● 08.02.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 02/08/2023: Microsoft Covering Up Azure Breach

Posted in News Roundup at 6:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• The long running British1 SF Magazine Interzone has a new home and new editor, Gareth Jelley, starting with issue 294.

• It’s also got a swanky new format (“JB6″): a perfect-bound, paperback novel size, perfect for fitting into an oversize coat or jeans pocket for reading on the train.

Science

• To have been alive over the last five decades is to have seen superconductors progress from only possible at near-absolute-zero temperatures, to around the temperature of liquid nitrogen in the 1980s and ’90s, and inching slowly higher as ever more exotic substances are made and subjected to demanding conditions. Now there’s a new kid on the block with an astounding claim of room-temperature and pressure superconductivity, something that has been a Holy Grail for physicists over many years.

Hardware

• It’s a story we’ve heard so many times over the years: breathless reporting of a new scientific breakthrough that will deliver limitless power, energy storage, or whichever other of humanity’s problems needs solving today. Sadly, they so often fail to make the jump into our daily lives because the reporting glosses over some exotic material that costs a fortune or because there’s a huge issue elsewhere in their makeup. There’s a story from MIT that might just be the real thing, though, as a team from that university claim to have made a viable supercapacitor from materials as simple as cement, carbon black, and a salt solution.

• There are many applications for particle accelerators, even outside research facilities, but for the longest time they have been large, cumbersome machines, not to mention very expensive to operate. Here laser wakefield accelerators (LWFAs) are a promising alternative, which uses lasers to create accelerate particles along the wake in a plasma field. One of the major struggles has been with reinjecting the thus accelerated particles into another stage of a multi-stage accelerator, which would be required to obtain energies closer to one TeV. In this rea researchers have now demonstrated a way around this, by using curved channels for the laser beams (paywalled paper) which inject the laser beam into the continuous cavity.

• If you haven’t heard of an “all-American five,” then you probably don’t dig through bins for old radios. The AA5 is a common design for old AM radios that use five tubes: a rectifier, an oscillator/mixer, an IF amplifier, a detector, and a single tube for driving the speaker. [Mikrowave1] took an old specimen of such a radio from the mid-1950s and wanted to restore it. You can see how it went in the video below.

• Lenses are a necessary part of any head-mounted display, but unfortunately, they aren’t always easy to source. Taking them out of an existing headset is one option, but one may wish for a more customized approach, and that’s where [WalkerDev]’s homebrewed “pancake” lenses might come in handy.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Climate change is causing an increase in extreme weather events and Australia is on the frontline, doctors warn.

• A group representing more than 100,000 doctors on Wednesday issued a joint statement calling for Australia to better prepare for the next climate disaster.

• Pfizer says it’s eyeing possible cost-cutting measures to manage potential losses from low uptake of its COVID-19 vaccine and antibody treatment — a sign of how the market for COVID products has weakened, even as hospitalizations and cases tick up again.

• Despite calls to bring back facemasks by UNAM, the government says that COVID-19 cases remain under control throughout Mexico.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• 2023 has seen a series of significant layoffs, leaving thousands of workers unemployed across various companies, including tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Meta, and Zoom. Startups have also not been spared from this wave of job reductions, impacting sectors ranging from cryptocurrency to enterprise SaaS.

• Among these companies, New Relic, a 15-year-old software firm headquartered in downtown San Francisco, has been grappling with its own set of challenges, facing not only layoffs but also financial losses.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the schedule for WasmCon, a new event for developers, engineers, architects, and business leaders exploring the vast potential of WebAssembly (Wasm). WasmCon takes place September 6-7, 2023 at the Hyatt Regency in Bellevue, Washington. View the full schedule here.

• Nvidia Corp., Apple Inc., Adobe Inc., Autodesk Inc. and Walt Disney Co.’s Pixar Animation Studios today announced the formation of the Alliance for OpenUSD, which will promote the joint development of open 3D standards for computer graphics for the metaverse and large-scale 3D projects.

Security

• The Reproducible Builds project relies on several projects, supporters and sponsors for financial support, but they are also valued as ambassadors who spread the word about our project and the work that we do.

• The three blog posts which the company issued about the breach — the last was on 14 July — have been criticised as being obfuscatory and not levelling with users.

• The email account of US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was among a slew of accounts breached at both the State and Commerce Departments by the attackers, who are claimed to be from China.

