● 07.30.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 30/07/2023: Cilium 1.14 Released, Grande Communications Loses Copyright Liability Case

Posted in News Roundup at 12:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• I can’t stop thinking about a photo I saw on social media yesterday. It was posted by an evangelist for a tech company to celebrate the opening of their industry event. They were EXCITED! PUMPED! JAZZED! I’m sure I’m missing some other adjectives.

• You know the type of account. Their avatars sport cheesy grins, and their post history exudes nothing but giddy, insincere optimism for their employer and life in general. I’m so EXCITED to be at this launch! We’re taking on the WORLD! Check out this HAM SANDWICH!

• The audience photo they posted from their recent event showed anything but. Most were on their phones. Those actually looking at the brightly coloured stage, smoke machines, and thumping lights looked bored witless. Two in the front row were literally caught mid-yawn, and one sported such an ashen expression I wanted to reach out and give him a hug.

• Watching movies on TV, without a crowd, is just not the same, Ebert argued: “A lot of the fun of seeing a movie such as Jaws or Star Wars comes, for me, from the massed emotion of the theater audience. When the shark attacks, we all levitate three inches above our seats, and come down screaming and laughing.”

• But when Russia launched an all-out war not only on Ukrainian territory, but also on its independent identity and culture, passive acceptance of the linguistic status quo came to feel like a moral failure. A language once used neutrally as a tool for communication now evoked terror, centuries-long erasure, and oppression. Russian had become the language of filtration camps and interrogations, and speaking it felt like relinquishing one small means to resist.

Science

• In 1581, Queen Elizabeth I of England bestowed a knighthood on notorious privateer Sir Francis Drake. The captain of the Golden Hind was hailed by the British crown for his exploits against Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and on what is now the U.S. Pacific coast (which did involve quite a lot of indiscriminate murder and plundering, mind you). To the Spanish, Drake was nothing but a lowly pirate. As was the case now, and then, who is a “hero” and who is a “pirate” is all about perspective, and it’s usually based on whose booty is being plundered.

• On Wednesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced it planned to award notorious pirate captain Alexandra Elbakyan for her work providing scientific knowledge free to the world through the notorious shadow library Sci-Hub. The pirate cove has been banned in some countries, but the site has survived a mountain of lawsuits and corporate take-down attempts and now claims it houses more than 88.3 million research articles and books on a range of topics.

Hardware

• The Baikal-S features 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores on a 16nm process node with a 2 GHz base clock and 2.5 GHz boost clock. The Kunpeng 920, specifically the 920-4826 model number, wields 48 TaiShan v110 cores with a 2.6 GHz clock speed. Baikal’s processor is on an older process node than the Kunpeng 920′s newer 7nm TSMC HPC manufacturing process.

• In most cases, cutting pin headers is a pretty simple job to tackle with a pair of cutters or even your bare fingers. But if you’re doing a lot of it, like for kitting up lots of projects for customers, then you might want to look at something like this automatic pin header cutter.

• Want a better way to feed solder, but want to do it on the quick and cheap? Well [ptkrf] has a solution for you in an old instructables post we stumbled upon recently. You might have, or can inexpensively buy, a mechanical pencil which has the feeder button on the side rather than on top, as usual. With the pencil in hand, [ptkrf] shows you the simple procedure for modifying the pencil into a solder feeder. You might need to experiment with different size pencils and solders to get a perfect match. Common mechanical pencils come in sizes to accommodate 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9 mm leads, but there are bigger and smaller ones available. Perhaps one of those really large drafting lead holders could be repurposed as a solder dispenser for the bigger jobs.

• What makes a body’s organs into what they are is more than just a grouping of specialized cells. They also need to be oriented and attached to each other and scaffolding in order to create structures which can effectively perform the desired function. A good example here is the heart, which requires a large number of muscle cells to contract in unison in order for the heart component (like a ventricle) to effectively pump blood. This complication is what has so far complicated efforts to 3D print complex tissues and entire organs, but recently researchers have demonstrated a way to 3D print heart muscle which can contract when stimulated similarly to a human heart’s ventricle.

• Unless you were lucky enough to be able to afford a floppy disk drive, you probably used cassette tapes to store programs and data if you used pretty much any home computer in the 1980s. ZX Spectrum users, however, had another option in the form of the Microdrive. This was a rather unusual continuous-loop mini-tape cartridge that could store around 100 kB and load it at lightning speed, all at a much lower price point than a floppy drive. The low price came at the cost of poor durability however, and after four decades it’s becoming harder and harder to find cartridges that work reliably. [Derek Fountain] therefore set out to make a modern Microdrive emulator that stores data on SD cards.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• According to the FDNY, four “electric scooter” riders collided at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday and were taken to the hospital with unspecified injuries. But bikers on the bridge at the time describe a much more horrifying scene — one that involved e-bikes and electric scooters traveling at unsafe speeds and a collision that left a trail of blood and wreckage more than twenty feet long.

• “Inevitable carnage,” Lucas Freshman, an emergency room nurse, described it. “As shaken up by it as I still am, twelve or sixteen hours later, the sad feeling I have is that I’m not surprised by this happening.”

• In our study out today [July 27], we explored the health potential of brief bursts of vigorous physical activities embedded into daily life.

• These could be short power walks to get to the bus or tram stop, stair climbing, carrying heavy shopping, active housework, or energetic play with children.

