● 05.20.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/05/2023: CodeWeavers Without Jeremy White

Posted in News Roundup at 4:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• System76 just gave their ultra-portable laptop the Lemur Pro a nice upgrade, here’s what’s now included with it.

• The System76 Lemur Pro is a thin and light Linux laptop that ships with either Ubuntu or Pop!_OS software, weighs just 2.54 pounds, and measures just 0.65 inches thick. But despite its compact size, it has a reasonably high capacity 73 Wh battery.

• System76 has been selling Lemur Pro models for a few years, but now the company has launched a new model powered by 13th-gen Intel Core chips. It’s available now for $1149 and up.

Instructionals/Technical

• After the previous post, I figured that the best way to decide on the direction for Humble UI is to make an experiment.

• And I did. I implemented a reactive/incremental computation engine (signals) and wrote a simple TodoMVC in it. Following are my thoughts on it.

• Linux is increasingly becoming a strong choice for PC gaming as a realistic alternative to Windows. With Wine, improved GPU driver support, SteamOS, and many other enhancements, Linux gaming is now a reality.

• But as with Windows, things may not be perfect from the off. Here’s how to improve gaming on Linux with these top tips to tweak performance.

• On YouTube, I have found several tutorials for colorizing a photo. Michael Davies Design has one, as well as Logos By Nick and others. I also found one by JBColourisation. I also did an article on colorizing a photo back in 2013, but there are several methods, so we’ll do a different method this time.

• We’ll be using layer masks for this, and I just heard an easier description of a layer mask. It’s like “a window that’s been blacked out” so you can’t see what’s inside, and when you paint the layer mask, you’re “making a hole” that shows what you want seen.

• When I first registered for PCLinuxOS and started getting more involved in the community, I noticed how in the artwork of the distro logo, two letters in the middle are cleverly ‘joined’ to look like only one letter or character. The U and the N look like they are merged or magically melted together. Being a fan of graphics, in time when I needed to use the logo, I wasn’t sure how to go about joining the two letters. I asked in the forum, but the answers I got didn’t yield a good enough result. There was always something sticking out of place, or something didn’t look quite right. In time, I eventually figured out how to join the two letters seamlessly. Here, in this Gimp tip, we’ll see how I made it work for me. I am sure there are many other different ways to accomplish the same task, but this is how I do it. (See samples A1, A2, A3)

• The system administrator role includes creating users, deleting users, and reviewing existing users. They also control who can, and cannot, use root’s elevated powers.

• When you install or upgrade packages on an Arch Linux system, pacman checks the digital signatures of the packages against the keys in the archlinux-keyring package. This verification process ensures that the packages you download and install are unmodified and come from trusted sources.

• If you have not updated your Arch Linux system for a longer period, then the digital signatures of various packages may mismatch. The changed keys may not match what you have in your system. Here’s how to fix this error.

WINE or Emulation

• After 27 years, Jeremy White is leaving CodeWeavers, the company who oversee and fund Wine development and also work on Proton with Valve for the Steam Deck and Linux desktop.

• After leading CodeWeavers for 27 years, Jeremy White has decided to leave the company, prompting the transition to an employee ownership trust. CodeWeavers is known for its CrossOver software and contributions to the Wine project.

Games

• Ready to scare yourself silly? The Outlast Trials has hit Steam Early Access and it’s Steam Deck Verified right out of the gate. This is a single-player and online co-op survival horror mixing together gory action with plenty of psychological stuff thrown in to really make you sweat.

• For fans of point and click adventures with a twist, you may want to take a look over at Last Christmas that recently added a Native Linux version. The game released on Steam in April, with the Linux version arriving May 17th.

• 8BitSkull developer of the awesome Void Scrappers and Fates of Ort has announced BORE BLASTERS, a game all about drilling with machine guns.

• If dwarves aren’t your thing and you want to do some building in space, Stardeus is worth a look and it just recently had a pretty huge upgrade. As a reminder: Stardeus is a deep colony sim set on a broken starship manned by drones and hibernating human survivors. As the AI, have your drones repair your ship, save your crew and travel the stars in this beautiful simulation.

• Enjoy games like RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress and The Settlers? You’ll likely quite enjoy dwarven colony builder Mountaincore as well. It’s just hit Early Access and works well on Linux desktop and Steam Deck with full support.

• Want to play the classic Heroes of Might and Magic II on modern platforms, with plenty of enhancements? Well the fheroes2 just keeps getting better – now with widescreen support.

Distributions and Operating Systems

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• I’ve discussed my son, Ryan, before in this magazine. In my article in November 2020, I laid out the challenges he faces. He continues to improve in all aspects of his “challenges.” Just get him talking about Transformers, Minecraft, or Sonic the Hedgehog, and he’ll talk your ears off. You’ll probably learn WAY more than you ever thought possible and more than you probably wanted to know about any of those topics. His reading is coming along fantastically, although we are now focused on improving reading comprehension. Math remains his favorite school subject. His new favorite reading material involves the graphic novel adventures of Dog Man and Cat Kid.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Red Hat has recently announced the general availability of Enterprise Linux 9.2 and the upcoming release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8. The latest release brings new features to streamline complex Linux platform tasks across hybrid cloud environments.

• “The latest versions of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform bring greater automation to help IT teams extend their reach across the hybrid cloud while at the same time making it easier to embrace innovation, whether containers or new hardware architectures,” said Gunnar Hellekson, VP and GM of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• Red Hat has introduced a new realmd RHEL system role that should make it easier for IT admins to manage security and compliance within their organizations. It allows administrators to automate the integration of RHEL systems with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Moreover, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.2 adds support for Ansible DevOps content to improve system checks following the guidelines established by the Center for Internet Security (CIS).

• I was surprised when Red Hat laid off 4% of its staff. It was a bad move. But, I never saw Red Hat laying off community Linux distro Fedora Program Manager Ben Cotton, until I saw his blog post about leaving Red Hat.

• Cotton has played a major role in making Fedora an outstanding Linux community both for users and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) developers. He was also the CentOS Stream program manager. And, he authored Program Management for Open Source Projects. In short, he was a major mover and shaker in open-source circles and in RHEL development.

• Or, in other words, he was not the kind of person I saw Red Hat, or any other tech company, getting rid of.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• With the advent of software-defined vehicles (SDVs), cars are rapidly evolving to become more connected, autonomous, shared, and electric. These four features have eventually become so prominent that everyone in the industry can recognise them as the popular acronym CASE.

• Constantly growing customer expectations also drive the SDV concept and impose challenges both on automotive hardware and software. To accommodate CASE trends and consumer needs, traditional vehicle architectures need revisiting and redesigning. Along with many other requirements, the new architecture must ensure upgradability, performance, and security.

Devices/Embedded

• Sipeed launched yesterday the Tang Nano 20K development board powered by a GowinSemi FPGA from the GW2A series. This compact embedded platform offers the same amount of logic units as the Tang Primer 20K launched last year.

