● 07.19.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 19/07/2023: Smartphone Sales Plunge Again

Posted in News Roundup at 8:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• Still, it’s worth considering what we lose if our area codes, prefixes, and line numbers are slowly washed away by the sands of time. If nothing more, it’s worth appreciating these digits—an impersonal series of semi-random numbers that, once they’re yours, take on a new life. When shared, a phone number is the most intimate of invitations, offering boundless possibilities of connection. It moors and orients us. That alone is a small miracle worth celebrating.

• The Commonwealth Games could return to the United Kingdom, with Scotland weighing up the cost after Victoria dumped the event because it was too expensive.

• State Premier Daniel Andrews put the price tag to run the 2026 event in regional Victoria at up to $7 billion, more than double the initial estimate of $2.6b.

Hardware

• The Semiconductor Industry Association said in a statement on Monday: “Recognising that strong economic and national security require a strong US semiconductor industry, leaders in Washington took bold and historic action last year to enact the CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen our industry’s global competitiveness and de-risk supply chains.

• “Allowing the industry to have continued access to the China market, the world’s largest commercial market for commodity semiconductors, is important to avoid undermining the positive impact of this effort.

• It said: “According to our Smartphone Inventory Tracker, the global smartphone inventory (sell-in vs sell-through) has been reaching healthy levels over the past four to five months, allowing OEMs some breathing room to launch and push newer models in the second half and attract consumers to upgrade, and accelerate the replacement cycle.

• As much as some people on the Internet might like to think — no, Apple did not come up with the idea of the smart watch. Even if you ignore the calculator watches that we imagine a full 60% of Hackaday readers wore at one time or another in their lives, the Timex Datalink was already syncing with computers and pulling down the user’s list of appointments back in 1994 by decoding the pulses of light produced by a CRT monitor. Hey, it sounded like a good idea at the time.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Failure to comply with the new guidelines could lead to termination, the memo said.

• In-N-Out did not respond to a request for comment.

• On the other hand, as Rosa Cohen points out, we must understand demotivation as an emotional state that can have different causes: “A school environment that only promotes competition instead of cooperation, or that imparts an education based on rote learning, is meaningless when access to information today is unlimited.” “High demand on academic performance in the family may also trigger chronic demotivation,” adds Cohen. At the opposite extreme, demotivation can come from “solving everything for children and adolescents with the illusion of having everything under control and thus responding quickly to the demands of the environment,” she adds.

• Animal shelters are crowded with animals taken during the Covid-19 pandemic, representatives of shelters told Latvian Television on July 18.

• This drug has gradually become a menace to social security across the U.S., a country long plagued by opioid addiction and abuse.

• The number of Haitians facing emergency-level food insecurity is the second-highest in the world. They also represent one of the highest levels of chronic food insecurity, with 22 percent of children chronically malnourished.

• “This action will ensure that [Wuhan Institute of Virology] does not receive another dollar of federal funding,” a HHS spokesperson told the outlet.

• The figures underpin estimates of a nationwide death toll in the millions after the lifting of restrictions

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Microsoft reportedly let go of 1,000 employees over the past week in addition to the 10,000 it cut earlier this year…

• NTFS (better file exchange since 2021) vs Open Source https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/13/how_ntfs_finally_made_it/ wow.

• This is a vicious cycle: massive fire suppression efforts creates the illusion that people can safely live at the wildland–urban interface. Taken in by this illusion, more people move to this combustible zone. The presence of these people in the danger zone militates for more extreme fire-suppression, which makes the illusion all the more tempting. Yielding to temptation, more people move to the fire zone.

• But the opposite of controlled burns isn’t no burns, it’s out-of-control burns: wildfires.

• On Tuesday, diplomats and leading experts in the field of A.I. laid out for the Security Council the risks and threats — along with the scientific and social benefits — of the new emerging technology. Much remains unknown about the technology even as its development speeds ahead, they said.

• “It’s as though we are building engines without understanding the science of combustion,” said Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, an A.I. safety research company. Private companies, he said, should not be the sole creators and regulators of A.I.

• Recently, when I asked this editor — he asked me to withhold his name because Wikipedia editors can be the targets of abuse — if he still worried about his encyclopedia’s fate, he told me that the newer versions made him more convinced that ChatGPT was a threat. “It wouldn’t surprise me if things are fine for the next three years,” he said of Wikipedia, “and then, all of a sudden, in Year 4 or 5, things drop off a cliff.”

• I called 1-800-Discover to tell them how to reproduce it and expose the user’s account credentials to anyone with local access to the phone’s Web browser if that browser is Firefox or Fennec on Android.

• I’m also going to expose the issue here on my blog to motivate them to fix it since I noticed this problem several months ago and meant to say something and it still does it.

• A group of anti-car activists in San Francisco have been disabling driverless cars owned by Waymo and Cruise by placing traffic cones on their hoods which appear to render the vehicles inoperable. Far from being a “prank” as others have described it, the group, which calls itself Safe Street Rebel, is reviving a century-old practice of U.S. urban residents protesting against more cars in cities.