• {loadposition sam08}Critics of Microsoft’s reaction to the intrusion include Democrat Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who last Friday asked the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to hold Microsoft responsible for its “negligent cyber-security practices, which enabled a successful Chinese espionage campaign against the US Government”.

• The US Securities and Exchange Commission adopted final rules around the disclosure of cybersecurity incidents. There are two basic rules: [...]

• Researchers unmask an Iranian-run company providing command-and-control services to hacking groups, including state-sponsored APT actors.

• A new power side-channel attack named Collide+Power can allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information and it works against nearly any modern CPU.

• Guest Post: Examining the history of password security and how it’s shaping the future.

• Ivanti EPMM customers have been warned of CVE-2023-35081, a second zero-day vulnerability that has been exploited in targeted attacks.

• Imagine the scenario… A nation state recruits an asset / spy at age 18.

• We have updated Qubes Security Bulletin 090: Zenbleed (CVE-2023-20593, XSA-433). The text of this updated QSB (including a changelog) and its accompanying cryptographic signatures are reproduced below. For an explanation of this announcement and instructions for authenticating this QSB, please see the end of this announcement.

• The Xen Project has released one or more Xen security advisories (XSAs).

Privacy/Surveillance

• From banning books to restricting classroom discussions about race and gender, politicians across the country have been busy censoring speech in the name of “protecting the children.” Now they also have their eyes on limiting access to social media.

• Surveillance marketers are upping their game. Instead of relying on tracking pixels, companies are now sending tracking data directly to one another [...]

Defence/Aggression

• A Reserve Force soldier showed true mettle and honesty when initiating a takedown from an apparently unscrupulous supplier.

• Last week, Lithuanian Defence Minister Arvydas announced on Facebook that the country decided it would acquire the German Leopard 2 tanks. As the news spread at home and abroad, Anušauskas came under criticism from fellow party members and officials ​​– he spoke too soon.

• Lithuanian Defence Minister Arvydas Anušauskas continues to reject accusations that he published classified information after a State Defence Council meeting. He admits, however, that what his Facebook post about purchasing German tanks could have looked like classified.

• A video viewed more than 10 million times on social media has been shared with captions suggesting the new junta in Niger has given the finance minister an ultimatum: either he explains what happened to “missing money” in the state budget, or he will be killed. In reality, the video dates from 2021 and has nothing to do with the recent coup in Niger.

• We look at the growing crisis in Niger, where the country’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, was overthrown last week by his own presidential guard. One of the coup’s leaders, Brigadier General Moussa Salaou Barmou, was trained by the U.S., making the Nigerien coup the 11th in West Africa since 2008 to involve U.S.-trained military officers. The U.S. has approximately 1,000 troops in Niger, where it’s also spent $100 million building a drone base in its ongoing “war on terror.” The Biden administration has so far refused to describe last week’s event as a coup, because doing so would force Washington to cut security aid to Niger. While the reasons for the coup are still unclear, it is part of a worrying trend in the region, where “countries that have oversized involvement of the military in political life … are far more likely to have an ongoing pattern of military coups,” according to Stephanie Savell, the co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

• ECOWAS has threatened military intervention if deposed President Mohamed Bazoum is not restored in a week. Bazoum was overthrown in a coup by officers who have received support from thousands in th…

• The choreography of finding and clearing unexploded, decades-old munitions has become routine on Germany’s northern coast.

• This week, leaders from 17 African countries will be guests of Vladimir Putin. Alongside Russia, all the major powers are vying for influence and raw materials on the continent. The conditions are increasingly dictated by the Africans themselves, with the West often coming away empty-handed.

• Put aside your politics and look at the world clinically, and you’ll see the three areas many experts consider existential threats to humanity worsening in 2023.

War in Ukraine

• Since the collapse of the Black Sea grain deal two weeks ago, small ports on the Danube River are the only shipping outlet for millions of tons of grain.

• A coalition of Belarusian investigative journalists based abroad has identified officials cooperating with the Russian authorities in children’s abductions from the occupied territories of Ukraine and their indoctrination.

• The number of foreign citizens residing in Lithuania increased by more than 6,000 in the first half of the year. The number of Ukrainians, however, went down by about 10,000, the Migration Department said on Wednesday.

• A court in Kyiv on August 1 issued an arrest warrant on a charge of high treason for former pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker Vadym Rabinovych, who is currently outside of Ukraine, the State Bureau of Investigations said.

