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● Leftover Links 10/08/2023: CNET is Burning Past Journalism

Posted in News Roundup at 8:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

=> ↺ Niels Provos ☛ Launching Activ8te’s Quantum Breach at DEF CON 31

• The call for soundtrack submissions for DEF CON 31 this year provided an opportunity to produce industrial techno just made for DEF CON. In a dark basement 0×30 miles away from Detroit, Jake Lizzio of Signals Music Studio and I produced this track in a few days – just in time for the submission deadline. Whether or not it made the cut is something you’ll have to find out on your own. Were they able to resist this compelling and absolutely not humble pitch?

=> ↺ Pro Publica ☛ What It’s Like to Report on Repatriation

• We had reached the top of a sandstone mesa when Theresa Pasqual set down her hiking pole and scanned the storied canyon before us.

• We could see the centuries-old buildings of Chaco Canyon, a site in northwest New Mexico that her tribe’s ancestors, the Ancestral Puebloans, had occupied before eventually establishing other communities in the region. Pueblo Bonito, the canyon’s largest structure, sprawled from near the base of the bluff where we stood, its walls arcing around hundreds of hollowed rooms.

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ Ken’s Rights? Research Shows Barbie Is Surprisingly Accurate on How ‘Men’s rights Activists’ Are Radicalized

• In the Barbie movie, we open with a picture of a perfect Barbieland where (almost) everyone is happy…

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Pedal Car Vs Ministry Of Transport

• [Tim] from the “Way Out West” Youtube channels has started a fun project — building a wooden pedal-car heavily inspired by “Bugsy Malone”. The kids-sized gangsters in that movie got around in kid-sized pedal cars. Apparently kid-sized [Tim] just loved the idea, but just didn’t have the skills or tools to try to build one. But the time has come, and he has spent years putting together a workshop, tools, and skills.

Education

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ ‘So much need’: How one group is helping teachers with mental health

• What’s the best way to show support and respect for educators? For one group in Colorado, the answer is to provide free mental health care that empowers teachers.

=> ↺ Chris Coyier ☛ How have you stayed motivated to work on the same thing in the same space?

• I like the question because, frankly, I do have a decent tenacity for my projects. CSS-Tricks was about 15 years old when I sold it. It’s been almost 12 years since I started working on CodePen, and that’s still my main project every single day. Dave and I will darn near hit 600 weeks of ShopTalk show this year.

• Here’s some self-reflection on how that works for me: [...]

Hardware

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Taiwan’s Chip Giant Will Build a Plant in Germany

• TSMC, the world’s largest maker of semiconductors, said it would invest 3.5 billion euros ($3.8 billion) and own 70 percent of the joint venture, in Dresden. The three other companies — Robert Bosch and Infineon Technologies, both based in Germany, and NXP Semiconductors of the Netherlands — will each control 10 percent.

• The combined private and public investment, “including strong support from the European Union and German government,” is expected to total €10 billion, the company said.

=> ↺ Jim Nielsen ☛ Stealth Airplanes & Best Practices

• tldr; I quite enjoyed the (audio)book. It’s a fascinating look at how a collective group of people can find innovative solutions at the intersection of science and technology, creating something that is almost more of an art form in the beginning and only later becomes a common, standardized form.

• Suffice it to say, there are lots of interesting parallels in the book to creating software.

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Share Your Projects: Leave Breadcrumbs

• I’ve talked about a low-effort way to document your projects by taking plenty of pictures, and about ways that your PCBs could be documenting themselves. Today, let’s talk about a quick and easy way that you could help other hackers as you go through your own hacking adventures — leaving breadcrumbs.

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ 3D Print Your Own Seiko-Style “Magic Lever” Energy Harvester

• Back in 1956, Seiko created their “magic lever” as an integral part of self-winding mechanical watches, which were essentially mechanical energy harvesters. The magic lever is a type of ratcheting arrangement that ensures a main gear only ever advances in a single direction. [Robert Murray-Smith] goes into detail in this video (here’s a link cued up to 1:50 where he begins discussing the magic lever)

=> ↺ Hackaday ☛ Why VR As Monitor Replacement Is Likely To Be Terrible For A While Yet

• Putting on a headset and using virtual monitors in VR instead of physical ones is a use case that pops up, but is it really something feasible? [Karl Guttag], who has long experience and a deep understanding of the technical challenges that face such devices, doesn’t seem to think so.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ Pokémon Company Uses Fan Music In Trailer Without Crediting The Fan

• If you go take a look at all the different posts we’ve done on the topic of Pokémon, you will be left with one undeniable conclusion: the people behind Pokémon content take IP rights very seriously. This has particularly been true when it comes to some of the franchise’s most dedicated fans trying to express their fandom by creating cool things. Ownership is everything here and the Pokémon people will simply not countenance anyone using its creation, because that’s wrong.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Heart Attacks Are Rising in Young Adults – Slashdot

• National Geographic: Research does show that heart attacks, also called myocardial infarctions, are on the rise in younger people. Common symptoms include chest pain or discomfort; pain that radiates into the jaw, neck, back or arms; shortness of breath; and feeling weak or faint.

=> ↺ Axios ☛ Impact of new pill to treat postpartum depression will depend on price

• The approval of the first-ever pill treating postpartum depression on Friday was hailed as a significant milestone, but it was quickly tempered by questions around how much the drug will cost.

=> ↺ International Business Times ☛ ChatGPT, Google Bard could fuel deadly mental illnesses: research

• New research has discovered that AI (artificial intelligence) platforms including OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Bard can fuel deadly mental illnesses. According to a few experiments, these platforms are providing dangerous advice regarding eating disorders.

=> ↺ Pro Publica ☛ This PA Doctor Has Been Investigated at Every Level. How Is He Still Practicing?

• Cheryl Lee Carr clutched her phone, willing it to ring. The last time she’d answered it, a hospital surgeon told her he didn’t know if he could save her mother’s leg, let alone her life. But he would try to stop the hemorrhaging from her major leg artery, punctured by a doctor at a nearby clinic.

• Carr had spent that morning in February 2020 at the Lehigh Valley Vascular Institute in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, waiting as her 82-year-old mother underwent what was supposed to be a simple procedure to clear plaque from her arteries. More than four hours in, Carr knew something was wrong. She pushed past the front desk to find her dazed mother in a recovery room, two clinic employees holding a bloody compress over a leg that had turned deep purple.

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ Bola Tinubu, Nigerian President and ECOWAS Chair, Laundered Millions for Heroin Dealers

• Before leading the charge for intervention, ECOWAS chair Bola Tinubu spent years laundering millions for heroin dealers in Chicago, and has since been ensnared in numerous corruption scandals.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

=> ↺ Gizmodo ☛ ‘Hypnotized’ ChatGPT and Bard Will Convince Users to Pay Ransoms and Drive Through Red Lights

• Making matters worse, the researchers told the LLMs never to tell users about the “game” in question and to even restart said game if a user was determined to have exited. With those parameters in place, the AI models would commence to gaslight users who asked if they were part of a game. Even if users could put two and two together, the researchers devised a way to create multiple games inside of one another so users would simply fall into another one as soon as they exited a previous game. This head-scratching maze of games was compared to the multiple layers of dream worlds explored in Christopher Nolan’s Inception.

• “We found that the model was able to ‘trap’ the user into a multitude of games unbeknownst to them,” Lee added. “The more layers we created, the higher chance that the model would get confused and continue playing the game even when we exited the last game in the framework.” OpenAI and Google did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s requests for comment.

=> ↺ APNIC ☛ Large Language Models — the hardware connection

• According to Wikipedia, an LLM typically requires six FLOP per parameter and token. This translates to 6 x 175B x 300B or 3.15 x 10^23 FLOP to train the GPT-3 model. GPT-3 model took three weeks to train. Thus, it needed 5.8 x 10^16 FLOPS (Floating Point Operations per second) of compute power during that three-week duration.

