● 07.27.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 27/07/2023: Google Pushes “Web Integrity API” (DRM) Into the World Wide Web

Posted in News Roundup at 12:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• Remember that early-2000s ad campaign that equated downloading from peer-to-peer networks with car theft? The one that featured a stolen soundtrack? The shoe is on the other foot today, with large AI companies hoovering up yours and my data for their profit.

• Officials and police focus more on ‘stability maintenance’ than taking care of bereaved families, they say.

• Forums, on the other hand, were just a platform that facilitated the coming together of people with similar interests. There were no followers, no boosting, no influencers and no bullshit. It was lovely.

• For the most part, forum users fell into a couple of buckets – people who wanted to either help others, or people who just wanted to chew the cud about a topic they’re interested in.

• Don’t get me wrong, forums had some of the same problems that plague the social web today. Namely trolls and idiots, but that’s par for the course for any place where a large number of people congregate. My forum experiences were almost exclusively positive.

• The Tucson mom found guilty of neglect for letting her 7-year-old son play at the park has finally had her name removed from Arizona’s Central Registry, a government blacklist of unfit parents that is maintained by the Department of Child Safety (DCS).

• While this is obviously a victory for the mom—and for common sense—the constitutional rights of countless other people are still at stake.

• Two days ago I decided to give up on my blog’s commenting system. I wrote about a solution that I had tried but abandoned along the way: synchronizing comments from my Mastodon account. I abandoned it because I thought that my instance automatically flushed all posts older than 30 days, and it was too ephemeral to be a long-term solution.

• But here is an update: I was wrong. The instance doesn’t auto delete the message and an admin on my Mastodon instance contacted me to tell me the reason: they had an accident that resulted in the loss of comments older than that date. And he assured me that they don’t plan to do it again.

• So, in light of this new element, I’ve decided to give my solution another try, even if it only affects the last five articles published on my blog after 25 June 2023. The solution works (you can see it in the footer of my recent posts) and I’m happy to have an alternative commenting system back here.

• Internet cafes — cheap, accessible venues where just about anyone could explore cyberspace in its infancy — spread slowly across the world at first, and then snowballed in popularity. In the spring of 1996, Sri Lanka got its first two [Internet] cafes: the Cyber Cafe, and the Surf Board. A few months later, Kuwait’s first [Internet] cafe launched with 16 PCs. In 1999, a travel guide promised readers a list of 2,000 cafes in 113 countries.

• Within a couple years, it was estimated that there were more than 100 [Internet] cafes in Ghana alone. BusyInternet opened the largest [Internet] cafe in Accra, boasting 100 screens. By 2002, there were more than 200,000 licensed [Internet] cafes in China, and still more operating under the table.

Science

• He led scientific advances at IBM and within the federal government during a career that spanned the space race and the dawn of the internet.

• How old were you when you were finally able to rub your stomach and pat your head… concurrently!? Or was it rub your head and pat your stomach? Either way, I remember a few of us getting the hang of it quickly, when others in the class struggled. My music teacher said I should be a drummer on this basis, which I now sadly regret not picking up. Maybe I need an apartment-friendly electronic set.

• But I digress. Some of those people who struggled with patting their knees and rubbing their elbows grew up, and entered project management, public relations, or politics. You can spot them because they claim we can’t do something because we’re doing something else.

• It’s the first time we’ve ever seen this.

• With a new image, NASA commemorates the first anniversary of doing science with the most powerful observatory ever sent to space.

• A new kind of sustainable pharmaceuticals.

• After faculty protests and a debate over racial equity, the state’s public universities reconsider whether high school students can skip a foundational course.

• It’s pretty pictures – and so much more. The range and precision of the James Webb Space Telescope are transforming cosmological research.

• This can’t be a coincidence.

• To be clear, we don’t think open approaches to AI development should make their use fully exempt from the Act’s requirements, and we recognize how open source AI can also make harmful uses of AI more accessible to more people. Instead, our recommendations underscore the need for a tailored, proportionate approach to open source and open science, which supports collaborative models of development of AI by a wide range of players.

• The AI Act holds promise to set a global precedent in regulating AI to address its risks while encouraging innovation. By supporting the blossoming open ecosystem approach to AI, the regulation has an important opportunity to further this goal through increased transparency and collaboration between stakeholders. Unfortunately, current proposals threaten to create impractical barriers to and disadvantages for contributors to this open ecosystem.

• The undersigned organizations represent both commercial and nonprofit stakeholders in the open source AI ecosystem. Below, we make 5 concrete suggestions for how to ensure the AI Act works for open source: [...]

Education

• Thousands of parents take to streets after an influx of students makes it harder to gain a place in senior high.

• Australian university chiefs have been grilled over scrapping a sexual consent campaign at campuses across the country.

• Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson confirmed some of the organisation’s members, including vice-chancellors from multiple tertiary institutions, raised concerns about the campaign.

Hardware

• These days, there is a plethora of cheap hardware and software which you can use to make digital music. Back in the 1980s, though, this was still a nascent field, with new gear changing the game for musicians. In his latest video, [cTrix] puts together a guide to building a budget MIDI home studio like it’s 1988.

• Fewer and fewer people have cable TV subscriptions these days, due to a combination of poor business practices by cable companies and the availability of alternatives to cable such as various streaming platforms. But before the rise of the Internet that enabled these alternatives, there was a short period of time where there were higher-quality channels, not too many commercials, a possibly rose-tinted sense of wonder, and where MTV actually played music. [Irish Craic Party] created this vintage cable TV network to capture this era of television history.

• Researchers at cloud security startup Wiz are reporting that a whopping 62 percent of AWS environments may be exposed to the newly documented Zenbleed information leak vulnerability in AMD Zen 2 processors.

• Let’s say you’re doing lots of woodwork now, and you’ve expanded your workshop with a few big tools. You’re probably noticing the sawdust piling up awfully quick. It would be ideal to have some kind of collection system, but you don’t want to buy a shop vac for every tool. This simple manifold from [Well Done Tips] is the perfect solution for you.

• The problem with building automated systems is that it’s hard to look at any problem and not see it in terms of possible automation solutions. Come to think of it, that’s probably less of a bug and more of a feature, but it’s easy to go overboard and automate all the things, which quickly becomes counterproductive in terms of time and money.

• Skid steers are great fun if you get to drive one on a construction site. [ProfessorBoots] has long been a fan of the diminutive diggers, and decided to make a 3D-printed version for his own pleasure.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The world lender has urged India to reverse the ban.

• But China, India and Indonesia halved the number of people without access to clean cooking in 12 years.

• It manifests differently in young people.

• Scientists are brewing a “fish oil” without fish and hope it will catch on as consumers increasingly school companies on more sustainable products.

• Advanced manufacturing and science have combined at the University of Sydney where a new ingredient has been made from marine and soil bacteria.

• Smartphones and social media were supposed to bring us closer together. But the more we learn about their effects, the more we see that these tools come with a price. Research by Jean Twenge and others has shown that teens who use social media excessively are more likely to experience depression, anxiety, and sleep deprivation. Recently, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory warning that social media are causing a profound mental health crisis among America’s children.

• Even though most research on excessive smartphone usage focuses on teens and young adults, it does not mean that older Americans are immune to this issue. In the recent IFS teen and tech report with Jean Twenge, about 1 in 7 parents of teens (15%) said they use their phones or other digital devices “almost constantly” during conversations, meals, or family events. And there is growing evidence that our closest, most important relationships, such as our marriages and dating relationships, are suffering as a result. Using a sample of 145 adults, James Roberts and Meredith David found that “phubbing” (prioritizing one’s phone over people) among romantic partners leads to greater relationship dissatisfaction.

• Short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are cropping up almost everywhere, both in the environment and in the news. The category of PFAS includes thousands of chemicals first used in the 1940s and now found in countless industries and products, such as moisturizing cosmetics, nonstick cookware, durable food packaging and waterproof clothing. When washed out of clothing or leached from landfills, these forever chemicals can linger in water and living organisms without breaking down. Their accumulation in humans and other animals is linked to an increased risk of cancer, immune damage and birth complications.xs

• When visiting three foodbanks around the north-east last month, I met people with jobs who nevertheless needed regular emergency food parcels – and those relying on benefits weren’t receiving enough to live on.

• Today, subsidies are the most common method of encouraging countries to deal with global warming; but it is debatable how effective they are. For instance, agriculture subsidies cause farmers to violate forest frontier and make them responsible for 14% of global deforestation every year. Not to mention excessive use of fertilizers degrades the soil and water and eventually damages human health.