• Seven years ago, Geoffrey Hinton, an artificial intelligence pioneer, made a bold prediction. “People should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious that, within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists… It might be 10 years, but we got plenty of radiologists already,” Hinton said at a machine learning conference in Toronto. Hinton, who received the Turing Award in 2018, had pioneered research on the neural networks that underlie the recent progress of AI. So, naturally, people listened.

• Fast forward to 2023. The world went through a global radiologist shortage during covid: Professionals were either burning out or aging out. For anyone training in the field now, the future looks bright—in the US, the employment of radiologists is projected to grow 4% between 2021 and 2031, at a faster rate than the overall employment of physicians and surgeons, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. And pay remains high: the average wage hovered in the region of $300,000 a year.

• So what happened? Was Hinton wrong, or are we missing something fundamental about the big AI boom, fueled by OpenAI, DeepMind, Nvidia, and dozens of other companies?

• “The speed they are going is too fast for sidewalks, but it’s too slow to be in traffic,” said Jeremy Collis, a sergeant at the North Coastal Station of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating Brodee’s accident.

• To some policymakers and law enforcement officials, the technology has far outpaced existing laws, regulations and safety guidelines. Police and industry officials charge that some companies appear to knowingly sell products that can easily evade speed limits and endanger young riders.

• “It’s not like a bicycle,” Sergeant Collis said. “But the laws are treating it like any bicycle.”

• A nurse midwife discusses how health care providers and movements connect in the fight for reproductive justice after the upending of abortion rights.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Recently leaked court documents during Microsoft Corp.’s ActivisionBlizzard hearing require us to revisit our cloud forecasts and market share data. The poorly redacted docs, which have since been removed from public viewing, suggest that Microsoft’s Azure revenue is at least 25% lower than our previous estimates.

• As a result, we’ve cut and revised our Azure revenue figures, which in turn increases Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Big Four hyperscale cloud market share. Our new estimates show that AWS maintains a greater than 50% share of revenue through 2023. Although the change also helps Google Cloud, its market share is only modestly affected.

• Perhaps, then, the demise of the Twitter brand was inevitable. A brand acts like a scar in the mind of a consumer, a reminder of past encounters. Allowing the “shadow side” of a brand to be expressed confuses us. It perhaps reminds us of our inner demons – to which we gave vent on the website.

• This Jekyll and Hyde nature of Twitter has been both embraced and confronted by Musk. Instead of limiting the bile, he has arguably acted in ways that have enabled its release.

• According to a Reuters report, Zuckerberg shared the details of the precipitous decline in active users during a phone call with Meta employees, calling the regression normal and pledging to add more features to keep users engaged. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment on the report.

• Threads—like other Twitter rivals Blue Sky and Post—has struggled to prevent users from returning to X’s familiar ecosystem. Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, told employees that the Threads team was working on “retention-driving hooks” to make sure users get into the habit of checking the app, like embedding Threads posts directly on Meta’s popular photo-sharing platform Instagram.

• Etiquette experts tend to agree. Lizzie Post, the great-great-granddaughter of famed etiquette author Emily Post and co-president of the Emily Post Institute, advises wedding guests to leave their wearable tech at home. “For any wedding where you are asked to put your phone away or where you are asked to check your cell phone, I don’t think that wearable tech is a good idea,” Post tells Town & Country. “I could come up with all kinds of caveat situations—a doctor who’s on call, for example—but [in those cases] make sure that your notifications are silent.”

Windows TCO

• The U.S. has nearly 700,000 job vacancies in cybersecurity, which members of a House Homeland Security Committee subpanel said they find troubling in a hearing last month.

• “We need not only enough people, but the right people with the right skills in the right jobs to meet the growing cyber threat,” Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) said.

Security

• Cilium, an open-source networking, security and observability project, has released version 1.14 with an array of connectivity, security and observability updates. The Cilium 1.14 update also introduces new mesh capabilities, high-speed networking and security enhancements.

• “Cilium is quickly growing beyond Kubernetes and beyond container networking,” Thomas Graf, founder of Cilium and CTO of Isovalent, told SDxCentral. “It is becoming an overall cloud-native connectivity platform meeting enterprise-grade standards.”

• Thank you to Ruth Webb for contributing this article.WordPress stands tall as one of the most popular content management systems (CMS), empowering millions of websites worldwide in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Its flexibility and user-friendliness have made it a top choice for bloggers, businesses, and individuals. However, with great popularity comes great responsibility, and WordPress, like any other platform, is not immune to security vulnerabilities.

• The private encryption key used by Chinese hackers to break into the email accounts of high-level U.S. government officials disclosed last week also gave them access to a vast array of other Microsoft products, according to new research from cloud security firm Wiz. In a blog post published Friday, Shir Tamari, head of research at Wiz, said further investigation has revealed the compromised key would have given the hacking group, which Microsoft calls Storm-0558, access to far more than Outlook, spanning many other Microsoft services that use the same authentication process, including every application that supports personal account authentication, such as SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, customers’ applications that support the login with Microsoft functionality, and multi-tenant applications in certain conditions. Tamari wrote.Microsoft revoked the affected key, Wiz warned that a sophisticated APT could have used the access and time to build in backdoors or other forms of persistence into victim systems and accounts. Further, any applications that rely on local certificate stores or cached keys may still be using the corrupted key and would be vulnerable to continued exploitation. A link to the Wiz blog is included in the shownotes to this episode.

• This report is provided “as is” for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained herein. The DHS does not endorse any commercial product or service referenced in this bulletin or otherwise.

• [...]

• CISA obtained two SEASPY malware samples. The malware was used by threat actors exploiting CVE-2023-2868, a former zero-day vulnerability affecting versions 5.1.3.001-9.2.0.006 of Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG).