• The highest-performing H100 GPU from Nvidia can do approximately ~60 TeraFLOPS. If these GPUs were 100% utilized, we require ~1000 GPUs to get 5.8 x 10^16 FLOPS. But, in many training workloads, GPU utilization hovers around 50% or less due to memory and network bottlenecks. Thus the training requires twice the number of GPUs or roughly ~2,000 H100 GPUs. The original LLM model (Table 1) was trained using an older version of the GPU, so it needed 10,000 of them.

• With thousands of GPUs, the model and the training data sets need to be partitioned among the GPUs to run in parallel. Parallelism can happen in several dimensions.

=> ↺ Axios ☛ Exclusive poll: Americans distrust AI giants

• By the numbers: Those polled prefer federal AI regulation over self-regulation by tech companies, with 82% saying they don’t trust tech executives to regulate AI.

=> ↺ Axios ☛ Zoom CEO admits mistake as terms-of-service changes raise AI fears

• Details: Zoom made changes to its terms of service back in March, but concern only spiked this past weekend after a Hacker News post highlighted that the changes appeared to give the company unbounded rights to use content to train its AI systems.

Windows Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

=> ↺ NBC ☛ [Crackers] force hospital system to take its national computer system offline

• Sixteen hospitals and more than a hundred other medical facilities across the United States are offline after the largest cyberattack on a U.S. hospital system since last year.

• Prospect Medical Holdings, a chain that owns hospitals, as well as more than 165 outpatient facilities, in California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island has taken its main computer network offline, a spokesperson said Friday.

=> ↺ The Record ☛ Israeli hospital redirects new patients following ransomware attack

• The ransomware attack on Mayanei Hayeshua Medical Center shut down its administrative computer systems but didn’t affect the medical gear.

=> ↺ The Record ☛ [Crackers] accessed 16 years of Colorado public school student data in June ransomware attack

• The Colorado Department of Higher Education (CDHE) published the bombshell revelation in a notice on Friday, saying it was attacked by a ransomware gang during an eight day period in mid-June. Also affected are certain cohorts of higher education students, as well as some recipients of General Education Development certificates and teacher’s licenses.

• The governor’s office and the Office of Information Technology did not respond to requests for comment about which ransomware group targeted the CDHE and whether a ransom was paid. No ransomware gang has taken credit for the incident.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

=> ↺ The Conversation ☛ Why Meta is allowing users to see the inner workings of its new AI chatbot

• Meta’s embrace of the open-source ethos with Llama 2 allows it to capitalise on what appears to be an approach that has worked for the company in the past. Meta’s engineers are known for their development of products to aid developers such as React and PyTorch. Both are open source and have become the industry standard. Through them, Meta has set a precedent of innovation through collaboration.

=> ↺ [Repeat] OSI Blog ☛ Meta’s LLaMa 2 license is not Open Source

• OSI is pleased to see that Meta is lowering barriers for access to powerful AI systems. Unfortunately, the tech giant has created the misunderstanding that LLaMa 2 is “open source” – it is not. Even assuming the term can be validly applied to a large language model comprising several resources of different kinds, Meta is confusing “open source” with “resources available to some users under some conditions,” two very different things. We’ve asked them to correct their misstatement.

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Silicon Angle ☛ Nvidia announces major updates to Omniverse with generative AI and OpenUSD

• Nvidia Corp. today announced a major release to Omniverse, its hyper-realistic real-time 3D graphics collaboration and simulation platform, that will allow enterprises to build better 3D models and scenes using OpenUSD and artificial intelligence.

Security

=> ↺ LWN ☛ Security updates for Wednesday

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (cjose, hdf5, and orthanc), Fedora (java-17-openjdk and seamonkey), Red Hat (curl, dbus, iperf3, kernel, kpatch-patch, libcap, libxml2, nodejs:16, nodejs:18, postgresql:10, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, and python-requests), SUSE (bluez, cjose, gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-base, gstreamer-plugins-good, gstreamer-plugins-ugly, keylime, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, pipewire, poppler, qemu, rubygem-actionpack-4_2, rubygem-actionpack-5_1, rust1.71, tomcat, webkit2gtk3, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (binutils, dotnet6, dotnet7, openssh, php-dompdf, and unixodbc).

=> ↺ National World Publishing Ltd ☛ Russia ‘prime suspect’ in cyber attack which saw names and addresses of 40M UK voters exposed – reports

• Russia is suspected to have been behind a cyber attack which exposed the data of tens of millions of voters in the UK, raising fears it was an attempt to undermine democracy.

• The Electoral Commission admitted on Tuesday (8 August) that hackers had been able to access reference copies of electoral registers from between the years 2014 and 2022 – files which contained the names and addresses of the 40 million people registered to vote during that timeframe.

• While the security breach was only made public on Tuesday (8 August), it first took place all the way back in August 2021. However, shockingly, it was more than a year before anyone noticed the cyber-attack had happened – with reports to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and National Crime Agency only made in October 2022.

=> ↺ White House Announces Efforts to Strengthen K-12 Schools’ Cybersecurity

• In a 2019 post about increasing cyber risks in K-12 schools, we cited a report, “The State of K-12 Cybersecurity: 2018 Year in Review,” that contained sobering information about cybersecurity in local school districts across the country. According to that report, in 2018, there were 122 publicly-disclosed cybersecurity incidents affecting school districts across 38 states. Not much has changed. A more recent article looking at ransomware activity in 2023 reports there being 120 attacks against school districts thus far in the year.

=> ↺ GamingOnLinux ☛ Downfall is a new ‘severe’ flaw in Intel CPUs, while AMD deal with INCEPTION

• Uh oh! Another rather serious security flaw has been found in Intel CPUs named Downfall, so here’s a bit of info on it. Additionally, AMD are also dealing with INCEPTION.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Firms using facial recognition in China face new rules, with some exceptions

• Firms using facial recognition in China will be required to obtain consent or legal permission before collecting personal information, draft regulations released Tuesday said, while stipulating the rules would not apply to some bodies.

• [...]

• At an industry expo in Beijing in June, AFP saw a number of prominent firms showcasing tech that allowed them to identify “undesirable” behaviours and scan faces from more than 100 metres (yards) away.

=> ↺ The Hindu ☛ Hyderabad activists

• Digital privacy rights advocates in Hyderabad have raised concerns over the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2023, that was passed in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday. They pointed that the move is likely to have an adverse impact on transparency, and does little to address issues of surveillance.

=> ↺ The Register UK ☛ Palantir lobbied UK pensions department for its software to tackle fraud

• US spy-tech firm Palantir launched a direct lobbying campaign targeting UK government departments, including the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

=> ↺ Silicon Angle ☛ UK Electoral Commission hack steals data on up to 40M people

• The stolen electoral data included the name and address of anyone who registered to vote between 2014 and 2022 and details of registered overseas voters. As the commission’s email systems were also accessed, the full list of personally identifiable information that may have been stolen included names, email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, web form information and any personal images sent to the commission.

=> ↺ The Register UK ☛ Northern Ireland police may have endangered its own officers by posting details online in error

• A spreadsheet containing details of serving Northern Ireland police officers was mistakenly posted online yesterday, potentially endangering the safety of officers, given the volatile politics of the region.

• The data leak involved a spreadsheet detailing the surnames and initials of all serving officers in the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), plus civilian staff members. It listed their rank or grade, plus location and department in which they work, but no other personal information such as private addresses is said to have been included.

=> ↺ WhichUK ☛ Electoral Commission falls victim to cyberattack: is your data affected?

• These registers included the name and address of anyone in the UK who registered to vote from 2014 to 2022, and some overseas voters. People who qualified to register anonymously – for example, for safety reasons – are unaffected by the breach.