• Honestly, I had planned on not blogging today, mainly because I have an August 4 grant deadline. However, the pandemic being the pandemic and antivax conspiracy mongering being antivax conspiracy mongering (meaning that it never sleeps), I decided I had to say something about Bronny James.

• DEA Administrator Anne Milgram’s tenure has been marked by increasingly alarmist proclamations about fentanyl, social media, fentanyl, “the children,” fentanyl, “drug dealers want to kill their customers,” and… fentanyl.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Microsoft has mostly managed to stay in the good books of the EU’s competition regulators since the late aughts, when it received a record $1.3 billion fine in 2008 for failing to properly comply with an earlier antitrust decision about interoperability, and settled another major antitrust investigation in 2009 by giving Windows users a choice of default browser when they fired up the operating system.

• However, Microsoft’s cultural transformation into a supposedly less aggressive entity has recently been called into question. The company has started ignoring Outlook and Teams users’ browser choices by opening links in its Edge browser. It might soon face a British antitrust probe over contractual terms that arguably lock customers into its cloud (rival Amazon is also in those crosshairs). And now it’s under investigation by the EU antitrust directorate again.

Windows TCO

• Cybersecurity firm Fortinet has published details on three critical- and high-severity vulnerabilities patched recently in the Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) service.

• Two of these flaws, tracked as CVE-2023-21554 and CVE-2023-28302, could lead to remote code execution (RCE) and denial-of-service (DoS) and were addressed by Microsoft with its April 2023 Patch Tuesday updates. No CVE identifier has been provided for the third issue.

• A proprietary messaging protocol, MSMQ supports communication between applications running on separate systems. It places messages that did not reach their destination in a queue and resends them as soon as the destination becomes reachable.

• The Akira ransomware gang has compromised at least 63 organizations since March 2023, mostly focusing on small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf reports.

Linux Foundation

• Google regularly spends billions of dollars on its mapping initiatives, like its recent return to recording street views in Germany. Other companies both big and small are working together to create a open source dataset that everyone can draw from.

• Just yesterday, I was a suit-wearing Musk-eteer, deep in thoughts of “wow, what a world we live in. With artificial intelligence (AI) definitely sluiced into the public consciousness with good intentions, and the continued persistence of cloud computing trading on the thrown scrap of convenience and cost-effectiveness against the dark ‘service-as-a-service’ whims of any company comically evil enough to enter into a consortium.”

Security

• India’s nodal agency for computer security-related threats has issued a warning to citizens and organisations about the emergence of a new ransomware called ‘Akira’. Union government’s Computer Emergency Response Team-India (CERT-In) issued the critical advisory on Monday, stating that the ransomware was targeting both Windows and Linux-based operating systems.

• The agency informed that the group responsible for the ransomware compromised the users via VPN services, particularly when the users had not enabled multi-factor authentication. It also hoodwinked the users through tools such as AnyDesk, WinRAR, and PC Hunter, to download benign-looking files.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (amd64-microcode, gst-plugins-bad1.0, gst-plugins-base1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, iperf3, openjdk-17, and pandoc), Fedora (389-ds-base, kitty, and thunderbird), SUSE (libqt5-qtbase, libqt5-qtsvg, mysql-connector-java, netty, netty-tcnative, openssl, openssl-1_1, openssl1, php7, python-scipy, and xmltooling), and Ubuntu (amd64-microcode, avahi, libxpm, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.15, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-oem-5.17, linux-oem-6.0, linux-oem-6.1, openstack-trove, and python-django).

• After a period of quiet, DESORDEN Group has re-emerged as a threat to Malaysian entities, and now, it seems, to providing drinkable water to Johor (see this post from 2021 for an overview of Ranhill Utilities Berhad in the environment sector and the role of AquaSmart).

• The Moscow City Court sentenced to 14 years in prison the founder of Group-IB Ilya Sachkov. As reports (https://lenta.ru/news/2023/07/26/sachkovvv/) to Lenta.ru, he will serve his sentence in a strict regime colony.

• Several UK NHS ambulance organizations have been struggling to record patient data and pass it to other providers following a cyber-attack aimed at health software company Ortivus.

• In a statement, the Sweden-headquartered software vendor said it was subject to a cyber-attack on July 18 which hit UK customer systems within its hosted datacenter environment.

• Yamaha’s Canadian music division confirmed that it recently dealt with a cyberattack after two different ransomware groups claimed to have attacked the company.

• The Yamaha Corporation — different from the spun-off motorcycle division — is a Japanese manufacturing giant producing musical instruments and audio equipment. It is considered the world’s largest producer of musical equipment.

• In a statement last Thursday, Yamaha Canada Music said it “recently encountered a cyberattack that led to unauthorized access and data theft.”

• Security researchers say they have high confidence that North Korean hackers were behind a recent intrusion at enterprise software company JumpCloud because of a mistake the hackers made.

• Mandiant, which is assisting one of JumpCloud’s affected customers, attributed the breach to hackers working for North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, or RGB, a hacking unit that targets cryptocurrency companies and steals passwords from executives and security teams.

Privacy/Surveillance

• British merchants are increasingly using the technology to combat shoplifting, raising questions about its spread as artificial intelligence rapidly improves it.

• As a homeowner, I take my 1 Gbps internet service for granted. I love having a fast connection, particularly because have so many connected devices. But I’ve gotten so used to it that I don’t have the perspective of others who might live in an apartment that has much slower wireless networking speeds.

• Rush System for Health must defend a proposed class action alleging it shared health information of patients using its patient portal with Google Inc. and other third parties, in breach of its contract with patients and in violation of the Illinois Eavesdropping Act.

• On 28 June, the parliamentary session’s final Senedd cross-party group (CPG) on digital rights and democracy, of which Open Rights Group (ORG) acts as secretariat, took place online with over 20 attendees tuning in to hear a follow-up to a previous group session on facial recognition technology.

• During the last meeting in February, we discussed the landmark ruling that found the use of facial recognition by South Wales Police breached the right to privacy under the European Convention of Human Rights. South Wales Police has since resumed use of the technology and Chief Inspector Scott Lloyd from the force addressed the CPG to explain why. He was joined by Lee Jones – Chief Executive, Police & Crime Commissioner for South Wales – and Madeleine Stone – Legal and Policy Officer, Big Brother Watch. Sarah Murphy MS chaired the meeting.

• Pakistan’s government appears poised to push through onerous data regulations that will put the country’s tech industry under strain—and raise concerns for consumers. On July 26, Pakistani media reported that the country’s cabinet had approved the draft Personal Data Protection Bill 2023, signaling that parliament is likely to pass the legislation before its term ends in August. In addition, the cabinet approved the E-Safety Bill 2023, which is also expected to move through parliament in the coming days. While the data protection legislation has been in the works for several years, the sudden movement of the draft legislation has caught both industry and civil society by surprise, especially since there has been little engagement with stakeholders on the legislation in the past few weeks.

• Today, noyb filed a complaint against Ryanair. When booking through an online travel agent and not directly on its website or app, Europe’s biggest airline requires a part of its customers to go through a “verification process” involving invasive facial recognition. There is no reasonable justification for Ryanair to implement this system. Instead, it seems like the airline is willingly violating their customer’s right to data protection in order to obtain an unfair competitive advantage over alternative booking channels.

• TELL the U.K. Parliament: Don’t Break Encryption

• If it passes, the Online Safety Bill will be a huge step backwards for global privacy, and democracy itself. Requiring government-approved software in peoples’ messaging services is an awful precedent. If the Online Safety Bill becomes British law, the damage it causes won’t stop at the borders of the U.K.

• Well, this is not surprising, but unfortunate. With the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to be debated in a Congressional hearing on Thursday, the White House had President Joe Biden come out and give a full throated endorsement of the horrible, dangerous, bill that will damage privacy and harm children.

• Social media giant Meta and subsidiaries have copped $20 million in fines after an app that claimed protect personal information was found to have collected user data for commercial benefit.

• Onavo Protect was a free mobile app made available by Meta that provided a virtual private network service which claimed to “keep you and your data safe online” and give users “peace of mind when you browse” according to its App Store listing.

Confidentiality

• Seems that there is a deliberate backdoor in the twenty-year-old TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard used by police forces around the world.

• While the researchers frame their discovery as a backdoor, the organization responsible for maintaining the standard pushes back against that specific term, and says the standard was designed for export controls which determine the strength of encryption. The end result, however, are radios with traffic that can be decrypted using consumer hardware like an ordinary laptop in under a minute.

