code that no longer runs because of package updates. One way to address the problem was the MRAN Time Machine which Microsoft retired on July 1, 2023. You can get similar functionality for source packages using “dateback,” thanks to Ryota Suzuki. As with MRAN, examples of when you could benefit from using dateback include: [...]

Leftovers

=> ↺ Omicron Limited ☛ Many people feel they work in pointless, meaningless jobs, research confirms

• The study, by Simon Walo, of Zurich University, Switzerland, is the first to give quantitative support to a theory put forward by the American anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 that many jobs were “bullshit”—socially useless and meaningless.

• Researchers had since suggested that the reason people felt their jobs were useless was solely because they were routine and lacked autonomy or good management rather than anything intrinsic to their work, but Mr. Walo found this was only part of the story.

=> ↺ Medium ☛ X to Close: The origins of the use of [x] in UI design.

• Clicking on [x] to close a feature has become an instinctual part of using a computer and a standard in web and software design. Although it may seem like the ubiquitous [x] has always been a part of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), a quick jaunt through the history of GUIs reveals that this actually isn’t the case.

• So where and when did the [x] first enter into the UI lexicon?

=> ↺ NPR ☛ Twitter’s ‘X’ sign is taken down in San Francisco after neighbors filed 24 complaints

• The San Francisco Department of Building Inspection said it received 24 complaints about the sign, including “concerns about its structural safety and illumination.”

=> ↺ ABC ☛ Brightly flashing ‘X’ sign removed from the San Francisco building that was Twitter’s headquarters

• The Elon Musk-owned company, which has been rebranded as X, had removed the Twitter sign and iconic blue bird logo from the building last week. That work was temporarily paused because the company did not have the necessary permits. For a time, the “er” at the end of “Twitter” remained up due to the abrupt halt of the sign takedown.

=> ↺ David Revoy ☛ Peertube Avatar Generator

• I made a new avatar generator for Peertube mascot squid-like characters.

=> ↺ Omicron Limited ☛ Creative designs: Geography of Australia’s digital technology industries

• Over the decades many researchers have observed clusters and asked the question: why? What are the reasons businesses of the same sector want to co-locate? Well, it turns out there are a lot of good reasons to be in a cluster.

=> ↺ CBC ☛ A kayaker takes a 11,000-km solo journey to ‘reverse the bad.’ There was lots of stealth camping

• Mark Fuhrmann, 65, started his paddling adventure in Halifax on June 1 last year.

• It has taken him down the St. Lawrence River system through Quebec and Ontario, along the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida and back up the Atlantic coast — a route he calls the “Greater Loop.”

=> ↺ Craig Murray ☛ Modern Life

• This is simply an anecdotal tale of my personal experience, but it seems to illustrate so much that is wrong with being an ordinary individual in modern late capitalist society, that I thought it was worth relating.

Science

=> ↺ Mark Dominus ☛ Computational content of Gantō’s axe

• Lately I have been thinking about the formula

• $$((P\to Q)\land (\lnot P \to Q)) \to Q \tag{$\color{darkgreen}{\heartsuit}$}$$

• which is a theorem of classical logic, but not of intuitionistic logic. This shouldn’t be surprising. In CL you know that one of !!P!! and !!\lnot P!! is true (although perhaps not which), and whichever it is, it implies !!Q!!. In IL you don’t know that one of !!P!! and !!\lnot P!! is provable, so you can’t conclude anything.

• Except you almost can. There is a family of transformations !!T!! where, if !!C!! is classically valid !!T(C)!! is intuitionistically valid even if !!C!! itself isn’t.

=> ↺ Quillette ☛ How Accurate is Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’?

• The critics rave—and I don’t disagree—that the box-office blockbuster Oppenheimer is the greatest film, or at least biopic, since Lawrence of Arabia. The cinematography is grand, the acting is fine, the pace is excellent, and the story has real importance. If, considered as a meal, most movies today are a bag of skittles, Oppenheimer is a thick juicy corn-bred Iowa steak. So, if all you need to know from a film’s review is whether you should go see it, the answer, in Oppenheimer’s case, is unquestionably yes.

• But is Oppenheimer accurate? That’s the question that Claire Lehmann asked me to answer for the readers of Quillette.

=> ↺ BBC ☛ Voyager 2: [NASA] loses contact with probe after sending wrong command

• Last month, the spacecraft – exploring the universe since 1977 – tilted its antenna to point two degrees away from Earth after the mistake was made.

• As a result, the probe has stopped receiving commands or sending data.

• [NASA] said it hopes communication will resume when the probe is due to reset in October.

=> ↺ Axios ☛ Henrietta Lacks’ estate settles lawsuit over use of her cells

• Why it matters: The cells, harvested when Lacks, a Black woman, was treated for cervical cancer, have allowed breakthroughs in modern medicine as the first immortal human cell line.

Education

=> ↺ Teen Vogue ☛ Teachers Are Quitting In Huge Numbers, But Here’s Why I’m Staying in Education

• There are about one hundred reasons to leave teaching, and one hundred more reasons to stay. Narratives providing insight into the challenges plaguing education are salient, but they should not exist in isolation. They should be told alongside narratives of joy and hope because that is what our schools are too. Many will leave, many will stay, many will join us too. Don’t give up on schools just yet.

=> ↺ CPJ ☛ Situational awareness: A guide for journalists

• When talking about journalist safety, security measures such as filling out a risk assessment, completing hostile environment awareness training (HEFAT), or using personal protective equipment (PPE) are often the first things to come to mind. However, one of the most important security measures in a journalist’s toolbox is the ability to maintain situational awareness and to remove yourself from harm’s way in advance of a threat.

• This guide is intended for journalists and editors to refer to while planning assignments and reporting. Read on to understand more about what situational awareness is, why it’s important, and how situational awareness can be best used while reporting. For additional information on how to safely cover protests, please see CPJ’s safety videos.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ [Old] NPR ☛ More cyclists are being killed by cars. Advocates say U.S. streets are the problem

• But amid a sharp increase in fatalities and serious injuries among cyclists hit by cars and trucks, some cycling advocates say there’s often a disconnect between efforts to encourage more biking and ensuring the safety of bicyclists who are using streets that are primarily designed to move cars and trucks through city neighborhoods and urban centers quickly.

• Our roads have not always been built to prioritize cars, because the first vehicles to use the nation’s streets weren’t automobiles; they were carriages and bikes. In fact, the League of American Bicyclists has been around since 1880, long before cars.