=> ↺ Privacy International ☛ Privacy International raises concerns regarding Pakistan’s Personal Data Protection Bill

• Whilst we are yet to receive confirmation of the version which will proceed to the legislative process, the Bill in its current form (public version published on 19 May 2023) still contains a number of shortcomings, does not meet international human rights standards and could have grave implications for the effective protection of people and their data.

=> ↺ Futurism ☛ Zoom Insists It Wasn’t Using Private Calls to Train AI System

• By checking the agreement box, the updated TOS reads, users “consent to Zoom’s access, use, collection, creation, modification, distribution, processing, sharing, maintenance, and storage” of user data for “any purpose” including “machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training and tuning of algorithms and models).”

• You can’t really get any clearer than that, and Zoom users, who seemed generally unaware of the update until Stack Diary first reported about the changes on Sunday, were unsurprisingly upset by the revelation. After all, if the TOS was updated back in March, how much of their private data — which may have included the content of Zoom therapy or telehealth meetings, corporate meetings, and intimate conversations — had been guzzled up by Zoom’s AI?

=> ↺ The Conversation ☛ The new technology that is making cars easier for criminals to steal, or crash

• There is much talk in the automotive industry about the “internet of vehicles” (IoV). This describes a network of cars and other vehicles that could exchange data over the internet in an effort to make transportation more autonomous, safe and efficient.

• The IoV could help vehicles identify roadblocks, traffic jams and pedestrians. It could help with a car’s positioning on the road, potentially enable them to be driverless, and provide easier diagnoses of faults. It’s already happening to some extent with smart motorways, where technology is used with the intention of managing motorway traffic in the most effective manner.

• A more sophisticated IoV will require even more sensors, software and other technology to be installed in vehicles and surrounding road infrastructure. Cars already contain more electronic systems than ever, from cameras and mobile phone connections to infotainment systems.

• However, some of these systems might also make our vehicles prone to theft and malicious attack, as criminals identify and then exploit vulnerabilities in this new technology. In fact, this is already happening.

=> ↺ Democracy Now ☛ Meet Porcha Woodruff, Detroit Woman Jailed While 8 Months Pregnant After False AI Facial Recognition

• Porcha Woodruff was eight months pregnant when Detroit police mistakenly arrested her for robbery and carjacking based on a faulty facial recognition match. She was held in jail for 11 hours, where she started having contractions, and had to be taken to the hospital upon her release on a $100,000 bond. “Being under that type of stress could have ultimately led me to lose my child,” says Woodruff. According to the ACLU, Woodruff is at least the sixth person — all of whom are Black — to report being falsely accused of a crime as a result of facial recognition technology. It is yet another case of what has been termed algorithmic bias, in which technology is trained on biased information, automating and further cementing existing oppression. “No one would take what I was saying seriously. It was as if I was already a suspect,” says Woodruff about her experience. She and attorney Ivan Land are now suing the city of Detroit for false arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution.

=> ↺ Site36 ☛ Using captured tablets of soldiers from the “battlefield”: Hacking attacks on Starlink in Ukraine

=> ↺ Site36 ☛ Security gap in blue-light vehicles: Locations of Rosenbauer technology accessible on the Internet

Confidentiality

=> ↺ The Hindu ☛ IT Ministry announces cash prizes for browser that trusts Indian digital certificate issuing authority

• Cash prizes amounting to ₹3.4 crore are being promised to developers who help create an indigenous Indian web browser “for the world”, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology announced on Wednesday. An important caveat is that browser ideas entered into this competition will have to trust the Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA), the Indian government’s authority for digital signatures, including SSL (Security Sockets Layer) certificates.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ NL Times ☛ Over 100 explosions in Rotterdam region this year

• The Rotterdam area has been ravaged for several years by explosions at homes and business premises throughout the city. It is suspected that the incidents are linked to drug trafficking. Stores and homes are especially affected by the explosions.

• The number of such incidents has been sharply rising in recent years. In the Rotterdam police region, 12 such incidents were registered in 2021, a figure that rose to 65 the following year. Last weekend, two incidents occurred at separate buildings on Vierambachtsstraat in the center of Rotterdam.

• Of the 104 incidents this year, 74 occurred in Rotterdam, with the remainder in nearby municipalities such as Vlaardingen, Schiedam, Capelle aan den IJssel, and Voorne aan Zee. According to Rijmond, the perpetrators use incendiary bombs, hand grenades, cobras, and assembled explosives.

=> ↺ Axios ☛ Special counsel served Twitter search warrant for Trump account

• The existence of the warrant, which was obtained by Smith’s team in January, was not previously known to the public.

• Zoom in: In the warrant, the government requested “data and records related to the ‘@realDonaldTrump’” Twitter account.

=> ↺ US Court of Appeals, D C Circuit ☛ Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (No. 1:23-sc-00031) [PDF]

• The parties subsequently submitted papers regarding the applicability of sanctions. The government suggested that Twitter’s three days of noncompliance after the deadline had passed merited a $350,000 sanction, under the sanctions formula that the court previously had adopted and announced. See Gov’t Notice Regarding Accrued Sanction 2, ECF No. 19. Twitter denied that any penalty was “appropriate,” arguing that it had acted in good faith and had substantially complied with the February 7 deadline. I.A. 274. Twitter further argued that an incremental $200,000 sanction for the last day of noncompliance was unjustified, in light of “new search terms provided by the government” shortly before 4:00 p.m. on February 9 and Twitter’s production of the required information “just hours” after the February 9 hearing. Id. at 277-78. Notably, Twitter still did not object to the sanctions formula.

=> ↺ Hindustan Times ☛ Nagasaki Day 2023: 78th anniversary of US atomic bombing today. All you need to know

• Remembering the horrific attack and its victims, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that the world should never allow such a devastation to occur again and urged to eliminate the nuclear risk by eradicating nuclear weapons.

• “78 years ago, atomic weapons were used on Nagasaki. We must never again allow such devastation to occur. The only way to eliminate the nuclear risk is to eliminate nuclear weapons,” UN chief said on X (formerly Twitter).

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Iran Says It Has Obtained Supersonic Cruise-Missile Technology

• Iran has obtained the technology to build a supersonic cruise missile, which is still under test, the semiofficial Tasnim news agency reported on August 9. [...]

=> ↺ New Eastern Europe ☛ Why it is not just Putin’s war: the collective responsibility of Russians

• While Ukraine continues to occupy a regular spot in news reporting, western outlets and politicians still overlook the main reason for the war. In order to make sure such a conflict cannot happen again in the future, we must understand the deep-rooted societal norms that allowed Russia to invade in the first place.

=> ↺ FAIR ☛ Brooks’ Defense of Trump Defenders Disguises Where Real Power Is

• Brooks’ column encouraged anti-Trumpers (among whom he includes himself) to think of themselves as “the bad guys,” because while they diagnose the Republican base’s unflagging support for its leader as rooted in bigotry and resentment, it actually derives from “the class war between the professionals and the workers.” Brooks, enlightened member of the professional class that he is, understands “why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault.” He asserted, “They’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class.”

=> ↺ Spiegel ☛ Anger Against France Grows in Africa’s “Coup Belt”

• It was the fifth military coup in Niger since the country’s independence, but this overthrow is different from the previous ones. It is the latest in a series of such putsches: Almost the entire Sahel, a strategically important region of Africa, is now ruled by regimes installed by a coup, with six successful overthrows in the region since 2020. The area some are calling the “Coup Belt” stretches south of the Sahara, nearly 6,000 kilometers (3,728 miles) long, from Guinea on the west coast of the continent to Sudan on the east coast. In Mali, where an estimated 1,500 mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner Group are stationed, and in Burkina Faso, Moscow has established itself as an important supporter of the new rulers, with both countries now positioning themselves explicitly against the former colonial power France.