• The protest event, dubbed by the group as the “Week of Cone,” comes as a powerful state regulatory body will rule on whether the AV companies can rapidly expand both the number of cars they operate in San Francisco and expand the hours of operation from the middle of the night to 24/7, an expansion that is opposed not just by anti-car activists but also the city’s fire and police chiefs.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• Meta announced the new open-access Llama, which stands for Large Language Model Meta AI, in a blog post today. The corporation explained that letting people peer under the hood of Llama was an important step in making the AI safer, as a “generation of developers and researchers can stress test [it].” Llama 2 is now available for free for research and commercial use—Meta touts that Llama 2 was trained on 40% more data than the first model. Meta also named Microsoft as a preferred partner in Llama 2, with the AI being available with Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure.

• The company is actually releasing a suite of AI models, which include versions of LLaMA 2 in different sizes, as well as a version of the AI model that people can build into a chatbot, similar to ChatGPT. Unlike ChatGPT, which people can access through OpenAI’s website, the model must be downloaded from Meta’s launch partners Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Hugging Face.

• The financial terms of that partnership were not disclosed.

Security

• [This is Part III in a series on research conducted for a recent Hulu documentary on the 2015 hack of marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com.]

• Nasuni Corp., a provider of cloud file services, today added targeted restore capabilities to its Nasuni Ransomware Protection service that reduce investigation time and speed recovery. The company also said it has integrated its software with Microsoft Corp.’s Sentinel cloud-based security information and event management platform.

• Introduction In the previous post of this series we showed why Brute Ratel C4 (BRC4) isn’t able to execute most BOFs that use the de-facto BOF API standard by Cobalt Strike (CS): BRC4 implements their own BOF API which isn’t compatible with the CS BOF API.

• A recently reported potential buffer overflow issue in QXmlStreamReader has been assigned the CVE id CVE-2023-38197.

• By Michael Brown and Heidy Khlaaf The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has circulated a request for information (RFI) on how best to develop policies that support the responsible development of AI while minimizing risk to rights, safety, and national security.

• The NSA and CISA have published guidance on hardening 5G standalone network slices against potential threats.

• The White House unveiled its plan for a U.S. Cyber Trust Mark that will certify that the IoT device marked with the label has met a set of security criteria developed to protect consumers’ networks and device data.

• New US cyber program will label smart devices that are considered safer and less vulnerable to attacks.

• Smart devices have become a popular target for hackers due to lax industry security standards, something that the Biden program is hoping to turn around.

• At least two new Adobe ColdFusion vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild, including one that has not been completely patched by the software giant.

• Daniel Kelley was just 18 years old when he was arrested and charged on thirty counts – most infamously for the 2015 hack of UK telco TalkTalk.

• In today’s increasingly digital world, the defence industry is increasingly adopting cutting-edge technologies to enhance its capabilities. These technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and virtual reality (VR), offer tremendous opportunities for improved operations and services.

• Attackers have started exploiting CVE-2023-28121, a recent critical vulnerability in the WooCommerce Payments WordPress plugin.

• The attackers have given the organisation a deadline of 24 July to get in touch and presumably negotiate a ransom payment.

• A countdown clock on the site shows there is a little more than five days to go before data is leaked.

• Said Simas: “MOVEit is a file transfer platform made by a company called Progress Software Corporation. The platform is used by thousands of governments, financial institutions and other public and private sector bodies all around the world to send and receive information.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Beginning in January 2023, Zuurbier recommenced collecting misdirected .mil emails to show to US authorities. So far this year, he told the Financial Times, he’s collected some 117,000 missives. The fear is that some miscreant or other could soon enough register .ml domains that correspond to .mil domains, and harvest all the lost mail.

• Scammers impersonate the YouTuber MrBeast in phishing ads

Privacy/Surveillance

• This decision “does not ban Facebook or Instagram in Norway,” Tobias Judin, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority’s international department head, stated in a release. “The purpose is rather to ensure that people in Norway can use these services in a secure way and that their rights are safeguarded.

• Norway’s data protection agency wants to ban Facebook and Instagram owner Meta from using the personal information of users for targeted advertising, threatening a $100,000 daily fine if the company continues.

Defence/Aggression

• Ukrainian sources are telling media outlets it was a joint operation between the SBU and the Ukrainian Navy.

• UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday warned that artificial intelligence could pose a risk to global peace and security, calling on all member states to urgently set up guardrails to keep the technology in check.

• The imprisoned former chief of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee (KNB), Karim Masimov, has been added to the Central Asian nation’s list of sponsors of terrorism.

• Tunisian security forces have committed “serious abuses” against black African migrants, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday, calling on the European Union to suspend migration control funding to the country.

• At his speech during the NATO Summit in Lithuania, President Biden called the U.S. and Europe “anchors for global security” when in reality there are no anchors during this increasingly dangerous and polarized time of never-ending war in Europe.

• The two foreign companies are being sanctioned for “for trafficking in cyber exploits used to gain access to information systems.”