• On December 22, 2022 DataBreaches added MHMR Authority of Brazos Valley to our non-public breach worksheet. Based on information at that time from Hive threat actors, it appeared that the non-profit Texas mental health and substance abuse treatment provider’s files had been locked on November 5. Their listing on Hive’s leak site was a sure sign that the provider had not paid Hive’s ransom demands.

• But it wasn’t until July 28 of 2023 that MHMR Authority of Brazos Valley issued any press release. Based on their statement, on May 30, they learned that personal and protected health information of some employees and current and former patients may have been involved. They do not explain why it took them so many months to determine that. If Hive had been true to form, they would have emailed MHMR Authority of Brazos Valley at least several times and told them in the emails what kinds of data they had acquired. In a number of ransom emails DataBreaches had seen that were sent to other Hive victims, Hive would also indicate how many files or GB of data they had acquired. Was such info sent to this victim, and if so, did it help them determine what had been accessed or not?

• In an underappreciated ruling, District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the multinational law firm Covington & Burling must comply with an SEC subpoena requiring the firm to give up the names of clients, publicly-traded corporations, in order for the SEC to investigate whether there was any trading on non-public information. This didn’t arise because of suspicious trades or other red flags on the corporate side of the ledger, but because hackers working for China launched a successful cyber attack on Microsoft which ultimately gave them access to the firm’s internal records.

• When contacted by DataBreaches, Fowler indicated that he did not know for how long the database had been publicly accessible and he spotted no logging records in the exposed database. Nor does he know whether they have notified affected individuals, although it is now more than two months since they secured the database.

• Marco A. De Felice of SuspectFile (aka @amvinfe) reports that BankCard USA (BUSA) recently paid the Black Basta ransomware group $50,000 ransom. But if BUSA hoped to keep the breach and payment out of the public eye, they should sit down before they read SuspectFile’s reporting, because it is going to make them sad.

• BankCard USA provides end-to-end electronic payment products and services to more than 100,000 American companies. As described by SuspectFile, for about a month, the merchant services provider and Black Basta went back and forth in their negotiations, with BUSA’s negotiator demanding a series of guarantees from Black Basta and offering the ransomware group payment of less than 10% than what was being demanded to delete what the threat actors claimed was 200 GB of files they had exfiltrated.

• In May, DataBreaches dutifully noted The Chattanooga Heart Institute (CHI) on our non-public worksheets. At the time, all we knew was that Karakurt threat actors had claimed to have attacked them and to have exfiltrated 158 GB of data.

• Ronald Bell has been sentenced to two years and nine months in prison for extorting Georgia Tech. Bell recruited a security guard to falsely claim that the guard witnessed an assault by its basketball coach in exchange for part of the extortion payout he expected to receive from the university.

• “Ronald Bell tried to extort Georgia Tech and ruin the reputation of its basketball coach,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan. “As federal prosecutors, we have a responsibility to the citizens of this district to pursue accountability and justice for crimes of sexual violence. But in this case Bell attempted to exploit the mission of our office, and law enforcement partners, to combat sexual assault through a brazen effort to enrich himself at the expense of Georgia Tech and a member of its staff. Bell has now been held accountable for his crime.”

• “Bell sought to severely damage the reputation of the institution and their coach solely for his own financial gain,” said Keri Farley, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta. “This sentence proves that the FBI will not tolerate false allegations and will do everything in our power to seek the truth and hold individuals who commit these type of crimes accountable for their selfish actions.”

• The Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) are releasing this joint Cybersecurity Advisory to warn vendors, designers, and developers of web applications and organizations using web applications about insecure direct object reference (IDOR) vulnerabilities. IDOR vulnerabilities are access control vulnerabilities enabling malicious actors to modify or delete data or access sensitive data by issuing requests to a website or a web application programming interface (API) specifying the user identifier of other, valid users. These requests succeed where there is a failure to perform adequate authentication and authorization checks.

• A data breach exposed the personal information of thousands of Arizona students enrolled in the state’s school voucher program, according to Gov. Katie Hobbs, but the state’s top education official says it’s not a problem.

• Earlier this month, ClassWallet, the online financial administration platform that handles payments for Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, suffered a data breach that jeopardized the names and disability categories of thousands of Arizona students. The incident triggered an investigation by the Arizona Department of Homeland Security, according to a letter sent from Hobbs, a Democrat, to Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican, on Friday.

• A recent discovery by a PhD student of Northeastern University has revealed a potential vulnerability in text messaging that could expose smartphone users’ location to hackers.

• PhD student in cybersecurity at Northeastern Evangelos Bitsikas and his research group employed a sophisticated machine-learning program to analyze data from the traditional SMS system, which has been used since the early 1990s and identified this concerning flaw.

• Bitsikas explained that the vulnerability lies in the automated delivery notification feature of SMS. When a text message is sent, the recipient’s phone automatically responds with a delivery notification.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• Up first is Zenbleed, a particularly worrying speculative execution bug, that unfortunately happens to be really simple to exploit. It leaks data from function like strlen, memcpy, and strcmp. It’s vulnerable from within virtual machines, and potentially from within the browser. The scope is fairly limited, though, as Zenbleed only affects Zen 2 CPUs: that’s the AMD Epyc 7002 series, the Ryzen 3000 series, and some of the Ryzen 4000, 5000, and 7020 series of CPUs, specifically those with the built-in Radeon graphics.

• [...]