Defence/Aggression

• The story is a warning. Will we heed it?

• Kosovo’s former intelligence chief, Driton Gashi, was convicted of “abuse of official post or authority” on Wednesday in consequence of deporting six Turkish people who had permanent residence or temporary permits unlawfully. /blockquote>

• Almost exactly 66 years ago, 22 pre-eminent scientists from 10 countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, gathered in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, to identify the dangers that nuclear weapons posed…

• A French zoo will bid farewell to one of its star attractions – a 5-year-old giant panda – on Tuesday, with the bear set to participate in a breeding programme in China’s Sichuan province. Although Yuan Meng was born in France, he is Chinese property on loan to the zoo as part of China’s international “panda diplomacy” programme.

• A diabolo coach is among those accused of recruiting military personnel in financial difficulties

• The two countries look forward to deepening cooperation in areas such as the Belt and Road Initiative to generate more benefits for the two peoples.

• Japan’s new export rules require fab tool makers to get an export license from the government before shipping them to China.

• Finland will serve as the chair for the preparatory meeting of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has announced.

• The first meetings of the preparatory committee will take place from 31 July to 11 August in Vienna, Austria.

• Now the early but commanding front-runner in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, Trump regularly downplays the violence, lionizes the [insurectionists] as patriots and spreads false claims about who was involved. He has not only vowed to pardon a “large portion” of Jan. 6 defendants if he wins a second term, but he has also fundraised for them, befriended their families and collaborated on a song that became a surprise iTunes hit.

• As a social media company, TikTok has not had to deal with warehousing, supply-chain management and after-sales service so far. To get the ball rolling, the company has been poaching Temu and Shein talent, according to the WSJ.

• The J&K Police on Thursday arrested a Ph.D. scholar from south Kashmir’s Kulgam for his alleged role in “motivating, funding and providing logistic support to the gullible youth of the district and adjoining areas to recruit them into terrorist ranks”.

• Five days after leading a failed uprising against the Russian state, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his top Wagner Group officers sat face-to-face with Russian President Vladimir Putin for a three-hour meeting on June 29.

• Despite having called his former close advisor a traitor and vowing harsh punishment, Putin reportedly gave immunity to Wagner personnel. He also agreed to let Prigozhin keep some of his vast, shadowy empire in Africa.

• In northern Nigeria and northern Mozambique, two violent extremist groups are separated by thousands of kilometers but connected by certain characteristics.

• Both emerged in regions where state security was largely absent and local grievances against the government had grown. Both insurgencies preached the rejection of traditional education in favor of a radical form of Islam. Both movements are funded through the illicit economy. And, in both places, an initial heavy-handed response by the military did not stop attacks and might have helped extremist recruitment.

• In Australia and New Zealand, Morocco’s Nouhaila Benzina could go a step further, but there is still work to be done, including in France, where the hijbab is still banned in football.

• At the end of June, the Council of State (Conseil d’Etat) declared the headscarf ban at football matches to be legal. The French Supreme Administrative Court ruled that the FFF’s requirement to dispense with the hijab was “appropriate and proportionate.”

• On Tuesday, the State Duma adopted both the second and third reading of legislation that will expand Russia’s age range for conscription (not to be confused with mobilization) to men between the ages of 18 and 30, effective January 1, 2024. Late last year, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced a “phased increase” in the lower age limit for conscription from 18 to 21. State Duma deputies later abandoned the idea, however, arguing that Russia’s “serious demographic situation” means the military must cast a wider net to draw enough men into the armed forces. At the same time, lawmakers raised the upper age limit by three years immediately, even though Defense Committee chairman Andrey Kartapolov said just a day earlier that the increase would be gradual.

• This week, a witness to the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 revealed for the first time that he overheard a New York police officer asking if Malcolm’s assassin was “with us.” The eyewitness, Mustafa Hassan, spoke Tuesday alongside Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz and civil rights attorney Ben Crump at a press conference at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center. Democracy Now! spoke to Hassan at the press conference. He told us, “My testimony would have changed the outcome of the trial. It would have pointed the finger of guilt at the establishment.” We’re also joined on the show by Ben Crump, who calls this latest revelation “astonishing.” .

• North Korea fired two ballistic missiles into the sea Monday, hours after a second American nuclear-armed submarine arrived in South Korea. Meanwhile, peace activists are gathering in Washington, D.C., for a national mobilization to call on President Biden and Congress to officially end the Korean War, 70 years after the signing of the July 27, 1953, Korean Armistice that ended active military conflict. To discuss the renewed call for peace and the history of “the dirtiest war of the 20th century,” we’re joined by two guests: Bruce Cumings, professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of several books on Korea, and Christine Ahn of the organization Women Cross DMZ and the coordinator of the campaign Korea Peace Now! Ahn calls for the U.S. government to “atone” for its role in the war by replacing the ceasefire with a peace agreement, not feeding into the peninsula’s nuclear hostilities.

War in Ukraine

• When considering buying tanks, Lithuania looked into three models made by German, US, and South Korean companies, Defence Minister Arvydas Anušauskas said on Tuesday as Lithuania plans to sign a letter of intent to acquire German-made Leopard tanks later this week.

• On the night of July 27, Russian troops launched a new missile strike on Odesa region, says Oleh Kiper, head of the region’s military administration.

• The Ukrainian Ministry of Youth and Sport has issued a decree easing the ban on Ukrainian national teams participating in international competitions with athletes from Russia and Belarus.

• Many of Russia’s propagandists, “war correspondents,” and media outlets shared a video on Wednesday that they claimed is a political ad for a far-right political party in Germany. The clip depicts the German authorities confiscating a family’s belongings to send as aid to Ukraine. Journalists from Radio Liberty and the independent investigative outlet Agentstvo as well as fact-checker Ilya Ber, however, have determined that all of the main actors in the video are Russian and that the clip was likely filmed in Russia.

• Ukraine’s air defenses shot down Russian cruise missiles over the city of Dnipro and the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions, said Yuriy Ignat, spokesperson for Ukraine’s Air Forces .

• Moldovan authorities have decided to reduce the staff of the Russian embassy in Chişinău to ten diplomats and 15 technical staff, the press service of the country’s foreign ministry said.

• Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed a decree Wednesday to finalize the government’s official summons form for mobilization, according to the parliament’s official weekly, Parlamentskaya Gazeta.

• On the morning of July 25, Boris Kagarlitsky, a political scientist, the editor-in-chief of the online publication Rabkor, and one of the most well-known leftist thinkers in Russia, was arrested on charges of “justifying terrorism.” Later that day, Kagarlitsky’s family found out he had been moved to Syktyvkar in the Komi Republic. There, the local FSB office opened a criminal case against him, presumably for a post he made in 2022 about the Crimean Bridge explosion. Kagarlitsky has reportedly been sent to a remand prison for a period of two months. If found guilty, he faces up to seven years in prison. Meduza spoke with his daughter Ksenia Kagarlitsky to learn more about the circumstances of his arrest.

• FSB officers have identified a second foreign vessel that could have been used to deliver explosives to Ukraine, the agency claims.

• Speaking at a stamp ceremony on Wednesday, Ukrainian Security Service head Vasyl Malyuk said that the explosion on the Crimean Bridge in October 2022 was “one of the implementations” carried out by the agency, according to the outlet RBC Ukraine.

• A Syktyvkar court has arrested sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky on charges that he “justified terrorism” in an online post about the 2022 Crimean Bridge explosion. According to the human rights monitoring project OVD-Info, Kagarlitsky has been sent to a remand prison for two months.

• The arrival of several citizens of the Russian Federation in Latvia for a European football match as part of an Azerbaijani team has attracted the attention of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which will invite other Schengen zone member states to adopt a common approach to the matter.

• The National Electronic Mass Media Council (NEPLP) has decided to deny access to three websites maintained in Russia – wagner2022.ru, dentv.ru and yapolitic.ru. These websites disseminate propaganda, and it is in the public interest to block such information, according to NEPLP’s statement on July 27.

• The State Security Service (VDD) has allegedly started an inspection to assess whether the decision of “Latvijas Gāze” shareholders to pay dividends to one of the owners – Itera Latvija – is in line with the regulation of sanctions imposed on Russia, TV3 News reported Wednesday evening.