=> ↺ ABC ☛ Team USA teen cyclist killed by car in training accident just days before world championships

• The investigation into the deadly crash is ongoing and it is not immediately clear if criminal charges are being pursued.

=> ↺ ‘Eggsplosions’ and eyes don’t mix

• These explosions typically cause thermal injury to the eyes, Wang says. This means damaged tissue, peeling skin and scars on the eyes, all of which can cause a lot of pain. It can also harm the cells that assist in repairing tissue on the front of the eye.

• Sometimes, injuries can be severe enough to require medical treatments or put people at risk of further infection. In the worst cases, people can experience long term vision issues from scarring.

=> ↺ The Economist ☛ Horrifying numbers of Americans will not make it to old age

• According to a study by Jessica Ho of the University of Southern California, published last year, which looked at 18 high-income countries, from a fairly average position in 1980, by 2018 America had fallen to dead last on life expectancy. In the 1960s Americans could expect to live seven or eight years longer than people from Portugal, the country in the study that now has the next-lowest life expectancy. By 2018 they could expect to live over a year less. Areas like eastern Kentucky, which have been worst hit, help illustrate why.

=> ↺ Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Animal feed scarcity, cost means many dairy cattle to be slaughtered

• Unfavorable conditions have not only hit Estonia’s arable farming sector, but has also impacted the dairy sector so heavily that farmers in many cases only have around a half the usual amount of winter feed stocked up.

• The scarcity of fodder and resulting price increases also exerts a pressure to reduce dairy herds, meaning that many dairy cows will instead be heading for the slaughterhouse, ETV news show “Aktuaalne kaamera” (AK) reported Monday.

=> ↺ House appropriators propose $1.9B for VA electronic health record in 2024

• In May, the VA struck an agreement with Oracle Cerner to renew the technology giant’s contract for the electronic health record modernization program. In a statement at the time, the agency said the renegotiated contract “dramatically increases” the agency’s ability to hold the company to account.

=> ↺ Ali Reza Hayati ☛ Managed and controlled sleep: end of experiment

• I’m super tired right now. Since I started my experiment, I’ve been trying very hard to keep up with it and it’s been 15 days since I started not sleeping well intentionally. 15 very hard days indeed.

• At first I thought it becomes easy when I go with the experiment a few days. i thought it’s hard at first and I get used to it but as I was moving forward, it became harder and harder. I’ve become exhausted more and more and I tried to get energy with food and sleeping in quiet rooms to make up for it but it wasn’t working.

=> ↺ The North Lines IN ☛ Poor Air Quality Is Behind For Rise In Lung Cancer Cases Among Non-Smokers: DAK

• “Researchers have found that increased exposure to fine particles – typically seen in vehicle exhaust and smoke from fossil fuels trigger inflammation which causes cancerous state in lung cells,” he said.

=> ↺ LRT ☛ ‘Honey crisis’ presses Lithuanian beekeepers amid plummeting prices

• “Nowhere in Europe do they speak about support for beekeepers, at least to my knowledge,” he says. “Beekeepers get a special support for feeding bees during the winter, where every year we allocate a little more than half a million [euros] for the purchase of sugar or syrup.”

• According to beekeeping expert Vaičiūnas, apiaries create far more value than just honey, notably pollination. If beekeeping farms are drastically reduced, other farmers will feel the consequences.

• “Bee products are only 20 percent of the value created by bees. If bee populations decline, not only beekeepers would feel the impact, but other sectors of the economy too,” he stresses.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

=> ↺ Chris Coyier ☛ Other People’s Busted Software is an Opportunity

• He went to the internal (put public-facing) Delta website, logged in, and tried to use the voucher system, but it just loaded a blank white page with no errors at all, which he didn’t understand. I understood it: this thing is wicked broken. I turned off my content blocker thing, 90% of the time it’s that in my experience, no dice. We tried another browser, no dice. It was just broken. I couldn’t help.

=> ↺ Chris Ferris ☛ AWS Security Hero

• Cloud is Hard. Cloud is harder when you don’t have massive cloud security and governance teams. You go to the cloud with the AWS you have, not the AWS you want. Engineering compromises are made. The expense of later going back to retrofit and changing those engineering choices is expensive. I love having those conversations with teams. Helping them understand what they should revisit and what’s working for them, and what they should keep.

=> ↺ MIT Technology Review ☛ These new tools could help protect our pictures from AI

• In a voluntary pledge to the White House, leading AI companies have pinky-promised to “develop” ways to detect AI-generated content. However, they did not promise to adopt them. If they are serious about protecting users from the harms of generative AI, that is perhaps the most crucial first step.

=> ↺ The Register UK ☛ AI on AI action: Googler uses GPT-4 chatbot to defeat image classifier’s guardian

• In a paper titled, “A LLM Assisted Exploitation of AI-Guardian,” Nicholas Carlini, a research scientist for Google’s Deep Mind, explores how AI-Guardian, a defense against adversarial attacks on models, can be undone by directing the GPT-4 chatbot to devise an attack method and to author text explaining how the attack works.

• Carlini’s paper includes Python code suggested by GPT-4 for defeating AI-Guardian’s efforts to block adversarial attacks. Specifically, GPT-4 emits scripts (and explanations) for tweaking images to fool a classifier – for example, making it think a photo of someone holding a gun is a photo of someone holding a harmless apple – without triggering AI-Guardian’s suspicions. AI-Guardian is designed to detect when images have likely been manipulated to trick a classifier, and GPT-4 was tasked with evading that detection.

=> ↺ Deccan Chronicle ☛ IT ministry to send notice to WhatsApp on international spam calls issue

• The minister’s comments assume significance as WhatsApp users in India have reported a massive surge in incoming international spam calls over the past few days. Many users complained on Twitter that a major chunk of these spam calls had country codes belonging to Indonesia (+62), Vietnam (+84), Malaysia (+60), Kenya (+254) and Ethiopia (+251).

• Chandrasekhar on Tuesday said the ministry is taking note of the matter and will send a notice to WhatsApp on the issue.

=> ↺ IT Wire ☛ Cl0p’s MOVEit attack victims now slowly approaching 600

• The number of organisations hit by the ransomware group Cl0p using vulnerabilities in the secure managed file transfer software MOVEit Transfer is now 546, the security firm Emsisoft reports, estimating that more than 37 million individuals are now affected.

• This figure is almost double what it was on 19 July, the New Zealand-headquartered company’s Zach Simas wrote in a blog post that is being updated as the number of companies/individuals affected increases.