• Russian drones attacked port and grain storage facilities in the south of Ukraine’s coastal Odesa region in the early hours of Wednesday, including the inland port of Izmail across the Danube River from Romania. And Kyiv’s military administration said the city’s air defences downed more than 10 Russian drones during an overnight attack.

• The crew of the Russian ship managed to neutralize the Ukrainian aquatic drone before it did any damage.

• The hammer-and-sickle symbol has been removed from the Motherland monument in Kyiv as the dismantling of Soviet symbols continues in Ukraine.

• Among those mercenaries are citizens from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador.

• The terrorist attack was foiled by air defense systems that destroyed two Ukrainian UAVs over the Odintsovo and Naro-Fominsky districts.

• The United States has been told that Russia is prepared to return to talks on a deal that had allowed the safe Black Sea export of Ukraine grain, but “we haven’t seen any evidence of that yet,” the U.S. envoy to the United Nations said

• As president, Niinistö has enjoyed broad support across most of the Finnish political spectrum, including for his handling of ties with Russia and its attack on Ukraine.

• Russian drone strikes damaged grain facilities at the Ukrainian ports of Izmayil and Odesa overnight, authorities said on August 2, prompting Turkey to call on the Kremlin to avoid escalating the already high tensions in and around the Black Sea.

• Ukraine’s army has for now set aside U.S. fighting methods and reverted to tactics it knows best.

• Nearly half of the Ukrainians held by Russian troops in detention centers in Kherson encountered widespread torture and sexual violence, according to a new report.

• Moscow hit Izmail, one of the small ports on the Danube River that are the only outlets for exporting grain by sea since Russia pulled out of the Black Sea deal.

• Positioned close to the front lines, temporary medical posts are a critical lifeline for the constant inflow of soldiers hurt in the counteroffensive.

• The Foreign Affairs Ministry said Mexico will take part in discussions of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s peace plan if both sides are present.

• Moscow launched at least 10 drones at the city, with an administrative building among those damaged by debris from interceptions, local officials said.

• The same building housing Russian government offices was hit twice within 48 hours.

• Russian drones have hit a Ukrainian port city along the border with Romania, causing significant damage and a huge fire at facilities that are key to Ukrainian grain exports. Russia has hammered the country’s ports with strikes since halting a deal that allowed Ukrainian shipments to world markets through the city of Odesa. In the past two weeks, dozens of drones and missile attacks have targeted the port of Odesa and the region’s river ports, which are being used as alternative routes. The head of the Ukrainian president’s office, Andriy Yermak, said the city of Izmail was hit in the strikes on Wednesday. Izmail is on the Danube River that forms part of the Ukraine-Romania border.

• Russia’s Ministry of Defense says it has opened live-fire naval exercises in the Baltic Sea. Russia last carried out mass military exercises in the sea in June, two months after Finland became NATO’s newest member. The drills took place at the same time NATO was holding its own Baltic Sea exercises. The Russian exercises announced Wednesday will involve more personnel and aircraft than the last round and will feature the use of live weapons. The defense ministry says some 6,000 personnel, 30 warships and boats, and 30 aircraft are expected to take part in more than 200 combat exercises. The drills are being held with Russia-West tensions already high over NATO’s expansion and Ukraine.

• Their grain and sunflower oil once helped feed the world. Now, even their backup routes to the international market have become targets.

• The Turkish president urged a resumption of the agreement that allowed Ukraine to ship grain through the Black Sea, and called on both Russia and Ukraine not to escalate tensions.

• Night vision equipment, drones, cars and other equipment was sent from Latvia to Kyiv in another convoy to support both those on the frontline and those trying to deal with the consequences of Kakhovka’s floods, Latvian Television reported August 1.

• A military court in Moscow has sentenced 12 associates of a notorious gangster from Russia’s North Ossetia region in the North Caucasus to prison terms between 12 years and life.

• The mercenaries of the Russian private military company Wagner are not moving towards the Suwalki Gap, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko was quoted as saying by the Belarusian state news agency Belta.

• Takhir Arslanov, a 67-year-old retired Russian from Novosibirsk, was sentenced to three years in prison for posting anti-war comments on social media.

• Fortifications are being actively constructed near the tent camp of the private Wagner mercenary group in the village of Tsel in eastern Belarus, the site believed to be where troops from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s company have settled after its aborted mutiny in Russia in late June.

• Russia on August 2 announced the start of regular naval exercises in the Baltic Sea that involve more than 50 vessels and 30 aircraft.