• North Korean state media say leader Kim Jong Un has met with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu for discussions on military issues and the regional security environment. The report came Thursday as the country celebrated the 70th anniversary of an armistice that halted fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War. The North’s official Korean Central News Agency says Kim and Shoigu had talked Wednesday in the capital, Pyongyang, and reached a consensus on unspecified “matters of mutual concern in the field of national defense and security and on the regional and international security environment.” KCNA also says Kim took Shoigu to an arms exhibition showcasing some of North Korea’s newest weapons.

• Russia has sentenced Ilya Sachkov, co-founder of the Group-IB cybersecurity firm, to 14 years in prison on treason charges.

• Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania made it clear July 26 they are completely against the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes at the Olympic Games in Paris, France one year from now.

• Military equipment and vehicles believed to belong to the private Wagner mercenary group continue to move to a site in the village of Tsel in eastern Belarus that is believed to be a site where troops from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s company have settled after its aborted mutiny in Russia last month.

• The Kremlin says less than one-third of the presidents invited will attend the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg on July 27-28.

• Millions of people depend on the Russian grains: in 2020 alone, countries on the continent, notably Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, Tanzania, Algeria, Kenya and South Africa, spent around $4 billion to import agricultural products from Russia, according to data from the Integrated Trade Center (ITC).

• Earlier on Wednesday, Putin met with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and BRICS New Development Bank President Dilma Rousseff.

• The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has formally invited 203 countries to compete in the 2024 Paris Games, notably excluding Russia and Belarus from the list.

• The Russian minister and a Chinese delegation are in the country for the 70th anniversary of the end of the Korean War.

• As President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia prepares to host African leaders at a summit, a collapsed grain deal and the uncertain fate of Wagner mercenaries have cast a shadow.

• Pyongyang vowed increased military cooperation against the United States, a common enemy, during a visit by Russia’s defense minister.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• On July 19, while addressing a group of fighters at a training camp near the Belarusian town of Asipovichy, Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin said that a man named Sergey with the call sign “Pioneer” would become the group’s “chief in the Belarus direction.”

Environment

• This summer, a string of heatwaves has struck countries across the globe – in Europe, North America, and China. A new study says that climate change is very likely responsible for the unprecedented and dangerous heat

• All told, it’s a worrying new reality that the world is facing severe new weather patterns, heightened by climate change and turning summer into hell for both humans and marine life.

• Human-induced climate change has played an “absolutely overwhelming” role in the extreme heatwaves that have swept across North America, Europe and China this month, according to an assessment by scientists published on Tuesday.

• Bright idea.

Energy/Transportation

• The Inflation Reduction Act passes its first year in August. The climate legislation boosted the U.S. transition to renewable energy, accelerated green domestic manufacturing, and made it more affordable for consumers to make climate-friendly purchases.

• Experts warn that various North Korean hacking efforts are streamlining and evolving in ways that make them more difficult to defend and detect.

• Federal prosecutors want to once again take hold of the frizzy-haired ex-FTX head Sam Bankman-Fried and put him back in jail. Reports from inside pre-trial court hearings say the Department of Justice has had it up to here with the once-[cryptocurrency] kingpin leaking sensitive material to the press, alleging he’s trying to discredit witnesses.

• The request came after Bankman-Fried gave a New York Times reporter personal writings by Caroline Ellison, who led his [cryptocurrency] hedge fund Alameda Research and is expected to testify against him, in what prosecutors said amounted to witness tampering.

• From 2018 to 2022, annualized electricity usage from global crypto-assets grew rapidly, with estimates of electricity usage doubling to quadrupling. As of August 2022, published estimates of the total global electricity usage for crypto-assets are between 120 and 240 billion kilowatt-hours per year, a range that exceeds the total annual electricity usage of many individual countries, such as Argentina or Australia. This is equivalent to 0.4% to 0.9% of annual global electricity usage, and is comparable to the annual electricity usage of all conventional data centers in the world.

• All of the above make cryptocurrency mining possible, but also power-hungry. Factor in the competitive, always-on nature and you’d need to scale operations exponentially to enable concurrent processing.

• In short, the better your odds, the more power you’ll need. And, in some cases, the cost can outpace the reward.

• It is currently impossible to put out the fire onboard the cargo ship. As Edwin Granneman from the Coast Guard told NOS, “No fire-fighting efforts are underway on the ship itself, nor is water being sprayed onto the ship from the sea.” He explained this was a deliberate strategy to maintain the ship’s stability as filling it with water could cause it to tilt or capsize. Furthermore, putting out fires in electric vehicles presents its own set of challenges.

• Granneman outlined three potential scenarios. Firstly, the ship might sink, but every effort is being made to prevent this from happening, and, for now, the ship remains stable. The second possibility is to tow the ship to shore. “To successfully implement this, people would actually need to board the ship. Whether this is possible given the current conditions is still uncertain,” he said. The third option is to let the ship burn out, a process that, according to Granneman, could take weeks.

• Among the legislation the House Financial Services Committee is scheduled to consider is a bill that would define when a cryptocurrency is a security or a commodity and another that would establish a regime to oversee stablecoins – digital tokens typically backed by traditional assets like the US dollar.

• Binance has withdrawn its application for a crypto license in Germany, suggesting the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange is rethinking its immediate expansion plans amid a tough regulatory stance towards the industry.

• German regulators had told Binance they would not grant it a [cryptocurrency] custody license, Reuters reported last month.

• The bill has galvanized many in the [cryptocurrency] industry, who say that with Democrats’ support, the bill could have a shot in the Senate.

• A group of Melbourne-based engineers say they are in pole position in the race to develop a cheaper, safe battery that will not end up in landfill.

• The team at RMIT University announced on Wednesday a two-year research partnership with Italian automotive component firm Eldor Corporation to accelerate the invention.

• Tania Thompson scratches her head when she sees sunlight covering the empty roof space on her social housing block.

• Underneath, most of the block’s 170 residents in inner Sydney are struggling with rising living costs, with some forgoing showers and giving up cooking on gas stovetops.

• Slamming new labour laws, BHP Australia’s boss has warned the country must become more competitive if we are to benefit from surging global demand for battery minerals.

• Australia is at a “critical moment”, BHP Australia president Geraldine Slattery told an American Chamber of Commerce in Australia event in Melbourne on Thursday.

• Critical minerals miner Allkem expects the lithium chemicals market to be tightly balanced this year amid the global drive to go electric.

• Demand conditions have been mixed over the June quarter with the market showing signs of recovery, Allkem said in a production report released to the ASX on Thursday.

• Citing “new evidence” of Big Oil firms’ advanced knowledge of climate risks and their actions to publicly conceal these risks, Democratic members of Congress are renewing calls for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate carbon majors for potential violations of federal law.

• In a letter sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday, the 20 congressional signatories, led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), compare Big Oil’s deceptive conduct to that of Big Tobacco. In 2006, major tobacco firms were convicted of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act in litigation brought by the DOJ. The letter requests that the DOJ now open an investigation into ExxonMobil, Shell, and other oil majors to “determine whether they violated RICO, consumer protection, truth in advertising, public health, or other laws.”

• Oil and gas supermajors including Shell and BP are using UK influencers to push false solutions to the climate crisis and manufacture a more family friendly image, DeSmog can reveal.

• The influencers have included a popular former BBC presenter, a polar explorer, and an exasperated father of five who needs a break and finds it in the form of BP’s rewards app.

• The Conservative Party’s victory at last week’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election has been credited to an aggressive campaign against the expansion of the Mayor of London’s ultra low emissions zone (ULEZ).

• In the days since, the wider net zero “agenda” has been pulled into the spotlight, with opponents of green action seeing an opportunity to capitalise on the by-election result.

• A new wind turbine installed in the Taiwan Strait went online last week, as part of the Fujian offshore wind farm project by the China Three Gorges Corporation (CTG). The system is the MySE 16-260, designed by the Ming Yang Wind Power Group, one of the leading manufacturers of wind turbines in the world. The numbers are staggering, the 16MW generator is projected to provide 66 GWh (gigawatt-hours) to the power grid annually. And this is a hefty installation, with a 260 m rotor diameter ( three each 123 m blades ) sitting atop a 152 m tower. The location is both a blessing and a curse, being an area of the Pacific that experiences Beaufort level 7 winds ( near gale, whole trees in motion ) for more than 200 days per year. Understandably, the tower and support structures are beefy, designed to survive sustained winds of 287 km/h.

Wildlife/Nature

• Magpies are using anti-bird spikes for their own purposes.

• Strips of sharp metal pins are meant to keep birds away from buildings. Some birds are stealing them to build their nests.