Scoop News Group ☛ VA special salary rate for tech and cybersecurity staff takes effectThe Department of Veterans Affairs has increased the salaries of its technology and cybersecurity employees by an average of 17% in a bid to boost its ability to hire private sector talent [sic].Scoop News Group ☛ White House seeks whole of society approach, immigration reform to boost cyber workforceThe National Cyber Workforce and Education Strategy strategy focuses on four major pillars: equipping every American with cyber skills, transforming cyber education, expanding and enhancing the national cyber workforce and strengthening the federal cyber workforce. The strategy relies heavily on non-governmental and private sector entities to provide funding, internship and apprenticeship programs to increase the number of workers with cybersecurity skills.[...]While the exact number of open cybersecurity jobs is unclear, the strategy cites figures from (ISC)², a nonprofit association of certified cyber workers, estimating that there are more than 400,000 unfilled jobs in the cybersecurity industry.CSO ☛ Lazarus group exploits Windows IIS servers to distribute malwareNorth Korean cybercrime group, Lazarus, has been found to be attacking Windows Internet Information Service (IIS) web servers and using them as distribution points for their malware, according to AhnLab security emergency response center (ASEC).CBC ☛ Cyberattack on B.C. health employer websites may have taken personal informationThe cyberattack targeted [sic] three websites recruiting physicians, nurses and other health professionals: Health Match B.C., Locums for Rural B.C. and the B.C. Care Aide & Community Health Worker Registry.

Security

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ Bruce Schneier ☛ Hacking AI Resume Screening with Text in a White Font

• Clever. I’m not sure it’s actually useful in getting a job, though. Eventually the humans will figure out that the applicant doesn’t actually have the required skills. But…maybe.

=> ↺ The Washington Post ☛ Job applicants are battling AI résumé filters with a hack

• The concept is simple: Copy a list of relevant keywords or the job description itself, paste it in a résumé and change the font color to white. The hope is that AI bots or digital filters in applicant tracking systems read the white text and surface the résumé for human review. Because keywords are in white, the résumé will look normal to human reviewers.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ California is investigating how car companies use the data they collect

• CPPA’s enforcement division noted that CVs routinely come equipped with several data collection points, including location sharing, web-based entertainment systems, sensors, smartphone integration, and cameras. In a statement, Ashkan Soltani, CPPA’s executive director, called modern cars “connected computers on wheels.”

• Autonomous vehicles are known to collect up to 19 terabytes of data per day. Last month, the EV manufacturer Tesla announced an ambitious project to build its own supercomputer, to better store and process the petabytes of real-time data generated by its vehicles around the world.

=> ↺ International Business Times ☛ Reports show 50% of banks think data-driven financial services have provided commercial benefits

• Nevertheless, many banks are taking an offensive approach, embracing the opportunity to expand and invest in these services. A reported 62 per cent of those polled are currently working on or would like to be able to offer budget management tools to consumers, while 63 per cent are working on transaction categorisation.

=> ↺ Terence Eden ☛ I don’t think you need to be civil to puppy-smashers

• It was Robert Jones, Jr. who said: “We can disagree and still love each other. Unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression, your denial of my humanity, my right to exist.”1

• I don’t think you need to be civil to those people who are deliberately trying to harm you. Sure, you might get a more positive reaction if you gently cajole them or politely help them see the error of their ways. But sometimes it is important to let people know vociferously just how much their plans will hurt you and your puppies.

=> ↺ Site36 ☛ Police in Leipzig to return cell phones: Devices were seized from 380 people as “means of violence”

• Apparently, the kettled people were also threatened by the police. MDR reports about one demonstrator who had been asked to hand over the password of his cell phone. “If you do not give us the PIN, you will bear all the costs for decryption. There will be several hundred Euros on them,” a police officer is quoted as saying. The cell phone, which was confiscated for aggravated breach of the peace, was a “means of violence,” he said.

=> ↺ NYOB ☛ Meta apparently switches to consent for behavioral ads after five years of litigation

• After more than five years of extensive litigation by noyb, the German Kartellamt and decisions by the EDPB and CJEU it seems that Meta finally complies with EU privacy laws. The company announced it will ask its users for consent before showing behavioral ads in the future. It is uncelar if Meta fully applies the consent requirement. noyb will follow up with litigation if the GDPR is not fully implemented by Meta.

=> ↺ The Hindu ☛ Citizen data collected by the volunteers is safe and secured, Govt of Andhra Pradesh clarifies

• In order to protect the integrity of data, the GSWS department has appointed Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for the implementation of software applications. TCS develops and maintains various software components of the GSWS department, the Fact Check explained.

• During the data collection, the demographic data of citizen is fetched from Aadhar server. After biometric authentication of citizen, all the data is encrypted and stored at the Government SDC. The data is sent to the SDC through Application Programming Interface (APIs) from the apps and is stored there with multiple layers of security protocols and encryption. All the apps are developed with high-level security features and the data is protected at all times.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Gannett ☛ ‘An assault on this republic’: What the Jan. 6 charges Trump faces say about our democracy

• The 45-page indictment charges Trump −and at least six co-conspirators − with three conspiracies, including a scheme “to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit” to overturn the results of a presidential election. Trump is also charged with a conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding” at which the collected results of the presidential election were to be counted and certified on Jan. 6, 2021. And the third conspiracy, the indictment said, was a “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”

• “A self-coup, using lawyers instead of soldiers”

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ Trump Attempted a Brazen, Dead-Serious Attack on American Democracy

• Trump, aided by six specific co-conspirators, used several avenues, Smith alleges. They tried to get state governments to subvert the election results. They encouraged the creation and submission of fraudulent slates of electors. They attempted to weaponize the power of the Justice Department by standing up sham investigations. And they unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Mike Pence to exceed his powers and throw the certification of the election into turmoil. Although the charges don’t accuse Trump of criminal misconduct in inciting the mob that attacked the Capitol, they do say that he “exploit[ed] the violence and chaos.”

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ This Is the Case: Special Counsel Jack Smith has sounded the call, but voters must answer it if they wish to preserve American democracy.

• Trump is accused of multiple conspiracies against the United States, all designed to keep him in power against the will of the voters and in violation of the Constitution. The former president—once our chief executive, the commander in chief, the leader we entrusted with the keys to nuclear hell—is accused of knowing that he lost a free and fair election, and, rather than transferring power to a duly elected successor, engaging in criminal plots against our democracy, all while firing up a mob that would later storm the Capitol. (The Trump campaign issued a rambling statement that called the charges “fake.”)

