● 08.01.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 01/08/2023: Twitter de-X’ed, Microsoft Blasted for Epic Breach

Posted in News Roundup at 1:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection opened two complaints regarding the new logo on July 28, one for an “unsafe sign”—related to the removal of the old Twitter logo— and another for placing the giant “X” on the roof “without permit.”

• The sign was installed on the roof of Twitter’s (rebranded as X) headquarters on Friday, less than a week after the company was stopped from removing the iconic Twitter logo from the side of the building. When Musk attempted to scrub the bird logo from the building, local police arrived at the scene after receiving 911 calls that the sign’s removal was stopping two lanes of traffic at a busy intersection and workers didn’t have a permit. When police arrived at the scene, they noted it was unsafe for pedestrians because the workers hadn’t set up sidewalk tape to protect passersby from falling debris. Workers were ordered to immediately stop removing the Twitter sign, leaving just an “er” on the building.

• But when SF inspectors visited X HQ on Friday to take a look at the glowing logo, they were turned away, according to the city. A city inspector was denied access by a “Tweeter [sic] representative,” who told the inspector the sign was temporary. Nevertheless, the inspector noted, the sign had to come down if X didn’t get the proper authorization.

• The same inspector returned to X HQ on Saturday, but “access was denied again by [the] tenant,” they said in their report. We asked the SF DBI about what recourse it may have to gain access to the roof and the sign, but didn’t immediately hear back.

• The city building department logged 24 complaints after a weekend of the big X, which on Friday was erected on the roof of the company’s downtown San Francisco headquarters, on Market Street, to the chagrin of neighbours who complained about intrusive lights, Reuters reported.xs

• The company had removed the iconic blue bird logo from the building last week, though the ‘er’ of Twitter remained up after the takedown was abruptly halted since the company did not have the necessary permits.

• The chaos around the replacement of the sign is reflective of Musk’s rebranding efforts in general. The micro-blogging platform still sports the Twitter name and branding in several places on the platform.

• Thanks to a brother of her father who had the foresight to get out before the invasion, the family had the means to set themselves up, first on Drummond Street in Montreal and then on Central Park West in New York. With astonishing speed, the family learned English and entered American life. To give you a sense of their assimilation, I’d like to read the full text of a telegram sent by my grandfather and two of his brothers on Nov. 6, 1940, a day after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to the presidency for the third time: [...]

• If you’re happy with my blog’s RSS feed, you don’t need to do anything! The email newsletter gets the exact same content.

• As some of you might have seen, this past weekend, the NY Times ran a very nice profile about me, written by Kashmir Hill. There’s not much to say about it, other than it was an interesting (if somewhat awkward-feeling) experience to be the subject of a story, rather than the journalist covering it. But Hill is an excellent reporter and spoke to a bunch of different folks for the profile (including one who kindly called me in a panic to alert me that the NY Times was “sniffing around” for what they feared was a hit piece).

Science

• “Skepticism, by definition, is defeasible. That is, when confronted with sufficient evidence, a skeptic will—provisionally—accept the well-confirmed claim. Mere refusal to accept any evidence is not skepticism.”

• In graduate school, Warrener did not see any reason to doubt the obstetrical dilemma. For her dissertation, she investigated one of Washburn’s key assumptions – that women walk less efficiently than men do because their pelvis is wider for childbirth. But in 2015, after studying volunteers walking on treadmills, Warrener found that having a wider pelvis did not create a bigger demand for oxygen.

Education

• Sitting in the shadow of Parris Island’s replica of the Iwo Jima monument, Field said his biggest challenge is that a number of Marine hopefuls cannot pass the military’s academic test, known as the Armed Services Voluntary Aptitude Battery.

• That is a widespread problem, but the Army recently set up a program that targets recruits who score below 30 on the test and provides schooling for several weeks to help them pass. Already more than 8,800 recruits have successfully gone through the classes, raised their scores and moved on to basic training.

• Prior studies have discovered that school-based physical activity, particularly with physical education, can significantly improve a child’s classroom performance. Despite this, there have been very few studies that have actively examined the association.

Hardware

• A global race to harness the power of atoms for navigation, computing and encryption is pitting concerns over protectionism against the spirit of cooperation.

• “It will also provide tremendous opportunities for our large pool of highly skilled semiconductor engineers and researchers and will catalyse Narendra Modi’s vision of India becoming a global talent hub.”

• Mark Papermaster, executive vice-president and chief technology officer at AMD, said:”From a handful of employees in 2001 to more than 6500 employees today, AMD has grown its India footprint based on the strong foundation established by our local leadership and the highly skilled talent pool.

• “AMD has one of the industry’s broadest product portfolios fuelled by growth in artificial intelligence, networking and 6G communications, and our India teams will continue to play a pivotal role in delivering the high-performance and adaptive solutions that support AMD customers worldwide.

• Ongoing issues with Linux and AMD’s fTPM – the chip designer’s firmware-based TPM – appear to be wearing on kernel overseer Linus Torvalds’ nerves, who has suggested switching off the module’s random number generator altogether.

• Cars (including LEGO ones) will roll downhill. In theory if the hill were a treadmill, the car could roll forever. In practice, there are a lot of things waiting to go wrong to keep this from happening. If you’ve ever wondered what those problems would be and what a solution would look like, [Brick Technology] has a nine-minute video showing the whole journey.

• The 433 MHz spectrum is a little bit of an oddball. It’s one of the few areas of the radio spectrum which is nearly universally unlicensed, meaning as long as devices using it adhere to the power restrictions and other guidelines about best practices, it’s essentially an open playground. IoT devices operate here, as well as security systems and, of course, remote controls. And, using a few off-the-shelf parts [hesam.moshiri] shows us how to take advantage of this piece of spectrum by designing and building a programmable and versatile 4-channel 433 MHz remote control.

• When it comes to flight simulators, we’ve seen people go all-out with their immersive setups, with all kinds of hyper-realistic control systems and monitors as far as the eye can see. But for those gaming on a budget this can seem a little overwhelming and daunting. We all have to start somewhere, though, so if you’re looking for your first semi-realistic flight simulator control mechanism take a look at this yoke which can be cobbled together for almost no money or time.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Mounting frustration with hospitals’ billing practices are stirring reform efforts in Congress, state legislatures and within the Biden administration. But not everyone agrees on where to start.

• Why it matters: Some measures under discussion could cost hospitals hundreds of billions of dollars, by paring payments that critics say are excessive and costing taxpayers and patients.

