● 06.04.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 04/06/2023: Azure Outage Again (So Many!) and Tiananmen Massacre Censored

Posted in News Roundup at 12:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Today, TUXEDO, manufacturer of Linux-based computers, releases the second generation of its Gemini gaming workstation laptops. These high-end notebooks embrace the power of open-source software, delivering exceptional performance, unrivaled customization, and a liberating computing experience. Don’t want Linux? That’s OK. These laptops can instead be equipped with Windows 11 if you prefer.

• At the heart of the Gemini series is the powerful Intel Core i9-13900HX processor. With 24 cores (8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores) and an impressive 40 threads, this high-end processor is suitable for demanding tasks such as video rendering, 3D animation, and top-level gaming. Users can equip them with up to 8TB of SSD storage and up to 64GB of DDR5 RAM, ensuring ample space and high-speed performance for intensive tasks.

Server

Kernel Space

• Intel has removed support for the 14th Gen Meteor Lake-S CPUs from the Linux kernel, signaling the official end of the Meteor Lake desktop family. The patch states that the commit was supposed to add support for Meteor Lake P/M, but mistakenly added support for Meteor Lake-S instead. The same has been added for the former due to which the latter needs to be removed.

Instructionals/Technical

Distributions and Operating Systems

Debian Family

• Have you heard of Tails? No, not Sonic’s buddy. We’re talking about the Linux-based operating system known for its privacy features, focus on anonymity, and deep adaptability. While PC and Android users may be familiar with browsers like Tor as the pinnacle of online privacy, Tails extends Tor’s anonymity to the entire system, keeping it encapsulated and transferrable while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge who you are or if you’ve ever used it before.

• While you may not be directly acquainted with Tales, you probably know about its claims to fame. For example, Edward Snowden used it to hide from the NSA. If you want to block unwanted surveillance or avoid censorship in your region, Tails is one of the go-to choices. Here’s how it works.

Devices/Embedded

• For some reason smbios device support always gave me trouble on every laptop I worked on for the 2000s.  So, this support for smbios identification on EFI-only boots is good news to me.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Today we’re going to overclock a stock Raspberry Pi 4B as far as possible before it gives up. I decided to try this after I accidentally increased the clock speed of this particular board to 2.2GHz instead of the 2.0GHz that I usually use.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• An open source SFTP client for Android and iOS.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• Find out how to customize a shiny app and make it more accessible to users with our workshop on 14/06.

• I laughed no less than three times while putting this together. THREE TIMES I SAY.

• Git is an industry-standard distributed version control system used for software development and other version control tasks. It facilitates collaboration, allowing multiple contributors to work on a project concurrently without overriding each other’s changes.

• Sometimes you need to understand what databases and data sources your company uses. I’d like to show how I do that. I use a small spreadsheet that lists all the data sources, with just half a dozen questions about each data source.

• This is mainly a personal tool: it will help you to organize your thoughts if you need to have a discussion with somebody, or with your team.

• Note: I have worked at Google for the majority of my professional life, which will color my views. Take with a pinch of salt, remember that everything here is my own views and do not represent that of Google or anyone else.

• Seriously though, if you look up “systems engineering” on Wikipedia, it talks about “how to design, integrate and manage complex systems over their life cycles”. That’s definitely not my personal slice of the world. I don’t think I’ve ever taken anything through a whole “life cycle”, whatever that even means for software.

• In the best case scenario, I suppose some of my software has gotten to where it’s “feature complete” and has nothing obviously wrong with it. Then it just sits there and runs, and runs, and runs. Then, some day, I move on to some other gig, and maybe it keeps running. I’ve never had something go from “run for a long time” to “be shut down” while I was still around.

• This is not to say that I haven’t had long-lived stuff of mine get shut down. I certainly have. It’s just that it’s all tended to happen long enough after I left that it wasn’t me managing that part of the “life cycle”, so I heard about it second- or third-hand and much much later.

Standards/Consortia

• In short: in Markdown, you can write 1. for every list item instead of 1., 2., 3., etc.

• Markdown lets you make ordered lists, like so: [...]

• I like alternative, community-owned, social media. They have the potential to be much less user-hostile, and can be more mindful of the well-being of their users. Yet, pretty much all of them still copy one of the worst features of corporate social media – the linear feed. Let me explain.

