● 07.07.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 07/07/2023: More Twitter Problems, Fedora Criticised Too

Posted in News Roundup at 10:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Maybe the DBUS developers have a point: desktops are like buses… you wait for ages, then two of them come along at once: Lomiri on Debian, and GSDE, the GNUstep Desktop Environment.

Graphics Stack

• At the moment of writing, the Budgie desktop environment doesn’t support Wayland. Last year, Joshua teased us with a “Wayland-focused development” for the Budgie 11 series, saying that “Budgie 11 will be developed with Wayland in mind, with it being the primary method of using Budgie 11.”

• But Budgie 11 is nowhere near completion and no release date is set in stone yet. However, with Budgie 10 series being actively maintained, Joshua Strobl talks now about the possibility of it getting Wayland support sooner than you might think.

Applications

• This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives to products and services offered by Microsoft.

• Microsoft Edge is a proprietary cross-platform web browser. It is a Chromium-based browser with Blink and V8 engines.

• Edge is available for Linux but it’s proprietary software. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this post, I’ll try to explain the syntax and use of an URL and the difference between URI, URL, URN, and URC.

• SparkFun has long offered embedded products that focus on logging information from a connected system or sensor. These ready-to-use products enabled rapid data logging of a connected device to a local storage (SD card) or to an attached serial device, while delivering a low-power, flexible data logging solution that required minimal configuration and no firmware development effort. Later versions also added the capability for automatic device recognition, delivering a true, plug-and-play data logging solution.

• Part of the reason it worked this transparently is that the client and the server both had our standard /etc/resolv.conf and had their hostnames in a standard format (and have fully qualified domain names in the same subdomain). My understanding is that this matters because for ‘sec=sys’, NFS v4 clients and servers need to agree on a NFS v4 domain name to insure that login ‘fred’ on the client is the same as login ‘fred’ on the server. This ‘domain name’ can be set explicitly in idmapd.conf(5), but if you don’t do this it’s derived from the DNS domain names of the hosts involved. In a production deployment, we’d probably want to set this specifically in idmapd.conf just to avoid problems.

• Things are different with IPv6. I learned that ISPs typically delegate you an entire /48 range of addresses, from which your router DHCP’s to your local machines. This negates the need for NAT and port forwarding, because every end point is globally routable.

• In 2023, the way to use AES is AES-GCM. Anything else is very unlikely to make sense. We might not like that, we might wish OCB hadn’t been patented, but with hardware support in most processors these days GCM is both faster than the alternatives, ubiquitous, and just tolerable to implement.

Games

• Awesome Linux Game Tools is a series of reviews showcasing the finest tools for Linux gamers.

• When we want to capture a video of our desktop, our thoughts always turn towards OBS Studio, open source software for video recording and live streaming. OBS Studio may seem very unfriendly at first, but it’s generally regarded as a must-have for streamers. With Linux, there are always other open source alternatives.

• gpu-screen-recorder-gtk is a GTK frontend for GPU Screen Recorder. It’s billed as a screen recorder that minimizes system performance by recording using the GPU only. It also claims to be the fastest screen recording tool for Linux. That’s a bold claim indeed and piqued our senses.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The alpha version of GNOME Shell 45 comes with several improvements to the built-in screen recorder by implementing a fallback mechanism for GStreamer pipelines and fixing some issues, an improved Background Apps menu in Quick Settings, improved calendar styling, and a complete GTK4 port.

• In addition, GNOME Shell 45 adds color-scheme setting support for the default stylesheet, adds support for user-defined names in the Bluetooth menu in Quick Settings, and adds support for icons for ornaments in pop-up menus.

• Phosh 0.29 is here to implement lockscreen notifications about ongoing calls and improves the lockscreen notifications to take more vertical space. It also adds the ability to suspend your session from the system menu (if enabled using enable-suspend), and adds audio device selection and details in the Settings app.