• The West Siberian Transport Prosecutor’s Office said on August 2 that a seaplane crashed in the region of Krasnoyarsk, killing both people on board.

• The Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian electricity transmission system operators have signed an agreement to finish the synchronisation of the Baltic sates’ electricity grids with Western Europe in early 2025.

• Coinciding with the Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg last week, Russia’s Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation has highlighted the joint projects and weapons sales to African countries, which have ordered $10 billion worth of military hardware since 2019.

• Cloudzy, an internet hosting company with a New York phone number, may aiding hackers from Iran, Russia and North Korea.

• In Europe, the United States needs a strategy that focuses its attention and resources on the countries doing the most to counter Russia.

• On July 6, it was revealed that secret back-channel talks have been held between former US officials and “prominent Russians believed to be close to the Kremlin.”

• NATO allies located along the alliance’s eastern front are growing increasingly worried about the presence of Russia-linked Wagner group mercenaries in Belarus. Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, have already been on alert since large numbers of migrants and refugees began arriving at their borders from Belarus two years ago. They accuse Belarus, an ally of Russia, of encouraging the migration in an act of “hybrid warfare” aimed at creating instability in the West. Concerns have grown further since the Wagner troops began arriving in Belarus after their short-lived mutiny in Russia in June. An incident Tuesday added to the concerns, with two Belarusian helicopters flying briefing into Polish air space at low altitude while carrying out exercises.

• The scholar who famously warned in 2014 that NATO was provoking Russia in Ukraine on the state of the war and the troubles ahead.

• During a broadcast of the Solovyov Live propaganda show, the spokesperson for Russia’s Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova compared the recent drone attacks on Moscow City, a high-rise commercial development in the Russian capital, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

• On the night of July 31, multiple drones “attempted to fly into Moscow but were downed by Russian air defense forces,” according to Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin.

• The president of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko says he was only joking when he hinted, during a meeting with Vladimir Putin, that the Wagner fighters stationed in Belarus were restless “to go on an excursion to Warsaw.”

• ADF STAFF The Wagner Group has spread like a virus and infected the government, military and economic sectors of the Central African Republic (CAR) to the extent that experts say the country is now a laboratory of Russian influence.

• During the summer, a dozen Russians have crossed Finland’s eastern border without permission. They include Russian soldiers who have defected and sought asylum in Finland.

• The dirty secret of deterrence is that it works until it fails, and when it fails, it fails spectacularly.

• The main buyers of Russian grains were Saudi Arabia (578,000 tons), Turkey (518,000 tons), Egypt (467,000 tons), and Israel (345,000).

• A driver slammed his car into the gates of the Russian Embassy in Moldova’s capital, Chisinau, early on August 2, before driving away from the site, police said.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Transparency is good, actually.

• Military courtroom sketch of Pfc. Manning and military judge Col. Denise Lind by Sgt. Shawn Sales (Produced for the U.S. Army and in the public domain) By Kevin Gosztola / The Dissenter It was ten …

Environment

• The government announced a two-day public holiday, ordering all government agencies, banks and schools to close amid soaring temperatures that threatened public health and strained the power grid.

Finance

• Don’t ignore the role of financial speculation

• The head of a major industry group has slammed Labor’s next round of workplace reforms as a roadblock to productivity growth.

• Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox took aim at the upcoming workplace relations changes, which include a pathway for casual workers to become permanent, during a speech on Wednesday.

• A plan to raise more money by taxing big gas and oil companies faces an uphill battle as independent senator David Pocock reveals he is willing to vote against the proposal as it stands.

• The ACT senator said a proposed petroleum resource rent tax was a “disappointing” and “weak” approach from the Albanese government and called for it to be higher.

• Satellite imaging company Planet Labs announced plans to cut 10% of its workforce, following a massive round of cuts this week at retail pharmacy giant CVS Health, making it the latest U.S. company to conduct layoffs as recession fears push employers to make cuts (see Forbes’ layoff tracker from the first quarter here).

• In February 2023, the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson announced to its employees that it would lay off 8,500 employees globally as part of its plan to cut costs, much like other industrial counterparts already have, including Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet. Now, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) submitted by Ericsson and acquired by The Dallas Morning News, the company will cut 750 jobs across the U.S.

