● 07.12.23

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● Leftover Links 12/07/2023: Windows TCO Tales and Many Attacks on Freedom of the Press

Posted in News Roundup at 12:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

Science

Education

• As part of the organizing committee, members of the Foundation team have been meeting since January to tackle our first in-person meeting in two years. With all of the many event planning details to sort out, there was definitely a wave of relief when I arrived at the venue and saw the boxes of t-shirts and FreeBSD Journals waiting for me. The organizing committee would also be remiss if we didn’t mention the invaluable help from BSDCan’s own Dan Langille. Co-locating with BSDCan makes producing the Developer Summit so much more manageable.d

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• While downsizing, Sisense also changed its business focus several times, moving from developing analytics tools for businesses to focusing exclusively on large enterprises, and then focusing on integrating analytics tools into other corporate applications.

• Microsoft later confirmed it to GeekWire, but declined to provide the scope of the job cuts.

• A Microsoft spokesperson declined to specify the number of cuts in the latest round. In January, CEO Satya Nadella issued a memo, indicating the company would change its hardware lineup and consolidate leases.

• Anecdotally, The Reg noticed Microsoft workers all over the world posting #OpenToWork status notices on LinkedIn within the last few hours from various other US states including Arizona, Texas, Florida, Philadelphia, Illinois, and Michigan, as well as places as far afield as Canada and Denmark. Most appear to be in sales, support, and customer roles.

• According to his LinkedIn profile, Wagner has led Microsoft’s government technology operation since March 2020, and before that was president of ManTech’s mission, cyber and intelligence solutions group.

• APNIC’s structure has seen its director general serve as its sole legal director, and also as trustee of the only share in APNIC Pty Ltd. The director general has been unable to do anything with the share without the approval of the org’s Executive Council (EC) – an elected body with the status of a board even if its members are not formally directors.

• The changes mean EC members will become actual directors of APNIC Pty Ltd. A new not-for-profit company, called APNIC EC Limited, has been established to hold the single share in APNIC Pty Ltd in trust for the APNIC EC. The principle that nothing can be done with the share without the approval of the elected EC remains in place. EC members will be the directors and members of APNIC EC Limited.

• Instead of focusing on the legal matters of the supposedly new EU-US “Data Privacy Framework”, EU Commissioner Didier Reynders used an official press conference of the European Commission on Monday, to discredit the work of civil rights organizations like noyb. This is intolerable behavior coming from the Commissioner who has been entrusted with upholding justice and fundamental rights. In an open letter, noyb formally requests a rectification and apology from Commissioner Reynders.

• MICROSOFT has confirmed additional redundancies, which could see another 70 jobs go within its Irish operation.

• The tech giant said in February this year that it would cut 120 jobs in the Republic as part of it global cost cutting plan.

• A further 60 redundancies were announced in March 2023.

• Confirming the latest round of jobs cuts, a spokesperson for Microsoft said: “Organisational and workforce adjustments are a necessary and regular part of managing our business.

• Microsoft is expected to cut up to 70 additional jobs at its Irish operations as the tech slowdown continues to hit the industry globally.

• These cuts are in addition to the 120 Irish workforce redundancies in February and a further 60 cuts in March.

• The tech company has significant operations in Ireland, employing 3,500 people at its office bases in Carmanhall and Leopardstown.

• It has been reported that some staff will be redeployed to other parts of the company as part of the cost saving measure.

• Up to 70 Irish jobs are believed to be at risk, with Microsoft making workforce adjustments as it enters a new fiscal year.

• Microsoft is making another round of staff cuts, with hundreds of layoffs expected to take place worldwide.

• It is widely reported that these cuts are separate to the 10,000 global layoffs that Microsoft confirmed earlier this year. The new round of cuts come shortly after the tech giant entered its 2024 fiscal year. GeekWire reported that the layoffs will impact employees in customer service, support and sales roles.