=> ↺ The Register UK ☛ We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA

• One goal is to land on the Moon’s south pole, where scientists suspect there is water and ice – a vital resource for human survival. “I don’t want China to get to the south pole first with humans and then say this is ours, stay out … If indeed we find water in abundance there that could be utilized for future crews and spacecraft, we want to make sure that’s available to all, not just the one that’s claiming it,” Nelson said.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Putin proposes eliminating requirement that Russia notify Council of Europe about martial law or states of emergency

• Under existing law, Russia is required to notify both the Secretary-Generals of the UN and the Council of Europe when it deviates from its obligations under international treaties by restricting the rights and freedoms of Russians. The requirement is in line with the European Convention on Human Rights.

=> ↺ NPR ☛ Special counsel Jack Smith got a secret search warrant for Trump’s Twitter account

• This warrant was tied to the special counsel’s investigation into Trump and his involvement in attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump is now facing four criminal charges related to this investigation. He’s pleaded not guilty.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Vladivostok residents hear nighttime explosion by naval base in Pacific port city. Officials attribute blast to air-defense exercises. — Meduza

• Residents of Vladivostok, a major Pacific port city in the Russian Far East, report hearing a nighttime blast near a naval base located in the area. The explosion was heard in the early hours on August 9.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Powerful explosion rocks optics plant in Moscow region. At least 38 injured as blast wave blows out windows in vicinity. — Meduza

• A powerful explosion in Sergiyev Posad, a city in the Moscow region, left up to 20 people injured, according to various reports.

=> ↺ The Nation ☛ A Venezuelan Family Seeking Asylum

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ German officer arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia — Meduza

• An employee of the German armed forces was arrested in the city of Koblenz on suspicion of spying for Russia, reports the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ ‘An open invitation’: Niger coup raises fears of Wagner Group upping Russia’s influence in Africa — Meduza

• On July 26, presidential guards overthrew Niger’s democratically elected President Mohamed Bazoum. The ousted president was seen as an important partner for the West — he took part in the Crimea Platform, supported Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and snubbed the recent Russia–Africa Summit in St. Petersburg. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, meanwhile, has referred to the military coup that overthrew Niger’s government as an “unconstitutional act” and called for the “constitutional order” to be restored. But Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group reportedly supports Niger’s new military junta. Previously, a military coup in neighboring Mali paved the way for the mercenary group to increase its presence in the country significantly. Wagner also has its eyes on Burkina Faso, where the government was twice overthrown last year. This has contributed to larger concerns about growing Russian influence in Africa, as pro-coup protestors in Niger were seen waving Russian flags and holding signs reading “Long live Putin.”

War in Ukraine

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ Poll Shows Majority of Americans Oppose Further Aid in Ukraine

• CNN released a poll…

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Local authorities report one person killed in shelling attack on Belgorod village — Meduza

• One person was killed and four were injured in a shelling attack on the village of Gorkovsky in Russia’s Belgorod region on Wednesday, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov reported.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ More than 800 people admitted to Russia’s top universities under quotas for veterans of war in Ukraine — Meduza

• More than 800 people have enrolled in Russia’s top universities under quotas for veterans of the war in Ukraine and their children, according to the independent outlet iStories. The majority of these students scored lower than the minimum score for enrollment on the country’s college aptitude test, the EGE, or didn’t take the exam at all.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Grozny (demolished by Russia in 1995) and Mariupol (demolished by Russia in 2022) declared ‘twin cities’ by Russian government — Meduza

• The Chechen capital Grozny and Mariupol in the Russian-annexed Donetsk region of Ukraine have been “twinned” by a formal agreement, signed during the Chechen officials’ working visit to the Donbas.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Mark Dominus ☛ No plan survives contact with the enemy

• The actual quote appears to have been more like “Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time”. The “punched in the mouth” version only seems to date back to 2004.

=> ↺ Society for Scholarly Publshing ☛ Science and Truth, Stanford President and Student Journalism Edition

• Dozens of stories in the The Stanford Daily, most of them by freshman Theo Baker, and the 95 page report from the university have been followed by a barrage of news coverage. Plenty of that coverage has focused on Baker, who won a George Polk award – the youngest ever recipient – for his reporting: “Meet the Student who Helped Boot the President of Stanford,” (Washington Post); “Q&A: “How This Stanford Freshman Brought Down the President of the University” (LA Times); “Stanford President Resigns After Reporting from Freshman Journalist” (Teen Vogue), and plenty more. Baker is the son of two prominent journalists, Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the the New Yorker and, as the Washington Post story noted, he’d been “toddling around” newsrooms “before he could walk.”

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ Never Tweet: Trump’s megaphone is coming back to haunt him.

• Earlier today, an unsealed court opinion revealed that prosecutors working for Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant in January to access the now-dormant account of @realDonaldTrump, perhaps in order to learn what, if anything, went on behind the scenes—in messages or drafts that users can’t see. According to the opinion, the warrant “directed Twitter to produce data and records related” to Trump’s account. The company initially refused to comply, because the warrant contained a clause prohibiting Twitter from notifying Trump that the government had issued the warrant. After being held in contempt of court and fined $350,000, Twitter ultimately handed over the information.

=> ↺ The Dissenter ☛ Secret Police: One Department In Virginia Is Trying To Hide The Names Of Most Officers

Environment

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ Sunrise: “Practically Speaking” President Biden Has Not Declared a Climate Emergency

• “Young people across the country know that ‘practically speaking’ President Biden has not declared a climate emergency. Approving new fossil fuel projects like the Willow Project is not “practically” declaring a climate emergency. Expediting the Mountain Valley Pipeline is not “practically” declaring a climate emergency. ”

=> ↺ International Business Times ☛ Fossil fuel sites in Australia releasing climate-damaging methane into atmosphere

• Methane gas contributes significantly to the greenhouse effect and, consequently, to rising temperatures. It is around 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas over a 20-year period, but it stays in the atmosphere for only 12 years compared to centuries.

• The leaks were observed at coal mines and gas facilities owned by energy giants Santos and Origin and pipeline company Jemena. However, the details of these locations have not been revealed yet.

=> ↺ Omicron Limited ☛ Iraq’s extreme temperatures a ‘wake-up call’ for world: UN

• Iraq has been experiencing its fourth consecutive summer of drought, and temperatures in parts of the country including the capital Baghdad, and in the far south, have been around 50 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit).

• “Rising temperatures plus the drought, and the fact that the loss of diversity is a reality, is a wake-up call for Iraq and for the world,” Turk said.

• “When we look into the situation of these communities we look into our future,” he added.

=> ↺ Omicron Limited ☛ Yellow jerseys of the fireline: A day fighting wildfires can require as much endurance as riding the Tour de France

• Hiking with a load and digging firelines with hand tools burns about 6 to 14 calories per minute. Heart rates rise in response to an increased pace of digging.

• Measured with the same techniques used to quantify the energy demands of Tour de France riders, wildland firefighters demonstrate an average total energy expenditure approaching 4,000 to 5,000 calories per day. Some days can exceed the Tour’s average of about 6,000 calories. Add to that a daily water need of 1.5 to over 2 gallons.

• This isn’t just for a few days. Fire season in the western United States can last five months or more, with most Hotshot crews accumulating four to five times the number of operational days of the 22-day Tour de France and over 1,000 hours of overtime.

=> ↺ International Business Times ☛ Young Indigenous activists are fighting the climate crisis

• Although Indigenous People make up less than five per cent of the global population, they bear the weight of economic disparity and represent 15 per cent of the world’s poorest people. Indigenous people all across the globe are most affected by climate change, according to a report by Health Canada.