• Driving the news: States are increasingly passing laws to address “facility fees” that hospitals tack on for services provided to commercially insured patients in clinics they own, according to a recent report from the Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

• New research has found that microwaving plastic food containers spews out toxic microplastics — and it’s really freaked out the guy who’s studying it.

• In an interview with Wired about a new study out of the University of Nebraska — Lincoln, researcher Kazi Albab Hussain said that becoming a new dad inspired him to figure out what was going on with the containers his baby’s food came in.

• The results, which ultimately became a paper in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, are even more shocking than you’d expect.

• Working too much is the drug in this case. But the root problem is almost identical: You’re unhappy with your current path. Or you don’t have one. Either way, your meaning loop is nonexistent or misguided.

• Ms. Langenkamp was, improbably, the third foreign service officer at the State Department to die while walking or biking in the Washington area this year. She was killed in August in suburban Bethesda, Md. Another died in July while biking in Foggy Bottom. The third, a retired foreign service officer working on contract, was walking near the agency’s headquarters in August. That is more foreign service officers killed by vehicles at home than have died overseas this year, noted Dan Langenkamp, Ms. Langenkamp’s husband and a foreign service officer himself.

• “If there’s anything that COVID taught us, it’s that we can change streets overnight to create safer communities,” she added. “It is possible; we just have to understand that these are our public spaces, and we do have a right to feel safe walking, biking, and using any form of transportation.”

• “I’ve tried to make sense of what happened to Sarah, and since I started looking into it, I’ve realized this is not a freakish accident,” Dan Langenkamp said. “What happened to her is part of a huge, worsening trend in America of people getting killed in traffic crashes. There’s an epidemic of traffic violence against people walking or biking.”

• This week, U.S. Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-VA) and Deb Fischer (R-NE), joined by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and John Thune (R-SD), introduced the Deceptive Experiences To Online Users Reduction (DETOUR) Act to prohibit large online platforms from using deceptive user interfaces, known as “dark patterns,” to trick consumers into handing over their personal data. The bill would also require these platforms to obtain consent from users for covered research and prohibit them from using features that result in compulsive usage by children and teens.

• The term “dark patterns” is used to describe online interfaces in websites and apps designed to intentionally manipulate users into taking actions they otherwise would not. These design tactics are frequently used by social media platforms to mislead consumers into agreeing to settings and practices more beneficial to the company.

• New data show that the adoption of the WHO’s package of six tobacco control measures 15 years ago has protected millions of people from the harmful effects of tobacco use.

• The measures, which were launched in 2008, call on governments to monitor tobacco use and prevention policies, protect people from tobacco smoke, offer help to quit tobacco use, warn people about the dangers of tobacco, enforce bans on tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, and to raise taxes on tobacco.

• “The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) cites apricot kernels as a cyanide poisoning risk. Eating more than three of these kernels in one sitting is not recommended as it can exceed the recommended safe level. The woman in this video says she ate at least five of these a day – almost double this.

• “If replicated, this trend could be highly dangerous and I would not recommend people trying to increase their consumption of cyanide.”

• To gain information on the origins of these different varieties, researchers in China have sequenced the genomes of over 100 oat plants from around the world. Their analyses indicate that unlike the current belief—that the two varieties came from one domestication event—the hulled and naked oat were domesticated independently. The work is published in the journal GigaScience.

• In Spain, authorities announced a set of measures in 2021 that ended up becoming a list of 10 recommendations developed in conjunction with the energy drink industry itself. This decalogue warns about the health risks of these drinks, advises against their consumption by adolescents, warns athletes that they are not useful for rehydration, and reminds manufacturers of their obligation to include a label indicating their high content in caffeine, therefore making them unadvisable for children and for pregnant or breastfeeding women.

• Why it matters: So far this year, the U.S. has seen an average of two mass shootings every day, for a running total of 419.

• At this point in 2021, 401 mass shootings had occurred, and that year over all had a daily average of 1.9 mass shootings.

• Health insurance CEOs pocket millions while citizens can’t pay the out-of-pocket.

• The legislation seeks to improve data and research, as well as develop stillbirth awareness materials. Many women interviewed by ProPublica said they didn’t know they were at risk until they delive…

• If there’s one reliable characteristic of physicians who go all-in on antivaccine beliefs, it’s that, after they have come to  identify vaccines as The One True Source of All Chronic Disease (or just a bunch of toxic sludge causing “vaccine injury”), it is almost inevitable that they come up with quackery to treat what they view as vaccine-induced chronic disease or injury. Back in the “old days,” I used to write about what was called “autism biomed,” because the primary antivaccine claim 15 years ago was that childhood vaccines cause autism. Basically, “autism biomed” was—and remains—a blanket term used by believers in the vaccine-autism conspiracy theory to describe a rather large collection of quackery that included chelation therapy, various “detox” regimens, “metabolic” treatments, and more, none of which had one iota of evidence to support them as treatments for autism spectrum disorders. Use of the term “biomed” was meant to imply that these were legitimate “biomedical” treatments for “vaccine-induced autism,” when in reality they consisted mainly of a motley collection of “detox” quackery, often bolstered by “functional medicine” and various alternative medicine treatments like naturopathy and homeopathy. This brings me to Dr. Peter McCullough and his “Base Spike Detox,” which uses enzymes like nattokinase and bromelain to “detox” the spike protein from both COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. As it turns out, Dr. McCullough’s protocol is just a variant of an earlier protocol that I first learned about earlier this year, Signature Series Spike Support Formula sold by The Wellness Company and promoted by Dr. McCullough, a video of whom is featured on the product page.

• The National Institutes of Health is starting some studies to test possible treatments for long COVID. Millions of people are estimated to have the mysterious condition. The studies are small but each will tackle multiple possible therapies for things like brain fog, sleep disturbances and the theory that lingering virus may be at least partly to blame. The studies are part of the RECOVER project, which had to unravel what the most common and burdensome symptoms of long COVID are before doing studies.

• Dear Abby advises a woman who is having a hard time discussing the many challenges she and her family went through during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• This summer, borrowing for the purchase of holiday homes dropped by nearly a third compared to last year, and below pre-pandemic levels.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Bloomberg this week called the end of the smartphone era and the dawning of the AI era, all based on the fact that chip manufacturing firm TSMC now has a “double-digit percentage gap” in quarterly revenue between sales of high-performance computing chips and chips destined for smartphones. Bloomberg may have been really kneading the data point to support its thesis, but if it is the beginning of the AI era, should I be writing about AIoT instead of IoT?