• A number of staff have confirmed on LinkedIn that they are part of the new wave of job cuts. While the total number has not been confirmed, Microsoft filed a notice yesterday that it would cut 276 staff in Washington, CNBC reports.

• The activists, who are calling their actions leading up to the vote “The Week of Cone,” don’t want this to happen because they think this expansion will increase the number of cars in the city, the vehicles are unsafe to pedestrians, and they block traffic such as buses and emergency vehicles.

• s…so.wh…what’s there to stop me from…not having that condition? and blocking every keystroke across the entire system? what’s there to stop me from logging every keystroke even while my application is in the background?

• good news! nothing at all. i just tried it. you can use this code to very easily make a keylogger or keyboard disabler for your local windows machine. yes, it logs password fields, of course. and, conveniently, windows applications don’t need to create a visible window! they can just hang out in the background as a little row in the tasque manager.

• Similarly, searching for “threads.net” without the “url:” operator generates a myriad of irrelevant results from Threads users who are talking about the new platform without linking to it. However, it doesn’t show any linked Threads posts.

Windows TCO

• Today on the show, a conversation with Jennifer Pahlka about her new book Recoding America and lessons learned from California’s broken unemployment system.

• In an unusual move, Microsoft documented “a series of remote code execution vulnerabilities” impacting Windows and Office users and confirmed it was investigating multiple reports of targeted code execution attacks using Microsoft Office documents.

• Redmond’s security response pros tagged the unpatched Office flaws with the CVE-2023-36884 identifier and hinted that an out-of-band patch may be released before next month’s Patch Tuesday.

• In the first half of 2023, Mandiant Managed Defense has observed a threefold increase in the number of attacks using infected USB drives to steal secrets. Mandiant tracked all of the cases and found that the majority of the incidents could be attributed to several active USB-based operation campaigns affecting both the public and private sectors globally.

• Crucially, there is no patch yet for CVE-2023-36884, and one may be provided via an emergency update or future scheduled Patch Tuesday, we’re told. Microsoft went public early with some details of the flaw because a Russian crew, dubbed Storm-0978, apparently used the vulnerability to target attendees of the ongoing NATO summit in Lithuania on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Storm-0978, also known as RomCom and DEV-0978, is known to carry out opportunistic ransomware campaigns – infecting vulnerable organizations as the crooks find them – as well as prey upon specific targets to harvest their access credentials for Russian intelligence, according to Microsoft. Along with government IT systems, Storm-0978 has also allegedly attacked telecom and finance organizations in Europe and the US.

• Microsoft said that in all, about 25 organizations, including government agencies, had been compromised by the [cracking] group, which used forged authentication tokens to get access to individual email accounts. Hackers had access to at least some of the accounts for a month before the breach was detected, Microsoft said. It did not identify the organizations and agencies affected.

Linux Foundation

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (mediawiki and node-tough-cookie), Red Hat (bind, kernel, kpatch-patch, and python38:3.8, python38-devel:3.8), SUSE (kernel, nextcloud-desktop, and python-tornado), and Ubuntu (dwarves-dfsg and thunderbird).

• Trinidad and Tobago’s justice department is dealing with a cyberattack that has impacted the ministry’s operations.

• The island nation of more than 1.4 million people announced on Friday that its Ministry of Digital Transformation discovered a cyberattack targeting the country’s Office of the Attorney General and Ministry of Legal Affairs (AGLA) in recent days.

• More than three-quarters of a million people may have had their social security numbers stolen in a data breach at Lansing Community College in late 2022 and early 2023, according to a law firm that says it’s investigating the incident.

• The community college notified “757,832 employees, students and vendors that their personal information may have been accessed or acquired by an unknown unauthorized person,” Federman & Sherwood, a law firm with offices in Texas and Oklahoma, said in a statement posted on its website.

• Cybercriminals attempted to access accounts of a Scranton couple who are among clients whose personal information was exposed in a data breach at a Commonwealth Health cardiology group’s practice, according to a proposed class-action lawsuit.