• In a bit of research cleverly named “Game Over(lay)”, [Sagi Tzadik] and [Shir Tamari] of Wiz describe a flaw they found in Ubuntu‘s patches on top of OverlayFS. The short version is that the Linux kernel had a vulnerability in the OverlayFS kernel module in 2020. Fixes were added to the vfs_setxattr function, but Ubuntu exposes more functionality by skipping this function, and directly calling __vfs_setxattr_noperm. Because of the Ubuntu-specific changes, the fixes in the upstream kernel are bypassed in Ubuntu’s kernels.

• Wiz researchers Sagi Tzadik and Shir Tamari have identified a pair of vulnerabilities that are estimated to be affecting two in five Ubuntu users, so users of the popular Linux distro are being urged to update now.

• The vulnerabilities, being tracked as CVE-2023-32629 and CVE-2023-2640, were both dealt with in the latest patch available for Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster.

• Two high-priority vulnerabilities have been discovered in the OverlayFS module of Ubuntu Linux, impacting approximately 40% of Ubuntu cloud workloads.

• According to security experts at Wiz Research, the vulnerabilities, designated as CVE-2023-2640 and CVE-2023-32629, were discovered in the widely used Linux filesystem, OverlayFS, which gained popularity with the widespread adoption of container technology due to its ability to deploy dynamic filesystems based on pre-built images.

• Cybersecurity researchers at Wiz have disclosed two high-severity security flaws in the Ubuntu kernel that could pave the way for local privilege escalation attacks, and which have the potential to impact 40% of Ubuntu users. The vulnerabilities – tracked as CVE-2023-32629 and 2023-2640 and dubbed GameOver(lay) – are present in a module called OverlayFS and arise as a result of inadequate permissions checks in certain scenarios, enabling a local attacker to gain elevated privileges. Wiz security researchers Sagi Tzadik and Shir Tamari said, “the impacted Ubuntu versions are prevalent in the cloud as they serve as the default operating systems for multiple [cloud service providers].”

• Researchers have discovered two vulnerabilities in the Linux operating system Ubuntu with the potential to grant attackers escalated privileges.

• The two bugs impact OverlayFS, a widely installed Linux filesystem used for containerization on cloud servers with technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.

• After being notified of the vulnerabilities by researchers with the cloud security firm Wiz in June, Ubuntu released patches for both on Tuesday.

• Researchers this week disclosed two kernel-level vulnerabilities impacting, they say, up to 40% of Ubuntu cloud workloads. The bugs, dubbed ‘GameOver(lay), are said to be easy to exploit and allow for local privilege escalation.

• The two flaws, CVE-2023-2640 and CVE-2023-32629, relate to the OverlayFS module in Ubuntu, a popular Linux filesystem widely used in cloud containers. OverlayFS is a file system commonly used with Docker that lays one filesystem on top of another. This allows users to modify the upper file system while keeping the base system intact, useful in cloud workloads where it is often desirable to provide an isolated layer for an application to run in that will not affect or modify the host system.

• Researchers at Wiz discovered that Ubuntu’s modifications to OverlayFS make it possible to ‘trick’ the kernel into copying a privileged executable from one layer and writing it to another where it no longer requires privileges to execute.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Phishing attempts are currently widespread, with particular attention to so-called secure account scams, which first emerged in Finland during the spring. Nordea reminds everyone that banks or authorities will never ask for confidential information through email, text messages, or phone calls.

• According to Sara Helin, an expert from Nordea’s fraud unit, a new form of fraud has been on the rise, especially during the summer.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Large language models (LLMs) have been all the rage lately, assisting from all kinds of tasks from programming to devising Excel formulas to shortcutting school work. They’re also relatively easy to access for the most part, but as the old saying goes, if something on the Internet is free the real product is you (and your data). Luckily there are ways of hosting LLMs on your own to avoid your personal data getting harvested, as well as taking advantage of open-source solutions, but building these systems takes a little bit of effort. [Stephen] and a team from Mozilla walk us through this process and show us a number of options currently available.

• The cybersecurity company that developed the NordVPN privacy software has proposed an experiment that, they say, allows users to test whether their phones are actively listening in the background to record what they hear and use it to cater advertising to individual users. To demonstrate, three NordVPN workers conducted the experiment themselves, placing their phones on a table near them, at a safe distance from each other, but within listening range of their respective owners. Then, each person spoke about a specific topic, using keywords like “Alaska” or “Volvo” and carrying on conversations with repeated references to those chosen terms.

Defence/Aggression

• The coup is a heavy blow for Niger and the wider region, which has long been battered by jihadists linked to al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Last year some 10,000 people were killed in conflict across Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. Soldiers seized power from civilians in Mali in 2020. In Burkina Faso gun-toting men took power in January 2022 before a different set of khaki-clad men overthrew them in a second coup in September. Both juntas have pushed out and scapegoated French forces. Mali’s has invited in mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner Group.

• The people facing a $300 million class-action lawsuit for organizing the 2022 [blockade] protests in Ottawa are attempting to have the case quashed altogether, or moved out of Canada’s capital.

• PhD student Liyana Yamin said that when interviewing for a part-time job at a restaurant in Taipei’s Zhongshan district earlier this month, she was asked by the interviewer if she would be prepared to remove her hijab while she was working.

• Yamin told Taiwan News that this was the first time she had been asked to remove her hijab after interviewing at four different restaurants. However, she said that she has also been told by potential employers that she would only be allowed to wear a hat at work, not a hijab.