• [...]

• We all know the feed. You open it, you are presented with a list of posts. You scroll down more, and, if you see a post you’ve already seen, you’re caught up. It actually works pretty well with a small volume of posts. But, as you follow more frequently-posting people, you’ll go past the point of being able to see every post. If you want to ensure you see updates from rarely posting friends, your only option is to keep scrolling – otherwise they’ll get lost in the noise from more frequent posters. Not that frequent posting means that your posts are less valuable – but, generally speaking, I’d rather see 10 posts from 10 different friends, than 10 posts from 2 friends. I use social media to keep up with people, so I want to have at least a peek at everyone’s lives.

Leftovers

• A new generation of perfumers in Kannauj are trying to carve out a new identity for the products.

Science

• Hunter-gatherers can help us understand the conditions that children may be psychologically adapted to because we lived as hunter-gatherers for 95% of our evolutionary history. And paying greater attention to hunter-gatherer childhoods may help economically developed countries improve education and wellbeing.

Hardware

• Arizona has long been a magnet for semiconductor companies, and now it’s a magnet for their expansions. Intel announced in 2021 it was building two chip factories in Chandler, Arizona, which will bring 6,000 jobs.

• AMD’s EPYC 7022 chips can hang after 1,044 days due to an errata that AMD posted to its revision guide.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A pest never before seen in Latvia – the pale potato cyst nematode (Globoder pallida) has been identified in a Zemgale potato farm. The organism was found in a potato field of 10.33 hectares, the State Plant Protection Service said in a statement on June 3.

• The $1.19 billion agreement, announced by Chemours, DuPont and Corteva, wouldn’t resolve all the claims against them.

• There had previously been an expectation that anxiety among teenagers would reduce after the pandemic.

Proprietary

• Big Tech’s warnings about an AI apocalypse are distracting us from years of actual harms their products have caused.

Security

• The US and Korea are warning of North Korean social engineering attacks targeting employees of think tanks, academic and research institutions, and news media organizations.

• Splunk has resolved multiple high-severity vulnerabilities in Splunk Enterprise, including bugs in third-party packages used by the product.

• Enzo Biochem says the clinical test information of roughly 2.47 million individuals was exposed in a recent ransomware attack.

• A zero-day vulnerability in Progress Software’s MOVEit Transfer product has been exploited to hack organizations and steal their data.

• Trend Micro, which examined an x64 VMware ESXi version targeting Linux machines, said it identified an “extremely high degree of similarity” between Royal and BlackSuit.

• An unknown threat actor began exploiting the critical SQL injection vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer on May 27 and in some cases has taken data within minutes of deploying the web shells.

• Security researchers at Mandiant attribute the activity to a newly created threat cluster with unknown motivations dubbed UNC4857 that has gone after organizations across a wide range of industries based in Canada, India and the United States (see: Hackers Exploit Progress MOVEit File Transfer Vulnerability).

Privacy/Surveillance

• Computational giant Microsoft says it needs to pay a massive fine to settle a legal case that entails LinkedIn’s subsidiary.

• The firm was quick to reveal how the costs linked to such a fine could go as far as $425 million which may be a part of Q2 in 2023.

• Meanwhile, Reuters states how a spokesperson of the firm had unveiled how the charges were linked to a new investigation by the IDPC. This is one inquiry that began in the year 2018 as a regulator from Ireland was checking to see if LinkedIn went against the GDPR by carrying out advertising against targeted individuals.

• Tech giant Microsoft mentioned how the firm made this initial decision regarding this fine in the month of April. For now, it’s yet to make a final decision and go public with it.

• This memo contains the thoughts and recountings of events that transpired during and after the release of information about the NSA by Edward Snowden. There are four perspectives: that of someone who was involved with sifting through the information to responsibly inform the public, a security area director of the IETF, a human rights expert, and of a computer science and law expert. The purpose of this memo is to provide some historical perspective, while at the same time offering a view as to what security and privacy challenges the technical community should consider.

• How many hours per day can you stare at your phone before you qualify for a 12-step program? Eight? Four? Twenty? One?

• Here’s the truth: Screen time doesn’t matter.

• It’s not about how much you use your phone. It’s about whether your phone is a needy, attention-sucking vampire.