• No. Because what we call it doesn’t matter. What matters is what we do with AIoT or AI or IoT. And so far, we’re making the same mistakes we always make when it comes to technology innovations.

• One of the key reasons we shouldn’t let AI have executive power is that it entirely lacks emotion, which is crucial for decision-making. Without emotion, empathy and a moral compass, you have created the perfect psychopath. The resulting system may be highly intelligent, but it will lack the human emotional core that enables it to measure the potentially devastating emotional consequences of an otherwise rational decision.

Windows TCO

• In a report published earlier this month, researchers at the security firm Wiz concluded that an encryption key stolen by Chinese hackers to target U.S. officials could have been used far more broadly. Microsoft has said the Chinese operation was a targeted and stealthy one and has disputed Wiz’s findings — despite the fact that Microsoft’s own engineers vetted the Wiz report.

• In a statement to CyberScoop, a Microsoft spokesperson dismissed Wiz’s “blog” as “hypothetical attack scenarios” and that Microsoft has not “observed those outcomes in the wild.” An earlier statement described the Wiz report as “speculative” and “not-evidence based.”

• But there should be little reason to doubt Wiz’s technical findings, according to the report’s author, Shir Tamari. In an interview with CyberScoop, Tamari said that he met with a Microsoft technical team to discuss his findings and that the firms engineers were very helpful in correcting his analysis. “Eventually they approved everything,” he said.

• “Microsoft never took responsibility for its role in the SolarWinds hacking campaign. It blamed federal agencies for not pushing it to prioritize defending against the encryption key theft technique used by Russia, which Microsoft had known about since 2017. It blamed its customers for using the default logging settings chosen by Microsoft, and then blamed them for not storing the high-value encryption keys in a hardware vault,” Wyden wrote, in a letter to DOJ, the FTC and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure and Security Agency today.

• Wyden highlighted four significant cybersecurity failures by Microsoft that led to the most recent [breach]: [...]

• After determining that the compromised data most likely contained personal information of approximately 28,000 individuals, the University of Hawaiʻi made the difficult decision to negotiate with the threat actors in order to protect the individuals whose sensitive information might have been compromised. A significant consideration in this decision-making process was that the criminal entity responsible for the attack has a documented history of publicly posting the stolen personal information of individuals when agreement with the impacted entity was not reached. Working with an external team of cybersecurity experts, UH reached an agreement with the threat actors to destroy all of the information it illegally obtained.

Security

• I was autofilling a passphrase of pseudorandom goodness this morning, like a gentleman, when the plugin in Firefox complained that the site didn’t match any credentials on file. I knew this couldn’t be true; I’d logged into this site many, many times before. So many times that I had to write many twice.

• Wait, that’s four total times. Many. Five. Damn it.

• I logged into KeePassXC, and sure enough I could see the record for the site, so plainly demonstrated that even I could see it before coffee. So why wasn’t it being detected? Was it a case of Monday-itis?

• Security updates have been issued by CentOS (apr-util, bcel, c-ares, emacs, git, java-1.8.0-openjdk, libwebp, open-vm-tools, python, and python3), Debian (amd64-microcode, kernel, and thunderbird), Fedora (iperf3), SUSE (cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, cjose, java-17-openjdk, jtidy, kernel-firmware, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-tools- container, virt-operator-container, libqt5-qtbase, librsvg, libvirt, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-3, qemu, samba, thunderbird, and zabbix), and Ubuntu (linux-iot and wireshark).

Privacy/Surveillance

• Making biometrics a requirement for the cryptocurrency’s use is not necessarily the foolproof identification tool that Worldcoin considers it to be. The biometric data has reportedly appeared in black markets in China where some users are selling their verification for $30.

• A German data watchdog has been investigating OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman’s Worldcoin project since late last year due to concerns over its large-scale processing of sensitive biometric data, the regulator’s president told Reuters.

• Worldcoin, which launched last week, requires users to give their iris scans in exchange for a digital ID and, in some countries, free cryptocurrency as part of plans to create a new “identity and financial network”.

• The White House might suddenly be willing to acknowledge that people in the U.S. are sick of having their digital communications harvested and accessible to domestic law enforcement without a warrant, but the review group’s proposed reforms are just a cheap political consolation prize that will do very little to restore the fundamental right to privacy that has been denied to people on U.S. soil who email or call friends or family abroad.

• For example, the 42–page report recommends that the FBI no longer be allowed to search 702 databases when investigating non-national security related crimes. In its current iteration, the FBI is permitted to sift through international communications in hopes of finding evidence of a wide range of crimes in the U.S.-based side of digital conversations. By our rough, most generous calculation, that would eliminate only  0.01% of these so-called FBI backdoor searches (about 16/119,000 backdoor searches according to the latest intelligence community transparency report). We deserve more than these tiny baby steps.

• Still, it’s a start, and should be a call to action for all of us to keep on the pressure.  Despite pushback against the authority, the White House had signaled earlier this summer that it was going to strongly defend Section 702, including all of its  more controversial domestic uses.

Confidentiality

• A sufficiently determined attacker may be able to de-anonymize the public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses of i2p hidden services (eepsites) by using a combination of brute-forcing the entire i2p router set with a replayed message. This is CVE-2023-36325.

Defence/Aggression

• Singapore executed Saridewi Binte Djamani, a 45-year-old woman, on Friday as the penalty for a 2018 drug-trafficking conviction. It was Singapore’s first execution of a woman in almost 20 years.

• Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers are seeking to exercise greater control over international assistance operations by imposing bans and restrictions on aid groups even as the country suffers from one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

• In a new report, the research group Afghanistan Analysts Network looked into why the Taliban has imposed restrictions on aid groups and the hard-line government’s attitude towards aid operations and the aid workers implementing them.

• “China has over a billion people, and film producers need this market. Some say that if [a scene] shows ‘a cow-tongue line,’ then we should just delete the scene. However, by allowing the movie to be shown, we would be sending a message of acceptance,” Tran Thanh Hiep, the director of Vietnam’s National Film Evaluation Council, told Vietnam News. The “cow tongue” is slang for the dotted line China puts on maps around disputed islands it claims as its own. “Vietnam’s position is clear. It does not accept films that are ambiguous in matters related to territorial sovereignty,”said Hiep.

• The strife arose from a map of the “real world” that appears behind Barbie (played by Margot Robbie) when she is urged to leave Barbie Land in search of a cure for her inexplicably flat feet. Vietnamese film reviewers objected to a particular detail on the map: a U-shaped dotted line extending down from an area called “Asia” into the South China Sea.