• The EmETX-i92U0 is an industrial Computer-on-Module designed with the 11th Generation Intel Core processors. This customizable board delivers Ultra HD display, codec support, up to 12x USB ports and wide expansion ports.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Konrad Beckmann is using a Raspberry Pi Pico to interface with a Nintendo 64 through the cartridge port.

• The Sumolink Erhu RP2040 is a Raspberry Pi Pico clone with the exact same features except the micro USB port has been replaced by a USB-C port that may be preferred by some people, and the Wisdpi claims it is one of the world’s cheapest RP2040 MCU boards at $3.60, although that price does not include shipping.

• Work continues on the Radxa ROCK5B RK388, as PCIe and RTL8125B networking support in U-boot have now been added. Publishing code as Open Source can benefit many different other projects, and allows anyone to benefit.

• For a spectrum analyzer to work, it needs to be able to break an electrical signal down into a series of frequency ranges. In an audio signal, frequency is pitch. That means that higher frequency ranges correspond to higher notes in the audio. This spectrum analyzer utilizes an MSGEQ7 IC, which is an equalizer filter, to pull seven frequency ranges from an audio signal. It outputs the peak of each band, giving a real-time reading of each band’s amplitude.

• We will have stock of all Raspberry Pi boards at both the Birmingham and Leeds pop-up stores. This includes incredibly limited numbers of Compute Module 4, which will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis and limited to one per customer. So if you really want a CM4, we advise getting into the queue early on the first day of the pop-up you’re visiting.

• ESP32-POE and ESP32-POE-ISO are the most popular ESP32 boards with Power over Ethernet features. They are supported by ESPhome, Arduino, MicroPython, PlatformIO and of course Espressif SDK.

• The KIM-1′s serial lines are connected to the last and smallest member of Digital Equipment Corporation’s true DECtalk hardware speech synthesizers, the 1994 DECtalk Express. The DECtalk’s classic default voice heard in this video is Perfect Paul, which (with adjustments) was the voice of Dr Stephen Hawking as produced with the 1988 Speech Plus CallText 5010.

• The 15 keys we can read off the KIM’s hexadecimal keypad are polled by a “talker” program that sends the DECtalk Express words and phrases to speak. However, although the KIM-1 has 20mA current loop output you can turn into RS-232 serial, its built-in ROM routines can’t reliably communicate at the 9600 baud rate the DECtalk Express demands.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• This isn’t entirely new in the Apache (httpd) project, since the initial releases of 2.2 and 2.4 were almost seven years apart, but it still feels like we’ve been using Apache 2.4 forever and are going to keep on using it for the foreseeable future. This isn’t particularly a bad thing; for example, I’ve certainly got a lot of use over the years out of Apache 2.4 expertise. But it does feel a little bit peculiar that such a core part of the web has stayed so stable for so long (I know that Apache is no longer the trendy web server, but we love it and I think it’s still reasonably commonly used).

Licensing / Legal

• Every time there is an infection point in technological innovations, the licensing dynamic comes up.

• With things becoming more open with data, licensing code should be simplified using a specific method, such as a reference file, according to Richard Hartmann (pictured), director of community at Raintank Inc. (dba Grafana Labs).

Programming/Development

• For as long as I can remember, I have heard people say C/C++ when referring to a project written in C and or C++. A lot of programming/developer jobs also refer to C/C++ when they need a programmer who knows either C or C++. To most people who have never touched C or C++ this might not seem like a big deal. However, the problem is that when people say this term (C/C++) they make it seem like C and C++ are similar or closely related programming languages. That is not true. Although C++ was based off of C when it was first created, these two languages have slowly drifted apart over the years to the point where they share less and less in common.

• At Pulumi we read every single error message that our API produces. This is the primary mechanism that led to a 17x YoY reduction in our error rate. You’re probably wondering how reading error messages make them go away.

• Doesn’t common wisdom tell us that we need a fancy observability toolchain, or to follow the Google SRE model? I can confidently say that you don’t. I’ll go a step further and state that throughout my career, every system I’ve worked on that relied on aggregate views of errors was a complete dumpster fire. In every team where we instead chose to read all the errors, reliability naturally improved over time.

• I offer a concrete process that will drive your error rates down over time with math to back it up.

• The Go programming language makes it easy to call C code. Suppose you have the following C functions: [...]

Standards/Consortia

• The first update to the Matter smart home interoperability standard is here. When the Matter standard launched in October of last year, the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) promised that it would release updates every six months or so. Surprisingly, they delivered (it took much longer to get the initial standard out).

Leftovers

• In 2022, the prices of visiting visiting museums, libraries and zoological gardens in Latvia rose by 5.3%, according to data published May 18 by Eurostat.

Science

• “In the earliest texts in the Sumerian language, kissing was described in relation to erotic acts,” according to researchers.

• Scientific American is the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology, explaining how they change our understanding of the world and shape our lives.

• An asteroid by the name of 2023 JK is expected to zip past Earth on Sunday, missing our planet by just a little more than a million miles. According to NASA, 2023 JK is roughly the size of a commercial jet. Or, as The Jerusalem Post measures it, the length of 18 adult male Pacific walruses.

• Unveiled on Wednesday, the 3D scan was the result of a six-week expedition to the North Atlantic wreck site in summer 2022, during which researchers used two remotely operated submersibles — named Romeo and Juliet — to map the entire shipwreck and the surrounding 3-mile debris field.

• The researchers took more than 700,000 images from every angle to create a virtual, exact 3D reconstruction.

• The first full-size digital scan of the Titanic has revealed the world’s most famous shipwreck as never seen before, and experts hope that it will provide more insight into how the liner came to sink in 1912.

• Created using deep-sea mapping, the unique 3D view of the entire vessel could break through “a century’s worth of human interpretation” about what happened to the liner as it made its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York, Parks Stephenson, a Titanic analyst and historian, told NBC News on Wednesday.

Education

• In a small Missouri town, a campaign to remove literature from the high-school library forced members of the community to reckon with the meaning of “parents’ rights.”

• A survey “Teachers’ voice” on how teachers feel and see themselves in the profession has been carried out in Latvia for the second time. The survey data, published on May 18, show that in 2022, the number of teachers who do not feel good in their job and are planning to leave has risen significantly.

• Hundreds of New College of Florida students, family members and friends gathered at an off-campus art gallery for an “alternative commencement” in defiance of state officials working to change the character of the traditionally progressive school. The Tampa Bay Times reports that Thursday evening’s ceremony preceded Friday’s official graduation on the school’s Sarasota campus. The college had less than 700 students enrolled this year. It has become the focal point of Gov. Ron DeSantis to rid higher education in the state of what the Republican governor calls left-leaning “woke” indoctrination on campuses ahead of his expected presidential candidacy.

• I watched Chapter 1 last night and, if it’s foreshadowing the rest of the course, my expectations have already been exceeded.

• Here are a few of the things I took notes on through Chapter 1: [...]

Hardware

• For years all I’ve ever wanted from TV manufacturers is a “dumb” TV that has a whole bunch of HDMI inputs, but no “smart” internals. Since I know the real money is increasingly made from spying on users and monetizing their every fart (while failing to properly secure the collected data), I’ve even been willing to pay extra for simplicity, quality, and privacy.