• If that’s the case, the only healthy screen time is no screen time. Zero. That’s why the main metric tracked by screen time apps is deceptive: ten minutes of shooting crack cocaine intravenously are still ten minutes of shooting crack cocaine intravenously.

Defence/Aggression

• Hawaii Gov. Josh Green has signed legislation that will allow more people to carry concealed firearms. At the same time, the measure prohibits people from taking guns to a wide range of places, including beaches, hospitals, stadiums, bars that serve alcohol and movie theaters. Private businesses allowing guns will have to post a sign to that effect. The legal overhaul comes in response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from last year that expanded gun rights by saying Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense. New York and New Jersey adopted similar laws last year that quickly met legal challenges that are making their way through federal courts.

• Civilians have killed at least 160 gang members in Haiti, a human rights group says. Residents say they feel safer, but others worry that it will lead to even more violence.

• Reggaeton rapper Pacho El Antifeka was assassinated in Puerto Rico. Local reports say the rapper was shot at a Bayamón shopping center, near San Juan. Local police found the body of the singer inside a car at the shopping center. Pacho El Antifeka’s real name was Neftalí Álvarez Núñez.

• Henry Kissinger turns 100, still wondering how the U.S. will engage with a world which it can no longer dominate but from which it cannot withdraw.

• Did the veteran newscaster give Kissinger a pass on his hundredth birthday?

• Ernie Pyle understood that the war would be won, or lost, in the realm of steel, dirt, and blood.

• Dr Armend Bekaj, Programme Manager in the Foundation’s Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace project shares an overview of the most recent online seminar with the International Training on Dialogue and Mediation Alumni Network hosted jointly by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University.

• History shows how to stave it off.

• Two Florida men who stormed the U.S. Capitol with other members of the far-right Oath Keepers group were sentenced Friday to three years in prison for seditious conspiracy and other charges — the latest in a historic string of sentences in the Jan. 6. 2021 attack. David Moerschel, a 45,-year-old neurophysiologist from Punta Gorda, and Joseph Hackett, a 52-year-old chiropractor from Sarasota, were convicted in January alongside other members of the antigovernment extremist group for their roles in what prosecutors described as a violent plot to stop the transfer power from former President Donald Trump to President Joe Biden after the 2020 election.

• The case of a Missouri doctor whose body was found in an Arkansas lake more than a week after he was reported missing remains shrouded in mystery. Forty-nine-year-old Dr. John Forsyth, an emergency room doctor in Cassville, Missouri, was last heard from on May 21. His body was found with an apparent gunshot wound in Beaver Lake in northwest Arkansas on May 30. Authorities say an autopsy was done but they have not released a cause of death. His family says Forsyth, a divorced father of eight, had recently become engaged and was happier than they had seen him in many years.

• The deal is valued at around 208 million euros and includes user and maintenance training, along with a provision for the procurement of up to 70 additional vehicles.

• The stamp is the latest in a line of Estonian support for Finland joining the defence alliance.

• Police in the west coast city of Pori believe a child was abducted on Sunday and then taken abroad.

• The United States and Taiwan signed a trade deal Thursday aimed at deepening economic relations between both sides — in a move that has sparked a warning from Beijing.

• NATO needs combat-ready brigade size units at its forefront, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said on Friday, addressing participants at a high-level meeting of parliament speakers from NATO member countries in Vilnius.

• Poland has invited Lithuania to step up military cooperation, President Gitanas Nausėda has said after a phone call with his Polish counterpart.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

Environment

• Brazil’s congress passed a bill this week that would make carbon credits available to companies that receive forest concessions. Although the new policy is expected to boost tax revenue, there is doubt that it will actually benefit local communities.

• “The storm led to a complete lack of vision in some places…”

• “With this emergency funding, humanitarian partners will focus on shelter support…”

Energy/Transportation

• If you want to imagine an engineer’s nightmare, here it goes: You’ve spent nearly a decade building a spacecraft, testing and re-testing the vehicle to ensure it can survive the extreme conditions onboard a rocket to orbit. Now, you’re preparing to launch NASA astronauts into space in a month.

• His cockpit warning system, which alerts the crew if an aircraft is heading toward a mountain, a building or the ocean, has saved thousands of lives.

• After decades when deadly accidents were frequent, train travel in India has grown far safer in recent years, with government investing heavily in the vast rail network.