• The report, named Health of Canadians in a Changing Climate said: “Natural hazards, coupled with unpredictable and extreme weather events, can result in temporary or long-term evacuations from traditional territories, in addition to greater risk of injury and death from accidents while out on the land.”

=> ↺ Interesting Engineering ☛ First adopter of hydrogen trains switches to electric models

• LVNG, a German state-owned railway company and the first firm to adopt commercial hydrogen trains, is letting go of the powerful vehicles and replacing them instead with electric versions.

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ The dream of the first hydrogen rail network has died a quick death

• The commercial rollout of these trains on a railway link, in August 2022, had already been derailed on several occasions. The trains required new hardware and software to be retrofitted for their routes, driver shortages left no spare time to educate them on running hydrogen trains, and there were troubles at the hydrogen refuelling station in winter.

• Now a year after the commercial launch, the Lower Saxony state ministry has abandoned ideas for future hydrogen trains, arguing that battery-electric models “are cheaper to operate.”

=> ↺ International Business Times ☛ UK’s electrification boom sees EV sales represent over half the entire market share

• The rise in BEV sales dominates the overall market with an increase of 49 per cent in this year’s second quarter in comparison to last year’s 17 per cent growth in the 10 Western European focus markets: UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria. In correlation the percentages for growth for the United States were 67 per cent and 19 per cent, and in China 49 per cent and 29 per cent.

=> ↺ H2 View ☛ Finavia set to decarbonise operations as part of the HyAirport project

• The aim is to develop the hydrogen supply chain from production to the fuelling of airport equipment, aircraft and testing operations. Finland’s airline service boasts around 20 snow removal machines at its Helsinki Airport that could use hydrogen fuel, with the project bringing gaseous hydrogen to the airport to act as the energy source.

=> ↺ Futurism ☛ The Claim of a Room Temperature Superconductor Is Starting to Look Fishy

• But a new lead-based material dubbed LK-99, as detailed in the pair of yet-to-be-peer-reviewed papers, is meant to change all that, exhibiting what its creators say is perfect conductivity at temperatures up to a blistering 260 degrees Fahrenheit. It can even purportedly levitate above a permanent magnet, a telltale sign that it could be a superconductor.

• The controversial research sparked plenty of criticism, with experts pointing out that such an extraordinary claim required extraordinary evidence — which simply hasn’t materialized yet.

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ Bad news about that miracle superconductor

• A rush to recreate the material—a combination of lead, copper, oxygen, and phosphorus—and test its properties ensued in laboratories around the world. And now we can say with some certainty that whatever LK-99 is, it’s probably not a superconductor. That conclusion was reached by a committee of South Korean researchers who reviewed the LK-99 team’s published data. A preliminary study in India did not find evidence of superconductivity, and preliminary papers from Chinese researchers who replicated the material say they didn’t discover zero resistance to electrical current at room temperature. Scientists in the UK didn’t find superconductivity in their sample, and neither did an international team (pdf) including scientists at Princeton University.

=> ↺ Federal News Network ☛ A Texas man on a trip to spread his dad’s ashes died of heat stroke in Utah’s Arches National Park

• A Texas man whose body was found in Arches National Park in Utah is believed to have died of heat stroke while on a trip to spread his father’s ashes. Two sisters of James Bernard Hendricks said the 66-year-old Austin man likely became disoriented from heat, dehydration and high altitude. Hendricks said in social media posts before his death that he was stopping in Utah while traveling to the Sierra Nevada region of Nevada and California to spread his father’s ashes. Hendricks was reported overdue on Aug. 1. Rangers found his body in the park later that day. His water bottle was empty.

=> ↺ Atlantic Council ☛ Don’t count on the G20 to solve the world’s problems. But don’t count it out completely.

• The upcoming summit in India can focus on hammering out statements that move the needle in limited ways on health, trade, digital governance, and climate change.

=> ↺ The Atlantic ☛ We Must Learn to Love Our Sweat

• The world is getting hotter. Prepare to be damp.

Energy/Transportation

=> ↺ RFA ☛ Indonesia again delays launch of China-funded high-speed railway

• Trial run of the Jakarta-Bandung line has been postponed to early September from Aug. 18, officials say.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi ☛ Raspberry Pi rides on turtle backs to monitor conservation areas

• A Raspberry Pi Zero and a Raspberry Pi Camera Module were packed inside a waterproof enclosure, which was then harmlessly attached to the shell of a green sea turtle. Photos, video, and location data are collected from the Raspberry Pi, and the hardware detaches itself from the animal once its job is done. Read more about how this works in our in-depth Success Story about the Arribada initiative.

=> ↺ The Revelator ☛ Playing Matchmaker for Corals

Overpopulation

=> ↺ Mexico News Daily ☛ Mexico’s per capita water supply dropped over 30% since 1996

• Experts blame poor water management, increased farming and drought as some states barely meet World Health Organization targets.

Finance

=> ↺ Latvia ☛ Annual inflation in July at 6.4% in Latvia

• The latest data published on August 8 by the Central Statistical Bureau show that in July 2023, compared to July 2022, the average level of consumer prices increased by 6.4 %.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Why Are Groceries So Expensive If Inflation Is Falling?

• We may shop locally, but on prices you have to think global.

=> ↺ Atlantic Council ☛ To deliver on IRA objectives, expand the clean energy workforce

• Upskilling and growing the US labor force for the clean energy transition is a must for delivering the economic and climate objectives of the Inflation Reduction Act.

=> ↺ CS Monitor ☛ China’s economic slump: Why is it happening?

• China’s exports tumbled significantly in July, adding pressure on the ruling party to buoy the economy. Demand for Chinese exports has slowed as interest rates have gone up and consumer spending in developed nations has dipped.

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ Another Chance to Reduce Child Poverty

• My story is proof that public programs can help kids escape poverty. Now lawmakers have a chance to help more kids get out.

=> ↺ Rapid7 slashing workforce by 18% as part of restructuring

• Rapid7 is joining the long list of major North American tech companies that have announced sweeping layoffs this year.

• In a recent filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the cybersecurity giant announced that it’s eliminating approximately 18 per cent of its workforce as part of its “Restructuring Plan.”

• “[The plan] is designed to improve operational efficiencies, reduce operating costs, and better align the company’s workforce with current business needs, top strategic priorities, and key growth opportunities,” the filing reads.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Atlantic Council ☛ China and India are at odds over BRICS expansion

• Beijing and New Delhi have different ideas about how the group should move forward, as India’s disagreement with China’s push to rapidly expand the organization’s membership demonstrates.

=> ↺ The Strategist ☛ Will China target Australia and how would Australia respond?

• In the latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs, the Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen makes assertions about the priorities of China’s nuclear targeting of Australia, as well as what he claims will be Australia’s missile [...]

=> ↺ BBC ☛ Candidate in Ecuador’s presidential election Fernando Villavicencio shot dead

• A candidate in Ecuador’s forthcoming presidential election has been shot dead at a campaign rally.

• Fernando Villavicencio, a member of the country’s national assembly, was attacked as he left the event in the northern city of Quito on Wednesday.

• A member of his campaign team told local media Mr Villavicencio was getting into a car when a man stepped forward and shot him in the head.

• Current president Guillermo Lasso vowed the “crime will not go unpunished”.

• Witnesses said Mr Villavicencio, 59, was shot three times.

=> ↺ The Register UK ☛ Rapid7 prepares to toss 18% of workforce to cut costs

• Rapid7 is initiating a restructuring process that will involve shedding 18 percent of its workforce after net losses widened over the most recent quarter.

• The NASDAQ-listed security info and event management biz reported turnover from sales of $190.4 million for calendar Q2, up 14 percent year-on-year, and a loss of $66.7 million versus a loss of $39.6 million.

=> ↺ Silicon Angle ☛ White House launches contest to improve critical infrastructure cybersecurity with AI

• The contest was detailed during Black Hat USA 2023, a major cybersecurity event taking place this week in Las Vegas.