• Robert and Colleen Maziarz of Scranton say there have been at least six different incidents since April in which their identity and/or banking information was improperly used, including an attempt to withdraw money from a PayPal account. Their credit union also advised them their account had been compromised.

• The couple are among approximately 181,000 people whose information was exposed in a February data breach at Great Valley Cardiology and Scranton Cardiovascular Physician Services, LLC in Scranton, which are part of the Commonwealth Health Physician Network.

• Earlier this month, SiegedSec, the group of self-described “gay and transgender furry hackers” claimed responsibility for cyber attacks on five state governments in Nebraska, South Dakota, Texas, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, leaking documents that include police files and contact details for court officials.

• Earlier today, the firm was added to LockBit’s leak site with a claim that 798 GB of data had been exfiltrated from four of the firm’s clients…

• While LockBit was adding one physician-owned medical entity to its leak site, a relatively new group known as 8Base was adding another physician-owned medical entity to its own leak site.

• 8Base claims to have attacked Kansas Medical Center on June 18 and to have downloaded data on July 11. They claim they will publish the data as a leak on July 15.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF) is the third attempt between the trading bloc and the US to iron out privacy kinks in the flow of data about their citizens. This latest agreement marks the EU’s determination that “the United States ensures an adequate level of protection – comparable to that of the European Union – for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies under the new framework,” the Commission said in a statement.

• Key to today’s decision [PDF] was an October executive order signed by US President Joe Biden that the Commission said adds new safeguards that address the problems raised with the second attempt at a transatlantic data agreement, Privacy Shield.

Confidentiality

• When Let’s Encrypt first launched, we needed to ensure that our certificates were widely trusted. To that end, we arranged to have our intermediate certificates cross-signed by IdenTrust’s DST Root CA X3. This meant that all certificates issued by those intermediates would be trusted, even while our own ISRG Root X1 wasn’t yet. During subsequent years, our Root X1 became widely trusted on its own.

• Come late 2021, our cross-signed intermediates and DST Root CA X3 itself were expiring. And while all up-to-date browsers at that time trusted our root, over a third of Android devices were still running old versions of the OS which would suddenly stop trusting websites using our certificates. That breakage would have been too widespread, so we arranged for a new cross-sign – this time directly onto our root rather than our intermediates – which would outlive DST Root CA X3 itself. This stopgap allowed those old Android devices to continue trusting our certificates for three more years.

• On September 30th, 2024, that cross-sign too will expire.

Defence/Aggression

• The United Arab Emirates and Qatar are battling for influence in Europe. A data leak has revealed how Abu Dhabi has sought to discredit its rival with the help of a private intelligence company in Switzerland – an effort that extends into Germany.

• As a result of the delays, the DOD is asking some officers to delay retirement, and asking others to assume more senior duties without being promoted, meaning they will not see a corresponding pay increase until confirmed by the Senate, according to Singh.

• Tuberville’s tactic has been met with criticism not just from the Biden administration and Senate Democrats, but members of his own party. In May, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, “No, I do not support putting a hold on military nominations.”

• The report is based on examination of scientific papers touching on a dozen relevant technologies – an effort that found 500 items of research concerning “routine AI applications” plus “a significant body of research … on AGI precursor technologies, indicating that China’s claims to be working toward artificial general intelligence are genuine and must be taken seriously.”

Environment

• Why it matters: The study’s estimates reinforce the fact that extreme heat events, which are becoming more likely and more severe because of climate change, are among the most dangerous weather-related hazards, though their death tolls and destruction are often not immediately known.

• Earth has gone through distinct geological epochs, vast chunks of time defined by changes in rock layers. To prove that the Anthropocene represents a new one, scientists had to find a “golden spike” — a physical site where the rock, sediment, or ice clearly records the change from a previous chapter in time to a new one. In 2009, they started hunting around the planet and found a range of strong candidates, from a peat bog in Poland to a coral reef in Australia to the ice of Antarctica.