• Reuters reports that this is part of a cost-cut plan announced by the company in December 2022, with expectations of reducing $880 million by the end of 2023. Ericsson employs more than 105,000 people worldwide, of which some 12,000 are located in the U.S. Layoffs began earlier this year when 1,400 jobs were cut in Sweden. While other companies in the industry have similar cost-cutting plans, Ericsson’s move is the largest layoff to hit the industry so far.

• Latvijas Banka (LB), the Latvian central bank, has published its latest Financial Stability Report, which analyses the development and resilience of Latvia’s financial system and throws up several interesting facts in connection with sanctions against Russia and Belarus.

• The Supreme Court of Russia said on August 2 that it had rejected an appeal filed by Ivan Safronov, a prominent former journalist, against his conviction in a high-profile treason case that highlighted the Kremlin’s crackdown on the media and free speech.

• Over the last five years, the number of guest workers from outside the European Union (EU) has been growing, and the country’s labor profile is changing with the Russian war in Ukraine, LSM’s Latvian-language service reported on August 1.

• Imprisoned Russian anti-war activist Ivan Kudryashov has been forcibly transferred to a psychiatric clinic less than two weeks after he ended his 40-day hunger strike to demand guards respect his rights.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Former president Donald Trump was indicted for a third time for alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump, a frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, was charged with four counts related to efforts to subvert the will of voters in 2020.

• Residents near the company’s location in downtown San Francisco complained of “intense” flashing lights and feared for their safety.

• Musk’s rebrand has changed “Twitter: Let’s Talk” to “X: Blaze Your Glory!” in the iOS App Store, for some reason.

• The platform’s new logo seems a little juvenile. So does the internet.

• Elon: “X needs to have an AI feel with blockchain vibes. And it should always be tracking you.”

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Last month we noted how media reform activists had petitioned the FCC to revoke Fox News’ local broadcast license in Philadelphia. More specifically, the group argued that Fox News’ rampant election fraud propaganda technically violated the “character clause” embedded in the Communications Act the FCC is supposed to use to determine whether an organization should hold a broadcast license.

• There are many different ways to represent the same text in Unicode. We’ve previously exploited this encoding-visualization gap to craft imperceptible adversarial examples against text-based machine learning systems and invisible vulnerabilities in source code.

Censorship/Free Speech

• There’s so much to dig into on this one. First off, just to state my own bias upfront, I’m not a fan of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Literally just a few days ago I wrote about one of its highly questionable studies and how it’s being used (badly) to justify a terrible bill in California. Beyond that, I think that the organization has a history of publishing overhyped reports that the media (and some politicians) love, but which do not accurately reflect reality.

• Speech has consequences.

• Plus: California tries to stop professors from testifying in suit over COVID education policies, state Republicans aren’t all abandoning free market economics, and more…

• by Matthew L. Schafer & Tanvi Valsangikar, just published, through our normal blind review process.

• Draft “fake news” legislation is threatening Jordan’s King Abdullah’s promised democratic reforms and placing him at the center of his people’s struggle for rights and freer speech.

• Does free speech protect Trump’s election lies?

• Last week, Digital Music News reported on far-reaching customer criticism of NFT platform OneOf. Now, despite having dropped thousands on tokens, a customer we spoke with says he’s been abruptly cut off from the Quincy Jones-backed company’s main communication channels.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Censorship has always been the name of the game when governments push “fake news” laws. First of all, laws like these allow governments to decide which news is “fake” and which news is “credible.” Those pushing these laws claim they just want to ensure citizens aren’t misled. But, in reality, governments just want more options at their disposal to control the narrative.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In an in-depth interview, we look at the life and legacy of the groundbreaking musician Sinéad O’Connor, who converted to Islam and also started using the name Shuhada’ Sadaqat in 2018. O’Connor died last week at the age of 56 and was known for her music as much as for her outspoken activism. In 1992, she performed Bob Marley’s “War” on Saturday Night Live, then proceeded to rip up a photo of Pope John Paul II on live TV to protest systemic child abuse in the Catholic Church, of which she was a survivor. The move provoked widespread uproar. O’Connor was also an ally to LGBTQ communities, an opponent of police brutality on some of her earliest records, a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights, and marched for abortion rights decades before it was legalized in Ireland. We are joined by Jamie Manson, president of advocacy group Catholics for Choice, and Allyson McCabe, music journalist and author of the recent book Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters.