• Long before now, however, Americans should have reached the conclusion, with or without a trial, that Trump is a menace to the United States and poisonous to our society. (Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio once referred to Trump as “cultural heroin,” but that was before he decided to seek power in the Republican Party.) The GOP base, controlled by Trump’s cult of personality, will likely never admit its mistake: As my colleague Peter Wehner writes, Trump’s record of “lawlessness and depravity” means nothing to Republicans. But other Republicans now, more than ever, face a moment of truth. They must decide if they are partisans or patriots. They can no longer claim to be both.

=> ↺ Gannett ☛ Trump allies charged in connection with conspiracy to breach voting machines in Michigan

• DePerno and Rendon face multiple felony charges including undue possession of a voting machine. They were arraigned in Oakland County Circuit Court and released on a personal bond.

=> ↺ Vox ☛ Trump was just indicted for trying to steal the 2020 election

• The indictment is the product of a months-long investigation in which Smith’s team questioned several high-profile members of Trump’s circle, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner and former White House communications director Hope Hicks. It follows the House January 6 committee’s investigation last year, which concluded that Trump incited the insurrection and conspired to defraud the US government, referring him and other associates to the DOJ for prosecution.

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ Former President Trump indicted on charges tied to 2020 election

• The indictment had been expected since Mr. Trump said in mid-July that the Justice Department informed him he was a target of its long-running Jan. 6 investigation. A bipartisan House committee that spent months investigating the run-up to the Capitol riot also recommended prosecuting Mr. Trump on charges, including aiding an insurrection and obstructing an official proceeding.

=> ↺ The Drone Girl ☛ The latest Air Force recruiting strategy: endorsing pro drone racer

• For the first time, USAF will endorse a DRL Pilot, who will fly as the official U.S. Air Force Team Pilot and engage in special appearances with veterans and military families around DRL race events. That USAF team pilot will be prominently featured in the upcoming 2023-24 DRL Algorand World Championship Season.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Elon Musk’s Unmatched Power in the Stars

• But concerns among Ukrainian and Western officials about Mr. Musk’s hold over the technology have grown, coming to a head last fall when he repeatedly made comments about the war that raised questions about his commitment to Starlink’s service in Ukraine.

=> ↺ The Economist ☛ Jihadists in Congo are extending their reach in the region

• Moreover, the attack highlights how jihadists have been able to spread their influence across a large triangle of east Africa —roughly from Somalia to Mozambique and Congo—often by exploiting local grievances. Uganda, which is at a nexus of this terrorist activity, has been attacked several times. The latest is its worst since 2010, when suicide-bombers from al-Shabab, a Somalia affiliate of al-Qaeda, killed more than 70 people in two almost-simultaneous attacks in Kampala, the capital. Uganda’s army, which has battled al-Shabab in Somalia for years, officially lost 54 soldiers (though the real number of casualties is understood to be far higher) when the group attacked one of its bases there in May. But it is the ADF that worries the Uganda’s security chiefs most. “This threat is more important to us, because it was born here,” says a senior Ugandan official.

=> ↺ RTL ☛ European nations to evacuate citizens after Niger coup

• France and Italy prepared on Tuesday to fly out their citizens and other Europeans from Niger, six days after a coup toppled one of the last pro-Western leaders in the jihadist-plagued Sahel and stoked anti-French demonstrations.

• in the region’s third military takeover in as many years, President Mohamed Bazoum was overthrown by his own guard, triggering alarm bells in France, Niger’s former colonial power and traditional ally.

=> ↺ JURIST ☛ EU member states evacuate citizens from Niger amidst mounting instability triggered by coup

• Meanwhile, Burkina Faso and Mali have indicated their support for Niger’s military takeover. According to a joint statement, “[A]ny military intervention against Niger will be considered equivalent to a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali.” Burkina Faso and Mali also previously overthrew their respective governments in 2022 and 2020.

• The joint statement came only a day after the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) issued an ultimatum threatening to use force if the military force did not relinquish authority within 7 days.

=> ↺ The Hill ☛ Who’s buying up land around major Air Force base in California? ‘We have no idea’

• “We have no idea who they are,” Garamendi said. “Flannery Associates is opaque. We have no idea where the nearly $900 million dollars has come from. They bought well over 55,000 acres of land in the area and [the purchase] raises a major concern.”

• [...]

• Garamendi alleges the lawsuit filed by the company against landowners is a “classic SLAPP suit specifically designed to force the landowners to lawyer up,” and ultimately rack up legal fees until they are exhausted and agree to sell.

=> ↺ The Telegraph UK ☛ Drones have shredded Russia’s air defences – and America could be next

• Both sides also fly small, speedy racing drones that are just powerful enough to haul a grenade-size explosive—and damage an armored vehicle. Smaller drones are controlled by nearby operators holding a controller and seeing what the drone sees through its camera. Bigger drones follow satellite-navigation coordinates.

• The great advantage of a drone, besides its low cost, is its small size and – believe it or not – low speed compared to a supersonic manned warplane. Air-defense radars are optimized for detecting large aircraft and missiles. And they have so-called “speed gates” that ignore very slow objects such as birds. It’s speed gates that make it so hard for radars to detect slowly-drifting spy balloons.

=> ↺ The Irish News ☛ Michigan prosecutors charge Trump allies with vote machine tampering

• Five vote tabulators were taken from three counties in Michigan to a hotel room, according to documents released last year by Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office. Investigators found that the tabulators were broken into and “tests” were performed on the equipment. They said that DePerno was there.

=> ↺ Deutsche Welle ☛ India: Several killed in Hindu-Muslim clashes near Delhi

• The unrest spread Tuesday to neighboring Gurugram, which is about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from New Delhi. Along with imposing a curfew and deploying troops, authorities said they ordered schools and colleges to remain shut as a precautionary measure.

• Mobile internet service was also cut in parts of Haryana.

=> ↺ Atlantic Council ☛ Ukraine is finally freeing itself from centuries of Russian imperialism

• There are a number of key factors behind Ukraine’s post-Soviet transformation from totalitarian society to a more recognizably European identity. At the grass roots level, Ukraine has experienced three revolutionary protest movements that have empowered the public and redefined the relationship between the state and society. The 1990 Granite Revolution, 2004 Orange Revolution, and 2014 Euromaidan Revolution all championed the fundamental democratic principles of individual human rights and the rule of law. Nothing comparable has taken place in Russia, hence the passivity and almost complete lack of agency that characterizes modern Russian society.