• The turmoil in Niger jeopardizes a yearslong effort by the United States, France and other Western countries to combat Boko Haram and affiliates of the Islamic State terrorist group. It could also offer Russia a chance to bolster its influence after forging ties with other military juntas in West Africa through its Wagner Group paramilitaries.

• The governments of many predominantly Muslim countries have issued withering denunciations of the Swedish authorities for allowing the desecrations, including one burning. In mid-July, hundreds of people stormed the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad and set parts of it ablaze. Iraq also expelled the Swedish ambassador and directed his Iraqi counterpart to withdraw from the country’s embassy in Stockholm.

• The researchers highlighted that in Amsterdam, only a third of people under the age of 15 currently have both parents born in the Netherlands. Furthermore, in 40 percent of Amsterdam’s neighborhoods, individuals without a migration background are now in the minority. The researchers highlighted that their study refers to people without a migration background as individuals whose both parents were born in the Netherlands. This means that the group surveyed also includes people with a third-generation migration background.

• According to the researchers, most of those surveyed appreciate the cultural diversity in their neighborhoods yet seldom interact with residents of immigrant backgrounds. When asked whether they feel integrated into their own neighborhoods, the answer is largely negative.

• Last year, some Ukrainians already observed Christmas on Dec. 25, in a gesture that represented separation from Russia, its culture and religious traditions.

• The law also moves the Day of Ukrainian Statehood to July 15 from July 28, and the Day of Defenders of Ukraine to Oct. 1 from Oct. 14.

• Noni Battiste-Kosoko was being held on misdemeanor charges in Atlanta, Georgia’s notorious Fulton County Jail.

• The European Union has suspended its financial support and co-operation on security with Niger with immediate effect following a military coup, the EU’s senior diplomat says.

• On Friday, the coup leaders declared General Abdourahamane Tiani as head of state, ousting President Mohamed Bazoum.

War in Ukraine

• At a meeting in the Kremlin concerning the war in Ukraine, President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa called on President of Russia Vladimir Putin to resume the Russia-Ukraine grain deal. The full transcript of the meeting is available on the Kremlin’s official website.

• The authorities in Poland say that more than 100 Wagner Group mercenaries have advanced toward the Suwałki Gap, a sparsely populated and strategically important area on the Poland–Lithuania border that links the Baltic countries to “greater Europe.”

• At a meeting with leaders from African nations concerning the peaceful settlement of Russia’s war in Ukraine, President of Russia Vladimir Putin said that Russia “strives for peaceful resolution to all conflicts.”

• As the war drags on, delusions mount, with no end, or victory, in sight.

• The Financial Times reports that the Ukrainian military has been firing rockets produced in North Korea against Russian positions near the city of Bakhmut.

Environment

• Yet this is not what I mean. So before I embark on this summary of where we are in terms of climate and active climate management, let me make it absolutely clear that the facts have 100% convinced me that climate change is real, extremely worrying and that we are absolutely the main cause. On top of that, the 2023 climate anomaly is exceptionally scary.

• Nothing you’ll read below is new. But, on the other hand, it is also rare to find a complete picture of what is going on. Also, some of the climate/geo-engineering stuff is not as widely known as it should be, and it might shock you.

• The UK and the rest of the world will be vulnerable to larger swings between flooding and droughts as global temperatures rise, a new study has found.

• Climate change is intensifying the world’s water cycle (the flows of water through the Earth’s atmosphere, across the surface and underground) leading to more extreme wet and dry periods, according to findings published this week in Environmental Research Letters.

• However, he also went on to mention the ill effects being caused to the cactus species, with the biggest threat being temperatures heating up over time. He also mentions how new generations of the cacti will eventually struggle to grow at all.

• According to Yle meteorologist Aleksi Lohtander, the heavy rainfall on Friday and Saturday will make July an exceptionally wet month. Typically, it rains 65-90 millimetres during the whole of July in Central Finland, while in the rest of Finland the average is between 60-80 millimetres.

• “Central Finland received a month’s worth of rainfall in one go. We have had a lot of rain and will continue to have a lot of rain today,” said Lohtander.

• The deaths are the result of a new variant of H5N1, a strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza, or “bird flu”. Low-pathogenic bird flu circulates naturally and causes no signs of disease in wild waterbirds, but the crowded conditions of intensive poultry farms can cause the virus to mutate into a deadly form. The origins of this particular strain have been traced to a farm in the Guangdong region of China in 1996. Since then, it has spilled over to wild birds and travelled westwards to Europe, Africa and, more recently, North America, via the movement of poultry and wild migration.

• “It’s not acceptable that customers struggling through a cost-of-living crisis are facing higher bills because the regulator and British Gas have done a deal allowing it to rake in a 900 per cent increase in profits.

Energy/Transportation

• AFIR is part of the EU’s Fit 55 legislation. The package, which was presented by the European Commission on July 14, 2021, intends to enable the EU to cut net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels and reach climate neutrality by 2050.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s buzzy startup Worldcoin has a relatively straightforward pitch to prospective users. First, you fork over a scan of your eyeball to one of several thousand iris-scanning, basketball-sized metal computers called “Orbs.” In exchange, you’ll receive a one-of-a-kind “World ID” that could one day be used to verify your identity throughout the web. In many locations, Worldcoin will actually trade you some of its own WLM cryptocurrency tokens “simply for being human,” per its website.

• Gizmodo was invited for some face-to-face time with “The Orb’’ this week in New York City. The experience, which only took a few minutes, was easy, comfortable, relatively mundane, and unquestionably dystopian. We gazed into “The Orb’s” eye and saw a cynical, anarcho-capitalist dream world where displaced workers bow in servitude to Silicon Valley’s [cryptocurrency] philanthropists [sic].