• The rail disaster, in the eastern state of Odisha, was among the deadliest in a nation with a history of rail safety problems.

• It is India’s deadliest rail accident since 800 died from a train plunging off a bridge in 1981.

• The Odisha crash is one of India’s worst rail accidents in years.

• Three trains: two passenger and one freight train, were involved in the accident.

• Two passenger trains derailed in India, killing more than 200 people and trapping hundreds of others inside more than a dozen damaged rail cars. The accident which happened Friday night about 220 kilometers (137 miles) southwest of Kolkata, created a chaotic scene of twisted wreckage and desperate rescuers as teams tried to free passengers and recover bodies. The cause was under investigation. The death toll rose steadily throughout the night. As dawn approached on Saturday, the top bureaucrat in the eastern state of Odisha said that at least 233 people were dead. P.K. Jena also said in a tweet that about 900 people were injured in the accident.

• Two passenger trains have derailed in India, killing more than 230 people and trapping hundreds of others inside more than a dozen damaged rail cars. The accident, which happened Friday night about 137 miles southwest of Kolkata, created a chaotic scene of twisted wreckage as rescue teams desperately tried to free passengers and recover bodies. The cause was under investigation. The death toll rose steadily throughout the night. As dawn approached on Saturday, the top administrative official in the eastern state of Odisha said that at least 233 people were dead. He also said that about 900 people were injured in the accident.

• Action and investment in maritime decarbonisation must increase in both size and pace, according to the latest All Hands on Deck 2.0 report from Shell and Deloitte.

• A report by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has raised concerns about “greenwashing and misleading messaging” about hydrogen-capable boilers.

• Some belongings of passengers lay scattered amid the wreckage, including a suitcase and a child’s shoe.

• If your electric vehicle gets struck by lightning, is that like getting a free tank of gas?

Wildlife/Nature

• An Alaska fishing adventure became a nightmare for a family of eight when the wreckage of one of the two boats they’d chartered over the Memorial Day weekend was found partially submerged off an island. The frantic search for survivors has only brought tragedy to the Tyau family. Two sisters and one of their husbands are dead. The other’s partner and the boat captain remain missing in the waters off southeast Alaska four days after the boat didn’t return Sunday. Authorities suspended a 20-hour search covering 825 square miles on Monday. They have no plans to resume it.

• A headcount by Finland’s state-owned wildlife agency Metsähallitus found about 100 ringed seal pups in the Saimaa lake region this spring.

• The Olkiluoto 3 reactor became fully operational in April after a decade-long delay.

Overpopulation

• The groundwater under Arizona’s city of Phoenix has run to alarmingly low levels—not enough to keep up with its booming residential demand, the state’s Department of Water Resources stated in a report yesterday (June 1).

• It has always been astounding to me that people think for even a second that their government makes decisions to help the people—that has never been the case. If a government’s decision helps anyone it is always an after effect…or an afterthought or a collateral unintended benefit.

Finance

• The US has a deal to suspend the debt limit, but it still may get its credit rating cut. Fitch Ratings says the country’s AAA rating remains in jeopardy because of the prospects for even more dysfunction in Washington, if lawmakers cleave to the kind of brinksmanship that nearly left the US Treasury depleted of cash.

• America is one signature away from staving off a disastrous default.

• Asking a neighborhood or municipality to bear the responsibility for a housing crisis is asking for failure.

• Annie Ernaux on the malaise of the grocery store

• The U.S. is returning to a tired old playbook: If at first you fail to make something a universal right, try making it an employee benefit.

• Hong Kong’s two leading food delivery platforms, Foodpanda and Deliveroo, have agreed to amend their exclusivity terms after an investigation by the city’s competition watchdog found they could be harming competition.

• California’s homeowners are already bearing the brunt of devastating wildfires every summer. Now, it will be harder for them to find insurance companies willing to potentially cover the damages.

• This month marks the close of the UK government’s “consultation” on the planned digital pound. This is your chance to have your say on plans to introduce a Central Bank Digital Currency to the UK. According to the UK government’s website: The way we use money is changing.

• The president addressed the nation from the Oval Office on Friday evening, after congressional passage of legislation to prevent economic calamity.

• The next government could see squabbles between the Finns Party and the Swedish People’s Party.

• A Good Cause law would ban evictions in most cases, except for where a tenant has violated their lease or when a landlord wishes to live in the unit.