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ The Profiteers of Armageddon

• Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex.

War in Ukraine

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ At least 10 Russian military enlistment offices set on fire in past day — Meduza

• In the past day, at least 11 military enlistment offices were set on fire, according to Mediazona’s calculations.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Poland says two Belarusian helicopters violated its airspace — Meduza

• Two Belarusian helicopters violated Poland’s airspace on Tuesday, the Polish National Defense Ministry has reported.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ A guidebook to Russian wartime oligarchs How Russia’s richest businessmen profit from the war in Ukraine — Meduza

• Independent Russian investigative outlet Proekt has put out a “guidebook to Russian wartime oligarchs,” which details the “contributions” the wealthiest Russian nationals have made so far to the war in Ukraine. Proekt journalists studied state contracts and other open sources of information, discovering in the process that at least 81 of Russia’s richest businessmen are involved in supplying Russia’s military-industrial complex, its army, and its National Guard, though some deny their involvement with the defense economy and even openly criticize the war. Meduza shares an English-language synopsis of Proekt’s investigation.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ St. Petersburg man arrested after setting fire to military enlistment office and trying to drive car through its gates — Meduza

• A St. Petersburg man set fire to the entrance of a military enlistment office in the city, multiple Russian news outlets reported on Monday.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Zelensky says Putin ‘won’t be around’ long enough to wage drawn-out war against Ukraine — Meduza

• Vladimir Putin won’t be around long enough to wage a drawn-out war against Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday in an interview with the Brazilian TV channel GloboNews.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ ‘This injustice has scorched us’ Kirill Radchenko was killed in Central African Republic while making a film about Wagner Group. Five years later, his father speaks about the struggle to bring the Russian justice system into motion. — Meduza

• Five years ago, Kirill Radchenko, a cameraman specializing in military documentaries, traveled to Central African Republic, together with filmmaker Alexander Rastorguev and journalist Orkhan Jemal. The three of them were planning to make a documentary about Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group and what Russian mercenaries were doing in the region. Just three days into their trip, the entire crew was killed, having never made it to the gold mining site linked to Prigozhin. Five years later, their murder remains unsolved. Radchenko’s bereaved parents believe this is due to Prigozhin’s powerful connections, which prevent law enforcement from prosecuting the case. Lilia Yapparova spoke with the cinematographer’s father, Alexander Radchenko, for the independent media cooperative Bereg. With Bereg’s permission, Meduza has translated Radchenko’s recollections of his son, his professional choices, and the two surviving parents’ disillusionment with the Russian justice system following Kirill’s death. In our translation, Radchenko’s remarks have been edited lightly for clarity.

Environment

=> ↺ FAIR ☛ Humans Might Be About to Break the Ocean? Don’t Stop the Presses

• “I really wish that journalists and editors took this as seriously as scientists do, and reported it loudly and accurately, taking the time to get the facts right,” Foley wrote. “The planet is in trouble, and we need to have the best possible information.”

• Unfortunately for the planet and those who inhabit it, corporate media would rather look the other way, at worst, and offer scary clickbait headlines with few connections to actionable policy at best.

=> ↺ El País ☛ The heat that is coming for us

• Another recently published book confronted me with the magnitude of this threat. The title is justifiably sensationalist: The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell combines reports with popular science chapters to communicate how vulnerable we are to the extremes of heat that climate change is already causing. At the beginning of the book, there is a list of compelling data, one piece of which I highlight as highly relevant to Latin America: currently, about 30 million people live in areas of extreme heat (places where the average annual temperature reaches 86 degrees Fahrenheit, or 30 degrees Celsius); in 2070, there will be 2 billion people living in such areas. This estimate does not mean that the population will increase in those places, but rather that the hot regions will expand enormously, occupying most of India, Southeast Asia, the Sahel in Africa and tropical America. In addition to harming the health and quality of life of almost a quarter of the world’s population, it will compromise agricultural productivity, leading to climate migration and sociopolitical crises.

=> ↺ PNAS ☛ Future of the human climate niche

• We show that for thousands of years, humans have concentrated in a surprisingly narrow subset of Earth’s available climates, characterized by mean annual temperatures around ∼13 °C. This distribution likely reflects a human temperature niche related to fundamental constraints. We demonstrate that depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, over the coming 50 y, 1 to 3 billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 y. Absent climate mitigation or migration, a substantial part of humanity will be exposed to mean annual temperatures warmer than nearly anywhere today.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ The Economist ☛ What if Germany stopped making cars?

• All these problems are coming together in Wolfsburg, home to Volkswagen’s headquarters—and thus the roof in Mr Schäfer’s metaphor. According to press reports, orders for the group’s EVs are between 30% and 70% below plans, depending on the marque. The firm still has to sort out its software problems: in May it again shook up the management team of Cariad, its digital unit. In China’s fast-growing market for EVs, the VW brand is an also-ran, with a market share of 2%.

=> ↺ Vice Media Group ☛ DIY Scientists and Institutions Are Racing to Replicate the Room-Temperature Superconductor

• In a preprint posted online on July 22, which has not been peer reviewed, a team of Korean researchers claimed that they achieved this monumental breakthrough using LK-99, a material made of lead and apatite with a twist of copper. The paper gained massive attention online, with many jumping to the conclusion that humanity had reached a new watershed. As Motherboard reported last week, many experts in this field have expressed doubt and skepticism over the preliminary results and have urged caution until other teams independently confirm the discovery.

=> ↺ David Rosenthal ☛ This Could Be An Issue

• It would seem that the bill would therefore require miners and validators within US jurisdiction to blacklist transactions that involve a wallet the identity of whose owner is unclear. Thus it appears that the bill implements Nicholas Weaver’s proposal from two years ago in How to Start Disrupting Cryptocurrencies: “Mining” Is Money Transmission:

• So a miner who creates a block is explicitly making decisions about which transactions to confirm. This successful miner … is a money transmitter.

=> ↺ New Statesman ☛ Abandoning net zero would be a historic mistake

• But we can already see from the exponential growth in electric cars – where demand outstrips supply – that the answer is to create better, more desirable products that happen also to have lower carbon emissions. Incentives matter. We need more carrot and less stick.

• The key enabler of net zero is the power system. When you have net zero power, you can use it to decarbonise the rest of the economy. Through clear political commitments and progressive policymaking, the UK has established itself as a world leader on this. We are decarbonising our power sector faster than any other developed economy, building the world’s largest offshore wind market in the process.