• Gonzalez is one of a handful of operators dispatched across Mexico by Worldcoin to collect iris scans through a device known as an ‘orb’.

• But privacy advocates have voiced concerns about building a private database of biometric information – and warned that citizens could be left unprotected in cases of data breaches or abuses in countries with weak data protection like Mexico.

• “We think the ionocaloric cycle has the potential to meet all those goals if realized appropriately.”

• The researchers modeled the theory of the ionocaloric cycle to show how it could potentially compete with, or even improve upon, the efficiency of refrigerants in use today. A current running through the system would move the ions in it, shifting the material’s melting point to change temperature. Ionocaloric cooling

• Algaba had amassed his fortune renting high-end vehicles and selling cryptocurrency and flashed his luxury lifestyle to his 900,000 plus Instagram followers.

• He reportedly racked up “irrecoverable” debts with Argentina’s tax agency and ran into trouble with a notorious local gang, which demanded $40,000.

Wildlife/Nature

• A recent study by Grand Valley State University scientists who researched what Michigan’s only venomous snake eats found that eastern massasaugas “strongly prefer small mammal prey, yet individuals occasionally consume other prey, including amphibians, reptiles and birds.”

Overpopulation

• Conservatives, probably better known as our enemies, the enemies of our continued existence on this planet, the prophets of the haves stomping on the have-nots: they have quoted scripture again and again in order to justify their tyrannical status quo (opposing abolition in the antebellum era, opposing civil rights in the Jim Crow era, opposing police reform in the BLM era, and opposing taking serious action against climate change throughout the entire industrial age) or to introduce new tyrannies by finding new groups to hound and harass.

Finance

• As the mainstream media continues to make irrational and diversionary statements about the economy, facts show and experience confirms that people’s living and working standards continue to steadily decline. The economy continues to move in the wrong direction. Poor economic conditions persist, which is why the vast majority remain pessimistic about the economy and recognize that the current direction is unsustainable. The 30 statistics below speak volumes about actual economic conditions and cut through the worn-out media disinformation that “the economy is doing great.”

• Port workers in British Columbia have rejected a mediated contract offer meant to end a labor dispute that stopped goods from moving in and out of harbors, including at Canada’s busiest port in Vancouver.

• In a letter posted on the union’s website late Friday, International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada President Rob Ashton said workers in the province are now calling on their employers to “come to the table” and negotiate directly, instead of doing so through the BC Maritime Employers Association.

• The vote to reject the contract raises the prospect of back-to-work legislation to end the uncertainty at more than 30 port terminals and other sites.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Bill C-11 may have receded into the background of CRTC consultations and government policy directions, but Canadians concerned with user content, video game and algorithmic regulation would do well to pay attention. Lobby groups that fought for the inclusion of user content regulation in the bill have now turned their attention to the regulatory process and are seeking to undo government assurances that each of those issues – user content, algorithms and even video games – would fall outside of the scope of the regulatory implementation of the bill. In fact, if the groups get their way, Canadians would face unprecedented regulations with the CRTC empowered to create a host of new obligations that could even include requirements for Youtubers and TikTokers to register with the Commission. With a new Heritage Minister in place, the submissions raise serious concerns about whether the government will maintain its commitments regarding scoping out users, video games, and algorithms.

• He was released from jail in July 2021, but was prevented from leaving China as he was “deprived of political rights”.

• It is rare for Beijing to impose this penalty, which includes an exit ban, on convicts who are not mainland Chinese nationals. Activists say that Mr Lee’s Taiwanese identity may have prompted authorities to make a political point, amid escalating tensions.

• Loden also said that while the ruling is a good place to start, it does leave some unanswered questions about what would be considered as “material” from a company’s perspective, as it could leave it up to its discretion to decide, creating some leeway.

• “I suspect we’ll find some organizations may be less willing to disclose things, so it’ll be interesting to watch how forceful the SEC will be with this if it’s later revealed that certain companies failed to disclose a serious security incident,” he said.

• The migration agency said it is re-examining his immigration status, after it received information from the Swedish authorities that have given reason to examine whether the man’s status in Sweden should be revoked.

• “It is a statutory measure that is taken when the Swedish migration agency receives such information and it is too early to say anything about the outcome of the case,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a statement to Reuters, adding it was unable to comment further due to confidentiality.

• According to the Swedish news agency TT, the man has a temporary residency permit in Sweden that is set to expire in 2024.

• Musk is suing those lawyers now. What for? – he says they charged excessive fees for their work in forcing him to complete the Twitter acquisition. They charged $90 million for about 4 months work.

• In his younger days as a carriage driver, Tony Youmans would strike a rapport with customers, nearly all of them white, as he prepared to show them around downtown Charleston, South Carolina. Youmans knew that long-whitewashed racial history lurked everywhere — beneath every cobblestone, every courtyard garden, the hooves of every draft horse he steered past the finely preserved antebellum structures.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• But the apprehension — including potentially spreading propaganda or ignoring the nuance humans bring to reporting — appears to be weightier. These worries extend beyond Google’s Genesis tool to encapsulate the use of AI in news gathering more broadly.

• If AI-produced articles are not carefully checked, they could unwittingly include disinformation or misinformation, according to John Scott-Railton, who researches disinformation at the Citizen Lab in Toronto.