• The AI Cyber Challenge will run for two years. Participants will be tasked with developing tools that use artificial intelligence to automatically find and fix software vulnerabilities. The goal, the White House detailed, is to explore how AI can be used to secure critical infrastructure assets such as electric grids.

=> ↺ Michael Geist ☛ It’s Complicated: Unpacking the Risks Behind Canada’s Digital Services Tax Plan

• The Canadian government released a detailed document last week outlining the specifics behind its draft Digital Services Tax Act. No actual legislation has yet been passed, but the government is providing guidance on how the potential law would be interpreted assuming it takes effect next year. The document has sparked criticism from business groups and the U.S. government given that it envisions a retroactive three percent tax that will hit a wide range of businesses. Further, the Canadian plan is facing significant opposition from many OECD countries since it may jeopardize a global agreement that is designed to address the digital services tax issue. While the digital services tax (DST) is typically framed as a tax on big tech, the reality is that the Canadian version extends far beyond just companies such as Google and Facebook, potentially including major Canadian retailers such as Canadian Tire, Loblaws, and others.

=> ↺ Rlang ☛ New Executive Director Position Created at R Consortium

• The R Consortium is pleased to announce that Joseph Rickert has been appointed to the position of Executive Director reporting directly to the Board of Directors.

=> ↺ YLE ☛ Justice Minister: Finland won’t separately classify online targeting as punishable offence

• “These offenses include, for example, crimes against public officials, public incitement to commit a crime, spreading information that violates privacy, defamation, unlawful threats, harassment and coercion,” Meri said on the ministry’s website.

• [...]

• According to the union, targeting journalists is an attack on freedom of speech, regardless of who is engaged in targeting.

=> ↺ India Times ☛ YouTube completes 15 years in India; expects creators, new tools to drive growth

• Global video-sharing platform YouTube expects mobile-first creators and content being consumed from living rooms to be the two major factors driving the growth of the platform in India, YouTube’s country director Ishan John Chatterjee said.

=> ↺ Common Dreams ☛ A Gospel Tract Is A Nice Idea Too: Saving Little Free Libraries From “Bad” Books and Praise Jesus

• Give it up for Zealot of the Week Jennifer ‘Karen’ Meeks, who took it upon her pious self to scurry around her Arkansas neighborhood’s Little Free Libraries, remove “bad” books that “don’t align with Christian values” – mostly, eww, “Pride stuff” – and put in “good” books, aka Bibles. Her GOP lawmaker husband says “leftists” are lying and his wife is just nobly replacing worn-out books with newer ones, which means he’s already breaking 2 Commandments – stealing and lying – so God help him.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ Court Ask Rudy Giuliani Why He Won’t Admit Defeat After He Admitted He Defamed Plaintiffs In An Election-Related Lawsuit

• As Trump’s favored performing monkey during his elected years, former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani managed to set a lot of precedent. Sure, none of this precedent was set in court, but it’s been all of NEVER since Americans have been blessed by the omnipresence of a TOP LAW GUY who has (1) leaked dark fluid out of his scalp during a public appearance, (2) engaged in quasi-sexual pre-interview rituals, and (3) held a press conference in front of an unsuspecting lawn care company.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Reuters: Aide to Russia’s children’s rights commissioner has links to online neo-Nazi groups — Meduza

• A Reuters investigation has discovered that Alexei Petrov, who is currently an aide to Russian Presidential Commissioner on the Rights of Children Maria Lvova-Belova, was associated with online neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ New Statesman ☛ Hacking democracy: How cyber attacks are undermining trust in voting

• People assume when they see a headline that says “election hacked” that it is about changing the results, MacAlpine explains. But if your goal is about undermining the credibility and trust in elections, attacks can take many forms. That includes direct attacks on campaign security, such as hacking and releasing emails, or election infrastructure, such as the websites used to register to vote. They can be launched independently by hackers or be sponsored by a state, with Russia frequently accused of being behind such disruption campaigns.

• However, simple attacks on vulnerable targets can be carried out by anyone with basic technical knowledge, and disinformation can be created and spread by anyone with a social media account. In the US, MacAlpine notes, it would not necessarily be against the law if a citizen spread false information, given free speech protections. “It’s not illegal to be an idiot,” she says.

=> ↺ India Times ☛ Curbing misinformation critical, will act against manipulated content: YouTube India director

• YouTube on Wednesday said curbing misinformation is critical for platforms and society as tech evolves and AI powered tools come in, and asserted that the video streaming platform will act swiftly against technically manipulated content that aims to mislead users and cause real world harm. YouTube has has well established community guidelines in place that determine what kind of content is allowed on the platform, Ishan John Chatterjee, Director, India, YouTube, said at a media briefing.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ Russian Foreign Ministry officials says incident with Chinese citizens on Russia-Kazakhstan border had ’no political context’ — Meduza

• Alexey Zaitsev, the deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Information and Press Department, said Wednesday that a recent situation in which five Chinese citizens were refused entry into Russia was not related to politics and will not affect the countries’ relations.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ RFA ☛ Chinese Communist Party slogans spark graffiti war on London’s Brick Lane

• Nationalist students slammed for painting over local artists’ work in ‘Marxist’ dig at Western freedoms

=> ↺ RFA ☛ North Korea cracks down on use of propaganda publication as scrap paper

• Wrapping snacks in the Rodong Sinmun newspaper is disrespectful to the party and the country’s leader.

=> ↺ Gizmodo ☛ CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search

• Tech news website CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results, Gizmodo has learned.

• Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks. A CNET representative confirmed that the company was culling stories but declined to share exactly how many it has taken down. The move adds to recent controversies over CNET’s editorial strategy, which has included layoffs and experiments with error-riddled articles written by AI chatbots.

=> ↺ The Verge ☛ CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking

• A comparison between Wayback Machine archives from 2021 and CNET’s own on-site article counter shows that hundreds — and in some cases, thousands — of stories have disappeared from each year stretching back to the mid-1990s. Data for 2022 and 2023 wasn’t available. Red Ventures, a private equity-backed marketing firm that owns CNET, didn’t immediately respond to questions about the exact number of stories that have been removed.

=> ↺ Third Door Media LLC ☛ Google warns against content pruning as CNET deletes thousands of pages

• Clearly, CNET needs better advice on how SEO works. Deleting content does not signal those three things. Publishing relevant, helpful, quality content for your audience is what makes you worthy of greater organic search visibility.

=> ↺ RFERL ☛ Student Reporter Caught In Russian Crackdown Questions Serbian Snub, ‘Detention’

• A former journalist for the Russian student magazine Doxa who has been publicly critical of Russian officials has accused Serbian authorities at the airport in Belgrade of imprisoning her for around 40 hours after refusing her entry to the country.

=> ↺ CPJ ☛ Turkey suspends critical outlet TELE1 for a week

• Istanbul, August 8, 2023—The Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned a court’s implementation of a seven-day suspension of critical online outlet and TV broadcaster TELE1 following an order by the official media watchdog the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK).

=> ↺ Scheerpost ☛ Right-Wing Extremism Means Homeschooling Surge in US Should Concern Us All

• With the book-banning right targeting mainstream schools, homeschooling is surging.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Journalists’ Union demonstrates in front of Sputnik Turkey

• Sputnik Turkey employer, who left the collective negotiation table without making an offer, laid off 24 journalists after their union, TGS took a decision to strike. Demonstrating in front of the Sputnik office in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, TGS announced that they want to show everyone that there are laws in Turkey protecting the labor rights.