• But the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), as the group is called, wanted to pick a site where the rock record indisputably shows that we’ve left behind the Holocene epoch, which started 11,700 years ago when the last ice age ended.

• At last, the geologists say, they’ve found their holy grail.

• But all that travel causes pollution: the global shipping industry is responsible for over a billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions each year, about 3% of the world’s total.

• A UN group called the International Maritime Organization (IMO) agreed on July 7 to set a goal of net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions for global shipping “by or around 2050.” (Net-zero emissions means either cutting off all sources of these emissions or finding ways to balance them out, such as using carbon removal.) Setting a target date for emissions to balance out to zero is a major step for an industry that’s often called tough to decarbonize. But experts say that there are more than enough tools available for the industry to reach, or even surpass, the new goals set by the IMO.

• Conceding that many people around the world are desperate for an end to the fossil fuels driving the catastrophe, including supposedly Wirth himself, Sorkin added, “At the same time, I think it would be impossible for you not to want your business to grow.”

• So there’s your frame: the life and health of people and the planet on the one hand, endless corporate profiteering on the other. Only question is, how do we balance them?

Energy/Transportation

• Recently, a new carbon tool has brought into light how rail journeys within the UK are better for the environment than taking flights. The newly launched Green Travel Pledge carbon calculator proved researchers right when it showed that a London-Edinburgh train journey creates 13 times less emission than a London-Edinburgh flight.

• This comes at a time when the travel industry is changing the way business travels with inventions like a new sustainable aviation fuel developed by an Oxford-affiliated company and organisations like the European Travel Commission vowing to halve their carbon footprint by 2030.

Overpopulation

• A lot of great scientific work has been done lately on population and biodiversity, spanning all areas of the globe. A new study from TOP describes this work and summarizes its main lessons.

Finance

• Disney’s (DIS) parks, experiences, and products business brought in the lion’s share of profits for the entertainment giant last year. Now, there’s growing concern that theme parks could be losing their magic.

• The company said the back half of this year will see “a moderation in demand” at the domestic parks, especially when compared to last year’s 50th-anniversary celebration at Walt Disney World.

• “This comparison, coupled with inflationary cost pressures, including from a new union agreement, is expected to drive a modest adverse impact to domestic parks and experiences operating margins in the third quarter compared to the prior year,” former CFO Christine McCarthy warned during the company’s latest earnings call in May.

• Executives at Vice Media were paid massive bonuses in the weeks before the company went bankrupt in May, reportedly leaving it unable to pay laid-off staff and freelancers for months.

• New court filings confirm earlier reports from Semafor that Vice senior executives received performance-related “retention bonuses,” totaling over $1,000,000, on April 28, one day after the company announced a “painful” round of layoffs.

• While Vice’s head of news, Subrata De, received a $201,000 bonus, her department was gutted by the cancellation of its Emmy-winning flagship show “Vice News Tonight.” Several other execs, who already commanded salaries in the $600,000 to $800,000 range, received six-figure bonuses while the company slashed over 100 jobs from its 1,500-person workforce.

• The Twitter owner, in a face-off with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg over his rival’s new Twitter-killer social media site Threads, is sitting out the high-profile annual confab known as “summer camp for billionaires,” now in its first day at ritzy Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Reddit has proposed a new policy that could change the site as we know it, according to an article on Lifehacker. Reddit recently announced that they will begin charging third-party apps to access their API. In many cases, those charges are ree-dic-u-lous. The developer of one popular app, Apollo, has announced that the app will be discontinued, as the developer points that his “charge” will be about $20 million. In protest, many subreddits will be “going dark” on June 12-14. Here is a list of subreddits that intend to “go dark” during this period (and a list of smaller subreddits here), and the list continues to grow. At the time of the writing of this article, over 2,000 subreddits planned to participate in the protest. This move comes atop Reddit’s plan to lay off 5% of its workforce, making this appear as if Reddit might be experiencing some cash flow problems and they plan to bolster their finances with this move

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Rather than replacing incorrect information, our minds tend to create new memories alongside existing ones, says Lisa Fazio, a psychology professor at Vanderbilt University.