=> ↺ DeSmog ☛ Polluters Rely on Old Rhetoric to Block Clean Energy Future

• The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering proposals aimed at reducing climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from existing coal and gas-fueled power plants. Power plants are the second-largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States, and the pollution standards, which are open for public comment until August 8, will mark a new milestone in climate action. But the United States’ biggest polluters and their political allies are pushing back — just as they have resisted every other landmark shift in the 60-year history of federal air pollution control.

• “This administration is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability,” declared Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-WV) in a May 10 statement.

Overpopulation

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Protests In Southeastern Iran As Water Crisis Deepens

• Diminishing water supplies are seen as an existential threat to Iran, where poor water management, drought, and corruption-ridden infrastructure projects have contributed to water scarcity.

=> ↺ The Irish News ☛ Government urged to support circular economy as world hits Earth Overshoot Day

• The landmark date falls on August 2 this year, marking when humanity’s demand on nature exceeds Earth’s biocapacity for the year.

• It comes as a report from Green Alliance found that UK Government policies are among the factors preventing innovative businesses from scaling the circular economy and stopping business models from being adopted more widely.

• The campaign group spoke to 10 companies, which are cutting carbon and reducing waste, finding that a lack of understanding and imagination among policy makers as well as ingrained consumer behaviours are also barriers to preventing growth.

=> ↺ Earth Overshoot Day 2023: How our daily water use can #MoveTheDate

• Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s demand for natural resources surpasses what the earth can regenerate in one year. This means we are living on credit for five whole months and depleting the earth’s resources further and further. This alarming fact calls for urgent action to reduce our ecological footprint and preserve the planet for future generations.

=> ↺ Le Monde ☛ Earth Overshoot Day: as of August 2, humanity enters ‘ecological debt’

• This year, humanity is entering into “ecological debt” starting from August 2 and will remain so for 151 days according to calculations by the North American organization Global Footprint Network. This Overshoot Day marks the date from which humanity has consumed all the resources that ecosystems are capable of producing in one year. The nonprofit estimates that it would take the equivalent of 1.7 planet Earth to regenerate our consumption of resources.

=> ↺ How Does the Food System Impact Earth Overshoot Day?

• Our collective food choices and agricultural practices play a pivotal role in rebalancing our use of resources. By embracing sustainable and eco-conscious alternatives, we can work toward a balanced and harmonious relationship with our planet’s resources.

=> ↺ When is Earth Overshoot Day 2023?

• Earth Overshoot Day 2023 falls on the 2nd of August. By this date, we have already used up the resources that Earth is able to generate this year. If we continue to overconsume, we will need 1.7 Earths to sustain us. We can also look at Country Overshoot Days to see which countries are consuming the least sustainably. As you can see from the diagram below, many of the western countries including Canada, the USA and the UK have overshoot days in the first few months of the year. While countries such as Jamaica and Ecuador have much later dates, sadly not a single country is operating within sustainable boundaries.

=> ↺ Earth Overshoot Day 2023

• Switzerland’s Overshoot Day 2023 was on 13 May. From this date onwards, Switzerland is living on credit at the expense of future generations. If the world’s population had the same lifestyle as Swiss citizens, the resources of three planets would be necessary to ensure its existence.

=> ↺ Overpopulation ☛ Earth Overshoot Day reminds us how far we are from sustainability

• The world’s richest countries use up their fair share much earlier in the year. Qatar, thanks largely to water desalination, air-con and a lot of oil wealth, reached overshoot day on 10 February (Figure 1). If everyone consumed like Qataris, we would need nearly 10 Earths. In North America, the date was 13 March, and 3 April in Sweden. To be sustainable, everyone would have to consume at the level of people in Kyrgystan or Nicaragua.

Finance

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ Sanctions on China, Export Controls on Rare Earths for the US: Two, It Turns Out, Can Tango

• If Washington intended to bully Beijing economically and indefinitely, July 3 was a rude awakening.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Broken Ownership

• The rationale was:

• 1. You cannot be responsible for something you don’t control. You need the mandate.

• 2. You cannot use that mandate effectively over something you don’t understand. You need knowledge.

• 3. You gain experience from running something and learn from the mistakes when things go wrong. You don’t use that knowledge to optimize it if it’s not your problem. You need to be held responsible.

• This article examines the scenarios where 1-2 elements of the ownership trio are missing. Unfortunately, broken ownership is much more common than true ownership. There’s an anonymous poll at the end to share your opinion about which one is the worst! 😈

=> ↺ Gizmodo ☛ Facebook and Instagram Begin Their Canadian News Blackout

• According to a statement released Tuesday, Meta will begin blocking access to links and content posted by any Canadian news publisher on Instagram and Facebook. Users of those platforms based in Canada will also be unable to access news links and content published by international outlets. The drastic measures, which Meta claims it is taking in order to comply with Canada’s recently passed Online News Act, amount to a near-total news blackout of Canadians who use Meta products.

=> ↺ CBC ☛ Meta permanently ending news availability on its platforms in Canada starting today

• Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has been signalling the move was coming after the government passed its Online News Act, Bill C-18, in June.

• The law requires big tech giants like Google and Meta to pay media outlets for news content they share or otherwise repurpose on their platforms.

=> ↺ Vox ☛ Meta and Google are blocking links to news in Canada. The US might be next.

• Instagram isn’t glitching — this is a feature, not a bug. Meta, Instagram’s owner, is just making good on its promise to block Canadian users from seeing or sharing links to news content on its platforms, starting with a small test pool of users that Fenlon, that CBC reader who alerted him, and Krichel apparently just happened to fall into. Google says it will do the same, and conducted its own link-blocking test run in February. So while the application of Meta’s blockade has been spotty in Fenlon’s case — he says he can see some publications’ feeds but not others, and he can see them all on Facebook just fine — it may not be long before he and every other Canadian user can’t see any news links on Instagram, Facebook, or Google at all.

• [...]

• The government legislation that both companies are protesting is called the Online News Act, or C-18. The intention is to give the long-suffering journalism industry a little cash boost, likely at the expense of two companies that are partially responsible for its woes. It accomplishes this by compelling them to pay Canadian news outlets if they host links to their content. (Fenlon’s employer, which is a public broadcaster, officially supports the Online News Act.) That’s why Meta and Google are threatening to remove news links for all Canadian users, permanently, if the law applies to them when it takes effect, likely by the end of this year.