• Australia is facing the largest challenge to its position of strategic primacy in the South Pacific since World War II as China continues to build relationships with Pacific island countries and enter into security agreements…

• By Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd / CounterPunch At his speech during the NATO Summit in Lithuania, President Biden called the U.S. and Europe “anchors for global security” when in reality there are no anchors during this increasingly dangerous and polarized time of never-ending war in Europe. Our NATO allies are not, as Biden would […]

• Terrorism remains a serious threat to global peace and security. No country is immune to it, but nor can any country effectively deal with it alone.

• The UN Command announced Tuesday that a US citizen on a tour of the Joint Security Area (JSA) of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea crossed the border into North Korea and is believed to be in North Korean custody.

• Aynsley Genga is a JURIST Senior Correspondent in Kenya. She files this dispatch from Nairobi.   Major public demonstrations against the Kenyan government and its handling of tax increases and the cost of living crisis are set to take place in Kenya from Wednesday to Friday this week.

• Hong Kong Secretary for Security Chris Tang told state-owned newspaper Wen Wei Po on Monday that the Hong Kong government is addressing “soft resistance” and online behavior that might threaten national security in its efforts to implement Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law.

• The fevered identity politics have turned what is essentially a private custody dispute into a national spectacle. Loh, who is Hindu and of Chinese and Indian descent, says she is now the subject of sustained harassment and intimidation from pro-Islam and pro-Malay people who falsely accuse her of trying to take Muslim children away from their faith.

• Today, Tennessee is a model of one-party rule. It has a Republican governor and legislature. Republican appointees run the state supreme court. The state’s nine-member U.S. House delegation contains eight Republicans; Tennessee has sent two Republicans to the Senate. The governor is the only other official elected statewide. Unlike in other states, the attorney general and secretary of state in Tennessee are appointed, and they are both Republicans too.

• So I think Donald Trump genuinely believed, as he has said, that he had “an Article II” and that lets him do whatever he wants. And so that being President of the United States was something like being the monarchical ruler of a kingdom. But that’s not how the United States government has operated, ever. And when I read that Times story, my first thought was that it seems like he is now trying to put together legal plans that would make the Presidency into more of a kingship and bring it a little bit closer to realizing what he understands the office to be.

• “We’ve learned the tactics of al-Shabaab,” Mohamud said in a report by The Soufan Center. “Our morale tells us that we are capable of defeating them. The government’s current policy is to liberate the country from Al Shabaab.”

• However, observers say, the loss of territory in Somalia likely pushed al-Shabaab to carry out attacks elsewhere.

• It is hard to see any military logic behind the dramatically different Russian reactions to NATO’s Nordic enlargement and the Alliance’s involvement in Ukraine. After all, while a theoretical future NATO presence inside Ukraine could pose a range of major headaches for military planners in Moscow, the recent accession of Finland has already doubled the length of Russia’s shared border with the Alliance overnight. Swedish membership will arguably be even more consequential for Russia, transforming the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake. If Russia is so apparently unconcerned by these very real military challenges, why was Putin prepared to launch the biggest European war since World War II over the far more distant prospect of Ukrainian NATO membership?

War in Ukraine

• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state-run news agency RIA Novosti that Russian attacks on Odesa’s port were “retaliatory strikes for the Crimean bridge.”

• The USA’s latest military aid package for Ukraine, announced in July, also includes “Penguin” drones developed by the Latvian company “Edge Autonomy Riga” (formerly “UAV Factory”), reports Forbes magazine.

• On July 11 and 12, NATO leaders met in Vilnius Lithuania for the annual NATO summit. The important summit brought into focus the many contradictions and conundrums in the difficult NATO-Ukraine knot.

• This article originally appeared on Timcast. When Dylan Allman turned 20, he found himself somewhat directionless. He was living with his father in Georgia, taking classes at a local college, and working a help desk job that was becoming increasingly tedious.

• Vladimir Putin insists Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” and appears to have genuinely believed his invading army would be welcomed. It is now clear this was a catastrophic miscalculation, writes Roman Solchanyk.

• Russia launched air attacks on Odesa for the second night in a row but the key port will not be intimidated and will continue its work to export grains, Ukrainian officials said early on Wednesday. The Odesa region’s governor, Oleh Kiper, said on social media that air defence systems were engaged in repelling the Russian air attack and urged residents of the region to stay in shelters.

• Ukraine’s counteroffensive is “far from a failure” but the fight ahead will be “long” and “bloody”, the top US General Mark Milley said on Tuesday. Milley’s comments came after Russia attacked the Ukrainian port cities of Odesa and Mykolaiv in a “mass revenge strike” for an attack on the Crimean Bridge, Russia’s defence ministry said.

• Lithuania’s main port could ship 10 million tonnes of Ukrainian grain, but the logistics of getting the cargo to the Baltic coast remain complicated, says Algis Latakas, CEO of Klaipėda Port.

• Ukraine and Russia both said they were seeking alternative ways to keep grain supplies flowing after an agreement that allowed exports to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia collapsed when Moscow refused to renew its participation in the deal as it expired on July 18.

• Indiscriminate shelling by Russian troops has killed at least four civilians in eastern and southern Ukraine, as the Ukrainian military said the situation is difficult but under control in some parts of the eastern front, while in the south, incremental advances are being made.