• Consequently, when we try to recall a corrected piece of information, we may end up with competing ideas – one based on the original information and another incorporating the corrected details.

• Depending on which memory was encoded more strongly or recently, incorrect information may dominate our recollection.

• This phenomenon, known as the “continued influence effect,” helps explain why corrections, even when we readily accept them, sometimes fail to override the original misinformation.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The attack on the youth by the extreme right is tremendously significant. It shows their terror of the radicalization developing rapidly among young people in particular. The aim is to stop thinking and criticism, as well as to consolidate the most backward social elements around the program of the ultra-right.

• The ineffectual hand-wringing at best of various Democratic politicians will have no impact on the fascistic forces and, in fact, is not intended to have any impact. The Democrats and their “left” orbit are incapable of organizing mass opposition to the extreme right, as their response to the January 6 coup and the anti-“Marxist” threats and ravings of Trump has revealed. To arouse the working class against the fascist threat would inevitably set in motion a movement against Wall Street, the corporate elite and the institutions of the capitalist state. The Democrats are far more frightened of such a movement than they are of a thousand fascist conspiracies.

• He was arrested on November 30 amid protests that erupted following the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini while she was in police custody for an alleged head-scarf violation. In the days leading up to his arrest, Salehi was living clandestinely, releasing numerous messages in support of the protests.

• Human rights sources say they have yet to obtain accurate statistics on the number of detainees in the protests, but the head of Iran’s judiciary announced on May 17 that about 90,000 protesters were pardoned by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

• On Saturday, July 8, authorities arrested Maroofian, a Kurdish Iranian investigative reporter for the state-run news website Rouydad24, after she responded to a summons at a court in Evin prison in Tehran. Authorities then transferred her to an undisclosed location, and she has not contacted her family, friends, or colleagues since, according to a person familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

• “Turkish authorities must immediately release the defendants and drop the terrorism charges, which are solely based on their journalistic work,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should also take necessary steps to ensure that pretrial arrest cannot be weaponized against the members of the press.”

• Mistreating the Quran is considered blasphemy in Islam.

• Autopsies would later show that police had left 57 bullet wounds in Tortuguita’s body and that the victim had their hands up when officers began shooting them. Their killing would be important to remember, regardless of what they were fighting for, but it had an added significance: According to multiple reports, Tortuguita was the first person in modern US history to have been shot and killed by police in connection with climate activism.

• Tortuguita’s death cannot be viewed in isolation. Their killing occurred just over a month after five Stop Cop City protesters were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. Both incidents are part of a growing trend of state-sanctioned violence and repression against climate activists in the United States and other countries, such as the United Kingdom and France.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Imprisoned journalists Ömer Çelik, Mehmet Ali Ertaş, Serdar Altan, Mehmet Şahin, and Zeynel Abidin Bulut took the floor in the hearing today, all of them in Kurdish and asserted that it was the Kurdish press, Kurdish journalism, or the media where the Kurdish problem is discussed that is being charged in this case.

• The ministry’s statement said one journalist worked as a radio correspondent, and the other as a correspondent and camera operator. It did not specify what reporting led to the revocation, but said the BBC had been “warned more than once” about “misleading reports relying on statements and testimonies from terrorist and anti-Syrian authorities.”

• When it comes to Fox News’ democracy-soiling propaganda, there’s not a whole lot the federal government has been able to do. The First Amendment generally protects the network’s ability to spew race-baiting conspiratorial bile, and the nation’s top media regulator, the FCC, generally either lacks the authority or backbone to stop the “news” channel from filling American heads with pebbles and pudding.

Civil Rights/Policing

• “What we say about the senior water rights holders is they all got their water through murder, mayhem, rape, theft and genocide,” Mulcahy says.