• The governments of Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea are also the result of recent military coups.

• The possibility of a U.S. Cyber Force moved one step closer to reality on Thursday after the Senate approved its version of a massive defense policy bill.

• The $886 billion National Defense Authorization Act passed in a 86-11 vote. The Republican-led House narrowly passed its version of the legislation earlier this month, mostly along party lines. The two chambers will now go to conference to write a final compromise measure.

• In the letter, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro wrote that the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) “made a series of troubling and baseless claims that appear calculated to harm Twitter generally, and its digital advertising business specifically.” Spiro wrote that Twitter, which recently changed its name to X, has “reason to believe” that the CCDH is “supported by funding from X Corp.’s commercial competitors, as well as government entities and their affiliates.”

• The letter cited research published by the Center for Countering Digital Hate in June examining hate speech on Twitter, which Mr. Musk has renamed X.com. The research consisted of eight papers, including one that found that Twitter had taken no action against 99 percent of the 100 Twitter Blue accounts the center reported for “tweeting hate.” The letter called the research “false, misleading or both” and said the organization had used improper methodology.

• In total, CCDH has written eight papers criticizing the company. In one of the latest papers, the organization accused X of not taking action “on 99% of hate posted by Twitter Blue subscribers,” which it says suggests X “is allowing them to break its rules with impunity and is even algorithmically boosting their toxic tweets.”

• “CCDH regularly posts articles making inflammatory, outrageous, and false or misleading assertions about Twitter and its operations, which CCDH holds out to the general public as supported by ‘research,’” said the letter. The missive goes on, saying the “outlandish conclusions” that CCDH has been made without attempting a “rigorous design process, analytic procedures or peer review” that a reputable research organization would be expected to make.

• Imran Ahmed, the centre’s founder and CEO, told the AP on Monday that his group has never received a similar response from any tech company, despite a history of studying the relationship between social media, hate speech and extremism. He said that typically, the targets of the centre’s criticism have responded by defending their work or promising to address any problems that have been identified.

• Ahmed said he worried X’s response to the centre’s work could have a chilling effect if it frightens other researchers away from studying the platform. He said he also worried that other industries could take note of the strategy.

• Oppenheimer should be required viewing by all those in Washington who are bent on spending $1.7 trillion over the next decades to build new nuclear weapons to kill us all, writes Marcy Winograd.

• A Queensland MP has delivered an emotional tribute to the four ADF members who died in a military exercise helicopter crash.

• A MRH-90 Taipan chopper crashed during the multinational Exercise Talisman Sabre last week, off the north Queensland coast.

War in Ukraine

• Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and the Turkish company Baykar have finalized an agreement to build a center for repairing and servicing Bayraktar drones in Ukraine, says the Defense Ministry’s press service.

• Kyiv and Zagreb have reached an agreement on the use of Croatian ports to export Ukrainian grain, says a press release from Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Ministry.

• Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has suspended the operations of its regional recruitment centers “indefinitely,” it announced on Telegram on Sunday, citing its “large personnel reserve.”

• Since the start of 2022, between 55,000 and 60,000 residents of Ukraine’s occupied territories have been forcibly mobilized into the Russian army, Ukrainian intelligence official Andriy Chernyak said on Monday.

• The Kremlin views Ukrainian attacks on civilian targets in Russia as “acts of desperation,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday, responding to a question about the drone attack that hit Moscow on Sunday and Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement that the war is “returning to its symbolic centers on Russian territory.”

• The dysfunction of the Atlantic military alliance over Ukrainian membership was just the most public manifestation of the debacle that was the Vilnius summit.

• A new report from Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova says that Russia has “taken in” approximately 4.8 million residents of Ukraine since February 2022, including more than 700,000 children.

• The Russian military targeted the Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih in a Monday morning missile strike. According to Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, one of the missiles hit a four-story university building. Rescue workers are searching for people that could be trapped under the rubble.

• New export routes are being sought for Ukrainian grain, including through Latvian ports. However, in order for such a solidarity corridor to become operational, the Baltic states and Poland must do thorough homework, Latvian Television reported July 31.

• Ukrainian presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak says the Wagner mutiny has exposed Russia’s internal weakness and predicts battlefield defeats in Ukraine will spark the collapse of the Putin regime, writes Peter Dickinson.

• Washington is doing a poor job of monitoring whether the weapons it sends to Ukraine are ending up in the right hands.

• Read how Russian officials’ actions in withdrawing and enforcing the withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative might constitute a war crime or crime against humanity under international criminal law.

• The Russian military said its anti-aircraft units thwarted a Ukrainian “terrorist attack” early on Tuesday and downed drones targeting Moscow, but one drone, sent out of control by its units, struck the same high-rise tower hit earlier in the week. There was no word on potential casualties. Follow our liveblog for all the latest developments on the war in Ukraine. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• Pro-Russian social media accounts have been widely sharing a video that they claim shows Ukrainian soldiers surrendering to the Russian army en masse. The video, however, actually shows a prisoner swap between the Russian state-funded paramilitary group, the Wagner Group, and the Ukrainian army in May 2023.

• A Russian drone strike has destroyed a college dormitory in Ukraine’s eastern city of Kharkiv, regional authorities reported early on August 1, as Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the Russian capital repelled a Ukrainian drone attack.

• U.S. government officials will attend a Ukraine peace summit in Saudi Arabia, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told a briefing on July 31, adding that he could not give more details.

• Ukrainian parliamentary speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk said on July 31 that lawmaker Andriy Kholodov of the ruling Servant of the People party had resigned.

• A military court in Russia’s Far Eastern Kamchatka Peninsula said on July 31 it had sentenced a soldier to 30 months in a colony settlement for refusal to go to war in Ukraine.

• The Kakhovka Dam’s destruction by suspected Russian sabotage has made the Ukrainian land itself a casualty of war.

• How Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private military company went from fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine to staging a mutiny at home.

• Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev accused Ukrainian and Western intelligence services of meddling in the Russian Republic of Karelia.

• The stepped-up drone and missile attacks show a will to hamper the Kremlin’s military logistics, and to remind ordinary Russians of the cost of war.

• Officials in Ukraine rarely discuss attacks on targets inside Russia, including Moscow. But video evidence shows an increasing effort to launch long-range strikes inside the country.

• A new law underscores how Vladimir V. Putin is increasingly using the war in Ukraine as justification for greater restrictions on L.G.B.T. life, portraying it as a consequence of deviant Western values.