• An Outcome Document and Chair’s Summary, released after the meeting, highlighted the differences over the war in Ukraine.

• Details gleaned from interviews with Ukrainians in Finland could be useful to war crime investigations by authorities in other countries.

• Russia’s withdrawal from a deal allowing Ukrainian grain to get to global markets isn’t simply a matter of spite. The agreement helped Kyiv and grain buyers, but not Russia, Moscow says.

• Russian forces launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Odesa, not usually a major target, a day after important shifts in the conduct of the war.

• The EU-Latin American summit stalled over Russia’s condemnation, with some South American nations maintaining a neutral stance on the conflict. The talks were further disrupted by Latin America’s colonial grievances, overshadowing the EU’s economic goals.

• Every day, Ukrainian children lose fathers in Russia’s assault on their country. A grief camp is fighting to protect their youth.

• In spring 2024, Vladimir Putin will run for Russia’s presidency once again, and his administration has decided that he should win with at least 80 percent of the vote. There are some obstacles to achieving what would be a record victory, including the unpredictability of the Russia-Ukraine war and a certain amount of skepticism from the business sector. Still, Putin’s domestic policy team is planning a series of events to promote his upcoming campaign and the extent of Russia’s achievements under Putin’s rule. Meduza investigates.

• The Kremlin’s comments came after Ukraine’s leader called for the shipments to continue despite Russia’s withdrawal from a landmark grain deal.

• The new funds will go toward food assistance, health and hygienic care, and providing emergency shelter, the agency said.

• Ukraine lets soldiers from towns occupied by the Russian military join the battle to reclaim them.

• On the night of July 18, the Ukrainian military shot down six Russian Kalibr missiles over Odesa, as well as 25 Shahed kamikaze drones in the Odesa and Mykolaiv regions, says Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) operational command South.

• One of the lines of inquiry that Russian investigators are pursuing in the criminal case over the July 17 explosion on the Crimean Bridge is that Ukraine carried out a “double terrorist attack” involving modified jet skis, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported on Tuesday.

• World War II has been an ideological battlefield in today’s war in Ukraine, and it is cropping up on the actual battlefield as well.

• Before last month, Mikhail Lobanov was an associate professor at Moscow State University (MGU) and a well-known trade union activist. In 2021, he ran for a seat in Russia’s State Duma as the Communist Party’s candidate — and he surpassed pro-Kremlin propagandist Yevgeny Popov at the polls (though the latter ultimately “won” the election due to falsified electronic voting results).

• For Russia to endorse the GCC’s position on three islands is especially surprising, considering how much Iran has done to support Moscow.

• When Russian President Vladimir Putin develops his network of influence in Africa, he isn’t doing so at random. He is drawing on the rich history of Soviet relations with African countries that dates back to the 1960s and the efforts made by Russian spies during the Cold War to counter US influence on the ground.

• Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda on Tuesday called on Latin American countries not to be “seduced” by Russian propaganda.

• A plane belonging to Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner military company, arrived in Belarus, according to Belaruski Gajun, a group of activists monitoring military movements. The Embraer Legacy 600 jet arrived from Russia on Tuesday at 11:05.

• South African President Cyril Ramaphosa says arresting Russian President Vladimir Putin if he attends a BRICS summit next month in Johannesburg would amount to a declaration of war.

• The Russian State Duma on July 18 adopted a bill raising the age limit for several key positions in the reserve by five years and raising the upper age limit for compulsory military service from 27 to 30.

• Overnight on July 18, nine drones were shot down by Russian air defense systems in eastern Crimea, while another 19 drones were suppressed by electronic warfare, says Sergey Aksyonov, the head of the annexed peninsula. According to Aksyonov, there were no casualties as a result of the incident.

• A bill on criminal liability for “propaganda and justification of extremist ideology” has been introduced in the State Duma. The amendment will be made to Article 280 of the Criminal Code (“Public calls for extremist activity”), which provides for punishment in the form of a fine of up to 300 thousand rubles (about $3,300) or imprisonment of up to five years.

• Government officials in the Central African Republic (CAR) were shocked when Yevgeny Prigozhin turned his infamous Wagner Group mercenaries against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Desperate for information, cabinet members called CAR military officers and Russian military instructors.

• The assertion, made in a court affidavit, was the clearest indication yet that South Africa was seeking any way possible to avoid arresting the Russian leader on an international warrant at a long-planned BRICS summit in Johannesburg next month.

• Moscow has received confirmation from 49 countries to participate in the Russia-Africa summit.

• ADF STAFF The recent mutiny by Russia’s Wagner Group and potential changes to the mercenary group’s operations in Africa could make room for China to expand its own private security footprint on the continent, according to experts.

• A pro-Russian activist with close ties to Moscow works for an AfD member of the federal parliament, giving him access to the seat of German democracy. Security authorities are alarmed by the man, who holds both German and Russian citizenship. Nevertheless, it seems there is little they can do.

• Russia said on July 18 that road traffic has partially reopened on a major bridge that connects Moscow-annexed Crimea with Russia over the Kerch Strait after it had been damaged by at least one explosion the previous day.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• “Nursing Home Inspect” makes it fast and easy to search thousands of recent government inspection reports, find information about specific nursing homes and discover new serious issues found by inspectors. Below are some tips to help you make the most of our database.