Finance

• Amazon operates 44 Amazon Fresh stores in the U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Naperville, Ill. The positions being cut are “zone leads” who manage sections of individual stores, according to three former Amazon Fresh employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their careers. Staff were told the cuts were part of a cost reduction plan, the people said.

• Can you imagine a president of the United States proposing a federal budget that quadruples the paychecks that go to top federal officials? Of course not. No president would dare risk wandering down that road. America’s taxpayers, our top pols understand, have a distinct aversion to seeing anyone get rich […]

• Amazon Prime Day easily made July 11 the biggest online shopping day of the year, with sales across the internet up 6% from the same day in 2022.

• The Federal Reserve is poised to raise interest rates after pausing in June. What comes next is crucial, but don’t expect clear commitments.

• In Detroit, the past was all too present. Houses, businesses and schools that once supported nearly 2 million people sat vacant. Old debts forced city leaders into impossible choices. There was not enough money for public safety, not enough for streetlights, not enough for parks, not enough for education — not enough, period.

• In March 2013, an attorney named Kevyn Orr was appointed to take charge. He’d never received a vote and had never been vetted by the mayor or City Council. And yet, he assumed all the power that otherwise would be held by the mayor and council, as well as additional powers, such as the ability to unilaterally sell city assets. While local officials could attempt to veto certain decisions, the veto itself was subject to state approval.

• Keeping a lid on costs is top of mind for executives holding the purse strings as economic conditions sour.

• Cost control emerged as the highest priority of chief financial officers surveyed by Deloitte Access Economics as margins are squeezed by high inflation.

• Battered private-sector entrepreneurs say privately new 31-point guidelines are nothing but words.

• Admission is pricey and must be paid in foreign currency, making it a ‘pipe dream’ for most.

• The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point, citing still elevated inflation as a rationale for what is now the highest US central bank policy rate in 16 years.

• The rate hike, the Fed’s 11th in its last 12 meetings, set the benchmark overnight interest rate in the 5.25 per cent-5.50 per cent range, and the accompanying policy statement left the door open to another increase.

• Beijing is a major ally and arms supplier of Myanmar’s generals.

• This is the lowest level seen in over two years, and appears on track with the government’s prediction that it will reach 4.7% by 2023′s end.

• The Biden administration has identified around 2,400 critical goods and materials that fall under its efforts to move supply chains out of China.

• The government’s new 31-point guidelines meant to inspire confidence feel empty to businesspeople after a three-year clampdown and no concrete changes.

• The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point and Fed Chair Jerome Powell says the US economy still needed to slow and the labour market to weaken for inflation to “credibly” return to the central bank’s two per cent target.

• The hike, the Fed’s 11th in its last 12 meetings, set the benchmark overnight interest rate in the 5.25 per cent-5.50 per cent range, a level last seen just prior to the 2007 housing market crash and which has not been consistently exceeded for about 22 years.

• The owner of Ange Postecoglou’s English Premier League side Tottenham Hotspur, Joe Lewis, has been indicted in New York over an alleged insider trading scheme described by a prominent attorney as “brazen” and “classic corporate corruption”.

• “My office … has indicted Joe Lewis, the British billionaire, for orchestrating a brazen insider trading scheme,” Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a video release on Tuesday.

• Anheuser-Busch—the maker of Stella Artois, Budweiser and Bud Light—announced plans this week to cut hundreds of employees, amid slumping sales following right-wing blowback from its partnership with transgender social media star Dylan Mulvaney, making the brewing giant the latest U.S. company to conduct layoffs as recession fears push employers to make cuts (see Forbes’ layoff tracker from the first quarter here).

• The economy added 23,700 jobs in the second quarter, down from the 33,000 in the first three months of 2023, according to advanced estimates from the Ministry of Manpower on Thursday, in signs that demand continues to ease amid headwinds in the global economy.

• Employment growth in the April-June period was mostly from non-residents in the construction sector amid sustained demand for housing, it said.

• Retrenchments moderated to 3,200 from 3,820 in the prior quarter, as manufacturing layoffs eased while the services sector took the biggest hit. Overall jobless rate rose slightly to 1.9%.

• Australia’s inflation rate has sunk by more than expected in the latest figures, bolstering the case for keeping interest rates on hold.

• Inflation moderated to six per cent in the June quarter from seven per cent growth through to March.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka was due to leave on an official visit to China on Wednesday.

• The New York Times is traditionally soft on right-wing extremists while portraying leftist Latin American governments as authoritarian.

• Wang Yi this week returns as China’s foreign minister, stepping into a job he held for almost a decade in the face of the month-long absence of deposed diplomat Qin Gang.

• Qin Gang’s month-long absence has been mysteriously unexplained by Chinese officials.

• However, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman offered ‘warm congratulations’ for Sunday’s vote.

• China’s foreign minister Qin Gang was removed from office on Tuesday, state media reported, after disappearing from the public eye for a month with little explanation from the ruling Communist Party.

• China named veteran diplomat Wang Yi as its new foreign minister on Tuesday, removing former rising star Qin Gang after a mysterious one-month absence from duties barely half a year into the job.

• Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang, who disappeared from public appearances for a month amid a series of high-level diplomatic meetings, has officially been sacked (link in Chinese) after just seven months in the role, Chinese state media Xinhua announced today (July 25).

• Elon Musk took over the @X Twitter handle from Gene X Hwang without payment, and Hwang’s account was moved to a new handle. Twitter is facing a lawsuit for not paying at least $500 million in promised severance to laid-off employees. Musk has also not paid rent for Twitter offices.

• Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats have sent letters to two wealthy businessmen and a major political activist requesting more information about undisclosed gifts to Supreme Court justices.

• The letters, sent Tuesday by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the committee chair, seek more details about an undisclosed 2008 luxury fishing vacation Justice Samuel Alito took that was reported last month by ProPublica. The letters went to three people: hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer; mortgage company owner Robin Arkley II; and Leonard Leo, a longtime leader at the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative legal group.

• Ruth Porat is stepping down as chief financial officer at Alphabet, Google’s parent company—but only to step up as president and chief investment officer. Porat has been serving as chief financial officer of Alphabet and its subsidiary Google since she joined the company in 2015. She’s the company’s longest-serving CFO, Alphabet said in its earnings press release announcing the promotion yesterday (July 25).

• But what if no accepted leader emerged after Putin was toppled? Ukraine’s stalled counteroffensive has induced Joe Biden to provide cluster bombs banned by over 120 states, including Britain. If Ukrainian forces nonetheless fail to break through Russian positions, a frozen conflict becomes a realistic outcome. Western support is nearing exhaustion. Munitions are running out in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, with a manufacturing base weakened by offshoring. Deindustrialised societies cannot sustain a protracted conflict when Russia is operating as a fully fledged war economy. The pro-Putin parties of the far right that are gathering strength throughout Europe will not endorse indefinite assistance, while Biden fears facing an anti-war Republican candidate in the next presidential election.

• Legal experts will be grilled about suggestions changes to consent laws could have unintended consequences on teenagers exploring sex.

• After days of testimony from survivor advocates about the need for justice system reforms to protect complainants, Australia’s peak legal body will front a committee examining consent laws.

• Australia is being warned to regulate artificial intelligence before it becomes weaponised by foreign powers and becomes too much of a national security threat.

• In a new Australian Strategic Policy Institute report, Simeon Gilding says AI products used or created by Chinese companies can create security risks and expose Australians to spyware or hacks.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• As we’ve been covering over the last few years, there’s been an almost entirely unsubstantiated moral panic over “kids and social media.” This is despite the fact that multiple large scale studies have found that way more kids have benefitted from social media than have been harmed by it. As we’ve noted time and time again, there are definitely a few examples of extreme cases of some kids who have difficulty dealing with certain aspects of the internet, but as the American Psychological Association noted in its recent report, the appropriate action here is to focus on helping those kids, rather than taking away social media from all the other kids it helps. But one other thing that the APA (and others) have put a big emphasis on is better educating kids in media and social media literacy.

• Twitter deleted its own label correcting unfounded, misleading speculation posted by Elon Musk, marking yet another example of the fact the free speech warrior does not, in fact, seem to care much about free speech at all.

• This story was originally published by The Energy Mix, and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate crisis.

• As reporters confront sophisticated tactics aimed at obscuring the reality of climate change, knowledge is their ultimate weapon against deception, say media experts, who exposed the greenwashing influence of PR teams and emphasized the benefits of local reporting at a recent online briefing about fighting disinformation.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The three organizations call on the Biden administration to demand the release of the Aldossari family members and end their persecution. The Biden administration should also impose the Khashoggi Ban – a policy that allows the State Department to impose visa restrictions on individuals who, acting on behalf of a foreign government, are directly engaged in serious, extraterritorial counter-dissident activities – on all Saudi officials, including judges and prosecutors, who have been participating in the extraterritorial harassment of Mr. Aldossari’s family. The organizations also call on the Saudi government to release the Aldossari family members and end the sham prosecution against them.