• Kryvyi Rih, the hometown of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, was attacked hours after he warned that the war was “returning to the territory of Russia.”

• Russia has been using antitank weaponry against the Ukrainian forces’ mine clearing vehicles, an analyst said.

• Envoys from nations including the United States, Brazil, China and India have been invited, but it was not clear who would attend, the diplomats said.

• The UK Government announced Monday that it has sanctioned six people involved in Russia’s sentencing of dual British-Russian national Vladimir Kara-Murza after his appeal was rejected. The government sanctioned three judges, two prosecutors and an “expert witness” over what it has called “politically motivated targeting.

• The Lithuanian government proposes to expand draft amendments that would oblige civil servants to declare their links with Russia and Belarus.

• A woman told police in Russia’s Urals region of Chelyabinsk that she escaped after 14 years of being held against her will and sexually abused by the man who abducted her.

• The First Court of Appeals in Moscow has upheld the 25-year prison term handed to outspoken Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza on charges of high treason, involvement in activities of an undesirable group, and discrediting Russia’s armed forces that he and his supporters call politically motivated.

• Moldovan lawmakers on July 31 passed a bill that prevents the leaders of a Russia-backed party that was banned by the Constitutional Court from running in elections for a period of five years.

• Czech media reports say investigators have frozen bank accounts and impounded the property of Russian oligarch Vladimir Yevtushenkov and his son Feliks in Prague and Karlovy Vary.

• Russian artist Filipp Kozlov, aka Philippenzo, told RFE/RL that he was arrested at a Moscow airport over the weekend upon his arrival from Georgia and later sentenced to 15 days in jail on a charge of refusing to follow a police officer’s orders.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner chief who led a short-lived insurrection in Russia last month, said that the mercenary group had suspended recruitment, adding that it “continues its activities in Africa and at training centers in Belarus.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

Environment

• That said, a team of researchers led by Peter Ditlevsen, professor and climate researcher at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark anticipate in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications that the currents could collapse anywhere between 2025 and 2095 — if we don’t cut global carbon emissions, that is.

• If it were to collapse, much of the Western world could be plunged into an extended period of extreme cold — a counterintuitive result of climate change. Previous collapses, which have predominantly occurred during ice ages many thousands of years ago, have indeed led to temperatures going haywire.

• Predictably, Sunak’s announcement has been met with strong criticism for weakening the UK’s climate commitments. (The UK’s independent climate advisor to the government has already judged these commitments to be in jeopardy.) Even some of Sunak’s Conservative party colleagues have been scathing. One Conservative lawmaker, Chris Skidmore, deplored the government’s decision in a message shared on social media on Monday, lambasting the move as wrong not only on economic grounds, but also because it has skirted parliamentary scrutiny. The UK’s lawmakers are currently on summer recess, and Skidmore said he will ask for an emergency debate on the move as soon as parliament reconvenes.

• An online guide from the Desert Botanical Garden, explains that saguaro cactuses do need some supplemental water during drought years. There are obvious signs that a cactus isn’t doing too well in hot and dry weather. Instead of having firm skin and standing tall, which are the signs of a healthy cactus, the saguaros become squishy. They lose limbs, they start to lean, and even collapse in extreme conditions, CNN reported. xs

• Spain’s Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit on Thursday challenging the Integrated National Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC), which set Spain’s climate and energy proposals. The court found that the plan is in accordance with the law and commitments made by the EU, despite several environmental groups’ insistence that it is arbitrary.

• The general consensus among us mammals is that if we get very cold, we die. Within the world of nematodes, however, they’d like to differ on that viewpoint. This is demonstrated succinctly after researchers coaxed a batch of these worms back into action after they had been frozen in Siberian permafrost for an estimated 46,000 years. The mechanism underlying this phenomenon is called cryptobiosis, which is essentially a metabolic state that certain lifeforms can enter when environmental conditions become unsuitable.

• Climate change is slowing down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a key ocean “conveyer belt.” New research finds it could collapse completely by 2060.

Energy/Transportation

• Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao is seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), arguing the regulatory body has exceeded its jurisdiction.

• Federal regulators allege that Heart raised more than $1 billion in unregistered [cryptocurrency] securities through his Hex, PulseChain, and PulseX companies and used at least $12 million of it on personal expenditures, including over $2 million on Rolex watches.

• The SEC’s lawsuit against Coinbase accuses the company of operating as an unregistered securities exchange with the commission’s lawyers further arguing that Coinbase was trading 13 cryptocurrencies that were identified as securities. Those alleged securities could cause Coinbase to fall under the purview of the SEC, but the exchange refused to register with the commission. Bitcoin is not believed to qualify as a security under the Howey Test, according to Reuters. Armstrong denied the SEC’s guidance and opted to handle it in court.

• The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had asked Coinbase to stop trading in all cryptocurrencies except bitcoin before suing the cryptocurrency platform in June, the Financial Times reported on Monday, citing CEO Brian Armstrong.

• The SEC accused Heart of spending investor funds on McLaren and Ferrari sports cars, four Rolex watches and “The Enigma,” which cost 3.16 million British pounds (then $4.28 million) at auction and was purportedly the world’s largest black diamond.

• The UK government will grant hundreds of new oil and gas licences in the North Sea in a bid for energy independence, ignoring calls to stop new fossil fuel projects.

• The plans announced by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak include a pledge to invest STG20 billion ($A38 billion) in carbon capture and storage projects as Sunak maintained the government’s commitment to eliminate net carbon emissions by 2050.

• Voters back schemes that charge road users for driving highly polluting vehicles, according to a new poll from Omnisis for DeSmog.

• A higher proportion of voters (44 percent) support ULEZ-style schemes than don’t (36 percent), according to the polling. People who intend to vote Conservative at the next election support charges on more polluting vehicles by a margin of 47 percent to 36 percent.

Wildlife/Nature

• UNESCO has stopped short of declaring the Great Barrier Reef “in danger” in a draft decision hailed by the Australian government.

• “We’re committed to better protecting our precious Great Barrier Reef – and this decision is evidence of that,” Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said in a statement.

Finance

• Intel reports profit for the first time in several quarters and announces that the first stepping of its Arrow Lake chips are in the fab.

• US share futures have treaded cautiously higher ahead of more large-cap earnings reports, central bank meetings and a key employment report due later this week.

• US stock futures were mixed on Monday morning with the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 both up about 0.1 per cent.

• Five years after Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) established an outpost in Bellevue, it became the city’s largest employer, according to data released Monday.