• “It’s sort of a shame that the places that are the most friction-free for AI to scrape and draw from — non-paywalled content — are the places where disinformation and propaganda get targeted,” Scott-Railton told VOA. “Getting people out of the loop does not make spotting disinformation easier.”

• In total, the Post has published five pieces in its opinion section (including Ignatius’ Q&A) that take a direct stance in favor of arming Ukraine with US cluster munitions, and only one opposed to it. Meanwhile, a recent poll by Quinnipiac University concluded that 51% of Americans disapprove of the president’s decision, while only 39% approve (The Hill, 7/19/23).

• With so much preference for escalation and so little toward military restraint, one thing seems clear: There aren’t many Einsteins in the Washington Post op-ed section.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The E.U.’s Digital Services Act will encourage censorship around the world and even in the U.S.

• Meanwhile, Niger’s Foreign Minister Hassoumi Massoudou from his Twitter account stated about the coup d’état that “this act of factious officers aims, as elsewhere, to call into question our hard-won freedoms, our democracy and the progress made.

• Many people tried to enter the area but were beaten and detained by the soldiers. Among those detained is the lawyer of the people of İkizköy, Ismail Hakkı Atal.

• Soldiers blocking the road at a distance of 5 kilometers from İkizköy also prevent anyone from entering. The people in the area continue to wait with slogans.

• The powerful are fully aware of the power of protest songs, even though they rarely acknowledge it. Soviets and Chinese clamped down heavily on any music that seemed to oppose the party. But such censorship is not just historical. As the Americans prepared to invade Iraq in 2003 with the ‘coalition of the willing’ (mostly blackmailed and threatened!’), the most successful female group of all time, The Dixie Chicks, appeared on stage in London. They said that they were ashamed that President Bush was a fellow Texan. The outcry in America led to them being banned by many radio stations with DJs sacked if they played Dixie Chicks’ music.

• The comments came after a small group of anti-Islam activists set fire to Korans in front of the Egyptian and Turkish embassies in Copenhagen on Tuesday, after similar protests in Denmark and Sweden over recent weeks.

• The secretary general of the 57-member body, Hissein Brahim Taha, received a call from Sweden’s Foreign Minister, Tobias Billstrom, on Thursday.

• Last month, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) said it would take legal action against Meta for failing to act against “undesirable” content relating to race, royalty, religion, defamation, impersonation, online gambling, and scam advertisements.

• Four years after the 2019 protests and unrest, the court on July 28 rejected the government’s application for an injunction to ban Glory to Hong Kong – the unofficial anthem of the 2019 protesters.

• And, as the city marked the 26th anniversary of its Handover, top officials celebrated its “fast track to recovery” and the implementation of “patriots ruling Hong Kong.” But they also warned against what they called continuing “soft resistance.”

• From service industry workers to delivery staff, at least 20 of the more than 30 people charged with sedition have not been activists nor politicians.

• Their cases receive little public attention as they are swiftly convicted as national security threats by the city’s lowest-level courts.

• Their “seditious” acts have mostly involved criticising authorities — the government, police and courts — through posters, stickers or on social media platforms.

• A Moscow court has ordered the detention of Vyacheslav Lutor for treason and participating in a terrorist organization, reports independent publication Mediazona.

• A Moscow court has ordered the arrest of Filipp Kozlov, also known as the street artist Philippenzo, Pavel Chikov, head of the human rights group Agora, told BBC News Russia. Artist Artem Loskutov also wrote about Kozlov’s arrest.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Speaking alongside Defence Minister Richard Marles, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Wong said representations had been made on behalf of Assange in public and private but there were limits on what could be done until his legal proceedings concluded.

• “I understand that Mr Assange has filed a renewal of appeal application in the U.K. The Australian government is not party to these legal proceedings, nor can we intervene,” she said.

• Mesopotamia Agency (MA) journalist, Fırat Can Arslan, who was detained on 25 July as part of the political genocide operation carried out by the Diyarbakır Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office and was taken hostage on charges of “targeting public officials”, was put in an isolation cell on the grounds that he did not write the “name of the organization in the file concerning him.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Fereydun, a motorized rickshaw driver from Herat in western Afghanistan, doesn’t transport women anymore. If he were to carry women who weren’t wearing a full-body covering, he would be beaten up by the Taliban and have his rickshaw confiscated, Fereydun told DW.

• He has already had to witness women being humiliated. The Taliban have stopped him several times and pulled women not wearing burqas out of the vehicle to curse and scream at them. Fereydun said he has also been punished.

• Workers at Grindr, the popular and long-running LGBTQ dating app, have announced supermajority support for forming a union. Jacobin talked to two Grindr workers about their demands.

• And these consequences would be dire for everyone in the industry. Theatrical releases remain the best and most consistent individual way to monetize any one movie. They’re the top of the revenue waterfall for films. Although some movies (particularly low-to-mid-budget pictures) may earn more in aggregate from nontheatrical than theatrical revenue, theatrical releases are still the biggest piece of the puzzle when it comes to completing the profitability picture. Even successful experiments in home distribution like Universal’s premium video-on-demand window—in which the studio charges extra for big releases still in theaters—depend on the prestige bump that theatrical exhibition bestows. The theatrical release is why customers are willing to spend $20 to rent a movie.

• On-demand delivery workers, who are primarily low-income immigrants, are typically classified as independent contractors rather than employees of the apps or restaurants.

• The industry has been criticized for that freelance model as it means companies are not obligated to provide these workers with benefits such as overtime and paid sick leave. But it also means the companies are not required to ensure bathroom or rest stop access, provide charging stations for electric bikes, or provide bikes at all.