• The traditional land of the Winnemem Wintu tribe in Northern California was flooded in the 1940s when California built Shasta Dam, creating the largest reservoir in the state. Today, it’s one of the most valuable sources of water, supplying farms and cities that stretch hundreds of miles, all the way to Los Angeles.

• “We have no water rights,” Mulcahy says. “We’re the Winnemem Wintu tribe. Winnemem means ‘middle water’– middle water people. That kind of tells you our culture, our spirituality is based on water.”

• California’s tribes, like most across the West, were forced to sign treaties with the federal government, giving up their land in exchange for a reservation to live on. But the treaties with most California tribes were never ratified by the U.S. Senate and were lost for 50 years. As a result, the tribes have no federal recognition, giving them little standing to claim water.

Monopolies

• The issue appears to stem from a technical glitch on Ticketmaster causing people to be unable to log into the website with their passwords. At one point, there were more than 700,000 fans in the queue to purchase tickets.

• This isn’t the first time Ticketmaster has botched sales for a Taylor Swift concert. The company had major technical issues with its presale of “The Eras Tour” tickets in November, such that more than two dozen fans filed suit against Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation. Swift herself commented on the debacle, saying it “really pisses me off that a lot of the people who were able to buy tickets feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”

• In a 53-page decision, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said the F.T.C. had failed to show it was likely to prove that the merger was likely to result in a substantial reduction in competition that would harm consumers.

• She denied the F.T.C.’s request for a preliminary injunction, which would have delayed the deal’s closing until after the agency could fight it in an internal court.

• For shoppers, Prime Day can even be less than ideal — you’re not saving money if you load up on a bunch of stuff you don’t actually want.

• Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley denied a request (pdf) for a preliminary injunction filed by the US Federal Trade Commission, the antitrust and consumer protection watchdog, which sued to stop the takeover.

• That decision allows Microsoft and Activision, two of the largest companies in the video game industry, to merge ahead of the July 18 deadline. Although the deal has now passed muster in the US and the European Union, which okayed it outright in May, it still faces one major regulatory obstacle: the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the country’s antitrust authority, which voted to block the purchase in April.

Patents

Trademarks

Copyrights

• Netflix, Disney, Columbia, Paramount, Universal, Warner Bros., and Village Roadshow have obtained a new pirate site-blocking injunction in Australia. The Federal Court order currently targets 22 sites and 36 domains but is intentionally flexible to deal with any pirate countermeasures. The notable aspect is how quickly the injunction was obtained; just 35 days from start to finish.

• YggTorrent, the largest French torrent community, has lost control of its main ‘.do’ domain name. The domain was presumably put on hold by the registry or registrar after some type of complaint. One of the site’s operators condemns the action but business continues as usual through one of YggTorrent’s many backup domains.

• Unless, of course, sites like Karagarga make unauthorised digital copies. It’s a great demonstration of the fact that copyright, far from preserving culture, often leads to its permanent loss. And that supposedly “evil” sites like Karagarga are the ones that save it for posterity.

• And isn’t it an uncomfortable feeling to think that there’s a third party service that you absolutely must appease? It’s the same kind of justification used by people who are still on Twitter even though it’s now a right-wing transphobic cesspit. “If I’m not on Twitter, I might as well not be on the web!”

• Dare Obasanjo, over on Mastodon:

• Robots.txt needs an update for the 2020s. Instead of just saying what content can be indexed, it should also grant rights.

• Like crawl my site only to provide search results not train your LLM.

• Google appears to have scrubbed the original page from the Internet Archive as well. Normally, an earlier version would be present as the archive crawls the Web and stores pages for people to use.

• There is no way the company can deny this scrubbing as many other sites have reported the bid to use copyrighted information from world+dog without bothering about copyright: 1, 2, 3.

• Cartographers occasionally sneak deliberate mistakes into their maps. Known as trap streets they are a simple “copyright trap”. If someone copies their map without permission, the fake street shows evidence of the source of plagiarism.

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