• Cincoze DX-1200 is a fanless embedded computer powered by a choice of 12th gen Intel Core (Alder Lake-S) Celeron up to Core i9 CPUs whose mainboard is housed in a rugged and compact chassis designed for industrial edge AI and machine vision applications. The DX-1200 supports up to 64GB of 4800MHz DDR5 memory with ECC, and the Intel Xe architecture of the UHD 770 graphics chip is said to deliver image classification inference performance that is 2.8 times the speed of the Comet Lake-S platform. The embedded computer also offers a wide range of I/Os and as well expansion capabilities for up to four 10GbE, DIO, and COM ports, and M.2 and mPCIe sockets for WiFi, GNSS, 4G, and Bluetooth connectivity.

• Slow response times and high cost of parts make program unviable, third-party repairers say

• Being one of the largest DRAM chip manufacturers in the world, Samsung is experiencing a rather critical moment in its recent history.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The updated Online Safety Bill will include prosecuting online abusers who try to manipulate people on the web into causing themselves injury or grievous bodily harm (GBH), regardless of whether or not the victims do inflict this pain onto themselves.

• The EU last month singled out 19 large online platforms, including TikTok, which will be subject to the Digital Services Act (DSA), a set of new online content rules from August.

• The rules require the companies to do risk management, conduct external and independent auditing, share data with authorities and researchers and adopt a code of conduct.

• France is finalizing a law that seeks to regulate the commercial activities of influencers and protect consumers from possible fraud or scams. The regulation, which has already been approved by the National Assembly and the Senate, prohibits promoting cosmetic surgery and subscriptions to sports betting applications. It also forces influencers to state whether they have been paid to promote a product, if images have been retouched or if a person’s figure or face have been created with the help of artificial intelligence. If a person breaks the rules, they may face up to two years in prison, a €300,000 ($320,000) fine and be banned from carrying out commercial activities on social media.

• Mylissa Farmer knew her fetus was dying inside of her. Her water broke less than 18 weeks into her pregnancy last August, and she was desperate for an abortion.

• But according to federal documents, during three emergency room visits over two days in Missouri and Kansas, doctors repeatedly gave Farmer the same chilling message: Though there was virtually no chance her fetus would survive and the pregnancy was putting her at high risk for life-threatening complications, there was nothing they could do for her.

• Finland recorded an exceptionally high number of gonorrhea cases last year.

• The staff writers return to The Political Scene to discuss the state of abortion rights and what has changed since the Dobbs decision.

• Increasingly, yes. But not necessarily in your home recycling. Here’s what to do with empty toothpaste tubes

• Advocates say one-third of Minnesota workers — about 900,000 people — don’t have any paid time off.

• The bill includes $10 million to establish the state’s first grain indemnity fund, providing protections for farmers who might be owed money when grain buyers or elevators become financially insolvent

• “As of May 16, 2023, a cumulative total of 1,017 suspected cholera cases, six laboratory confirmed deaths…”

• Tajik authorities say a 52-year-old woman has been arrested in the northern district of Bobojon Ghafurov on allegations that she deliberately infected nine men with HIV by having sex with them.

• Walgreens reached a $230 million settlement deal with San Francisco for its role in the opioid epidemic, after a landmark trial last year that found the pharmacy giant liable for fueling the crisis.

• The Dairy Industry Working Group of the Agricultural Organizations Council (LOSP) decided on May 18 to ask the government to immediately announce a state of emergency in the dairy sector in Latvia due to a prolonged fall in milk buying prices, and to implement intervention in the dairy market.

Proprietary

• The collections industry is pushing GPT-4 as a dystopian new way to make borrowers pay up, replicating the debt system’s long history of racial bias.

• I’m no stranger to robotic lawnmowers. When my wife and I moved into our rural home just over five years ago, we picked up the Husqvarna 450X Automower since I was far too lazy to manually mow my property and the cost was equal to that of a standard riding mower. It was a no-brainer.

• Fast-forward five years. Everything is still going great with the Automower. Some minor repairs were needed but that was mostly my fault since I was allowing the mower into places it shouldn’t have been (ie. root systems and dirt “craters”). Then lightning struck our backyard at the beginning of April this year. The mower was fine, since we stow it away inside for the winter but the charging station, charging brick and perimeter wire we not so lucky…

• The lightning traveled along the main perimeter wire and went straight to the charging station. Boom. The charging dock was quite literally blown up into a million tiny pieces and scattered across my backyard. Giant trenches were carved up where the perimeter wire had been embedded in the lawn. This surge also followed the path towards the main power adapter and exploded that as well. All of this happened even with the charging station / adapter turned off and unplugged from any outlet. At least my mower was safe…

• In other respects, the letter primarily laid out a series of vaguely worded allegations. For instance, it noted that while Microsoft was required to inform Twitter about its intended use of the data, it failed to do so for six of the eight Microsoft apps that drew on information from the Twitter database.

• Similarly, the letter asserted that at least one Microsoft app had supplied Twitter data to a number of virtual locations that “reference a government entity or agency.” That apparently violated Microsoft’s agreement with Twitter, the letter stated, which prohibited the company from retrieving Twitter data “on behalf of ‘any government-related entity’” without first notifying Twitter.

• ChatGPT just turned 6 (months old). So why does Sam Altman want OpenAI to be regulated? A few hypotheses.

Windows TCO

• An apparent cyberattack forced the Philadelphia Inquirer to close its office through Tuesday, the newspaper’s spokesperson Evan Benn told CNN in an email on Monday.

• That means the Inquirer’s journalists won’t be in the office on Tuesday as they cover a key election: Philadelphia’s Democratic primary for the mayoral race.

• The Inquirer had been unable to print its regular Sunday newspaper, and it was not clear until late Sunday afternoon that it would be possible to print Monday’s editions of The Inquirer and Daily News newspapers. Online posting and updating of stories to Inquirer.com continued, though sometimes slower than normal.

• It was unclear when systems would be fully restored, and Inquirer publisher Lisa Hughes said in response to emailed questions that “we are currently unable to provide an exact time line.” The incident was the greatest publication disruption to Pennsylvania’s largest news organization since the blizzard of Jan. 7-8, 1996, and it came just days before Tuesday’s mayoral primary election.

• Ms. Mastrull, who was working as an editor over the weekend, said that staff members had noticed on Saturday that they could not log on to the content management system.

• The cyberattack has caused the largest disruption to publication of Pennsylvania’s largest news organization since a massive blizzard in January 1996, the Inquirer reported.

• The cyberattack precedes a mayoral primary election scheduled for Tuesday. Hughes said the operational disruption would not affect news coverage of the election, although journalists would be unable to use the newsroom on election night.

• Hughes said other Inquirer employees will not be allowed to use offices through at least Tuesday, and the company was looking into coworking arrangements for Tuesday, the Inquirer reported.

• A failed cybersecurity attack is responsible for Newport News Public Library branch computers being out of operation the past three weeks.