• On top of that, Phosh 0.29 uses animations with automatic High Contrast mode to indicate what is happening on the device, implements the ability to automatically avoid device notches when device information is available, and adds fades-out system modal dialogs.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• TL;DR: I found a printed copy of an assignment I had to do in 2005 back when I was a student to implement a system call for OpenBSD and Linux. I lost the original LaTeX file so I decided to rewrite it so I have a digital copy. The article originally covered loadable kernel modules (LKM) which is no longer a thing in OpenBSD, I trimmed that part. I also trimmed the Linux part because I didn’t care about it back then and did the minimum to pass This article is translated from French.

• The major pfsync(4) rewrite on which we recently reported has been committed to -current by David Gwynne (dlg@).

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• A week of five openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots brought crucial updates for key packages like GNOME, MariaDB, transactional-update and others.

• The rolling release distribution showcased its commitment to providing users with the latest enhancements and bug fixes while ensuring users benefit from improved functionalities and better performance.

• MariaDB is the most recent package to benefit from a new major version in the rolling release as snapshot 20230705 provided users with new features; the 11.0.2 version provides a new option that is enabled by default and improves the accuracy of the optimizer’s estimations for hash-join operations. The package also fixes some optimizer crashes and resolves the accidental disabling of some InnoDB monitors, which should now be enabled by default. Both Indonesian and Finnish translations were made in the yast2-trans update and yast2-network 4.6.5 fixes a typo when writing the wireless channel. An update to python-argcomplete 3.1.1 improves logic for user installation and enhances compatibility with Python 3.7.

Fedora Family / IBM

• The Red Hat Display Systems Team, which oversees the development of the Fedora desktop, has presented a proposal to introduce a “privacy-preserving” data collection feature for Fedora 40. This initiative aims to gather limited, anonymous usage metrics of Fedora Workstation in order to enhance the overall user experience.

• I’m not sure what’s going on in the heads of the Red Hatters anymore, but all indications are that they’re doing whatever it takes to win this year’s “most controversial” decision award.

• After causing an earthquake in the Linux community last month by putting the future of Rocky and Alma at stake by limiting access to source code, their backed Linux distribution Fedora is now coming out with a new, highly controversial proposal.

• The team behind Linux distro Fedora has proposed the collection of telemetry data to improve services, sparking anger across its user community.

• Described as “privacy-preserving Telemetry for Fedora Workstation”, the proposal from the Red Hat Display Systems Team would enable the collection of anonymous Fedora Workstation usage metrics.

• The kernel team is working on final integration for Linux kernel 6.4. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora Linux. As a result, the Fedora Linux kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Sunday, July 09, 2023 to Sunday, July 16, 2023. The wiki page in this article contains links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Please continue reading for details.

• A test week is an event where anyone can help ensure changes in Fedora Linux work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed before, this is a perfect way to get started.

Devices/Embedded

• The Youyeetoo YY3568 is a development board based on the Rockchip RK3568 quad-core 64-bit processor. This embedded product offers a range of versatile features, including a SATA 3.0 interface, a CSI connector, and support for multiple displays.

• At the heart of the youyeetoo YY3568 System-on-Module is the Rockchip RK3568 System-on-Chip with 22nm lithography process and ARM v8.2 architecture.

Open Hardware/Modding

• David Ray at Cyber City Circuits designed DingsALot over Christmas a few years ago. It’s a choir of bells powered by Raspberry Pi that sings any song the conductor plays on an attached keyboard.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The plan to support ActivityPub is good news. However, the app is proprietary and it will be privacy-violating. The app is not available in the Europe due to the EU’s strict privacy regulations. That’s how dangerous it is for people’s privacy.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• There are a variety of situations where you (in the sense of programs and systems) want to know if a web server supports something or is under someone’s control. One traditional way is to require the publication of specific URLs on the web server, often URLs with partially random names. The simplest way to implement this is to simply require the URL to exist and be accessible, which is to say that fetching it returns a HTTP 200 response. However, in light of web server implementations which will return HTTP 200 responses for any URL, or at least many of them, this simple check is clearly not sufficient in practice. The mere ‘presence’ of a URL on a web server proves very little.