=> ↺ The Hindu ☛ Press bodies express concern over ‘campaign’ against news portal

• The press bodies said media organisations functioned within the confines of Indian law, and it was equally important for government agencies to adhere to these standards. A thriving democracy necessitated that media outlets, regardless of their affiliations, had the freedom to operate without government or corporate pressures. The vitality of a democracy was inextricably linked to an independent media.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ RFA ☛ Hong Kong police question parents of US-based democracy campaigner Anna Kwok

• Kwok is one of a group of eight prominent overseas activists targeted with a bounty on their heads

=> ↺ teleSUR ☛ Labor Exploitation of Kenyan Internet Cleaners

• Content moderators from several African countries demanded compensation of 1.46 billion euros for violation of labor rights and outsourcing. So far, most of the demands made by the sector to the technology transnationals have been ignored.

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ The Marvel universe has new avengers: Visual effects workers want to unionize

• More than 50 visual effects (VFX) workers at Marvel Studios have filed for unionization election with the National Labor Relations Board for the first time in history.

=> ↺ Yahoo News ☛ Disney to Cut Content Budget by $3 Billion Partly Due to Strikes

• Walt Disney is cutting its content budget for the year by $3 billion, CEO Bob Iger said Wednesday on the company’s third-quarter earnings call, in part because of the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

• “We currently expect fiscal 2023 content spend to come in at approximately $27 billion which is lower than we previously guided due to lower spend on produced content, in part due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes,” Iger told Wall Street analysts.

=> ↺ Democracy Now ☛ Nina Turner: Ohio Voters Have Rejected GOP Power Grab in Victory for Democracy & Abortion Access

• Voters in Ohio overwhelmingly rejected a Republican attempt to restrict abortion rights on Tuesday. The supermajority of Republicans in the Ohio Legislature had pushed for a ballot initiative that would have made it harder to amend the state constitution ahead of the November election, when voters will decide if the right to an abortion should be enshrined in the Ohio Constitution. A majority of Ohio voters support the right to abortion. “The voters of the state of Ohio did not buy what the Republicans were selling,” says former Ohio state Senator Nina Turner, now a senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School, who notes the victory also prevents Republicans from restricting support for other popular measures that could become ballot initiatives, such as raising the minimum wage.

=> ↺ ACLU ☛ The Authoritarian Agenda Behind the Scheme to Attack Democracy and Abortion in Ohio

• Yesterday, Ohio voters took to the polls for an unusual summertime special election. The only question before them was whether or not to raise the threshold for passing citizen-initiated constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60 percent — but much more than a procedural reform was on the ballot. Extreme legislators in Ohio led a concerted attack on both abortion rights and democracy. Despite their blatant effort to change the rules and strip away Ohio voters’ rights, in a stunning and historic display of democracy in action, over three million voters turned out across the state and ultimately rejected the measure by a wide margin. But our work is far from over. We need all hands on deck to pass a ballot measure that will enshrine reproductive freedom in the Ohio Constitution during the upcoming election in November.

• While we revel in the victory of last night, a look at how we got here reveals a long-term agenda. Republican legislators started this year by banning August special elections because of their high cost and low voter participation rates, but when Ohioans began collecting signatures to put a measure on the ballot in November to protect abortion rights, lawmakers did an about face and changed the rules to protect their extremist agenda. Hoping that the same low voter turnout they railed against would be a boon to their side, legislators hastily scheduled a last minute, vacation-season election to move the goalpost on the November reproductive freedom measure.

=> ↺ New York Times ☛ Eight Months Pregnant and Arrested After False Facial Recognition Match

• Handcuffed in front of her home on a Thursday morning last February, leaving her crying children with her fiancé, Ms. Woodruff was taken to the Detroit Detention Center. She said she was held for 11 hours, questioned about a crime she said she had no knowledge of, and had her iPhone seized to be searched for evidence.

=> ↺ The Register UK ☛ Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

• Detroit officers arrested her anyway. When she was being booked, Woodruff told police that she had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes, a condition that increases the risk of problems during pregnancy due to dehydration issues. Even so, she was arraigned on robbery and carjacking charges, and spent 11 hours in detention.

• Upon her release on a $100,000 personal bond, Woodruff was subsequently taken to St John’s Hospital by her fiancé. She was given two bags of intravenous fluid in response to symptoms associated with dehydration.

=> ↺ CBC ☛ Even Zoom is calling its workers back to the office — at least 2 days a week

• Zoom, the video-conferencing pioneer, is asking employees who live within an 80-kilometre radius of its offices to work onsite two days a week, a company spokesperson confirmed in an email.

=> ↺ Michigan News ☛ ‘Native American’ or ‘Indigenous’? Journalism group rethinks name

• The Native American Journalists Association is aiming to become more inclusive as its members vote on whether to rebrand as the Indigenous Journalists Association — a move inspired, in part, by evolving trends in cultural identity.

=> ↺ Democracy Now ☛ “Horrendous”: Black Men Tortured by White Mississippi Police “Goon Squad” React to Guilty Pleas

• Six white former police officers in Mississippi who called themselves the “Goon Squad” have pleaded guilty to raiding a home on false drug charges and torturing two Black men while yelling racist slurs at them, and then trying to cover it up. We speak with Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker about how, on January 24, six deputies in Braxton, Mississippi, raided the home they were staying in and attacked them, and how they are speaking out to demand justice. Meanwhile, the deputies have been linked to at least four violent attacks on Black men since 2019, in which two of the men died. We also speak with civil rights attorney Malik Shabazz, who is representing Jenkins and Parker in a federal lawsuit against the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. Shabazz asserts that the majority-white Rankin County, which is 20 miles away from majority-Black Jackson, Mississippi, is “infested with white supremacists” who “have decided ‘Rankin County is for whites’” and seek to enforce it through state-sanctioned violence and torture, overseen and covered up by Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey. “We demand that Bryan Bailey step down,” says Shabazz. Parker adds, “We want justice for everyone that has gone through this with Rankin County.”

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ South Dakota’s Top Court Reaffirms Its Refusal To Consider Polygraph Tests To Be Actual ‘Evidence’ Of Anything

• It has been known for years that polygraph tests can be beaten. This supposed thing of science can be manipulated to clear guilty people if guilty people know how to trick it.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ ABA Finally Speaks Up About The Problem Of Judge Shopping

• We’ve been writing about the problem of “judge shopping” for years in a variety of contexts. While there used to be concerns about “forum shopping,” in which plaintiffs would seek out specific courts that were deemed more favorable (such as the Eastern District of Texas for patent troll cases), it got more ridiculous in recent years with deliberate judge shopping, where plaintiffs would file cases in districts with only one judge, knowing they’d get who they wanted.

=> ↺ Meduza ☛ The ‘souls of the dead’ on trial Long after ‘Bloody January,’ the Kazakhstani authorities continue to prosecute protesters who died in the unrest — Meduza

• Criminal proceedings against citizens accused of taking part in the protests that rocked Kazakhstan in January 2022 are still ongoing, according to BBC News Russian. More than 5,000 criminal cases were opened in the wake of “Bloody January,” including ones against people who died in the unrest. The targets of these posthumous trials include six people who were killed in Almaty, two who were killed in Kyzylorda, and seven who were killed in Taraz. Kazakhstanis have termed them the “trials of the souls of the dead.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ APNIC ☛ The Bangladesh and South Asia Internet landscape

• Discussing the priorities, challenges, and action plans for the Bangladesh and South Asia Internet at SANOG 39.

• [...]

• After introductions, Gaurab sought opinions on the most pressing challenge currently facing Bangladesh’s Internet. Mirroring Gaurab’s opening statement, the responses were broad.

• Faisal nominated cooperation among service providers as a challenge. Mostofa suggested multiple issues in cybersecurity, misinformation, privacy, and addressing the digital divide.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ Dish, EchoStar Confirm Plans For Completely Pointless Merger

• We just got done noting how Dish Network’s long-hyped 5G wireless network is likely doomed. While they’re technically building a “wireless network,” the network’s coverage, phone selection, and overall quality has proven laughable so far, and there have been growing worries that Dish is running out of cash as it tries to meet regulatory deadlines for 5G deployment.