• FIN7 has a long history in the cybercrime world. According to the FBI, the group’s operations date to at least 2015, and FIN7 has targeted some 100 U.S. companies with attacks designed to steal payment credentials and other data that can be used or sold for profit. The group is believed to have developed the ransomware strain that was used to attack Colonial Pipeline in 2021, an incident that resulted in fuel deliveries being disrupted along the Eastern Seaboard and drew attention to the widespread problem of ransomware attacks.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• Meta is cracking the AI arms race wide open. Literally.

• According to a report from The New York Times, Meta-formerly-Facebook is doubling down on its decision to make its large language model called LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) — which competes with the likes of OpenAI’s GPT-4 — open source.

• Its actions contrast with those of Google and OpenAI, the two companies leading the new A.I. arms race. Worried that A.I. tools like chatbots will be used to spread disinformation, hate speech and other toxic content, those companies are becoming increasingly secretive about the methods and software that underpin their A.I. products.

Linux Foundation

Security

• Seven actively abused Linux-related security flaws, most of which are years old, have been added by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, according to SiliconAngle.

• Security updates have been issued by Fedora (cups-filters, kitty, mingw-LibRaw, nispor, rust-ybaas, and rust-yubibomb), Mageia (kernel-linus), Red Hat (jenkins and jenkins-2-plugins), SUSE (openvswitch and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.15, linux-gkeop, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-oracle, and linux-oem-6.0).

• A threat actor known for targeting Microsoft cloud environments now is employing the serial console feature on Azure virtual machines (VMs) to hijack the VM to install third-party remote management software within clients’ cloud environments.

• Tracked as UNC3844 by researchers at Mandiant Intelligence, the threat group is leveraging this attack method to skirt traditional security detections employed within Azure with a living-off-the-land (LotL) attack ultimately aimed at stealing data that it can use for financial gain, Mandiant researchers revealed in a blog post this week.

• The popular KeePass password manager is vulnerable to extracting the master password from the application’s memory, allowing attackers who compromise a device to retrieve the password even with the database is locked.

• The issue was discovered by a security researcher known as ‘vdohney,’ who published a proof-of-concept tool allowing attackers to extract the KeePass master password from memory as a proof-of-concept (PoC).

• A failed cybersecurity attack is responsible for Newport News Public Library branch computers being out of operation the past three weeks.

• Public computers and printing, faxing and scan-to-email services have all been unavailable since April 25. Library patrons who tried to use public computers at library branches were greeted with signs taped over the screens that say “out of order.”

• DataBreaches.net has noted some reports this week involving an unnamed business associate that discovered a phishing attack in January of this year. The most recent disclosure was spotted on the website of South Texas Health System for its South Texas Health System – Edinburg facility.

• The Health Breach Notification Rule has been in place since 2009. Given the pace of innovation, that seems like a century in tech years. Since then, we’ve seen an explosion in the popularity of health apps, fitness trackers, and other health-related monitors. To keep up with technological developments and evolving business practices, the FTC is proposing changes to the Rule and welcomes your comments.

• The Health Breach Notification Rule applies to certain businesses that aren’t covered by HIPAA – specifically, vendors of personal health records (PHR), PHR related entities, and third party service providers. When there’s been an unauthorized acquisition of a person’s unsecured, personally identifiable health information, PHR vendors and PHR related entities must (among other things) notify the FTC, consumers and, in some cases, the media. If your company is a third party service provider to a PHR vendor or a PHR related entity, you have notice requirements under the Rule, too. (Read Complying with FTC’s Health Breach Notification Rule for details.)

• Rackspace Technology Inc. won’t have to face proposed class-action litigation in San Antonio over a December ransomware attack that hobbled the cloud computing company.

• U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez on Thursday sided with Rackspace in dismissing litigation that had been brought by 37 plaintiffs from across the U.S. who lost access to email and related data as a result of the attack. More than 30,000 customers were allegedly affected, the judge noted in his ruling.

• A week ago, I wrote about Google starting to offer “.zip” domains and the possible risks associated with this. Earlier today, I quickly surveyed registered .zip domains to see what people are doing with them.

• Google Registry has recently introduced 8 new top-level domains for “dads, grads, and techies,” adding .dad, .phd, .prof, .esq, .foo, .nexus, .zip, and .mov…

• As enterprise adoption of virtualization technology increases, CrowdStrike has observed a rise in ransomware attacks on servers running VMware’s ESXi bare-metal hypervisors.

• Object storage specialist announces v2.0 of Artesca, with a heavy focus on functionality that can protect against ransomware such as object locking, sharding, backup to object etc

• By integrating software bill of materials creation into the software development lifecycle, IT and DevOps teams can build more secure and maintainable applications.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• The fix is pretty simple. Any redirection logic should ensure that users can only be redirected to an internal page not an external site.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Its deployment is nothing more than our demise from democracy. It may be all anyone can talk about this morning, but Beyonce’s nothing short of incredible performance (I’m sure) in Cardiff was marred by the disappointing news that Cardiff police were deploying live facial recognition to “support” the concert. What is live facial recognition?

• The head of Hong Kong’s largest journalists’ group said he feared a privacy breach when he was asked to show his identity card by a plainclothes officer, a court has heard.

• Taking in account certain complaints and apprehension raised in the DRSC meeting, Chairman (DC) ordered the installation of CCTV cameras in all the School buses, and Matadors registered with ARTO Doda.

• The executing agencies were directed to install glow signage, speed limit boards and boards with Emergency Response Team contact numbers on all the roads. The DRSC also instructed the concerned authorities to raise memorials at accident sites to alert the commuters. The agencies were also asked to remove the encroachments from all the roads.

• Finnish police announced on Friday that they will increase technical surveillance and use the newly unveiled road sign I16 to designate when it is in use.

• The police said that the new sign — which is blue and white with a device that appears like a camera — will notify drivers when the police and other authorities are using technical surveillance in a given area.

Defence/Aggression

• We dedicate the show to remembering Malcolm X on what would have been his 98th birthday Friday. We begin with an address by world-renowned abolitionist, author and activist Angela Davis on Malcolm’s legacy, attacks on the teaching of Black history by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and more. “This is a time to reflect deeply on the long struggle for liberation,” Davis said. “And Malcolm asked us to keep our eyes on the future, future worlds, radical democratic futures for all beings who inhabit this planet.”

• Economist Michael Hudson responds to the misleading arguments against de-dollarization that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman made in his attempt to defend US hegemony and the dollar system.

• Russian troops launched out a new series of airstrikes on Ukrainian cities on Thursday night.

• Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers searched the homes of multiple human rights advocates who work for Perm’s Historical Memory Center (the legal successor to the Perm branch of the Nobel Prize-winning human rights group Memorial) on Friday morning.

• Russia’s Prosecutor General has designated Greenpeace International an “undesirable organization,” banning its activities across the country.

• Despite all the attacks by fascism, the Green Left Party succeeded in becoming the third largest party in the parliament of Turkey following the 14 May elections. The European Election Coordination of the Green Left Party said that the targeted outcome was, however, not achieved. The European Election Coordination vowed to make fascism and Erdogan lose in the second round of the presidential election.