• The independent contractor model has left gaps in worker conditions, researchers and worker advocates say. Now, the city may be paying the price.

• In its statement, Haft Tappeh denounced all forms of judicial fabrication targeting workers and labor activists, including Ansari-Nejad. It demanded an immediate cessation of what it called “fabricated plots.”

• The Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company also released a statement expressing its deep concern over the verdict given to Ansari-Nejad. It said the judgment appeared to be based on the “routine procedures of the Ministry of Intelligence,” which, it said, were not even followed in their customary manner.

• Meanwhile, the Taliban-run Ministry for Vice and Virtue, which had announced the ban on beauty salons in early July, said Wednesday it was destroying goods and instruments used for the “promotion of music and corruption” and posted photos of bonfires on Twitter.

• “These materials, which were collected from immoral programs in Kabul and some provinces in the past few months, and which caused the loss of our youth and the deterioration of society, were destroyed according to Sharia (Islamic law),” the ministry tweeted.

• Use of robots by big brands, retailers and movers of goods accelerated significantly after 2019. According to the Association for Advancing Automation, robot orders in North America jumped 42% during the pandemic after essentially being flat over the previous five years.

• The shift has taken place largely out of sight, inside an archipelago of windowless warehouses across the Southeast and Midwest, helping companies to avoid inflaming the taboo against replacing human workers with machines. Some are reluctant to even discuss automation.

• They say they believe their songs represent a powerful cultural framework to stand up for Tibetan identity, closely tied to Tibetan Buddhism, which has come under assault by the Chinese government in recent years as it seeks to maintain an iron grip on the restive Tibet Autonomous Region.

• In the past, Chinese authorities have jailed scores of Tibetan writers, artists, singers, and educators living inside the region for asserting Tibetan national and cultural identity and language rights, especially after widespread protests swept Tibetan areas in 2008.

• The name itself is the feminine form of “dangerous” in Arabic. It was chosen not just because it can be understood throughout the region, but because it is also at the heart of what this media company is doing.

• Only 218 programs offer credit-bearing college programs in prison. That’s about to change.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• I am not the first person to write on this phenomenon, I think I originally came to understand it as a result of a 2010 segment of All Things Considered. For a period of a few years, almost everywhere you went, there was a WiFi network called “Free Public WiFi.” While it was both free and public in the most literal sense, it did not offer [Internet] access. It was totally useless, and fell somewhere between a joke, a scam, and an accident of history. Since I’m not the first to write about it, I have to be the most thorough, and so let’s start out with a discussion of WiFi itself.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• See how you can read this post using your favorite web browser or RSS reader? That’ll no longer be the case if this WEI thingy is put in work. Do you use tracker-blockers on your browser for safe and painless browsing? With WEI they can force you to use the browser the way they want and it can force you not to block ads.

• Imagine being forced to use an specific browser of their choice (not yours but theirs) and being tracked not by cookies only but by the browser itself (just like how Google Chrome does) and worse than that, imagine you’re blocked from accessing a web site because you tried to block trackers using an extension.

Monopolies

Patents

• Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winners, Mani Manikandan and Joseph Dorris, who split a cash prize of $2,000 for their prior art submissions on U.S. Patent 7,995,116, owned by Monument Peak Ventures, an NPE and Dominion Harbor entity. The ‘116 patent generally relates to photography and photographic equipment relating to varying camera self-determination based on subject motion.

• On July 27, 2023, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 8,719,101, owned and asserted by Adnexus, Inc., an NPE. The ‘101 patent relates to on-line advertising and has been asserted against Amazon, Meta Platforms, LinkedIn, Google, and eBay.

• Last month, Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) introduced the Promoting and Respecting Economically Vital American Innovation Leadership Act (PREVAIL) Act. Under the guise of promoting efficiency and protecting the interests of the proverbial ‘little guy,’ the legislation’s proponents say that it will reform the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)…

• EPO delegation participates at major biennial forum held by the Organisation Africaine de la Propriété Intellectuelle in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Copyrights

• Today in Tedium: I think, in starting this piece about sampling, we need to talk about a song that doesn’t have a single sample, but has probably done more to reshape the discussion about music and copyright in the 21st century than any other. That song? “Blurred Lines,” a tune that Pitchfork recently described as a “harbinger of doom.” The vibes around Robin Thicke’s collaboration with Pharrell and T.I. grew increasingly problematic over time—creating huge personal problems in Thicke’s life, and business problems for everyone involved with the track. One of those problems came from its point of inspiration, Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” The fact that, musically, it borrowed so many ideas from the bass-driven, chatter-filled recording turned into a huge liability for the recording industry as a whole, as Gaye’s estate sued—and won. Now, it’s become increasingly common for pop songs to preemptively offer credit to artists any time a song seems to directly borrow from a source too aggressively—and arguably has led to a huge push by publishing companies to buy out name-brand artists. But before “Blurred Lines” came along, sampling set the stage for famous artists (or more likely, their estates) to take a litigious stance towards new generations of musicians. As artificial intelligence promises to bring a fresh new stage to this discussion, it’s worth discussing why sampling created this arms race in the first place. Will the record industry finally meet its match in artificially generated hip-hop? (And is that a bad thing?) Today’s Tedium considers a big change in music. — Ernie @ Tedium

• Internet provider Grande Communications is appealing a jury verdict that awarded $47 million in piracy damages to several record labels. The ISP hoped to do so without posting a multi-million dollar bond but after the music companies opposed it, the request was denied by the court.

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