Education

• I’ve just sent an email everyone who volunteered to help make BSDCan 2024 happen. I suspect some of you have not received that email. If you haven’t seen it, please check your spam folder. We need to start organizing now to make 2024 go smoothly. Mostly smoothly.

FSF

• Our copyright & licensing associate Craig Topham is working together with free software developers, lawyers, and volunteers to help the community with licensing questions, finding hardware that respects your freedom, and keeping the public informed of interesting free software projects out there. In this article, Topham shares some of the accomplishments the Licensing and Compliance Lab achieved during the last six months.

Programming/Development

• I had remarked a few months ago I was surprised the sudo project has over 12,000 commits. Now I am no longer surprised. Behind a rather simple interface (from the common use case perspective) lies a mountain of complexity. That being said, I’m still quite surprised it took over 40 years for this surprising and undocumented behavior to be fixed.

• Qt has no Circle built in to QML as a basic type, as for example the Rectangle or the Button control. This post shows you how to get a Circle in QML, from the most basic method (a Rectangle with a radius of 180) to more advanced methods, using the Canvas JavaScript API (which allows us to draw a partially filled Circle, for a Pie Chart) and a c++ control based on QQuickPaintedItem. I wanted to experiment with the Canvas QML control and the QQuickPaintedItem C++ interface to get a better understanding of Qt and QML drawing interfaces, this post reflects that journey including showing your grouped QML properties exposed from C++.

• The C++11 standard introduced user-defined string suffixes. It also added regular expressions to the C++ language as a standard feature. I wanted to have fun and see whether we could combine these features.

• I’m enjoying a two-month sabbatical this summer. It’s been great so far! I’ve used almost half of the time to cycle through the entire Great Britain and let my body work physically and my mind rest (usually, the opposite is true). And now that I’m back, I’ve switched focus to a few personal projects that I have really wanted to work on for a while but never found time.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Using Nushell as an actual terminal shell is all good and well but I think a more interesting use case is to use it to write scripts.

Leftovers

• But I’m now becoming of the opinion, that seeing as this is a personal blog, my writing should mirror the way I think and talk. I’m not creating legal documents, marketing material, or a school textbook, this blog is about me, so it should probably sound like me too.

Education

• The stereotypical college experience involves curling up in the library with copious amounts of coffee and homework. However, the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate and Shapiro Undergraduate libraries get old pretty quickly, and during midterms and finals, they are packed with students desperately trying to cram in some last-minute studying or finish up the last few paragraphs of an essay. During my freshman year, I made it my personal mission to avoid studying in the libraries as much as possible. Below are my expert tips on the best campus study spots for any occasion.

• Some of what people see is straight-up fake news—predatory attempts to swindle consumers. But much of the bad advice on the web actually originates in a psychological phenomenon called “the illusion of explanatory depth.” Understanding this illusion can make you a better consumer of knowledge, as well as less likely to promote bad information yourself.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• “[The incident] was two flights before ours, so in Boston the clean-up didn’t happen. The plane returned to Paris, this bloody, dirty, sh**ty plane. And we got on it. That means other passengers were also exposed to it. I think they endangered their passengers’ wellbeing.

• “I started to ask, ‘How do you not check? What are the protocols for biohazards?’ I couldn’t get them to tell me. It was as if there were none.”

• Air France confirmed to CNN that the liquid appears to be blood and feces. When asked about their procedure for deep-cleaning biohazardous waste on board, they said that “specific products are used.”

• [...]

• “Incidents happen – we’re human, we bleed – but once that plane lands, you’ve got to clean the aircraft. It’s egregious that it didn’t happen.”

• “Millions of people have been drinking a toxic forever chemical linked to cancer all their lives and are only discovering it today,” Scott Faber, the senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, told the Washington Post Thursday.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Threads is here. It’s Twitter, but on Instagram. If that makes sense to you, we’re sorry, and also, you are the target audience for Threads: people who like to publish text posts on the internet but say they have ~worries~ (with tildes, just like that) about Elon Musk, the billionaire-king who now owns the bird app. Threads might bring excitement, even hope to those who have benefited from posting short bits of online text to the world—journalists, influencers, white nationalists, #brands, et al. But those feelings may be misguided. Social media cannot become good again, because we will not let it evolve. It can merely live and die over and over, like a zombie.