• First, a little background.

• ProPublica has updated “Nursing Home Inspect,” our database that helps you find problems that inspectors identified in more than 15,000 U.S. nursing homes, to make it easier to search government reports and browse serious issues. We’ve added new data, a redesigned user interface and advanced search features.

Environment

• With a sepia hue and the smell of a campfire engulfing the East Coast, the immediate effects of human-caused climate change seemed as concrete as they had ever been. But on US TV news, viewers were more likely to hear climate denial than reporting that made the essential connection between fossil fuel consumption and worsening wildfires—if they heard mention of climate change at all.

• The purpose of the activation is the production of maps and data of the affected region, to assist the work of agencies involved in dealing with emergencies and managing the consequences of the fire.

• In May alone, the mercenaries of the Turkish occupation cut down a total of 2,124 olive and pomegranate trees in the occupied Afrin region. Additionally, approximately 18,000 olive trees were burned. Furthermore, intentional fires destroyed numerous forest trees, according to a balance sheet published by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on June 4.

• Afrin Canton was the westernmost canton of Rojava and North and East Syria, home to 200,000 ethnic Kurds. Though the population was overwhelmingly Kurdish, it was home to diverse religious groups including Yazidis, Alawites and Christians alongside Sunni Muslims.

• Satellites managed by the likes of NASA are already helping firefighters keep track of moving fires across the planet. More recently, however, drones are becoming a more localized high-tech fire suppression gadget.

• A project underway in Finland, where 75% of the land is covered in forest, is making it easier to track emerging forest fires with the help of drones.

• “We’re developing a new AI-based drone technology to quickly detect forest fires and provide situational awareness when extinguishing the fires,” said Professor Eija Honkavaara from the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute (NLS) and a member of research group undertaking the project, the FireMan consortium.

• The Sun’s activity is defying forecasts and highlighting how difficult it is to predict the machinations of Earth’s nearest star.

Energy/Transportation

• According to the company’s website, passengers can expect to pay between 60 and 80 euros — depending on the day of travel — for the estimated 30-hour journey from Vaasa to Warsaw.

• Note in particular that traders don’t actually believe that USDT is safe, it is just that its size makes it convenient for traders to use USDT unless, like Wile E. Coyote, they look down at it as they did last May.

Overpopulation

• At a plenary meeting of Russia’s State Duma on Tuesday, Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said that women should give birth as early in life as possible rather than pursuing their education and building careers.

Finance

• Lendlease is cutting 10 per cent of its global workforce as the real estate giant works to implement a five-year turnaround plan.

• A Lendlease spokesman on Tuesday confirmed the company will lay off about 740 people.

• As Hollywood actors enter their fifth day on the picket lines and some 340,000 Teamsters working at UPS prepare to carry out one of the largest single-employer strikes in U.S. history, we speak with historian and labor organizer John Womack Jr. about his new book, Labor Power and Strategy, focused on how to seize and build labor power and solidarity. Labor actions around the world are gaining headlines this week. In Italy, over 1,000 flights were disrupted as airport and airline workers went on a two-day strike for higher wages and better benefits. Members of the Union of Southern Service Workers at a South Carolina Waffle House participated in a three-day strike protesting safety and pay conditions.

• British inflation has fallen by more than expected in June and was its slowest in more than a year at 7.9 per cent, according to official data that will ease some of the pressure on the Bank of England to keep on raising interest rates sharply.

• Sterling fell as the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday the consumer price inflation growth rate was its lowest since March of last year but remained above the pace of price growth in many other big, rich economies.

• In the year since her husband died, Royanne McNair felt increasingly lonely in North Las Vegas. With most of her children and grandchildren in the Midwest, she decided to sell the house she and her husband had already paid off and move back to Ohio.

• Her goal was to be there by July 29, the anniversary of her husband’s death.

• Olalekan Jacob Ponle, a Nigerian national living in the UAE, was sentenced to 8 years in a US prison for his role in an $8 million BEC scheme.

• A threat actor’s real identity was uncovered after they infected their own computer with an information stealer.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Adding Intellexa and Cytrox to the Entity List places export restrictions on the software vendors as part of the Biden administration’s ongoing crackdown against commercial surveillance technology. It is now impossible for US organizations to do business legally with those placed on the list without special permission from Uncle Sam; the list effectively cuts off Intellexa et al from America.

• The move also follows warnings from cybersecurity researchers about abuses committed using the firms’ snooping products.

• Both Intellexa and Cytrox are controlled by Tal Dilian, a former general in the Israeli military intelligence who was forced to retire from the Israeli Defense Forces in 2003 after an internal investigation raised suspicions that he had been involved in funds mismanagement, according to three former senior officers in the Israeli military.

• He eventually moved to Cyprus, a European Union island nation that has become a favored destination in recent years for surveillance firms and cyberintelligence experts.

• So, the Saudi people can use Twitter but so can the government and boy, does the government use Twitter.