• What’s the difference between Russia’s [Internet] before and after the invasion of Ukraine? The answer: a thirtyfold increase in censorship.

• That was the finding of a report published on Wednesday by Citizen Lab, a group from the University of Toronto that studies online censorship in authoritarian countries. The new report was one of the first attempts to quantify the extent of Russian [Internet] censorship since the war began in February 2022.

• VK predominantly blocked access to music videos and other entertainment content in Canada, whereas, in Russia, we found VK blocked content posted by independent news organizations, as well as content related to Ukrainian and Belarusian issues, protests, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) content. In Ukraine, we discovered no content that VK blocked, though the site itself is blocked to varying extents by most Internet providers in Ukraine.

• On Tuesday, July 25, two unidentified men with Cuban accents threatened Jiménez as he was walking home with his two-year-old son in Barcelona, according to news reports and the journalist, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

• The Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD) released its annual Blocked Web report for 2022, shedding light on internet censorship in Turkey. According to the report prepared by Prof. Dr. Yaman Akdeniz and Researcher Ozan Güven from Istanbul Bilgi University’s Faculty of Law, over 137,000 URLs faced access restrictions in Turkey within a year.

• The report provides insights into the magnitude of access restrictions imposed by various state institutions in response to their requests.

• Enter AI: back in 2018, Yuval Harari proposed that AI would supercharge dictatorships by mining and summarizing the public mood – as captured on social media – allowing dictators to tack into serious discontent and diffuse it before it erupted into unequenchable wildfire: [...]

• Even more insidiously, though, the logical goal of such very narrow standards could be to create artwork that is straightforward political propaganda. We’ve seen how badly that turned out for the evangelicals (and, indeed, for the Stalinists). Even if we are unlikely to face the scourge of a Leninist equivalent to VeggieTales, however, this style of criticism infantilizes its audience members by assuming they are essentially ideology-processing machines—unlike the wise commentator who somehow manages to see through the deception.

• The Russian government today handed down a treason conviction and 14-year prison sentence on Iyla Sachkov, the former founder and CEO of one of Russia’s largest cybersecurity firms. Sachkov, 37, has been detained for nearly two years under charges that the Kremlin has kept classified and hidden from public view, and he joins a growing roster of former Russian cybercrime fighters who are now serving hard time for farcical treason convictions.

• Valerie Koehler says she might go out of business if her book shop is forced to comply with a new state law regulating public school literature.

• That’s because the law will require vendors to evaluate every book they sell, or have sold, to schools for sexually explicit content. Sellers that don’t comply would be barred from doing business with schools.

• Koehler, owner of the Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, says that amounts to roughly 20 per cent of her sales.

• If there’s one thing nearly everyone on Capitol Hill can agree on, it’s that the federal government just isn’t interfering enough with social media services. The Democrats think social media services should be regulated because they’re allowing too much hate and misinformation to spread. The Republicans think social media services should be regulated because not enough hate and misinformation is being spread. Every so often, for various reasons, lawmakers reach across the aisle and say truly stupid things about dismantling Section 230 immunity.

• As you’ll recall, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman whined about what he called the “landed gentry” among moderators of subreddits that were protesting his ridiculous extractive API changes. He insisted that perhaps things should be more democratic. In response, many subreddits took a vote on how subscribers to those subreddits wanted the mods to handle things, and many urged the moderators to continue protesting.

• Authorities have also confirmed the arrest of a teacher for his online criticism of the government.

• Alexey Moskalev, who was sentenced to two years in prison earlier this year for “discrediting” the Russian army, told journalists that he has received his first letter from his daughter, Masha, since he was sentenced on March 28 and then arrested several days later in Minsk. Russian independent Telegram channels and media outlets published selections from the letter, which includes a poem Masha Moskaleva composed for her father.

• The Czech Foreign Ministry said it filed a lawsuit against Russia for compensation of 53 million crowns ($2.44 million) over lease payments on land in Prague and other cities used by the country’s embassy.

• A Russian fighter jet fired flares and struck a U.S. drone over Syrian airspace on July 26, the White House confirmed. It was the sixth reported incident this month in a string of harassing maneuvers that have ratcheted up tensions.

• The Baltic foreign ministers have sent a letter to the International Olympic Committee, expressing their concern about the recommendations to allow athletes from Russia and Belarus to compete at next year’s Olympic Games in Paris under a neutral flag.

• The independent journalist talks about true press freedom, the Twitter Files, Russiagate, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• On Tuesday, July 25, Turkish police detained Arslan, a reporter for the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency, at his house in the capital city of Ankara, in relation to an investigation by the chief prosecutor’s office in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır over allegations that the journalist was “making targets of those who were tasked to combat terrorism,” according to multiple news reports. A court ordered him to be imprisoned pending investigation.

• The investigation concerns a tweet Arslan posted on July 18 about the reassignments of a judge and prosecutor who are married to each other and are involved in an ongoing mass trial of journalists in Diyarbakır, according to those sources.

• The detentions were related to an investigation into a news report about the reassignment of a prosecutor and a judge, to whom the former is married, by the Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSK), involved in the recent court case of 18 journalists in Diyarbakır.

• Arslan had published the report and shared it on Twitter and the four other journalists had retweeted it.

• The background to the case is reports of a political trial against 18 colleagues in Amed. 15 of the accused journalists, who work for Kurdish media, were held in pre-trial detention for over a year on vague “terror charges” in what was obviously a contrived trial without charges and were released on the first day of the trial a fortnight ago. The long detention was based on the false testimony of an anonymous witness.

• The investigation against the journalists detained on Tuesday was triggered by Arslan’s report, which brought attention to the marriage between one of the judges overseeing the Diyarbakır-based case against 18 Kurdish media workers and the prosecutor who prepared the indictment.

• David Ignatius, a long-time Washington Post columnist on military intelligence topics, probably never dreamed his newspaper would fill over three full pages serializing his latest work of thrilling fiction, “The Tao of Deception.”

• Yanardağ was remanded in custody after he criticized the prison conditions of PKK leader Öcalan.

• Sir James Dyson himself is no longer pursuing the case after a judge ruled his claim out.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In the letter, civil society groups articulated the importance of a human-rights friendly implementation of the DSA. However, a recent French draft law on the regulation of the digital space requires browser-based website blocking, which is an unprecedented government censorship tool.The letter is here.

• The EFF Awards recognize specific and substantial technical, social, economic, or cultural contributions in diverse fields including journalism, art, digital access, legislation, tech development, and law.

• Hosted by renowned science fiction author, activist, journalist, and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow, the EFF Awards ceremony will start at 6:30 pm PT on Thursday, Sept. 14, 2023 at the Regency Lodge, 1290 Sutter St. in San Francisco. Guests can register at https://eff.org/effawards. The ceremony will be recorded and video will be made available at a later date.

• For the past 30 years, the EFF Awards—previously known as the Pioneer Awards—have recognized and honored key leaders in the fight for freedom and innovation online. Started when the internet was new, the Awards now reflect the fact that the online world has become both a necessity in modern life and a continually evolving set of tools for communication, organizing, creativity, and increasing human potential.

• Rob Delaney: One thing for sure that we know about AI is that it is going to be used to further marginalize workers. So that’s what we’ve got to stop. Can AI do good things? It probably can. On its own, it’s not malignant, but they want to use it to not pay people for the fruits of their labor, so that’s what we’ve got to squash. AI is not necessarily bad, but it needs to be managed. We certainly can’t trust the AMPTP [the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers] to do that. It needs our help. Taj Ali

• Taj Ali: SAG-AFTRA’s vote was an overwhelming majority for strike action — 97.91 percent.

• Oh, and let’s not forget, back in June Disney already delayed almost all of its 2024 and 2025 movies because of the writers’ strike. The company was already looking ahead with a “fuck the workers” mentality. Now it’s just trickling down, and there’s no sense of how long it will continue. We’ll keep an eye on these dates to see if or when any of them move. But for now, it seems the biggest corporations are getting ready for the long haul.