• Adams said her bank told her she needed to contact Uber to get the charge reversed, but she said that proved difficult. “There was barely any customer service and I was only getting pre-generated messages back.”

• An intruder who broke into the grounds of Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow intending to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II was encouraged by his artificial intelligence (AI) girlfriend, a court has heard.

• Jaswant Singh Chail discussed his plot with a computer-programmed chatbot, with which he believed he was in a “sexual relationship”.

• However, as much as I wasn’t planning on replacing either of my Mastodon or Twitter use with Threads, I’m still left a bit disappointed by the launch. I’m now doubting whether I’ll be using it at all.

• Sure, it’s just a 1.0, but it’s still a massively subpar experience.

• The problem is that we all see our little bubble and generalise what we observe as universal. We have a hard time understanding Mastodon ? Mastodon will never succeed, it will be for a niche. A few of our favourite web stars goes to Bluesky ? Bluesky is the future, everybody will be there.

• That’s not how it works. That’s not how it ever worked.

• In response, Reddit administrators—paid employees of the company—removed mods from their own subreddits and left many of the protesting subs without any mods; subreddits without moderators are eventually banned if they’re left without mods for a significant amount of time.

• Microsoft is having a rough week with troubles including an Outlook.com bug that prevented some email users from searching their messages for several hours on Thursday, and a Teams flaw that allows people to send phishing emails and malware to other Teams users.

• Developed by a US Army red teamer called Octoberfest7, TeamsPhisher is a Python-based automated attack that lets users send phishing messages with malicious attachments to external Teams users.

• It builds on earlier work including research published by Jumpsec red teamers Max Corbridge and Tom Ellson last month. The two found a weakness in the latest version of Teams that can be exploited to bypass security controls and send files — specifically malware — to any organization that uses Teams.

• “If we’re going to be rate-limited based on view count, why am I forced to view accounts I blocked?,” another user tweeted.

Windows TCO

• The current news involving India is even worse than Ms Tripathi may know. Threat actors called 8Base have listed ClearMedi Health” on their leak site and Telegram channel. “We have a large number of files. For demonstration, some of them are presented here. The entire amount of data has already been uploaded to the site, enjoy!”, they wrote.

• The Russia-linked ransomware group LockBit has claimed accountability for the cyberattack and published portions of the data it allegedly stole. LockBit’s dark web leak site has leaked 50 percent of the data, and the rest is up for sale.

• “Granules India is a company that does not know what cybersecurity and data protection are. During the pen test [penetration test] of its corporate network, we found more than 10 critical vulnerabilities that allowed access to its private data. Moreover, this company refused to protect the data of its employees, customers, partners, and investors in a case where it could and should have done so,” said a note put out by the ransomware group on the dark web.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Sales of appliances and electronics drop as customers struggle with cost of living, retailer says.

• However, it is understood that the DPC has not actively blocked the service. Instead, the tech giant has not yet prepared the service for a European launch outside the UK, which is not fully governed by GDPR or EU privacy rules.

• Sources close to Meta said that the tech giant has refrained from rolling the service out in the EU because of what the company believes is a lack of clarity contained in the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Under the Act, companies such as Meta become “gatekeepers”, with restrictions on how they mingle users’ personal data.

• French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. Part of a wider justice reform bill, the spying provision has been attacked by both the left and rights defenders as an authoritarian snoopers’ charter, though Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti insists it would affect only “dozens of cases a year.”

• Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones, the measure would allow the geolocation of suspects in crimes punishable by at least five years’ jail. Devices could also be remotely activated to record sound and images of people suspected of terror offenses, as well as delinquency and organized crime.

• The provisions “raise serious concerns over infringements of fundamental liberties,” digital rights group La Quadrature du Net wrote in a May statement.

• It cited the “right to security, right to a private life and to private correspondence” and “the right to come and go freely”, calling the proposal part of a “slide into heavy-handed security”.