• The Coordination issued the following message: [...]

• In response, Indonesian Religious Affairs Minister Yaqut Cholil Qoumas and his home affairs and education counterparts threatened to sanction state schools seeking to impose religious garb in violation of government rules and regulations.

• Thus, for Newsweek to detail doubts over the Pentagon’s decision to abandon a long-running cyber-security program protecting its global IT network and replace it with off-the-shelf tools from Microsoft certainly merits comment.

• Newsweek’s Shaun Waterman wrote that the criticism of the shift had come both from outsiders and insiders, with experts saying it would make the US “more vulnerable to foreign hackers, enemy cyber-warriors and online spies”.

• His effort is well worth a read; he quotes both anonymous and named sources in mounting the argument that sourcing everything from a single software vendor isn’t the wisest thing to do. One source says: “I was completely against it. A lot of us were, for the same reason: It felt like we were further embedding ourselves into this monopolistic (Microsoft) monoculture.”

• DOD’s decision to push ahead with the move to Microsoft security tools, based on an assessment from the National Security Agency, has cast a new light on long-standing questions about the security of the software produced by the Redmond, Wash.-based technology giant, and the impact of its dominance in government technology markets. It could also run counter to the White House’s new cybersecurity strategy, which calls on software companies to offer secure products in the first place rather than selling additional security measures on top.

• Kenneth Elliott, 88, is safe and well and has been reunited with his wife, Jocelyn, and their children, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said.

• According to a joint investigation by iStories, Der Spiegel and the OCCRP, Russia has been making monthly purchases of drones and microchips via Kazakhstan worth millions of dollars, in order to bypass sanctions.

• Given the mental anguish and, in some cases, brutal repression endured by the many thousands of Russians who oppose Putin and Russia’s war on Ukraine, everyone wants to know why the Russian opposition hasn’t managed to stop him. One theory holds that it has something to do with an innate Russian national character — whatever that might mean — of subservience, that the Russian people bring dictatorship on themselves by not desiring liberty and democracy enough. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, sociological studies from both within Russia and outside the country have shown that Russian citizens value democratic ideals as much as citizens of much freer states. But the idea that Russians are a “subservient nation” is, it turns out, both old and durable, lasting from the early imperial era, into the Soviet Union, and down to the present day. Meduza explains the history of the idea and why it’s, at best, overly simplistic and, at worst, dangerous.

• “These provisional figures could change quickly. Some sources even mention 28 deaths,” outlet Tchadinfos reported.

• The story of Darwin really begins with the necessity to establish a support route for the Overland Telegraph to the southern states of Australia.

• Uzair Younus talks to Amir Husain, founder and chief executive officer of SparkCognition, about current and emerging trends, what countries like Pakistan can do to take advantage of seismic advances in technology, and how individuals can better prepare themselves for the future.

• Israel deployed over 2,000 police on Thursday for a march by flag-waving Jewish nationalists through the main Palestinian thoroughfare in Jerusalem’s Old City, a contentious event that comes as tensions are already running high.

• The bodies of the victims were set ablaze, together with their vehicles, by the gunmen.

• Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has warned the de facto Taliban regime in Afghanistan that its noncompliance with joint agreements on water rights in regions along their shared border is escalating tensions between Tehran and Kabul.

• Australia’s detailed investigation into allegations that members of its special forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan demonstrated the nation’s commitment to the rule of law, says former defence minister Stephen Smith. In a video interview …

• Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies amplify upon a full-page ad in The New York Times on Tuesday calling the war an “unmitigated disaster” and urging Biden and U.S. Congress to help bring it speedily to an end.

• Junta threatens prison and death penalty for those who bear, sell and distribute weapons.

• The NASAMS air defence system has been used for the first time during a field tactical exercise, the Lithuanian military said on Thursday.

• The Lithuanian parliament, Seimas, has passed a resolution, saying that Lithuanian Communist Party was responsible for mass deportations in the wake of the country’s Soviet occupation.

• Seventy-seven SA National Defence Force (SANDF) staffers made good use of the facilities and expertise of the Peace Mission Training Centre (PMTC) to boost peacekeeping skills in disarmament, demobilisation and re-integration (DDR).

• Officials destroyed Sudanese passports on security grounds as they evacuated the Khartoum embassy. Now the passport owners are trapped in a war zone.

• Hungary will block EU military aid for Ukraine as well as new sanctions against Russia, unless Hungarian OTP Bank is removed from list of war sponsors, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in Vienna on Wednesday. The blocked tranche is worth €500 million and was due by next Monday.

• “The [Hungarian] government will not approve the next tranche of the European Peace Facility until Ukraine removes OTP from the list of international sponsors of the war,” Szijjarto said. He added that partially this is the reason Hungary does not support new sanctions. According to the Hungarian Foreign Minister the eleventh sanctions package “goes against common sese as the previous ten also failed.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• In November 2021, Gizmodo partnered with a group of independent experts to review, redact, and publish the Facebook Papers. This committee serves to advise and monitor our work and facilitate the responsible disclosure of the greatest number of documents in the public interest possible. We believe in the value of open access to these materials. Our collective goal is to minimize any potential harms that could result from the disclosure of certain methods by which Meta tackles sensitive issues like sex trafficking, disinformation, and voter manipulation. The documents, which have not previously been published, additionally contain both personal and private details about low-level Facebook employees and many of the users included in the company’s studies and internal discussions. The risks associated with publishing this information outweighs the value of disclosure.

Environment

• The Ministry of Coal in a statement said that the major leap in coal production of 893.08 MT in FY 2023 is the highest in the history of the country.

• While federal budgets include all the costs of fighting climate change, the other side of the ledger, the notional income from the benefits of you not breathing smoke, or at least breathing less, remain blank. Since there is no benefit, it is harder to justify spending the money.

• Corals grow like plants, but their branches are made of rock. They contain algae, but are animals. Their cells seethe with innumerable bacteria and viruses carrying out mysterious tasks.

• It is perhaps easier to describe their role in the world’s oceans: absolutely vital. They support about one-quarter of the ocean’s fish stocks.

• Their future is easier still to predict: unless we do something, they will all soon die. Nearly all tropical reefs will become extinct even if global warming is kept to 1.5 degrees.

• Tsunami waves of one-to-three metres above tide are possible along some coastal areas of Vanuatu.

• New Caledonia has lifted a tsunami warning triggered after a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck Friday in the Pacific Ocean southwest of the island.

• The death toll from floods that devastated an area of northeastern Italy rose to 11 Thursday after the bodies of two more people were found, authorities told AFP.

Energy/Transportation

• Electricity production must also be profitable for nuclear power plants, according to the facility’s operator Teollisuuden Voima (TVO).

• Australia’s biggest carbon capture project is working but not at the rates Chevron promised, leaving the gas giant open to criticism. The vast Gorgon project on Barrow Island about 60 kilometres off the northwest coast of Western Australia is the largest single-resource project in Australia’s history.