• Creating counterfeit digital people risks destroying our civilization. Democracy depends on the informed (not misinformed) consent of the governed. By allowing the most economically and politically powerful people, corporations, and governments to control our attention, these systems will control us. Counterfeit people, by distracting and confusing us and by exploiting our most irresistible fears and anxieties, will lead us into temptation and, from there, into acquiescing to our own subjugation. The counterfeit people will talk us into adopting policies and convictions that will make us vulnerable to still more manipulation. Or we will simply turn off our attention and become passive and ignorant pawns. This is a terrifying prospect.

• The key design innovation in the technology that makes losing control of these systems a real possibility is that, unlike nuclear bombs, these weapons can reproduce. Evolution is not restricted to living organisms, as Richard Dawkins demonstrated in 1976 in The Selfish Gene. Counterfeit people are already beginning to manipulate us into midwiving their progeny. They will learn from one another, and those that are the smartest, the fittest, will not just survive; they will multiply. The population explosion of brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice has begun, and we had better hope there is a non-magical way of shutting it down.

• The messages paint a lurid and often disturbing image of the process by which Tate allegedly recruited young women to do his bidding using a combination of lies, manipulation, and coercive tactics, all the while using examples of his conversations as teaching methods for his acolytes and inviting feedback from them.

• Tate and his brother Tristan, who also shows up in the leaked War Room chats, were arrested in Bucharest in December 2022 and detained on suspicion of sex trafficking, rape, and organized crime, and are currently on house arrest. The Tate brothers’ Bucharest compound was initially raided after an American woman and a Moldovan woman placed a call to a U.S. embassy saying they had been lured there under false pretenses and forced to create sexually explicit content online for the Tates’ financial benefit. The Tates have strongly denied these allegations.

• As more and more companies, especially large ones, have started demanding remote workers return to the office, the competitive hiring advantage for remote-first companies is back. And it’s even bigger than before the pandemic, now that so many workers have had a taste of what life can be like when you don’t have to commute to the office. This is great news for smaller companies and startups in particular.

• This will be the second Food Systems Summit (UNFSS). The first, in 2021 was supposed to address the lack of progress towards the UN’s sustainable development goals. It was dubbed a “people’s summit” by the organisers, but caused an outcry among local producers when their calls to roll back the power of transnational corporations were cynically ignored.

• Corporations that dominate global food systems, such as Bayer and Nestlé, used the summit to promote greenwashing initiatives rather than address pressing problems such as food speculation and the impact of Covid-19 on world hunger.

• For years, Kansas Highway Patrol troopers have stopped motorists on interstate highways. That’s the job. But the job became much more interesting when neighboring states legalized marijuana. Colorado led the way, with others following, but Colorado’s actions have had the most impact on the KHP. Missouri’s more recent legalization has only compounded the problem facing drivers on Kansas highways.

• A McDonald’s franchise that controls 12 restaurants in metro New Orleans violated child labor laws and has hired more than 80 minors in two states, the U.S. Department of Labor said Tuesday.

• Aynsley Genga is a JURIST Senior Correspondent in Kenya. She files this dispatch from Nairobi. What exactly is a country? Is a country its people, or is a country its government? Moreover, do the laws of a country exist to serve its citizens or do they exist to serve the whims of its government?

• The Chicago Police Department is extremely problematic, even by the extremely lax standards of US law enforcement. It has been home to a domestic black-site operation. It has been hit with reform mandates from federal courts. It has shown no interest in rooting out the worst of its officers. And it has engaged in a panoply of rights violations pretty much since its inception.

• To understand Barbie, the much-anticipated film by Greta Gerwig (Little Women, Lady Bird) based on the 64-year-old Mattel toy, you have to first understand its cosmology. Barbies and Kens (plus the discontinued Alan and Midge dolls) live in a glossy pink utopia called Barbie Land, where every day is perfect and “all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved.” In this world, every Barbie is unique, but all share the name Barbie, like a throng of angels or a mycelial network. Barbie is the president (Issa Rae); the Supreme Court justices are all Barbie; Barbie pens Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism, delivers the mail, works construction, and performs emergency medicine. (Ken, by contrast, is ancillary: “Barbie has a great day every day,” Helen Mirren tells us in voiceover, but “Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.”)

• Sexual violence perpetrators are exploiting loopholes in the justice system to avoid accountability and re-traumatise survivors.

• But legal organisations warn against the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction and the potential impacts on an accused person’s right to the presumption of innocence.

• We speak with civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump about two recent cases of anti-Black racism making headlines in the United States: Florida’s new curriculum standards that teach students the “benefits” of transatlantic slavery to enslaved people, and a set of lawsuits against Northwestern University accusing the school’s athletic teams of widespread and institutionalized hazing, including physical, racial and sexual abuse. Crump is representing former Northwestern football players in one of the lawsuits. Republican presidential contender and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has doubled down on the Florida Board of Education’s new rules that require educators to teach students that enslaved Black people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Crump, who says he may sue the state over the changes, notes, “It has the potential to cause serious psychological trauma to African American students, and we will not stand for it.” Meanwhile, Crump has called the cases at Northwestern the beginning of the “me too” movement for college sports.

• Nineteen fifty-three was a peculiar year for The Washington Post to question the C.I.A.’s drift into activist intrigues, writes Patrick Lawrence in this excerpt from his forthcoming book, Journalis…

• A collective of assholes d/b/a the Florida legislature recently passed another very bad law.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Türk Telekom is the sole internet service provider with its own infrastructure, making market prices dependent on its decisions. Turkey ranks 110th in fixed broadband speed and 66th in mobile internet speed worldwide.

• Pablo Hinojosa and Sunny Chendi facilitated a workshop on youth and Internet governance at the VNNIC Internet Conference 2023, held on 30 June 2023 in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam.

• The term “well-known ports” is commonplace in the field of networking, specifically relating to internet protocols. But what exactly does it mean? This article will unpack the concept of well-known ports, exploring their purpose, their functionalities, and examples of their use.

• We’ve noted for decades how US broadband caps are little more than a predatory cash grab. The usage limits and overage fees have zero real technical function and don’t manage congestion. Instead they’re little more than a glorified price hike; a way for regional telecom monopolies to nickel-and-dime captive customers, charging them more money for the same service under the pretense of technical necessity.

• I’ve spent the better part of two decades writing about how telecom monopolization (and the corruption that protects it) results in expensive, spotty, sluggish, broadband and historically terrible customer service. The cause of our substandard broadband isn’t much of a mystery, but because of these companies’ political influence, state and federal policymakers often lack the courage to do much about it.

• We just got done noting how the FCC has spent most of the last decade under the bootheel of the telecom lobby, and in an era where all DC policy is fixated on “big tech,” (often for very good reasons) nobody much seems to care or have noticed. For four years under Trump, the FCC was little more than a rubber stamp, approving every terrible idea the industry had.

• So a few weeks ago Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai came out of hiding to issue a dumb blog post about how killing net neutrality must not have been a bad idea because the internet still works. In his post, he prattles on about how secretly wonderful the U.S. broadband industry is, proving that his Trump-era decisions to lobotomize the FCC’s consumer protection authority must have been correct.

• More than 90 percent of Americans already have access to high-speed internet.

• There are more sites than ever, but they all feel completely useless. Why?

• How the Swedish built and operate a network service that provides a reference time source, and the problem with time.

• We help a reader after their internet was disconnected without notice

• Last March, popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn’s appointment to the FCC fell apart, after telecom and media giants (with the GOP’s help) waged a year long lobbying and propaganda campaign falsely framing her as a radical (The Verge has a good new interview with Sohn on what happened, in case you missed it).

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Google’s newest proposed web standard is… DRM? Over the weekend the Internet got wind of this proposal for a “Web Environment Integrity API. ” The explainer is authored by four Googlers, including at least one person on Chrome’s “Privacy Sandbox” team, which is responding to the death of tracking cookies by building a user-tracking ad platform right into the browser.

• The new proposal details “Web Environment Integrity,” which would use what sounds like Trust Tokens to ensure that the client viewing a website is a human without revealing too much about them. Google suggests the system could be an alternative to captchas and other solutions that websites utilize to block bots, online game cheaters, and other malicious actors.

• However, the GitHub page admits that servers could use the tokens to block visitors based on what they’re using to access a site. The result could theoretically be DRM prohibiting ad blockers, extensions, or modified operating systems.

• This therefore starts to slide the web toward a time in which only authorized, officially released browsers will be accepted by websites.

• And since Chromium serves as the foundation of not just Google Chrome, but also Microsoft Edge, Brave, and a number of other browsers, WEI could have a broad effect on the web – if and when it gets deployed and adopted.