• During a parliamentary debate late on Wednesday, MPs in President Emmanuel Macron’s camp inserted an amendment limiting the use of remote spying to “when justified by the nature and seriousness of the crime” and “for a strictly proportional duration”.

• Aside from surveillance, the Minister of the Interior in France announced on Sunday the country will restrict [Internet] access in “certain” neighborhoods as the violence continues across the country.

• According to the Ministry of the Interior, the restrictions are meant to prevent the use of social media and other platforms to organize violent activities.

Defence/Aggression

• French MPs on Thursday called on the government to ban video-sharing platform TikTok unless it clarifies its links to China, days after the government blamed social media for fuelling recent riots.

• The recent “trend” of hitting performers with objects began when singer Bebe Rexha was hit in the face with a cell phone mid-performance. Rexha shared photos after the injury, for which she got a black eye and required stitches. A 27-year-old concertgoer was arrested and charged with assault after the New York City performance.

• “There’s a whole generation of fans who are going to live events for the first time, and they might be unsure how to act appropriately,” Dr Whiting told this masthead.

• “A lot of them have grown up experiencing live music virtually, through YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, and don’t realise how much their behaviour impacts others.”

• Media reports late last year said ByteDance was planning an expansion into more countries of its music streaming service, a market currently led by companies like Spotify.

• Ansar al-Sunna, also called Al-Shabaab Mozambique, is an Islamic extremist movement which has gained prominence in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province. Despite military intervention by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and Rwanda since 2021, the bloody insurgency is far from quelled.

• The group’s goals and operations, and the challenges it poses, are similar to those of the most feared terrorist groups in other African countries. These are in particular Al Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Under the influence of unfettered algorithms, she writes, Facebook and its properties had become a hotbed of misinformation, a “spark plug” for political outcry. It stirred and stoked user outrage; it devastated teen girls’ mental health; it amplified inflammatory content later linked to ethnic violence and religious riots. It allowed human traffickers and drug cartels and armed militias to organize on its platforms. It batted away employees ringing alarm bells. “Facebook, just like the Big Tobacco companies before it, had known the toxic truth of its poison,” Haugen writes, “and still fed it to us.”

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• His money was also at stake. As part of an endorsement agreement Mr. Brady signed in 2021, FTX had paid him $30 million, a deal that consisted almost entirely of FTX stock, three people with knowledge of the contract said. Mr. Brady’s wife at the time, the supermodel Gisele Bündchen, was paid $18 million in FTX stock, one of the people said.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The layoffs were first reported by a local online news portal, Deep Analysis, on Thursday, which said that less than 1,000 workers were employed on the factory’s two battery production lines.

• If it were truly comparable to a world war, then surely the Liberal Party (joined by the NDP) would not continue to advertise on the platform. Yet since the 2021 election call, the party alone has run approximately 11,000 ads on Facebook and Instagram. That is separate from individual MPs, who have also run hundreds of ads. The Meta Ad Library provides ample evidence of how reliant the party has been on social media. For example, since the start of the year, Anna Gainey ran over 500 ads as part of her by-election campaign in Quebec. David Hilderley, who was a candidate in the Oxford by-election, ran approximately 180 ads on Facebook during the same timeframe.

• Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has scheduled a press conference for later today to answer questions on the legislative mess that is Bill C-18. With Meta and Google announcing that they will block news sharing and links on their platforms before the law takes effect, the Canadian media sector stands to lose millions of dollars with lost links, the cancellation of dozens of existing deals, and a bill that might not generate any new revenues. Rodriguez has been flailing for a response in recent days with mounting doubts about the government’s strategy and its seeming failure to anticipate this reaction. He will be joined by MPs from the NDP and Bloc, who were supportive of the legislation during the committee process and joined forces to cut off debate and defeat potential amendments that would have address the concerns regarding mandated payments for linking. There are no shortage of questions that require answering and I’ve identified my ten on Bill C-18 below.

• This is according to customer spending figures compiled by venerable analyst TechMarketView (TMV), which showed the local market grew by 12.2 percent in the 12 months to £67.7 billion ($86.15 billion), its fastest rate in more than a decade.