• Trucking company Yellow Corp. has shut down operations and is headed for a bankruptcy filing, according to the Teamsters Union and multiple media reports.

• After years of financial struggles, reports of Yellow preparing for bankruptcy emerged last week — as the Nashville, Tennessee-based trucker saw customers leave in large numbers. Yellow shut down operations on Sunday, according to the Wall Street Journal, following the layoffs of hundreds of nonunion employees on Friday.

• In an announcement early Monday, the Teamsters said that the union received legal notice confirming Yellow was ceasing operations and filing for bankruptcy.

• Doctor and Teal rep for Northern Beaches, Sophie Scamps, has called on Northern Beaches Hospital boss to resign if the hospital can’t get its act together to address the youth suicide and mental health epidemic on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. What’s the scam?

• The scam is the public/private hospital was privatised in the takeover by Brookfield (now bidding for Origin Energy) of Healthscope and, now controlled by a Cayman Islands entity, is notoriously elusive when it comes to transparency. Even meeting with the local MP it seems.

• “Teals and trolls” is how NT Chief Minister Natasha Fyles described “southern activists” in a speech to the National Press Club for criticising the Middle Arm petrochemical hub. What’s the scam?

• The scam is the Teals and trolls have had the cheek to express a view about public money, some $1.9bn of it, which has been earmarked to subsidise the second Darwin port and gas hub, a project whose major beneficiaries are multinational companies and fracking outfits such as the publicly subsidised Tamboran Resources whose major shareholder is a Texan billionaire.

• Private consultants who leak confidential government tax information or cover up breaches by their colleagues could soon face million-dollar fines.

• The changes, which include penalties of up to $1.1 million for individuals and $5.5 million for individuals, were introduced into the NSW parliament on Tuesday after a scandal over confidential federal tax briefings being leaked by a former PwC partner.

• Borrowers have been granted another month of interest rate relief, with the Reserve Bank leaving the official cash rate untouched at 4.1 per cent.

• The second consecutive month on hold follows four percentage points of increases that have heaped pressure on borrowers.

• Hong Kong’s economy expanded by 1.5 percent in the second quarter, data released Monday showed, indicating slowing growth after a robust start to the year.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Most nations have approached issues like this by allowing sectors to individually regulate AI, such as aircraft design and flight safety. The infamous Boeing 737 MAX – which was grounded for over 18 months following two crashes within five months that killed 346 people – is one egregious example of regulatory failure.

• Other fields that have proactively regulated on AI include medical information (presiding over robot surgery and scan analysis), automated vehicles (the yet-to-materialise Tesla robot taxis and ‘Full Self Drive’ [sic]) and policing social media networks to protect against harms like disinformation.

• A total of 16 papers are to be released on the subject. “The research published in these papers won’t settle every debate about social media and democracy, but we hope and expect it will advance society’s understanding of these issues,” Clegg added.

• Coming off a week in which the government engineered a major cabinet overhaul that saw Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez replaced by Pascale St-Onge, an escalation of the battle over digital services taxes, and which featured significant news on both the Bill C-11 and Bill C-18 fronts, this week’s Law Bytes podcast provides a mid-summer update on recent developments. Barring some urgent news, the podcast will be taking a break in August and return in September.

• The Russian Parliament has passed three bills banning Russian citizens from participating in the activities of foreign non-profit organizations that have not registered with the Russian government. Russian IT experts say the laws have an unintended side effect and may prevent software developers from contributing to some open-source projects. [...]

• I am excited to announce that I have been appointed as a co-chair of the W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group (SWICG). This group is dedicated to advancing discussions around the social web, and prividing a forum for implementors to discuss specifications published by the former and separate W3C Social Web Working Group.

• Rep. Yvette Clarke wasn’t exactly surprised when ex-President Donald Trump used an AI voice cloning tool to make Hitler, Elon Musk, and the Devil himself join a Twitter Space to troll Florida governor Ron DeSantis earlier this year. The former president wasn’t fooling anyone with the doctored screenshot, but Clarke worries similar political deepfakes will be weaponized to “create general mayhem” in what’s already shaping up to be a maddening 2024 election season. Without proper disclosures, Clarke, who has spent years warning of the danger of unchecked AI systems, says a skilled agent of chaos could even cause voters to stay home on election day, potentially influencing an election’s outcome.

• Even as his bid to become the Republican presidential nominee circles the drain, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis can take pride in the fact that he is almost keeping pace with his chief rival in having embarrassing Nazi scandals. Earlier this week, in response to continuing lackluster polling, DeSantis fired 38 staffers. Axios noted that one of those staffers was Nate Hochman, a speechwriter who “secretly created and shared a pro-DeSantis video that featured the candidate at the center of a Sonnenrad, an ancient symbol appropriated by the Nazis and still used by some white supremacists.” Earlier, Hochman and other staffers stirred controversy by sharing a bizarre homophobic and transphobic pro-DeSantis ad (presented as a fan creation, even though evidence points to its being another in-house production). This follows hot on the heels of a June scandal when it turned out that Pedro Gonzalez, a pro-DeSantis influencer whose social media voice was being promoted by the Florida governor’s staff, had a record of anti-Semitic, racist, and fascist private direct messages.

• Many see this agreement as a change in China’s lending policy. The Chinese may be incorporating some aspects of Russia’s notion of the Global South, which promotes an economic future that relaxes basic notions of trade liberalism.

• It is not the case that if DOJ obtained all the surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago, Trump Org must have given it to them. In fact, one of the most damning documents Mueller obtained during the Russian investigation came from Microsoft, the cloud provider hosting services for Trump Org.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Sweden is also facing similar diplomatic tensions with the Islamic States for the burning of Quran outside the Iraqi embassy. The Swedish government published a statement on July 26, claiming that the burning of copies of holy scriptures has caused strong reactions against Sweden from Arabic-speaking and Muslim countries. Sweden also claimed that there have been disinformation campaigns directed against the Swedish government, disseminating false claims that Sweden is behind the desecration of copies of holy scriptures. Swedish Minister for Civil Defence Carl-Oskar Bohlin added that the disinformation campaigns against Sweden could jeopardise foreignly based Swedish citizens’ lives and corporations’ operations. The disinformation campaign also poses a threat to national security.

• With the recent advances of generative AI, a platform that is phagocytizing our digital planet much faster than the previous technological wave, we need to act quickly, and we cannot overlook the risks: the need for reliable and unbiased technologies, drawing red lines and avoiding the concentration of power that can increase inequality and condemn more people to irrelevance. Not only that, words can become weapons, and today’s chatbots could be considered the equivalent of the “Kalashnikovs of disinformation,” as Marta Peirano puts it. AI is power, and narratives generated with the help of algorithms threaten to further destabilize and unbalance our society.