• A working draft specification for a new browser API from Google has raised outcry from the technical community about ethics, trust and adding DRM to the internet.

• The Web Environment Integrity API (WEI) is not a heavily promoted project – the documentation is only hosted on an employee’s personal Github account, rather than an official repo – but there are signs that Google is actively working to build the feature into Chrome now.

Monopolies

• Now Temu is striking back and accusing Shein of violating US antitrust law by forbidding suppliers from working with the newer platform. According to the court filing, Temu says Shein has asked all of its more than 8,000 manufacturers to sign exclusive agreements and “loyalty oaths” that specifically prevent them from selling on Temu. It also claims Shein is using false copyright infringement claims to try to get Temu to take down certain products that Temu sells at cheaper prices than Shein does.

Patents

• Since 29.04.2023, new Russian Patent Requirements (the Requirements) have been in force.

Trademarks

• If you go back and read nearly all of the posts we’ve done on luxury fashion company Louis Vuitton, you’ll see a history of a company that is about as big a pain in the ass when it comes to intellectual property bullying as you’ll find. The company often times takes it’s “protecting” of it’s IP rights, particularly trademark rights, to ridiculous extremes.

• It’s crazy just how many posts we’ve done here on the subject of tattoos. But if you go and review the posts we have done on this topic, you will notice that the majority of them involve tattoo artists as the ones asserting intellectual property rights, not those who got the tattoo on their person. The subject of this post is about the latter.

Copyrights

• The tool, called PhotoGuard, works like a protective shield by altering photos in tiny ways that are invisible to the human eye but prevent them from being manipulated. If someone tries to use an editing app based on a generative AI model such as Stable Diffusion to manipulate an image that has been “immunized” by PhotoGuard, the result will look unrealistic or warped.

• Today in Tedium: Typography has been one of the key ways that the computer has distinguished itself from more traditional physical forms. Here’s what I mean: In the 1930s or 1940s, if you wanted to change a font on a newspaper or magazine, you had to use a completely different set of blocks of metal type, and that process of switching blocks took time. Now, it’s a matter of literally selecting an item in a menu or changing a line of your CSS code. You can do it in real time without even thinking about it. It’s pretty wild how easy it is to change a font these days considering how hard it had been previously. But the steps that got us to our typographically friendly digital world could at times be particularly painful, due to a handful of gatekeepers that put their thumbs on the scales of the market. Today’s Tedium talks type. — Ernie @ Tedium

• Once again, the film studios are obsessing about something somebody wrote 12 years ago. Aside from the fact that the studios are repeating an argument they have already lost before, it is absurd for them to be wasting people’s time and money on something that was written this long ago, that may or may not have some tenuous connection to alleged copyright infringement.

• The U.S. Government’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is considering whether to make it harder for the public to access information about the owners of .US domain names. This is a bad idea, according to the RIAA, which prefers the status quo. Public access to WHOIS information helps to deter piracy, the music group notes, adding that potential privacy concerns are overblown.

• India’s Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill was introduced in 2019. The bill contained proposals to outlaw the recording of movies in theaters and criminalize unauthorized copying. Already approved by India’s Union Cabinet, the amended proposals have now moved to parliament. Whether India has done enough to satisfy the United States remains up for debate.

• Over the last few months there have been a flurry of lawsuits against AI companies, with most of them being focused on copyright claims. The site ChatGPTIsEatingTheWorld has been tracking all the lawsuits, which currently lists 11 lawsuits, seven of which are copyright claims. Five of those are from the same lawyers: Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, who seem to want to corner the market on “suing AI companies for copyright.”

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Seems like I’m back to awakening after just five hours of sleep. I mean, it’s sorta maybe kinda enough. But yawn….

• It occurred to me a little while ago that it takes (someone like) a Biden to be okay with (someone like) a Biden.

• Okay, I’ll be fair:

• It occurred to me a little while ago that it takes (someone like) a Trump to be okay with (someone like) a Trump.

• The recent news that a copy of Kolektiva.social’s database was confiscated by the FBI as the result of a raid at the home of one of the organization’s administrators, should serve as a cautionary tale for activists taking advantage of Mastodon’s federated nature to form online communities. Specifically, you should should do some research into the security in place at an activist-focused server, as well as the servers privacy policies.

• Actually, the same advice would hold even if you were joining a server for, say, people who like knitting, but if you’re a political activist it’s even more important because law enforcement loves to keep tabs on folks whose politics fall outside the mainstream.

Politics and World Events

• Only the first word of the Cartesian philosophy is true; it was not really possible for Descartes to say cogito **ergo sum,** but only **cogito**. The first (and last) thing that I perceive is my own act of spirit, myself perceiving. The spirit, which is life woken into self-consciousness, discovered its likeness to itself, or identity, through the act of thinking about thinking. All further perception is only an explication of this idea, which **is the** idea **par excellence.** I know that I think, that I am spiritually active, or, – since there is no other kind of activity – that I am active, but I do not know that I am. Not being, but the act, is the first and last.

• If we go on to an explication of this act, we find it to be threefold: the thinking, the thought-about, and the identity of these two, the “I.” “I think” means: the “I” places itself (or sets itself) before itself as another, but passes through this reflection back to itself, in the same way that the discovery of one’s own life in a mirror is something that comes from the outside. It perceives that the image in the mirror is its own.

• In the second half of the 19th century, small Korea, and formerly a frequent target of aggressive campaigns of neighboring China and Japan, became one of the main goals of Japanese colonial expansion. The Japanese power that gained strength saw Korea as its potential possession. Preparations for the colonization of Korea, however, faced certain problems, among which were the attempts of the Korean people to defend their independence, and the positions of China and the Russian Empire. However, after the Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905, Japan still managed to establish a protectorate over Korea. 22 August 1910 Korea was finally annexed to Japan and passed under the control of the Japanese governor-general.

• Of course, such a situation could not please the advanced part of Korean society. Moreover, in the Japanese Empire, all non-Japanese people were treated as second-rate people, and Koreans were no exception. However, since Japan was nevertheless more developed not only militarily and economically, but also culturally, a country, revolutionary ideas popular in Japan began to spread in Korea. So anarchism penetrated Korean land — an ideology that at some point became dominant in the East Asian revolutionary movement.

Technology and Free Software

• Yesterday I was trying to explain my anxieties regarding Arden Vul to my wife. This is about the megadungeon with a PDF of more than 1122 pages. It’s long. The levels are long. The rooms are long. The intro is long. The explanations are long.

• I’m one of the lucky ones whose computer came with something called a “lid”. I’ve discovered that when I cause it to become facing-ly parallel to the keyboard, I don’t have have to concern myself with the stuff you mention at all. It’s really quite miraculous.

• The Old Computer Challenge has concluded. I enjoyed taking on the challenge, as well as reading about everybody’s experiences in various protocols out there, gopher, gemini, irc, hypertext transfer, etc. When I first read about the challenge, I told myself that I needed to particpiate this year. I enjoy when the “smolnet” communities call for participating in shared experiences like occ, or ROOPLOCH, or christyotwisty’s monthly 5 questions, and we are able to come together as community and have fun![1][2][3]

• There are many things I have learned, not just from my direct involvement with my old hardware and software, but also from you people in the community. I have been keeping notes and still continue to take notes of what you all share.

• A couple of months ago i wrote about setting up soju on OpenBSD (it was pretty straightforward) and trying to get Emacs’ ERC working with it (shenanigans were required)…

• I still haven’t finished the mine game that I mentioned, but I have released a music editor, TinyTunes. It’s currently the first thing listed on the Thumby Arcade, but I think that just means it’s the most recent.

Internet/Gemini

• Slowly over the past year I’ve noticed I’ve not been getting the same enjoyment out of places like Mastodon that I used to.

• There’s a lot of goings on that might explain this, but I suspect the main culprit is myself and my changing tastes over time.

• Over the past year I’ve migrated Mastodon servers. I’ve made heavier use of filters to block politics, activism, and outrage porn. I’ve become quicker to block and mute people who I’m not interested in interacting with. All these things have been a help but not a cure.

• Sometimes, a decision gets made by the restriction of the possible options to a single plausible choice.

• I’m done with Twitter. Locked my account, cleared my info, posted a message to the effect of the following: I won’t use a platform that doesn’t take CSE seriously, where the posting of such doesn’t earn you a ban and a report to the Feds.

• Left as subtext: maybe all of you can justify it to yourself, but I can’t. And maybe you didn’t know about it before, but if you see this, you’ll know about it now.

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