• Breyer explains: „In landmark cases with far-reaching implications, the public has a right to know and debate our governments’ and institutions’ positions. In a democracy and where press freedom reigns the powerful can be held accountable. Transparency builds trust in times of the EU and the Court experiencing a crisis of acceptance. In the same vein civil society representing general interests needs to have a say before landmark decisions are made.“

• As England and Wales’ senior public prosecutor, Keir Starmer accepted more hospitality from Rupert Murdoch-owned newspapers than the rest of the British press combined, indicating his current cultivation of the Murdoch media is a long-term project.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• How much does this disinformation end up constraining patrons’ exercise of their full rights under the law? It’s impossible to know, of course. But as a profession that sees itself at the vanguard of the fight against both mis- and disinformation, it certainly should rankle us that we’ve been drafted into a disinformation campaign that affects so many information seekers so directly.

Censorship/Free Speech

• An app that promoted businesses sympathetic to Hong Kong’s 2019 protests appeared to have vanished from online platforms and app stores in the city, after local media reported that five people arrested by national security police on Wednesday and Thursday were linked to its operations.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The press freedom ranking representing journalists’ views stood at 25.7 this year, down from 26.2 last year. It marked the fourth consecutive year the index had fallen.

• Meanwhile, the press freedom ranking as rated by the public was 41.4, down from 42 the previous year.

• According to the report, 100 women journalists spent the first quarter of 2023 behind bars, 24 women journalists physically attacked and 23 women journalists legally harassed.

• The women journalists behind bars include 28 in Iran, 19 in Turkey, 15 in China, 9 in Belarus, 8 in Myanmar, 4 in Egypt, 3 in Russia, 3 in Vietnam, 2 in Ethiopia, 2 in Somalia, 1 in Laos, 1 in Syria, 1 in Hong Kong, 1 in the Philippines, 1 in Burundi, 1 in Palestine and 1 in Saudi Arabia.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Los Angeles County sheriff says a bystander’s cellphone footage showing a deputy violently tackling a woman while she filmed a man being handcuffed, then pepper-spraying her in the face, is “disturbing,” and community groups on Wednesday called for the department’s new chief to hold his agency accountable.

• Deputy gangs, or “subgroups,” with names like the Grim Reapers, the Regulators, and the Vikings, have plagued the sheriff’s department for fifty years. Members have been accused of serious breaches of department policy and violations of constitutional rights, of terrorizing the public and harassing their fellow-deputies, and of retaliating against whistle-blowers.

• Tibetans say they have the right to do so according to their Buddhist belief in the principle of rebirth. They believe the Dalai Lama chooses the body into which he is reincarnated, a process that has occurred 13 times since 1391, when the first Dalai Lama was born.

• But China, which annexed Tibet in 1951 and maintains a tight rein on the western autonomous region, says only Beijing can select the next spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, as stated in Chinese law.

• The Chinese government intends to appoint a pro-Beijing puppet leader in place of the Dalai Lama after he dies, giving it an opportunity to firm up its control of the region, according to a report issued in 2022 by the International Tibet Network, a global coalition of Tibet-related groups.

• In a landslide vote, 94% of Stanford’s graduate worker voters said ‘yes’ to being represented by the Stanford Graduate Workers Union (SGWU), according to an email announcement on Thursday. The final vote count was 1639 to 108, with a turnout rate of just over half.

• National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certification of the results will cement the Stanford Graduate Workers Union (SGWU), affiliated with the United Electrical Workers (UE), as the official representative of eligible graduate students in collective bargaining with the University.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Why did Amazon stop supporting subscriptions? To force subscribers to sign up for Kindle Unlimited, and to pay magazines less for their content. Amazon has recently made several changes that make them less friendly to readers and publishers alike. While I have chosen to reject their electronic publishing deal for new nonfiction titles, I don’t condemn other publishers for succumbing. Amazon has monopoly and monopsony power. The magazine has decided that they’d rather take a fifty percent reduction in income than lose everything. I’m certain I’ve lost money by not having OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems available in the Kindle store, and I will lose still more by not having Run Your Own Mail Server in there–but the alternative is unacceptable. Amazon’s goal is to reduce the price of writing to almost nothing, and will continue increasing the pressure on creators until we capitulate or leave.