=> ↺ Variety ☛ Twitter/X Sues Hate-Speech Research Group Over Claims That Hateful, Racist Content Has Proliferated Under Elon Musk’s Ownership

• A copy of X Corp.’s lawsuit against CCDH, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available at this link. The complaint accuses CCDH of breach of contract, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, intentional interference with contractual relations and inducing breach of contract. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages and an injunction barring CCDH from accessing, using or disclosing data provided by X/Twitter to Brandwatch.

=> ↺ The Register UK ☛ Twitter sues Brit non-profit, claims hate-speech reports scared off advertisers

• “Tellingly, after CCDH published this article, Twitter did not spend its time and resources addressing the hate and disinformation that CCDH had identified, despite Twitter’s purported commitment to addressing hate speech on its platform,” wrote Kaplan.

• “But your July 20 letter doesn’t stop there,” Kaplan continues. “You go on to state that there is ‘no doubt that CCDH intends to harm Twitter’s business’ and warn that you are ‘investigating’ whether CCDH has violated Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act. That threat is bogus and you know it. None of the examples cited in your letter constitutes the kind of advertisement or commercial speech that would trigger the Lanham Act.”

• Kaplan concludes by saying CCDH is prepared to fight.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Uber Posts 14% Rise in Revenue as Growth Slows

• Uber’s biggest growth in the quarter was in ride-hailing, with revenue rising 38 percent. Its active customers grew 12 percent to 137 million, while the number of trips taken in the past three months rose 22 percent to 2.3 billion.

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ Uber’s cost cuts and layoffs have yielded its first operating profit ever

• Uber, founded in 2009, has incurred significant losses since its inception. For years, the San Francisco-based company, flush with venture capital funding, burned through billions of dollars in cash to rack up market share and acquire customers fast. The margins in food delivery and ride-hailing are thin, because the money is split between customers, drivers, and the company. Uber’s idea was to rack up plenty of customers and dominate its field in order to achieve profitability.

=> ↺ Trail Of Bits ☛ How AI will affect cybersecurity: What we told the CFTC

• The second meeting of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) on July 18 focused on the effects of AI on the financial sector. During the meeting, I explained that AI has the potential to fundamentally change the balance between cyber offense and defense, and that we need security-focused benchmarks and taxonomies to properly assess AI capabilities and risks.

=> ↺ The Strategist ☛ The rising value of Papua New Guinea’s strategic geography

• The White House appears cognisant of the need to engage Pacific leaders across a comprehensive definition of security, so that the offer of an elevated US defence partnership can be politically sustainable in PNG, increasing the likelihood of it achieving local support. Yet that need shouldn’t obscure the fact that PNG’s primary value to the US is a function of its strategic geography. The access negotiated under the agreement serves an underlying strategic purpose, integral to the US–Australia alliance, as the US Indo-Pacific Command reshapes its force posture in response to China’s continuing military build-up and prepares the theatre for the future possibility of armed conflict on a regionwide scale.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ VOA News ☛ Putin Concocts a Decline in European Public Support for Ukraine

• That is false.

• Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, EU member states and European institutions have provided more than 70 billion euros (more than $77 billion) in humanitarian and military assistance to Ukraine. Four million Ukrainian refugees are currently living in EU countries.

=> ↺ Digital First Media ☛ Donald Trump made ‘knowingly’ false claim about Michigan election, indictment says

• The 45-page indictment from Jack Smith, special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice, revealed four criminal charges against Trump focused on his alleged efforts to subvert the results of the November 2020 election. One three-page section of the document focused on Michigan, where Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, spread dubious assertions that fraud influenced the outcome.

• The indictment contended that Trump knew one of his main claims against the results in Detroit, a Democratic stronghold, was incorrect, but he continued to make it publicly.

=> ↺ Digital Music News ☛ Watch Out TikTok—Meta’s Reels Drawing 200 Billion Views a Day

• Meta attributes the growth of Reels to its innate understanding of its users through its use of algorithms. “We can show Reels that we think you’re interested in based on our discovery engines,” Justin Osofsky, Meta’s Head of Online Sales, Operations, and Partnerships told Reuters in a recent interview. The short-form video format has exploded in the last five years as TikTok has become the dominant social media platform among the 18-24 age cohort.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Two Iranian Journalists Sentenced As Media Clampdown Continues

• Both journalists were charged with “propaganda against the regime,” “insulting the supreme leader,” and “disturbing public opinion.” The sentences were issued by Branch 26 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court, presided over by Judge Iman Afshari.

• The sentencing of Shafiei and Soltanbeigi is part of a broad push by Iranian authorities to use the judiciary to silence critics, including journalists, human rights activists, and opposition figures.

=> ↺ El País ☛ Musk threatens to sue researchers who documented the rise in hateful tweets

• The center is a nonprofit with offices in the U.S. and United Kingdom. It regularly publishes reports on hate speech, extremism or harmful behavior on social media platforms like X, TikTok or Facebook.

=> ↺ The Globe And Mail CA ☛ Chinese feminists fight harassment and government censorship to carve out space online

• For many women, China’s internet can feel like being on an uneven playing field. For years now, feminists have been subject to intense censorship, with Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, deleting the accounts of more than 20 prominent activists in 2021 on the grounds that they were promoting “extreme and ideological content.”

=> ↺ Outspoken activists are using an old playbook to challenge Massachusetts libraries

• According to the American Library Association, Massachusetts saw 45 attempts to censor books and other library resources in 2022 — the fourth highest number of any state. That number is even higher, according to the Massachusetts Library Association’s own survey, which reported 78 formal and informal challenges to books and programming last year. The surge in attempts to restrict access to library materials has alarmed free speech advocates, led to new legislation at the State House, and brought renewed attention to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling about censorship in schools.

=> ↺ El País ☛ WeChat, the Chinese ‘everything app’ that inspired Elon Musk to turn Twitter into X

• From a practical perspective, WeChat saves users time and storage space. However, it does so at the cost of their privacy: the app knows your location, your habits, your tastes, what you talk about and endless personal information that the users share from the moment they open their eyes until they go back to bed. It is considered by many experts to be the most complete and intelligent data collection tool in the world, one that has helped Beijing organize all aspects of daily life and maintain control of the country. This became evident during the pandemic: under the strict zero Covid-19 policy, it was mandatory to show, for absolutely everything (even to enter your place of residence), a health code generated by the application, which was key to detecting possible positive cases and decree confinements.