• The government has taken steps to control the flow of information on the platform. For example, it has banned certain hashtags and accounts and has been accused and/or caught doing the following shady stuff: [...]

• • creating fake accounts that pose as real people or organisations

• • using bots to amplify pro-Saudi messages and drown out criticism

• • paying people to spread pro-Saudi messages on Twitter

• • targeting specific hashtags and conversations with pro-Saudi messages

• What many did not know is that some of the groundwork for the blockade had already been laid on social media platforms like Twitter.

• An online propaganda battle, which started in the months before the GCC Crisis, continues to this day, Al Jazeera has found.

• As Bill C-18 made its way through the legislative process, the government and the media lobby groups supporting the bill insisted that Google and Meta were bluffing when they warned that legislation premised on mandated payments for links could lead the companies to stop Canadian news linking or sharing on their platforms. Proponents would point to the Australian experience or claim that links to Canadian news were simply too valuable for the platforms to walk away. Compromise amendments were ignored in favour of tough talk about not backing down, the platforms were investigated for daring to test link blocking, and MPs and Senators acted as stenographers for media lobby groups by introducing amendments that now leave the government with even less flexibility in the regulatory process.

• In lavishing gifts on the Supreme Court justice, the billionaire GOP donor may have violated tax laws, according to tax experts.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The slow collapse of Twitter has inspired a host of would-be successors. Millions of people are trying out new social-media platforms such as Meta’s Threads in a textbook triumph of enthusiasm over experience. I’m sure that creating free content for a social-media platform run by an unaccountable billionaire will turn out differently this time, we tell ourselves, as though we were all born yesterday.

• Even a staunch American ally, Egyptian President Mubarak, found it necessary to declare that “the introduction of democracy into the Arab world in this way is a complete illusion that will lead to anarchy in the Middle East.” However, he paid the price for this and spent several years in prison, and in his state, as a result of the planned revolutions of the so-called “Arab Spring”, the extremist Muslim Brotherhood (banned in Russia) was forcibly brought to power. They came to power in ostensibly democratic elections held with sabers and machetes. Egypt was on the brink of civil war, chaos and the initial phase of genocide against eight million Egyptian Christians. Only thanks to the coup d’état of General Al-Sisi with the support of Saudi Arabia, it was possible to somewhat stabilize the situation in the state.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Witnesses said Iranian singer Nyusha Qurbani was taken from the stage by plainclothed security agents while performing with her chamber music group Ataq Band on July 17.

• Authorities in Belarus have arrested a prominent journalist working with the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the latest step in a yearslong crackdown on opposition figures, independent journalists and human rights activists

• When asked about the missing chats, a Reddit spokesperson pointed Gizmodo to an announcement the platform made last month, which confirmed that user chats made before January 1, 2023, would be deleted on June 30. Reddit did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s questions about why those chats were deleted.

• Russian paratrooper Pavel Filatyev, who took part in Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, told Agenstvo Telegram channel on July 18 that he had obtained political asylum in France after writing a book about his experiences in the Kremlin’s war against its neighbor.

• [...]

• Shortly after launching the full-scale aggression against Ukraine in late February last year, President Vladimir Putin signed a law that calls for lengthy prison terms for distributing “deliberately false information” about Russian military operations as the Kremlin seeks to control the narrative about the war.

• The France-based founder of the Gulagu.net human rights group, Vladimir Osechkin, helped Filatyev escape Russia for France in August 2022.

• There I was sitting in the movie theatre trying to watch “Sound of Freedom,” when I heard the sound of an air horn.

• Bwaam! Bom-bom-bom-bom-bwaam!

• TikTok and Robert Kyncl-led Warner Music Group (WMG) have inked a “first-of-its-kind” expanded agreement extending to TikTok Music as well as the short-form video-sharing app itself and its Commercial Music Library.

• [...]

• However, perhaps the most noteworthy component of the announcement message about the TikTok-WMG deal is the entities’ commitment to spearheading “the joint development of additional and alternative economic models.”

• Exactly what these “additional and alternative economic models” entail remains to be seen, but the commitment has arrived as the major labels are exploring streaming-compensation reform against the backdrop of AI’s quick-growing industry role.

• Two months after expanding its “New Music” hashtag into “a global music discovery hub,” TikTok has debuted Elevate, which higher-ups are billing as the “first-ever program to identify, amplify and celebrate emerging artists.” The highly controversial video-sharing app announced the formal rollout of Elevate today.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Several Senators and Representatives, including Senator Ron Wyden, Sen. Mike Lee, Sen. Richard Durbin, Rep. Jamie Raskin and Rep. Kevin Kiley, re-introduced the bipartisan, bicameral legislation in June.

• Journalists shouldn’t be forced to choose between protecting their confidential sources or going to prison. Law enforcement agencies under both Democratic and Republican administrations have secretly subpoenaed emails and phone records from reporters in order to determine their sources. The PRESS Act protects newsgathering and the free flow of information to the American people, since journalists often rely on confidential sources — who may fear being jailed, fired, or retaliated against for speaking to the press. This law is a necessary protection for journalists to report vital news stories in the national interest.