• The president and his negotiators believe they worked out a deal that allowed Republicans to claim big spending cuts even as the reality was far more modest.

• Just days before a national debt default, the Senate approved a debt ceiling and budget cuts package Thursday night. The deal, negotiated by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, requires the president’s signature before becoming law.

• U.S. employers added 339,000 jobs in May, demonstrating a resilient job market despite recession predictions. The unemployment rate, however, rose to 3.7% from a five-decade low of 3.4% in April.

• The rare exercise of bipartisanship between the president and House speaker shows the virtues of meekness and an openness to shared wisdom.

• For President Joe Biden, aiming for the political center defined his career. Achieving a bipartisan debt deal in an era of hyperpolarization shows the old ways can still work.

• The Lithuanian government will not change its plans and will submit the tax reform package to the parliament, despite initiatives to call an early election and for the cabinet to resign, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė says.

• The Lithuanian parliament has drafted amendments on paying salaries to local government politicians instead of the existing payments to cover their office expenses, the use of which has recently sparked a scandal in the country.

• The U.S. reached in January its debt limit of US$31.4 trillion, over 120 percent of its GDP. The Senate approved the bill by a 63-36 vote.

• Hong Kong’s HSBC bank has closed three bank accounts used by the League of Social Democrats (LSD) – one of the few remaining opposition parties in the city – for receiving donations, according to a letter from the bank that was seen by HKFP. Dickson Chau Ka-fat, the external vice chairperson of LSD, told HKFP…

• Some of the most powerful economic institutions in the world are led by women at the moment, but their success hasn’t translated to broad representation. Structural barriers continue to prevent many women from reaching top roles in finance and economics.

• Pixar Animation Studios, a studio owned by the Walt Disney Company, has laid off 75 of its employees, two of whom were with the studio for over 25 years.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The trial of former Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli and 14 others for alleged money laundering related to their purchase of a publishing company concluded Friday, starting the clock on the 30 days the judge has to issue a verdict. Martinelli, a 71-year-old supermarket magnate who hopes to seek re-election next year, had back surgery the week before the trial started and was not present. The case, known locally as “New Business,” dates back to 2017 and concerns the 2010 purchase of a publishing company that owns national newspapers.

• A batch of thousands of new documents released by the Bureau of Prisons sheds more light on the last days of the notorious sexual predator.

• ‘I will handcuff you immediately,’ Hun Sen warned would-be demonstrators.

• ‘To move from imagining conflict is impossible to assuming war is inevitable is just as harmful to our shared goals. The fate of our region is not preordained. It never was. It never is.

• Member of the Indian National Congress and former politician Rahul Gandhi spoke at CEMEX about India’s fight for democracy and its relations with other nations. Gandhi is the first person to receive a maximum sentence for defamation in India.

• Set Aung was deputy finance minister under Myanmar’s ousted government.

• Protests this week in Kosovo when local officials took office resulted in injuries to NATO peacekeeping troops—and in fears of a further escalation of violence. Atlantic Council experts answer the critical questions.

• Protesters have again gathered in front of municipal buildings in several cities in northern Kosovo as Western diplomats ratchet up pressure on Pristina to hold fresh elections to defuse tensions over the installation of ethnic Albanian mayors that sparked clashes between ethnic Serbs and NATO peacekeepers earlier this week.

• American lawyer Kimberly West has been appointed as the chief prosecutor linked to a European Union-backed court prosecuting war crimes in Kosovo.

• The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which ran in the parliamentary elections under the People’s Alliance, won 268 seats.

• The EPC aims to push for political coordination in Europe without replacing any existing organization, structure, or process.

• Hundreds of people erected barricades using burning tires and vehicles, threw stones at police forces, and carried out acts of looting at businesses and public buildings.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Trump’s Fox News town hall is a reminder of the ferocity of his voters’ support.

• M. Evan Corcoran recorded recollections of his legal work last year for Donald Trump. The recording is now in the hands of prosecutors, unnerving some aides to the former president.

Censorship/Free Speech

• People in Latvia talk more and more about hate crimes, and the police have been able to investigate such crimes well enough recently, said Kaspars Zālītis, head of the movement ‘Dzīvesbiedri’ (Life Partners) in an interview with Latvian Radio on June 2.