• WeChat’s massive reach into every corner of its users’ lives has raised concerns about the censorship and the surveillance that authorities can exercise through it. Posts that question the official discourse disappear in a matter of minutes, and there are increasingly more critical voices whose accounts have been suspended for speaking against the government. Bear in mind that the success of the app is due, to a large extent, to the particular digital environment of the Asian giant, where the services that people use every day in Europe and the United States are blocked – as well as many international media outlets, including EL PAÍS.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ Journalists see a threat to the First Amendment in DeSantis’s bid to quash Disney’s lawsuit

• In a friend-of-the-court amicus brief filed Friday (July 28), RCFP urged the court toss out the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case and unequivocally side with Disney for two reasons: firstly, because the First Amendment explicitly prohibit governments from retaliating against a speaker, as DeSantis and other Florida leaders did against Disney. And secondly, because “Disney has established a prima facie case of retaliation against their protected speech” and the state “has admitted as much.”

=> ↺ Variety ☛ Vice Media Closes $350 Million Sale to Investors Fortress, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital

• As previously announced, the new owners of Vice Media are funds managed by affiliates of Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital. The recently installed co-CEOs of Vice Media Group heralded the deal close as “the start of an exciting new chapter” for the Brooklyn-based company.

• Vice Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May, after months of struggling to pay its bills. It’s a fire sale for the company, which in 2017 had boasted a valuation of $5.7 billion.

=> ↺ VOA News ☛ Haitian Journalists at Risk From Arson, Kidnapping, Attack

• About 50 men armed with assault-style rifles attacked the town of Liancourt, about 110 kilometers from the capital, Port-au-Prince, in the early hours of July 23 and burned down the station along with dozens of houses, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ.

=> ↺ CPJ ☛ At least 7 Ugandan journalists assaulted, robbed at news conferences

• Ugandan authorities should investigate and prosecute those responsible for assaulting, robbing, and harassing seven journalists at two separate news conferences, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Omicron Limited ☛ Opinion: No leg to stand on—why the US must reconsider its stance on climate reparations

• After over 30 years of pressure and negotiations, an agreement to provide funding for climate-related loss and damage was reached at the United Nations climate conference in 2022 (COP 27). Although the scope of the fund and the funding arrangements are yet to be finalized, the establishment of the Loss and Damage Fund has been described as ground-breaking.

=> ↺ Hindustan Times ☛ US-Taliban talks focus on economy, human rights, anti-drug trafficking

• The U.S. side repeated concerns about “deteriorating” human rights and called anew on the Taliban to reverse bans on girls’ secondary education and womens’ employment and for the release of detained Americans, the State Department said in a statement.

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ Try That In A Small Town Where Good Ol’ Boys Are Raised Up Right To Lynch and Stuff

• Currently stirring the culture war pot is a new, incendiary, “almost comically offensive” pro-lynching anthem by country singer Jason Aldean, who posed with his redneck band at the site of an infamous Tennessee lynching to flash videos of protesters and bray that if you “cuss out a cop” or “stomp on the flag,” “See how far you make it down the road,” which isn’t threatening at all so why is he being “cancelled”? Maybe ’cause he’s a racist “garbage fire of a human being”?

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ RTL ☛ Luxembourg scores highly in EU [Internet] access ranking

• As we mark World Wide Web Day, a time dedicated to acknowledging the profound impact of the [Internet] on our daily lives, it is vital to consider the continued challenges of digital exclusion across the European Union. The latest Eurostat report for 2022 brings to light the significant disparities in [Internet] affordability among member nations, with Luxembourg leading in providing affordable [Internet] access to its citizens.

• In 2022, 2.4% of the EU population were unable to afford an [Internet] connection, a 0.3% improvement from 2021 (2.7%). The situation improved further for the population at risk of poverty, with 7.6% unable to afford [Internet] access, down by 0.8% from the previous year (8.4%).

=> ↺ RIPE ☛ Mapping the Geopolitical Internet

• Mapping the dialectical relationship between the Internet and rivalries of power and influence across territories calls on expertise from a variety of disciplines. On the RIPE Labs Podcast, Louis Pétiniaud discusses how he and colleagues at GEODE are investigating the geopolitical Internet.

=> ↺ Lionel Dricot ☛ Splitting the Web

• A web which boils down to Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape, a complete cyberpunk dystopia.

• Then there’s the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.

• Between those two extremes, the gap is widening. You have to choose your camp. When browsing on the “normal web”, it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.

Monopolies

=> ↺ The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation

• A DRM-free audiobook to halt the [Internet]‘s enshittification and throw it into reverse (Amazon won’t sell it!)

=> ↺ The Economist ☛ Is there more to Alphabet than Google search?

• In the short run, probably. Like all heart-in-mouth moments, though, the chatbot panic invites broader questions: about the current state of one of the world’s biggest firms, its future and—as Google turns 25 in September—about the demands of different stages of corporate life.

Copyrights

=> ↺ BBC ☛ New AI systems collide with copyright law

• Together with cartoonist Sarah Anderson and illustrator Karla Ortiz, Ms McKernan has filed a lawsuit against Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, an online art community with its own generator called DreamUp.

• It adds to a growing stack of lawsuits against AI firms, which are testing issues of copyright.

• Earlier this year Getty Images filed a case against Stability AI, alleging that the company unlawfully copied and processed 12 million of the company’s images without permission.

=> ↺ Gizmodo ☛ Judge Says Reddit Doesn’t Have to NARC on Users Who Discussed Torrenting

• Movie studios were served a big loss in their quest to take down pirates. This weekend, a federal court tossed a subpoena in a case against the internet service provider Grande that would require Reddit to reveal the identities of anonymous users that torrent movies.

• The case was originally filed in 2021 by 20 movie producers against Grande Communications in the Western District of Texas federal court. The lawsuit claims that Grande is committing copyright infringement against the producers for allegedly ignoring the torrenting of 45 of their movies that occurred on its networks. As part of the case, the plaintiffs attempted to subpoena Reddit for IP addresses and user data for accounts that openly discussed torrenting on the platform. This weekend, Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler denied the subpoena—meaning Reddit is off the hook.

=> ↺ Tedium ☛ The Curator’s Code, Reconsidered

• Meanwhile, there was the related issue of bloggers uncovering interesting things and then those things appearing everywhere, with no due credit shared. Popova assuredly ran into this problem.

• The Curator’s Code was an attempt to solve this. As the initial version of the site, published in March of 2012, stated: [...]

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