• The PRESS Act is the strongest federal shield bill for journalists we’ve ever seen. Its definition of journalist is appropriately broad, its exceptions are narrow and targeted, and it restricts subpoenas directed not only to journalists but to their phone and email providers.

• Hong Kong authorities have proposed that programmes about national education, national identity, and the “correct understanding” of the national security law be exempt from an impartiality clause requiring “even-handedness” when opposing points of view are presented.

• It would have been realistic for the democrats to have gained a majority in the Legislative Council had Beijing not intervened with methods outside of the Basic Law, a defendant has testified at a landmark national security trial. Gwyneth Ho, a former journalist at the now-defunct Stand News, began her testimony on Tuesday.

• The buyouts and layoffs come amid a broader reorganization at Penguin Random House, which earlier this year overhauled its Random House and Crown divisions. The departures at the country’s largest publishing house also follow numerous other high-profile changes. Global company CEO Markus Dohle and U.S. CEO Madeline McIntosh both left within months of PRH’s failed attempt to purchase rival publisher Simon & Schuster, a deal struck down last fall by a federal judge. In June, Robert Gottlieb, a former Knopf editor-in-chief who worked on all of Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson books, died at age 92. Knopf has not yet announced a new editor for the fifth volume.

• At the blockade, Maile met up with other Native Hawaiian professors who were opposed to the project. They talked about “Kuleana and Kulana,” Maile recalled in an interview, referencing the ʻŌlelo Hawaii terms for “responsibilities and obligations.” As educators, they decided their fight wouldn’t be on the ground, but inside their institutions.

• Instead of protecting freedom of the press, to which he pledged allegiance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, Joe Biden is continuing Donald Trump’s prosecution of Assange under the infamous Espionage Act. James Ball is one of at least four journalists that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI are pressuring to cooperate with the prosecution of Assange, Ball wrote in Rolling Stone.

• This is the first time a publisher has been charged under the Espionage Act for disclosing government secrets.

• Burkinabè authorities should immediately reverse the suspension of French television news channel La Chaîne Info (LCI) and stop censoring local and foreign media coverage of the jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso and the Sahel region, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Law enforcement agencies often command an outsized portion of city and county budgets. The argument for this expenditure is basically just Blue Line bullshit: without the police at full staff, surely every locality will descend into criminal anarchy.

• Well, this is an unfortunate turn of events. The last time we discussed this issue in this state (March 2019), a state appeals court came to the opposite conclusion: compelling password production is a violation of rights.

• Australian business and government have joined the global chorus warning about the risks artificial intelligence (AI) poses to humanity. But despite their fretful tone, the introduction of algorithms into Australian political life has been less apocalyptic and more business-as-usual. Changes to the Australian welfare system are a prime example. Punitive and difficult-to-access by design, the system is now best known for a disastrous algorithmic innovation nicknamed robodebt.

• Some influencers are members of SAG-AFTRA, but even those who aren’t are still beholden to the rules of the strike. They risk being blacklisted from the union if they “scab,” a term for someone who continues to work while unionized workers strike.

• As SAG-AFTRA’s strike formally began this past Friday, July 14, many questions remained about how members and non-members could support the movement without going against the wishes of the union. But social media spent the weekend rife with confusion and misinformation, as people sought layers upon layers of clarification about how the strike impacted everyone from journalists working within the entertainment media landscape, to independent content creators and influencers, all the way down to members of the public who are simply just fans of the content being made by striking workers—past, present, and future. Discussions about reviewing or reacting to new and upcoming film and TV projects, to things as simple as cosplay or just talking about media at all online, as being equivalent to crossing a picket line came up for debate. So what can and can’t be done during either SAG-AFTRA or the WGA’s strike? Here’s a brief primer.

• “We are demanding a safe work environment where we are not straining, pulling muscles from lifting heavy packages, or tripping over boxes falling off the conveyor belt,” said Alicia Ozier, one of the strikers at the delivery station.

• She and her coworkers walked out after Amazon retaliated by refusing to accommodate her when she sustained an injury on the job.

• Yet as insurers demand higher rates and cancel policies amidst intensifying climate risks, they’re actively contributing to those risks. The three groups planning to limit or cease new business in California — Farmers Insurance Group, State Farm, and Allstate — also hold nearly $40 billion in fossil fuel investments, according to a Lever review of the most recent data reported to state regulators.

• But instead of addressing their own role in the climate crisis, insurers are using the disaster to push for deregulation. In order to continue writing homeowner policies, insurers and their lobbying groups are now demanding that regulators relax the state’s landmark price-gouging protections, considered the most rigorous in the nation.

• Watchdogs warn that this amounts to an attempt to exploit a crisis that the industry profits from twice over, shifting the costs of climate-fueled disasters to consumers in the form of higher premiums while continuing to invest billions of those premium dollars in oil and gas.

• According to the report, it would cost just over $14 billion—approximately 0.009% of global gross domestic product in 2022—to “mitigate the current surge of poverty and lift out of poverty the 165 million people living on less than $3.65 a day.”