• Congress is considering mandating automakers to include AM receivers in vehicles as a safety issue. The news comes as many automakers have plans to phase out AM receivers on vehicles sold in the U.S.

• California has its hydrogen hub wheels in motion with fuel cell-powered buses spearheading its funding proposal.

• During a visit to Japan, including to the destroyed Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant site, US Representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken Democrat from Queens, New York, made a series of Instagram posts.

• Companies in Italy, Austria and Germany have revealed plans to combine hydrogen pipeline projects to establish a 3,300km hydrogen-ready corridor which they say could deliver 40% of Europe’s imported hydrogen demand in 2030.

• “It (using existing Tartu or Pärnu railways – ed.) would require changing all domestic and international decisions and launching a completely new planning process,” Sander Salmu, the ministry’s undersecretary for transport, said in a reply to NGO Eesti Metsa Abiks.

• He explained that it was found in the planning process in 2018 that having Rail Baltic follow the existing 1,520-mm track gauge railway between Tallinn and Pärnu would not be justified, while earlier analyses (AECOME 2011) had not supported having it run through Tapa and Tartu.

• If you’re in the process of having solar installed in Idaho Power’s territory, or already have it installed, you recently got a letter in the mail informing you about their proposed changes to net metering for “non-legacy” systems under Schedule 84. This is the Idaho Public Utilities Commission case IPC-E-23-14. It relates to changing from kWh for kWh net metering to a new, generation-credit based system. And while the documents are fairly easy to read, they’re also quite long – so I thought I’d be helpful and summarize the changes and my thoughts on them here!

Overpopulation

• Lake and reservoir levels can change quickly and significantly, something the U.S. has experienced recently—drought last year emptied many critical lakes, but extreme winter storms refilled them this year. The water loss noted in the study was attributed to climate change and increased human activity, including greater water demands.

Finance

• The negotiations around the pending approach of the debt ceiling limit are shrouded in media-driven intrigue, but they boast as much creative and original thinking as the latest installment in the Fast and Furious franchise. And like each new entry in that steal-chase-crash-and-repeat Hollywood empire, the debt ceiling drama is long on senseless mayhem and short on coherent plotting.

• Japan is “now seriously thinking about joining Indian UPI”, the payments system and also, it is contemplating how it can mutually recognise e-ID, for increasing interoperability,” the country’s digital minister Kono Taro has said in a media interview.

• The Centre thanked Japan for its interest in UPI (unified payments interface) and said it is working to recognise a common e-ID for better interoperability.

• These scammers claim to be spiritual figures, promising to turn small investments into immense wealth.

• THREE Alepa grocery shops have recently closed or are about to close their doors in downtown Helsinki, Helsingin Sanomat reported on Wednesday.

• The grocery shops that closed their doors earlier this month were located in Forum and on Iso Roobertinkatu. Alepa Eliel at Helsinki Central Station, meanwhile, is set to cease operations next month.

• Six in 100 claims were underpaid in 2022-23

• The FT Group had planned to close the Pensions Expert brand.

• President Joe Biden met with congressional leaders May 9 in hopes of coming to an agreement to raise the country’s debt limit, or the cap on how much the federal government can borrow to pay for its functions and programs.

• media influencers and people with side hustles will come under scrutiny this tax season as the Australian Taxation Office cracks down on businesses amid the cost-of-living crisis. From July 1, tax officials will use sophisticated data-matching and analytical tools to catch taxpayers who under-report their income.

• Businesses will be slugged with higher premiums under changes to Victoria’s WorkCover, with the state government overhauling a system it says is broken. Premier Daniel Andrews announced businesses would pay an average of 1.8 per cent of remuneration from July 1, increasing from 1.27 per cent.

• Philadelphia-headquartered Audacy is being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) due to “an abnormally low selling price” – though the digital radio and podcasting company intends to appeal the decision. Audacy confirmed its NYSE exit, which follows several disappointing earnings reports and a Q3 2022 layoff round, via a general release.

• The US Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) does not need to provide notice to delinquent taxpayers of summons made against them to collect outstanding federal taxes. This does not apply to summons to determine whether a taxpayer owes an outstanding amount, only summons to collect.

• The tech layoff continues as the e-commerce giant Amazon is reportedly firing almost 500 employees in India across departments…

• President Biden is warning that a looming rail strike could have devastating economic consequences, and has called on House lawmakers to vote today to block the strike and force through a contract deal that raises wages by nearly 25% but includes no paid sick days and is opposed…

• Free of the tech industry’s “golden handcuffs,” laid-off workers are finding more meaningful work at fashion startups, wineries, and neighborhood retail shops. “I’m not above anything or below anything,” one laid-off tech manager said.

• Italy on Monday earmarked 30 million euros ($33 million) to improve the skills of unemployed people as well as those workers whose jobs could be most at risk from the advance of automation and artificial intelligence.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Under the state’s ban, TikTok will be fined if it operates within the state, while app store providers such as Google and Apple also face fines if they allow Montana-based users to download it.

• The Montana ban, which takes effect in January 2024, does not prevent current users from accessing the app or penalize them for doing so.

• Instead, the ban targets the availability of the app by threatening entities such as TikTok, Google and Apple with a $10,000 fine for each day that the platform remains accessible in app stores for users in Montana.

• “This is not doing anything with respect to existing users,” Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute, told ABC News, noting however that the law will hinder current users eventually as they fail to download new updates to the app.

• Montana Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed it into law Wednesday expecting a legal fight would follow. The law, which isn’t scheduled to take effect until Jan. 1, 2024, also faces a litany of questions over whether the state can even enforce the law.

• The new rules in Montana will have more far-reaching effects than TikTok bans already in place on government-issued devices in nearly half the states and the U.S. federal government. There are 200,000 TikTok users in Montana as well as 6,000 businesses that use the video-sharing platform, according to company spokesperson Jamal Brown.

• Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin will run on the ticket of the ruling United Russia party in the city’s upcoming election in September, Russian state media reported on Friday. The party will reportedly nominate him at a conference whose date has not yet been finalized.

• The official strategy coincided with the G7 Summit in Japan, where Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Japan premier Fumio Kishida unveiled a global strategic partnership on semiconductors between the two nations.

• The comments from The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) to the European Commission which is now looking into the issue underscores the high-stakes battle between Big Tech and Europe’s major telecoms operators.

• It’s frustrating how few news organizations these days are willing to call out nonsense for being nonsense. Too many feel they need to do one of those “view from nowhere” things where they pro/con everything. That’s why I appreciate The Verge, a news site that has spent years actually taking a stand. Its latest is a piece by Emma Roth, calling out the spate of age verification laws, and what a disaster they are for privacy online.

• A Yekaterinburg court imposed a fine of 260,000 rubles ($3,260) against the city’s former mayor Evgeny Roizman on Friday for allegedly “discrediting” the Russian military, granting the request made by prosecutors on Thursday.

• A G.O.P. demand to impose stricter work requirements on recipients of food stamps and other public benefits has drawn a Democratic backlash, underscoring the tricky politics at play in the negotiations.