Monopolies

• Indian-American Gurdeep Pall, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, who helped build and promote Windows, Skype and Bing, intends to retire from the company in September, a media report said.

• https://www.dtnext.in/news/business/indian-american-microsoft-exec-who-helped-build-windows-skype-to-resign-722771

• Microsoft, which has been fined 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in the previous decade for practices in breach of EU competition rules, including tying or bundling two or more products together, found itself in the EU crosshairs after a complaint by Salesforce-owned (CRM.N) workspace messaging app Slack in 2020.

• Microsoft added Teams to Office 365 in 2017 for free, with the app eventually replacing Skype for Business.

• Slack alleged that its rival had unfairly integrated workplace chat and video app Teams into its Office product. The company did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

Patents

• In fact, 80% of all economic espionage cases by the U.S. Justice Department pursued as of 2021 involved China’s illegal economic activities.

• The FBI estimates that Chinese theft of trade secrets, counterfeit goods and pirated software costs the U.S. economy between $225 billion and $600 billion annually.

• The proliferation of pirated [sic] copies nevertheless establishes Microsoft products — particularly Windows and Office — as the software standard. As economies mature and flourish and people and companies begin buying legitimate versions, they usually buy Microsoft because most others already use it. It’s called the network effect.

• “The first dose is free,” said Hal Varian, a professor of information management at UC Berkeley, facetiously comparing Microsoft’s anti-piracy policy to street-corner marketing of illicit drugs. “Once you start using a product, you keep using it.”

• Gates shed some light on his own hard-nosed business philosophy. “Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software,” he said. “Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

Copyrights

• The depressing tale of how the European Union passed copyright’s worst new law, the EU Copyright Directive, occupies some 36 pages in Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free). The main legislation was finalized over four years ago, but countries are still grappling with the problem of implementing its sometimes contradictory requirements in national laws. One of the latest to join the EU Copyright Directive club is Portugal. A Twitter thread from the non-profit digital rights group D3 – Defesa dos Direitos Digitais explains how the new law implementing the directive was passed in just about the worst possible way (translations of tweets by DeepL).

• This is the same idea that Ted Chiang wrote about: that ChatGPT is a “blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web.” But the paper includes the math that proves the claim.

• G/O Media’s foray into AI-generated content marks the latest of big media companies forcing their unwilling publications — CNET, Buzzfeed, and Insider, to name a notable few — into adopting the controversial technology. Worse yet, in many instances, these pivots have been preceded or accompanied by large layoffs.

• Stable Diffusion revolutionised image creation from descriptive text. GPT-2, GPT-3(.5) and GPT-4 demonstrated astonishing performance across a variety of language tasks. ChatGPT introduced such language models to the general public. It is now clear that large language models (LLMs) are here to stay, and will bring about drastic change in the whole ecosystem of online text and images. In this paper we consider what the future might hold. What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as Model Collapse and show that it can occur in Variational Autoencoders, Gaussian Mixture Models and LLMs. We build theoretical intuition behind the phenomenon and portray its ubiquity amongst all learned generative models. We demonstrate that it has to be taken seriously if we are to sustain the benefits of training from large-scale data scraped from the web. Indeed, the value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of content generated by LLMs in data crawled from the Internet.

• A bill submitted to the Russian parliament that would allow Western movies, TV shows and other content to be copied and distributed without permission from rightsholders, faces opposition. In a letter to the State Duma, TV companies and legal streaming services say that driving people to pirate sites will hurt rightsholders overseas and at home. Of course, they also have a plan.

• Turner Classic Movies is an invaluable institution for many film aficionados. The same is true for the private BitTorrent tracker Karagarga, which archives tens of thousands of films, many of which are not available through legal channels. While the latter operates without permission from rightsholders, it made a surprise appearance on Turner’s service recently in the form of ‘pirated’ subtitles.

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