• The parent wrote that the Bible’s “incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide” should make it illegal in schools under Utah’s book-banning laws.

• A court in Minsk has sentenced union activist and genetics scientist Alyaksandr Kandratsyuk to 42 months in prison for allegedly insulting authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent and civil society in Belarus.

• A Sai Kung shop has been inspected by officers from four different government departments within nine days, after it started to give away candles to commemorate the Tiananmen crackdown.

• As Hong Kong approaches Sunday’s 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, public commemorations of those who died on June 4, 1989, continue to be muted. The city was once one of very few places on Chinese soil where mourning events were permitted by authorities.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• A look ahead at the key events leading the news agenda next week, from the team at Foresight News.

• CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?

Civil Rights/Policing

• Meta wants employees back in the office.

• And Republicans are increasingly attempting to limit that direct-democracy option.

• US border authorities released a statement Thursday disclosing that the eight-year-old girl who died while in their custody last month was denied attention or review from medical staff.

• The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) announced Friday that they are “deeply troubled” by the detention of environmental human rights defender Hoang Thi Minh Hong in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

• Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo vetoed a bill Thursday that would have criminalized fake elector schemes in the state.

• The police have said that the suspect arrested over Friday’s brutal murder of two women at a Diamond Hill shopping mall was a 39-year-old jobless man with a history of mental illness. During a media briefing in the early hours of Saturday, officers said there was no evidence that the suspect knew his victims.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Econet Wireless has been on a mission to diversify its portfolio of service offerings over the years. They say they want to be a “fully-fledged digital services provider.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• The artist’s most famous track, Faded, was released in 2015 and has been played more than 1.7 billion times on Spotify alone.

• In a field historically dominated by men, Saariaho opened the door of classical music to a new gender.

• At least three HYBE employees face an investigation for insider trading related to BTS’ hiatus due to members’ mandatory military service. Three HYBE employees are facing charges related to insider trading, financial authorities said Wednesday.

• Four months after tapping Scooter Braun to lead its stateside operation, BTS agency Hybe is reportedly looking to raise almost $400 million to bankroll an acquisition-heavy global expansion. The Seoul-based company’s hunt for investor capital and a larger international presence came to light in a recent report from Bloomberg.

• New court filings reveal that federal prosecutors have moved to garnish R. Kelly-related royalties from Universal Music Publishing Group and Sony Music Entertainment. Federal prosecutors have formally moved to seize R. Kelly’s royalties held by Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Publishing Group, saying it will be used to pay victims and fulfill outstanding fines.

• In a surprising move, Japan’s government recently reaffirmed that it will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training. The policy allows AI to use any data “regardless of whether it is for non-profit or commercial purposes, whether it is an act other than reproduction, or whether it is content obtained from illegal sites or otherwise.” Keiko Nagaoka, Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, confirmed the bold stance to local meeting, saying that Japan’s laws won’t protect copyrighted materials used in AI datasets.

• Before I begin, let me say that I’m not dissing Generated Adventure or the people who created it. They made a very impressive tech demo in 72 hours, and if you don’t look too closely, it’s rather pretty. They were under tight time pressure, and they were specifically aiming to use only AI tools. They did better than I would have in 72 hours (although as a parent, the idea of devoting 72 straight hours to anything is totally unimaginable). It’s good enough to make me consider Deform over Godot for a project like this (I’m sure either could handle it, but they did it so fast!).

• But I feel like something that gets lost in the discussion of AI-generated artwork is the turds. Here’s an example of what I mean: it’s one of the sets of images that Midjourney generated for Generated Adventure (I don’t think any of them ended up being used for the game).

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

• Sometimes it takes a bunch of rewrites and a lot of bad code before you can zero in on something elegant (as in writing and music) or at least something less terrible. But this takes time and effort that in a commercial environment management may be like “nope!”, so you end up with a cron job running every five minutes that restarts the service because the service leaks that much memory. Who knew it would get so popular?

• OpenBSD is still increasing their lines of code, just at a slower rate than if they had not done the purges. So not exactly non-growth or even degrowth. And folks keep coming out with new hardware to support. Computers are still terribly new, so realistically we have to guess at what sustainable computing might entail over 10,000 years or longer—itty bitty Z80s? something like what we have today? something totally new and different? nothing? Who knows!

Internet/Gemini

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