• The persistence and breadth of generosity, a new study shows, matter far more than identity in shaping human interaction.

• In an attempt to sustain his argument that the FBI was overly hasty in opening an investigation into Trump’s Coffee Boy, John Durham whitewashed many of the details about George Papadopoulos, including that he himself found the Coffee Boy’s communications with Sergei Millian to be “creepy.”

• As the country heads to a Presidential runoff, will the aftermath of a devastating earthquake hold more sway than old narratives of grievance?

• Top U.S. negotiators who have been working to de-escalate tensions and implement reforms in the Western Balkans told a U.S. Senate committee on May 18 that they remain optimistic about progress in the region toward EU membership despite “considerable” obstacles.

• It claims the institutions used members of the civil disobedience movement.

• A coalition of civil and disability rights organizations filed an emergency injunction with the Northern District of Georgia on Wednesday asking the court to block two provisions of a Georgia voting law, SB 202, due to their impact on people with disabilities’ access to voting.

• The Supreme Court of Namibia ruled the country’s authorities must recognize foreign same-sex marriages for immigration purposes, potentially signaling a major policy shift in a country where homosexuality is criminalized. The decision came out of a consolidated appeal involving two foreign nationals in same-sex marriages with Namibian citizens.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The obviously faked video of President Biden is part of a much larger operation by the Republican Party and larger neofascist movement to use AI and other disruptive technologies to undermine the very idea of objective reality and empirical truth as part of their broader war on democracy and civil society.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A Turkish court has banned access to the 2021 annual report of the Freedom of Expression Association’s (İFÖD) EngelliWeb initiative, which focuses on the growing [Internet] censorship in Turkey in 2021, Turkish Minute reported, citing EngelliWeb.

• The report, which was drafted by Professor Yaman Akdeniz from İstanbul Bilgi University’s law faculty and researcher Ozan Güven, was published in October 2022. It said Turkish courts blocked access to 107,706 websites and domains, including 5,436 URLs containing news items, in Turkey in 2021.

• A new federal lawsuit alleges that recent decisions by officials in a Florida county to ban and restrict access to books in school libraries violates constitutional rights to free speech and equal protection under the law.

• Over the past year, officials in western Florida’s Escambia County have banned more than a dozen books in the county school district’s libraries and classrooms in response to a wave of challenges by conservative teachers and parents.

• Iranian authorities on Friday executed three men convicted of violence against the Islamic republic’s security forces during protests triggered by Mahsa Amini’s death in custody last year, the judiciary said.

• Hundreds of political books have been pulled from Hong Kong libraries in a move that analysts say is part of an ideological drive to purge “harmful” influences from the city that was once the bastion of freedom in Asia.

• This week, Hong Kong media reported that a number of books related to the 1989 military crackdown on the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement in Beijing, along with books by authors seen as pro-independence or pro-democracy, can no longer be found in libraries.

• And so today, she is finally speaking out, too scalded by the sense of injustice to choose the path of least resistance. It is a move of considerable courage, given the febrile climate in which sport’s trans debate is conducted. The fear of being denounced as transphobic is so acute that at the elite level, no active female athletes dare put their names to their disquiet over fairness. Only last week, Inga Thompson, a retired three-time US Olympian, found herself accused by cycling team Cynisca of “affecting its brand and reputation” for opposing the presence of post-puberty males in female sport.

• Police in Belarus have detained singer Patrytsia Svitsina, who in 2020 refused to accept scholarship from authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka, citing her moral principles.

• The Hong Kong government has a duty to identify books with “bad ideologies,” Chief Executive John Lee has said at a Q&A session at the legislature on Thursday, after hundreds of political titles were purged from the city’s libraries.

• Court rules that there is no reason to consider the case further. Congress should take note and focus their attention on addressing the power of digital platforms.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Last August, Rushdie was appearing at the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education and retreat center in western New York, when he was assaulted by a young man dressed in black and carrying a knife. Rushdie sustained multiple wounds, leaving him blind in his right eye and struggling to write.

• Over 100 international media leaders around the world have expressed support for detained Hong Kong pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong in a joint statement on Tuesday organised by Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Civil Rights/Policing

• Last year, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade., ignoring decades of precedent with the Dobbs v. Jackson Health Organization decision. Republicans have used majorities in statehouses to curtail civil rights and liberties for queer and transgender communities. Tennessee Republicans were expelled Democratic lawmakers for calling for gun control in the wake of a school shooting in Nashville. Billionaire funded think tanks have drafted legislation that could erase decades of child labor law and protections.

• Film and TV screenwriters went on strike at the beginning of this month. The WGA is seeking better pay, new contracts for the streaming era, and safeguards against the use of AI-generated scripted shows.

• Sean Penn’s comments about AI echo those of Sting, who believes AI is a battle every creative will have to fight “in the next couple of years.” “The building blocks of music belong to us, to human beings,” Sting told the BBC in an interview. “The tools are useful, but we have to be driving them,” the singer says of AI. “I don’t think we can allow the machines to just take over. We have to be wary.”

• Apparently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis uses they/them pronouns.

• Seeking help, L.G.B.T.Q. members of religious communities may end up in conversion therapy without even realizing it.

• US border authorities confirmed Wednesday that an eight-year-old girl died while in their custody along the US southern border. Her death is the second reported incident of a child dying in US custody since the lifting of Title 42, a Trump-era immigration policy that has been widely criticized by human rights groups.

• First the city tried hotels, then tents, then a cruise ship terminal, then school gyms. As migrants have continued to cross the border, the mayor pleaded on Wednesday for understanding — and ideas.

• Kemal Mrndzic, the former supervisor of the notorious Celebici Bosnian prison camp where Serbs were held and tortured during the bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia, has been arrested in Boston.

• An unrepentant and defiant Islamic extremist received 10 life sentences and another 260 years in prison on May 17 for killing eight people with a truck on a bike path in Manhattan.

• Three jailed Iranian protesters who fear their execution is imminent have appealed to the public for support in a handwritten note saying, “Don’t let them kill us.”

• Mining has increased dramatically on the Tibetan Plateau – and with it pollution and degradation.

• One year after successful unionization efforts, Stanford resident physicians held a unity break on Wednesday to demand that the University offer a “fair” contract for better pay and working conditions.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The two cases were called Google v. Gonzales and Twitter v. Taamneh. Both cases were brought by the families of victims of ISIS terrorist attacks who claimed that social media companies (namely Twitter and the Google-owned YouTube) helped the group carry out the attacks. Normally, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects Internet companies from liability for defamatory or illegal content posted on their platforms. In the Google case, families argued that YouTube’s algorithm actively promotes terrorist content to users it thinks might be interested in such activity, and thus the company should not be protected by Section 230. In the Twitter case, families argued that a different law, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), allowed them to sue Twitter for “aiding and abetting” terrorism and “providing substantial assistance” to ISIS.

• The decisions left untouched Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. As currently interpreted, Section 230 grants [Internet] companies broad legal protections for user-posted content on their services.