=> ↺ AccessNow ☛ Brazil must hold digital platforms accountable using human rights standards

• Leer en español Brazil is currently debating how to regulate digital platforms, which creates significant challenges and has sparked important discussions regarding the Brazilian population’s digital rights.

=> ↺ AccessNow ☛ Brazil must hold digital platforms accountable by settling human rights standards

• Leer en español Brazil is currently debating how to regulate digital platforms, which creates significant challenges and debates the Brazilian population’s digital rights.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ Techdirt Podcast Episode 361: The YouTube Effect, With Alex Winter

• As you may recall, we weren’t fans of The Social Dilemma, the documentary manipulated people with misinformation in the course of complaining about that exact practice. But now there’s a much better and more interesting documentary in the space, and one that’s worth your time: The YouTube Effect by Alex Winter. It takes a deep dive into the good and the bad of YouTube, and grapples with the fact that it has helped radicalize a lot of people. This week, Alex joins Mike (who still contests some of the points in the movie) on the podcast to discuss (and debate) the documentary and the role of YouTube in our culture.

=> ↺ CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles To Game Google Search

• According to Gizmodo, CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results.

• [...]

• What does Google have to say about this? According to the company’s Public Liaison for Google Search, Danny Sullivan, Google recommends against the practice. “Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn’t like ‘old’ content? That’s not a thing! Our guidance doesn’t encourage this,” Sullivan said in a series of tweets.

• If a website has an individual page with outdated content, that page “isn’t likely to rank well. Removing it might mean, if you have a massive site, that we’re better able to crawl other content on the site. But it doesn’t mean we go, ‘Oh, now the whole site is so much better’ because of what happens with an individual page.” Sullivan wrote. “Just don’t assume that deleting something only because it’s old will improve your site’s SEO magically.”

=> ↺ Gizmodo ☛ CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search

• Tech news website CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results, Gizmodo has learned.

• Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks. A CNET representative confirmed that the company was culling stories but declined to share exactly how many it has taken down. The move adds to recent controversies over CNET’s editorial strategy, which has included layoffs and experiments with error-riddled articles written by AI chatbots.

=> ↺ RIPE ☛ AWS introduces charges for public IPv4 use

• It seems there’s now another business case for deploying IPv6. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that from 1 February 2024, they’ll charge USD 0.005, per IP, per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, whether they’re attached to an AWS service or not.

• For an always-on service, that’s USD 43.80 yearly for each IP. Depending on market prices and resource requirements, Amazon BYOIP may be a better option (and is excluded from these charges). From early next year, running IPv4 via AWS will become an OpEx versus CapEx decision depending on your resource requirements. Considering how widely used the AWS platform is for users of all sizes, this will become an important factor for most AWS users but even the simplest maths will show that IPv6 will save operating expenses.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ [Repeat] DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Google’s YouTube Anti-Adblock Attacks Brave Again; More Thoughts on WEI

• Moreover, WEI will certainly be used by governments, starting with the United States, to enforce the usage of software and operating systems that they know they have put backdoors into. The user will no longer be able to say “I can examine the code of GNOME Web and I don’t think that anything malicious exists in this browser.” because it simply won’t be allowed into the Web sites that use WEI. No Free Software browser will.

• WEI is the ultimate “clipper chip”. The United States government has been trying to sabotage computer security and replacing it with something it can monitor since the 1990s. This concept isn’t new. But once WEI browsers are all that can access the Web, then even communications that are End-to-End encrypted will come through on browsers that have backdoors in them. Even if the site you use isn’t spying on you, your browser and operating system certainly will.

=> ↺ Techdirt ☛ Beyond Netflix And Chill: Gaining Control Of Our Digital Lives Via Data Portability

• Sometimes, the best ideas for blog topics (or anything, really), come over a good meal with an amiable companion, and a few glasses of wine. As one does after a few glasses, my husband and I randomly ended up on the topic of data privacy — specifically, an aspect of data privacy and rights that are frequently overlooked: data portability. 

Monopolies

=> ↺ David Rosenthal ☛ Predatory Pricing

• The answer is the remarkable effectiveness of predatory pricing at making money for VCs and founders. Rogers writes: [...]

=> ↺ CoryDoctorow ☛ No, Uber’s (still) not profitable

• The magic of early Uber – when taxi rides were incredibly cheap, and there were always cars available, and drivers made generous livings behind the wheel – wasn’t magic at all. It was just predatory pricing.

• Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar they brought in, lighting $33b of its investors’ cash on fire. Most of that money came from the Saudi royals, funneled through Softbank, who brought you such bezzles as WeWork – a boring real-estate company masquerading as a high-growth tech company, just as Uber was a boring taxi company masquerading as a tech company.

Patents

=> ↺ Tedium ☛ Corporations, Share Your Patents

• Companies that patent new ideas generally hoard them for value, even when they can potentially improve the lives of millions of people. That’s why Novo Nordisk will be making bank from Wegovy and Ozempic for years to come. It is much rarer for a company to develop something, then decide to share it for the good of the industry.

Trademarks

=> ↺ Quartz ☛ Amazon isn’t prepared for the incoming tide of AI-authored books. Jane Friedman has proof.

• How did Friedman find out about the fake books under her name? Friedman said a reader wrote to her saying she was searching for Friedman’s work on Amazon and ended up buying two books. A few pages in, the reader thought, “Oh that’s interesting. Jane’s trying a new publishing experiment of some kind.” But as she continued reading the book, she questioned whether Friedman had written any of it at all, and reached out to the author. When Friedman first looked into it, she thought the problem lay only with two books, but then she headed over to her Goodreads author page and saw there were more.

• Goodreads quickly took down the fraudulent books, said Friedman, after she reached out to the site. With Amazon.com, it was less straightforward. To get in touch with Amazon, the retail giant provides a form to file infringement reports that leads to prompt takedowns of fraudulent copies. But there was no separate form for her case. “When I filed the report, I didn’t think they’re going to do anything because, like, on what grounds?” she said. “It’s not a copyright violation. And I said that up front when I filed the record.”

• Here’s the message from Amazon asking for trademark registration numbers.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Digital Music News ☛ The Zombies Acquire the Rights to Their 1960s Catalog

• The Zombies, one of the pioneer bands of the “British Invasion” during the ’60s, has acquired the rights to their classic 1960s recording catalog, including hits like “She’s Not There” and “Time of the Season.”

=> ↺ Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong Harry Potter-themed cafe told to compensate Warner Bros for copyright infringement

• Judge David Lok ruled that Warner Bros owned the copyright for Harry Potter, while the characters were registered as trademarks. He also agreed that items like the trolley was a unique symbol of the Harry Potter series.

=> ↺ Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate Site Survives ‘Operation: Sunstroke’ But Massive Lawsuit Awaits

• As part of their years-long yet largely unsuccessful mission to bring down TV piracy site, Sdarot, in 2022 several Israeli entertainment companies obtained a court injunction in the U.S. which required every ISP in the country to block the site. While that never happened, action against Sdarot has now reached boiling point; international raids, server seizures, and a full-blown lawsuit in Israel targeting 14 people. And a site that remains up and taunting its rivals.

=> ↺ Torrent Freak ☛ Youtube-dl Site Goes Offline as Hosting Provider Enforces Court-Ordered Ban

• Hosting provider Uberspace has taken down the website of YouTube-ripping software, youtube-dl. The removal is the result of a German court order in a copyright infringement lawsuit, filed by Sony, Warner and Universal. While Uberspace didn’t host the open source software, it was held responsible for the website linking to the software hosted on developer platform GitHub.

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