• The SAG-AFTRA strike is a significant expansion of the scale and momentum of our struggle. But in a few key ways, things are the same for us as they were two-and-a-half months ago. Our members have continued to show up day after day on the picket lines. Our resolve to hold out for a fair contract, one that compensates writers fairly for the profits we generate and allows us to cultivate sustainable long-term careers and support our families (in whatever way we define them) has not wavered.

• One of Australia’s top intelligence officers has warned foreign countries are using legal proceedings in Australia to gather sensitive information.

• Office of National Intelligence Director-General Andrew Shearer told an inquiry into laws allowing secret trials to take place to deal with national security matters, that a high proportion of such cases would involve foreign interference offences.

• The ability for courts to hold trials in secret to deal with national security matters will be scrutinised at a two-day hearing in Canberra.

• Grant Donaldson, Australia’s Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, will hear from government officials, intelligence bosses, prosecutors and human rights advocates.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Below, you’ll find links to actions you can quickly take to contact your lawmaker…

• The Kids Online Safety Act would increase surveillance and restrict access to information under the guise of protecting children online. KOSA would put the tools of censorship in the hands of state attorneys general. It would greatly endanger the rights and safety of young people online. KOSA’s burdens will affect adults, too, who will likely face hurdles, like age verification, to access legal content online as a result of the bill.

• The British company secures $100 million in funding and announced the hiring of a new chief executive to pursue global expansion plans.

• When talking about personal storage, the traditional philosophy has been to slavishly backup anything irreplaceable, and not to worry too much about media like TV shows.

• This advice, which I’ve absolutely parroted in the past, presupposes that:

• Beating two eggs will eventually form stiff peaks.

• The Domain Name System (DNS) root zone will soon be getting a new record type, called ZONEMD, to further ensure the security, stability, and resiliency of the global DNS in the face of emerging new approaches to DNS operation. While this change will be unnoticeable for the vast majority of DNS operators (such as registrars, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and organizations), it provides a valuable additional layer of cryptographic security to ensure the reliability of root zone data.

• In this blog post, we’ll discuss these new proposals, as well as ZONEMD. We’ll share deployment plans, how they may affect certain users, and what DNS operators need to be aware of beforehand to ensure little-to-no disruptions.

Monopolies

• This flywheel creates a vicious cycle, starving local retail so that customers can’t get what they need from brick-and-mortar shops, which funnels sellers into offering their goods for sale on Amazon. The less choice customers and sellers have about where they shop, the more Amazon can abuse both to pad its own bottom line.

• There are 800,000 EU-based sellers on Amazon, and they have seen the junk-fees that Amazon charges them skyrocket, to the point where they have to raise prices or lose money on each sale. Amazon uses both tacit and explicit “Most Favored Nation” deals to hide these price-hikes. Under an MFN deal, sellers must not allow their goods to be sold at a lower price than Amazon’s — so when they raise prices to cover Amazon’s increasing fees, they raise them everywhere:

• Despite the flurry of lawsuits, those new works and the training of the tool itself probably do not infringe the copyright in any work used in the training set – even if the person who used the tool to generate it asked for something in a particular artist’s “style.” And that’s probably a good thing on balance: given the scope and length of copyright, as well as the financial cost of violating those rights accidentally, it’s important to clearly demarcate what is and is not protected, and “style” does not lend itself to clear markers.

• But that doesn’t mean the creator of the original work has no recourse. As the premise of at least one of those lawsuits shows, there’s an alternative legal theory: publicity rights. But that legal approach comes with its own risks – especially if, as some are proposing, it is enshrined as an expansive federal right.

• The right of publicity is an offshoot of state privacy law that gives a person the right to limit the public use of her name, likeness, or identity for commercial purposes. The original idea was to ensure that private individuals weren’t drawn into the public sphere without their consent through such marketing efforts. A majority of states have some version of the right, and a limited version of it makes sense. For example, you should be able to prevent a company from running an advertisement that falsely claims that you endorse its products.

Trademarks

• Monster Energy opposed Tom & Martha LLC’s application to register the mark LOCH MOOSE MONSTAH (in standard character form) for various gift shop-type goods and related services in four classes, claiming a likelihood of confusion with the mark MONSTER ENERGY and other MONSTER marks for energy drinks, beverageware, clothing, and bags, and related retails store services. Opposer argued that the proposed mark is “highly similar” to the MONSTER marks “in view of the respective terms MONSTER and MONSTAH which are phonetically similar” and further because “MONSTAH” is the dominant word in applicant’s mark. How do you think this Section 2(d) opposition came out? Monster Energy Company v. Tom & Martha LLC, Opposition No. 91250710 (July 14, 2023) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Karen Kuhlke).

Copyrights

• The International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy is reporting the completion of a highly successful anti-piracy campaign to protect live cricket broadcasts of the Indian Premier League. The announcement is good news for rightsholders while standing in sharp contrast to comments from other stakeholders, who repeatedly argue that tougher legislation is required.

• Two photographers who filed a copyright lawsuit against Instagram after their images posted to the platform appeared on BuzzFeed News and Time via embedding, have lost their case. In an opinion handed down Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit referenced its 2007 ‘server test’ precedent, noting that Instagram could not be liable for secondary copyright infringement because when content is embedded, no copy is made of the underlying content.

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