• The two related cases, which had been appealed to the Supreme Court, threatened to erode the protections of Section 230. In the first case, Twitter v. Taamneh, plaintiffs claimed that Twitter was liable for allegedly “aiding and abetting” an attack in Istanbul by ISIS because Twitter failed to adequately block or remove content promoting terrorism (even though Twitter had no specific knowledge that any particular post furthered a terrorist act). In its ruling, the Supreme Court held that hosting, displaying and recommending videos, without more, is not aiding and abetting terrorism. The court noted that all content is sorted by algorithms and that using content-agnostic recommendation algorithms is insufficient to create liability.

• In Twitter v. Taamneh, the court ruled that Twitter could not be held liable for abetting terrorism by hosting terrorist content. The unanimous decision was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, who had previously signaled interest in curtailing liability protections for online platforms.

• “Notably, the two justices who have been most critical of Section 230 and internet platforms said nothing of the sort here,” said Ari Cohn, free speech counsel at TechFreedom.

• The U.S. Supreme Court handed social media companies a major victory Thursday in the first test case involving the immunity from lawsuits granted to [Internet] platforms for the content they publish online.

• In two separate cases, one against Twitter, the other against Google, the families of people killed in terrorist bombing attacks in Istanbul and Paris sued Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube, claiming that the companies had violated the federal Anti-Terrorism Act, which specifically allows civil damage claims for aiding and abetting terrorism.

• The families alleged that the companies did more than passively provide platforms for communication. Rather, they contended that by recommending ISIS videos to those who might be interested, the internet platforms were seeking to get more viewers and increase their ad revenue, even though they knew that ISIS was using their services as a recruitment tool.

• The company’s strategy of killing inactive accounts after two years shows the real risk of having one account for everything if the goal is to keep your content online forever.

• We discussed that Econet’s recent outage was caused by multiple power failures at their network operations centre. Here is their full statement on what happened. We sincerely regret the challenges that our customers experienced over the past week, which were precipitated by power outages at our National Operations Centre (NOC) in Harare.

• The FCC moves to potentially open 1000 MHz of spectrum to new commercial uses.

Monopolies

• For monopolists and other predators, the Manne Seminar was an excellent return on investment. After attending a Manne Seminar, the average judge’s legal decisions tipped decidedly in favor of monopoly, operating on the Chicago bedrock assumption that monopolies are “efficient,” and, where we see them in nature, we should celebrate them as the visible manifestation of the entrepreneurial genius of some Ayn Rand hero in a corporate boardroom: [...]

• A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Even as post-Chicago economists showed that predatory pricing was both possible and rampant, a “rational” and effective strategy for cornering markets, suppressing competition, crushing innovation and gouging on price, judges continued to craft tortuous, unpassable tests that any predatory pricing case would have to satisfy to proceed. Economics moved on, but predatory pricing cases continued to fail the trial-by-ordeal constructed by Chicago-pilled judges.

• Microsoft hinted as much in February when it began pushing a patch to disable IE 11 via a Microsoft Edge update. It exempted the IE platform – IE11′s Trident/MSHTML browser engine, Web Object Control (WebOC), and Component Object Model (COM) automation – in order to permit the continuance of IE mode, a way to render websites that depend on the legacy browser using the IE platform. And that exemption is scheduled to last until at least 2029.

Patents

• EU countries currently regulate and implement the framework for compulsory licensing of patents in the EU using different, fragmented procedures. This means it is not efficient enough to tackle EU-wide crises.

• Also, the efficiency of the current EU procedure on compulsory licensing of patents for export to countries with public health problems (Regulation 816/2006) should be examined.

• This initiative aims to revise the framework so it is adequately prepared & coordinated to tackle future crises.

Copyrights/Music

• My sister does this thing where she creates playlists for every season of her life.

• Following the death of Elvis’ only daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, a dispute ensued over control of the family trust. Now that “dispute” has been resolved.  Priscilla Presley and her granddaughter Riley Keough reached a settlement over the control of the family trust.

• Telegram is an essential communication tool for millions of people. For some, it’s a source of the latest piracy releases too, with channels reaching hundreds of thousands of pirates each. Chasing Telegram pirates remains a cat-and-mouse game but behind the scenes, progress is being made.

• Since 2010, France has monitored and stored data on millions of internet users as part of anti-piracy scheme featuring warning letters, fines, and ISP disconnections. Europe’s highest court will soon decide whether the program is permissible under EU law. Digital rights groups insist that as a general surveillance and data retention scheme, it violates fundamental rights.

• Today if you want to reproduce a big schematic or a mechanical drawing, you just ask it to print or plot from the CAD model. But back in the day, you drew on big sheets at a drafting table. How do you make copies? Sure, there were a few large-format copiers, but they were expensive. A more common method was to use a heliographic copier which, often but not always, resulted in a blueprint — that is a blue page with white lines or vice versa. These days, you are more likely to see a blueprint as an artistic wall hanging, and since [Basement Creations] wanted some, he figured out how to make them with a 3D printer.

• After Prince died in 2016, Vanity Fair’s parent company Condé Nast ran an image from the series on the cover. It paid the Andy Warhol Foundation, which assumed ownership of the series, $10,250. Goldsmith got nothing. When she claimed that the work infringed on her copyright and asked for compensation, the foundation sued her seeking a court declaration that the work is protected by fair use.

• Modern day computer artist, [Amy Goodchild] surveys a history of Early Computer Art from the 1950s and 1960s. With so much attention presently focused on AI-generated artwork, we should remember that computers have been used to created art for many decades.

• When we think of MIDI devices, we typically jump straight to drum machines, rack synths, and keyboard controllers. However, there’s nothing saying you can’t build your own MIDI controllers that use the magic of breath to do their musical duty. That’s precisely what [Xavier Dumont] did with this unique 3D printed build.

• We’ve all most likely heard at least one of the above common sayings in describing images or pictures, if not all of them. And, until just very recently, there was a high level of “truth” in those sayings. But now, that line between what’s real and what’s not real has been blurred beyond distinction, blurring our perception of what is real and what is “Memorex.”

• Artists are understandably concerned about the possibility that automatic image generators like Stable Diffusion will undercut the market for their work. We live in a society that does not support people who are automated out of a job, and being a visual artist is an already precarious career.

• Now that computer-generated imaging is accessible to anyone with a weird idea and an internet connection, the creation of “AI art” is raising questions—and lawsuits. The key questions seem to be 1) how does it actually work, 2) what work can it replace, and 3) how can the labor of artists be respected through this change?

• A portion of the Twitter site’s source code was posted on GitHub shortly after widespread layoffs at Twitter, according to an article on TechRepublic. Twitter has taken down a GitHub listing in which a significant amount of the social media site’s source code was leaked, according to a legal finding on March 24, 2023 acquired by The New York Times. The leaked code appeared to have been available on GitHub for several months before Twitter sent a copyright infringement takedown. It included “proprietary source code for Twitter’s platform and internal tools,” according to the filing. The code is no longer available on GitHub since that time. Meanwhile, one week earlier, on March 17, 2023, Musk tweeted that all code used to recommend tweets would be open sourced on March 31.

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