Censorship/Free Speech

• [...] Philippenzo became known for his street art made after the Kremlin launched its ongoing invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. His works challenged the government’s decision to start the war. [...]

• The measure tightens prison sentences and penalties for any website, social media platform or person responsible for a public account deemed to have violated privacy and a host of other provisions. It passed by a majority vote after a marathon six-hour debate and is expected to be enacted in coming days.

• The law has alarmed journalists, human rights activists and pro-democracy groups worried that its vague language would curtail further free speech and that criminalising conversations online will enable more crackdowns on political opponents.

• U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, was set to take effect Aug. 1.

• A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged.

• Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson went on to describe the situation as the “most serious security policy situation since the Second World War.”

• It would be difficult for the government to appeal against a court decision to reject an injunction to bar the broadcasting and performance of pro-democracy protest song Glory to Hong Kong with illegal intentions, a senior government advisor has said.

• Hong Kong’s Court of First Instance rejected a government injunction application last Friday, saying such a move could have a “chilling” effect on freedom of speech. The court also questioned whether there was genuine use in ordering an injunction.

• “Ultimately it is about defending our free and open societies, our democracy and our citizens’ right to freedom and security,” Kristersson said.

• Last week’s revelation that Facebook took orders from the Biden Administration to censor even accurate information about Covid is the latest example of the US government’s disregard for our Constitution.

• Skipping Stones recognized the Media and Me as an outstanding teaching resource. “This book is aimed at young people, but it is an educational resource for media users of all ages,” educator Daemion Lee wrote in his review of The Media and Me.

• Corporate trolls use “Codes of Conduct” as a subtle act of sabotage against Free and Open Source Software and Communities.

• When I kept getting banned from Ubuntu and having them scream “Code of Conduct” over a decade ago, I became very annoyed at the entire concept.

• It turns out that it was just the seed of a very large problem beginning to percolate in the Free and Open Source Software Movement.

• In the past 15 years, CoCs have infiltrated most FOSS projects and have had a chilling effect on Free Speech and anyone with an off beat sense of humor.

• A group of book sellers and publishers filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Texas officials to block House Bill (HB) 900, the state’s new book ratings law.

• It has been a busy day for Arkansas.

• The regulation will continue until internet freedom improves, apparently. Last year we wrote about Senator Michael Bennet pushing a terrible “Digital Platform Commission” to be the new internet speech police, and now we have the bipartisan free speech hating duo of Senators Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham with their proposal for a Digital Consumer Protection Commission.

• We’ve talked a few times about California’s “Age Appropriate Design Code.” This is a bill in California that was “sponsored” and pushed for by a UK Baroness (who is also a Hollywood filmmaker and has fallen for moral panic myths about evil technology). As we explained there is no way for a site like Techdirt to comply with the law. The law is vague and has impossible standards.

• The self-proclaimed free speech warriors of the Republican party have spent much of the past half-decade trying to find some way to force social media platforms to carry their often-objectionable speech. That’s what these asshats and hypocrites consider to be the real “censorship:” the actions of private companies these same people have long stated should not be forced to offer their services to people they don’t like.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Iranian female journalists Saeeda Shafiei and Nasim Sultanbeigi have been sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison each for participating in the Freedom Life Women protests. [...]

Civil Rights/Policing

• French President Emmanuel Macron has declined to condemn the country’s top police chiefs for appearing to suggest officers were above the law, seeking to stave off unrest among security forces wearied by repeated bouts of street violence. Critics, however, lament a missed opportunity to reassert the state’s authority over an increasingly restless police force.

• The extreme heat is increasing the risk of a sudden heart attack due to dehydration for people with chronic illnesses such as high blood pressure, renal disorders, or diabetes.

• Discrimination based on body size is common and persistent in American workplaces — but it’s largely left out of diversity and inclusion training, and overlooked in employment law.

• Why it matters: There’s an economic cost to not being thin.

• In the prisons in Turkey’s northwestern Marmara Region, four prisoners died of illnesses in three months, according to the Human Rights Association.

• About three minutes later, that officer’s colleague tells him, “The wrong tag was written, this isn’t a stolen vehicle.”

• The residents of Gardi Sugdub have been planning an evacuation from the island due to rising sea levels since 2017. However, HRW claims that the Panamanian government’s promised support for the evacuation has been slow to come. Their report alleges that little work has been done to the site residents are being relocated to, with the site lacking sewage, water, garbage removal and health services. The report goes on to say that there may not be enough water supply in wells on site to support Gardi Sugdub residents, even if water service is connected. The report states: [...]

• Comparing these figures to January, there has been a notable increase in the cost of living. At the start of the year, Türk-İş had measured the starvation line at 8,864 lira and the poverty line at 28,874 lira, with the cost of living for a single working individual at 11,556 lira.

• Furthermore, the prices of various goods have been on the rise in Ankara, where a four-person family’s minimum food expenditure has increased by 12.38% compared to the previous month.

• At the beginning of the year, there were 16,163,549 workers, with a unionization rate standing at 14.42%. However, the recent data indicates that the unionization rate has slightly risen to 14.76%, showing a modest growth in union membership.

• The suspension was announced by the Tasnim news agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), on July 30. The agency had previously labeled the images of Azki’s female employees as a “violation” and “norm-breaking.”

• Last week, a video circulated on social networks showing Azki’s employees in various departments, many of whom were not observing the compulsory hijab.

• Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and the author of 20 books, from Prophesy Deliverance! (1982) to Race Matters (1993) to Black Prophetic Fire (2014). He’s also, more controversially, a candidate for president of the United States on the 2024 Green Party ticket. Whatever one thinks of his decision to run a third-party challenge (see The Nation’s editorial), as a founding member of Democratic Socialists of America and perhaps the leading Christian thinker on the American left, West brings both a public intellectual’s depth and a long personal history of radical politics to this unprecedented moment for American democracy.

• The Georgian coastal city of Batumi saw renewed protests Sunday morning against the arrival of the cruise liner Astoria Grande, which was carrying nearly 800 Russian tourists.

• Chelyabinsk regional police is investigating the abduction of the 33-year-old Yekaterina B., who spent 14 years locked in a bedroom in Smolino, a rural settlement just outside of Chelyabinsk. On July 30, her sister filed a police report after Yekaterina managed to escape from her captors.

• The Rev. Traci Blackmon will never forget Charlottesville. she was there in August 2017 with a multi-faith contingent of fellow clergy, face-to-face with white supremacist Christian nationalists chanting, “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!”

• Former New York gynecologist Robert Hadden has been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for sexually assaulting patients over more than two decades while working as an OB-GYN at the Columbia University Medical Center starting in the late 1980s. Hadden’s federal conviction relates to four survivors, and he has been accused of abusing at least 245 women under the guise of medical examinations. Lawyers representing survivors say Columbia had a long history of ignoring Hadden’s behavior in order to protect its reputation instead of acting in the victims’ interests, and Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital have paid out $236 million to settle claims by over 200 former patients of Hadden. For more, we speak with two survivors: Laurie Maldonado was a gynecology and obstetrics patient of Hadden’s between 2003 and 2012 and gave testimony at his trial, and Marissa Hoechstetter was a patient from 2010 to 2012 and gave a victim impact statement.

• For the past 14 years, relatives of four men jailed on terrorism charges in Newburgh, New York, have accused the FBI of entrapment. On Thursday, a federal judge agreed and ordered the release of three of the men known as the Newburgh Four: David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen. The men had been sentenced in 2010 to 25 years in prison for a government-orchestrated bombing plot of a New York synagogue. In a stunning decision, the judge accused the FBI of inventing a conspiracy. With the men set to be released within 90 days, we speak with lawyers Kathy Manley and Stephen F. Downs from the Coalition for Civil Freedoms about the monumental ruling, the legal issues with entrapment and what the ruling means for the many cases like this one. “This was the government’s standard operating procedure right after 9/11,” says Downs. “They were out there going to create as many terrorists as they could to show the public that they were on the job.” The fourth man convicted, James Cromitie, is expected to seek compassionate release.

• In her eight years as a pediatrician, Dr. Lauren Beene had always stayed out of politics. What happened at the Statehouse had little to do with the children she treated in her Cleveland practice. But after the Supreme Court struck down abortion protections, that all changed.

• The first Monday after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling was emotional. Beene fielded a call from the mother of a 13-year-old patient. The mother was worried her child might need birth control in case she was the victim of a sexual assault. Beene also talked to a 16-year-old patient unsure about whether to continue her pregnancy. Time wasn’t on her side, Beene told the girl.

• Joining the Black Prisoners Caucus helped me find direction and the opportunity to serve my community amidst a life-without-parole sentence.

• I didn’t think we had much reason to write about all of the Harlan Crow / Clarence Thomas stuff that I’m sure you’ve read elsewhere. But the latest (in a now increasingly long series) of mind-blowing revelations from ProPublica regarding the relationship between the billionaire and the Supreme Court Justice… actually has a somewhat bizarre trademark angle.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Understanding AWS’ forthcoming IPv4 charges.

• It seems there’s now another business case for deploying IPv6 with Amazon Web Services (AWS) announcing that from 1 February 2024, they’ll charge USD 0.005, per IP, per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, whether they’re attached to an AWS service or not.

• For an always-on service, that’s USD 43.80 yearly for each IP. Depending on market prices and resource requirements, Amazon BYOIP may be a better option (and is excluded from these charges). From early next year, running IPv4 via AWS will become an OpEx versus CapEx decision depending on your resource requirements. Considering how widely used the AWS platform is for users of all sizes, this will become an important factor for most AWS users but even the simplest maths will show that IPv6 will save operating expenses.

• This is the fourth blog post on the topic of the centralization of the Internet. The previous posts cover the diversity of authoritative name servers, the diversity of MX records, and an analysis of the use of CAA records across generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs).

• This research was first presented at the APAC DNS Forum 2023 Pre-Event on 20 June 2023 (slides).

• Under the Communications Act, the FCC is supposed to occasionally survey the state of the broadband industry to ensure that affordable broadband is being deployed on a “reasonable and timely basis,” and do something about it if it isn’t.

• IN yet another sign of the increasing scarcity of Ipv4 addresses, citing a pricing increase of 300% for new addresses, Amazon Web Services (AWS) will introduce a charge of $0.005 per IP per hour for all public IPv4 addresses starting from February 1, 2024. New charges will apply to Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Global Accelerator, and AWS Site-to-site VPN tunnel services using public IPv4 addresses. The advance notice was given to AWS customers just ahead of the weekend via a blog post by the Chief Evangelist of the firm, Jeff Barr.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.

• That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”: [...]

Monopolies

• Live Nation and Ticketmaster could face a federal antitrust lawsuit by the end of the year, says a new report from three individuals close to the situation.

• Any persons wishing to comment on the new version of Microsoft’s takeover should do so by Aug. 4, the CMA said in its statement.

• It is aiming to make a final decision on the deal by August 29, the CMA said.

• Italy’s AGCM competition watchdog on Monday said it had accepted commitments proposed by Alphabet’s unit Google to end a case over the tech giant’s alleged abuse of its dominant position in the user data portability market.

• The regulator opened the investigation last year following a complaint from Italian start-up company Hoda which accused Google of hindering its users right to share their personal data with other digital service platforms.

• The United States Department of Defence is bankrolling a processing plant under a beefed-up contract with Australia’s leading rare earths company.

• Lynas Rare Earths, the largest rare earths producer outside of China, on Tuesday announced the updated contract for the construction of the heavy rare earths component of a processing facility in Texas.

Trademarks

• The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (Tee-Tee-Ā-Bee) has scheduled nine oral hearings for the month of August 2023. All hearings will be held via video conference except for the third hearing, which will be “In Person.” Briefs and other papers for each case may be found at TTABVUE via the links provided.

Copyrights

• An appellate court is reportedly leaning towards reviving sexual abuse lawsuits filed against the estate of Michael Jackson by Wade Robson and James Safechuck, whose stories were told in 2019’s Leaving Neverland.

• A California federal court has again denied a request to compel Reddit to unmask several anonymous users. Film companies say the Redditors’ comments could serve as relevant evidence in a piracy liability case against Internet provider Grande. However, the court concludes that the Redditors’ First Amendment right to anonymous speech outweighs the interests of rightsholders.

• UK pay-TV broadcaster Sky has reportedly obtained a High Court injunction that will compel internet service providers to block access to live pirated sports streams, including both football and cricket matches. A novel aspect of the injunction is that it grants Sky the ability to protect specific content, such as a major TV show, by blocking certain piracy services at certain times. Precise details are confidential but it’s not too difficult to arrive at a credible theory.

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