• Sinéad O’Connor’s magnificent voice could shiver from between almost-closed lips like a tendril emerging through soft earth—tiny raptures or tiny requiems that could stop the breaths of an entire stadium audience while her own body barely moved. That same voice could suddenly rush from a wide-open mouth and blast ululations heavenward, calling down wrath upon injustices both intimate and global. At such moments, lightning bolts would seem to issue from the bristles on her head, and her limbs and torso could twist with the anguish of a Grünewald Jesus.

• In his book The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor, Les Leopold tells a story of practice pickets in which the late Tony Mazzocchi, then-president of Local 149 of the United Gas, Coke, and Chemical Workers Union, led a contract campaign in the 1950s at a cosmetics plant on New York’s Long Island. As the contract expiration loomed, Mazzochi knew that the workers needed to get ready for a showdown with management. The key was organizing a credible strike threat. Mazzocchi’s solution was for workers to save for a strike fund and walk the picket lines of other striking workers for more than 35 days, as practice for their own coming battle.

• Two members of the Hells Angels have won a High Court bid to seize back access to a rural property in South Australia in the latest legal stoush involving anti-gang laws across the country.

• In a judgment on Wednesday, the court allowed an appeal by Disorganized Developments Ltd and its two directors who it identified as members of the gang.

• ULEZ – the Ultra Low Emmission Zone – has become a political football. Its significance to a general election manifesto became apparent as the Conservatives retained the Uxbridge and South Rusilip seat in a crucial by-election as plans to expand the clean air zone loomed over constituents.

• Pope Francis headed to Portugal on Wednesday to open the first post-pandemic edition of World Youth Day, hoping to inspire the next generation of Catholics while coping with the church’s ongoing clergy sexual abuse scandal.

• An Asia-based legal group has expressed concern over “the broad application” of the Beijing-imposed national security law, after the Hong Kong police last month announced arrest warrants and HK$1 million bounties for eight overseas democrats.

• Democracy Now! co-host Juan González remembers his longtime friend and comrade, Juan Ramos, a founder and leader of the Young Lords chapter in Philadelphia in the early 1970s who recently died after a long bout with Alzheimer’s. “It’s really not possible to overestimate the influence that Juan Ramos had on the social and political and liberation struggles of the Puerto Rican, Latino community, but also all communities, in Philadelphia,” shares González. Ramos was a lifelong activist and became a founder and first president of the Puerto Rican Alliance, which led numerous battles to defend bilingual education, oppose police brutality, and which spearheaded a large squatters’ movement in abandoned HUD-owned houses that eventually won titles to those homes for more than 150 Puerto Rican families. He also helped found the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights in the 1980s, served in the administration of Mayor John Street and was himself elected to the Philadelphia City Council for one term, and became a union organizer and a deacon of a Catholic Church in his parish in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia.

Monopolies

• Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 413.

• I was asked to make a guest appearance on SwanBitcoin’s Café Bitcoin Tuesday today Aug. 1, 2023), where we discussed law versus legislation, the impacts of sound money on social character, and related matters.

Patents

• Thomas Edison’s pioneering incandescent light bulb, which cast illumination by heating a filament until it glowed, is fading into history. New federal rules governing the energy efficiency of lighting systems went into full effect Tuesday, effectively ending the sale and manufacture of bulbs that trace their origin to an 1880 Edison patent. The big winners are likely to be more efficient and longer-lasting LED bulbs. The rules have been whipsawed by politics for years, and as a result may not result in sweeping change simply because businesses and consumers have already begun to embrace more efficient lighting on their own.

• German company Kindermann, which sells media technology products, has concluded its dispute with Belgian rival Barco in the Netherlands over a patent for an electronic meeting tool.

• Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Ekta Aswal, was awarded $2,000 for her prior art submission on U.S. Patent 7,860,320, owned by Monument Peak Ventures, an NPE and Dominion Harbor entity.

• On July 31, 2023, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 8,909,779, owned and asserted by Cloud Systems HoldCo IP, LLC, an NPE and DynaIP entity.  The ’779 patent relates to methods for controlling devices in an environment. It is currently being asserted against Bosch Security Systems, Guardian Protection Services, Google, and Ring, and it has been asserted against others.

• In an article slated for publication in the Federal Circuit Bar Journal, Sean Keller, J.D. Candidate at Texas A&M University School of Law, and Jonathan Stroud, GC at Unified Patents, have written about the growing policy debate surrounding litigation financing disclosures.

• On 23 June 2023, the Madrid Appeal Court (Section 32) published one of the most interesting judgments coming from Spanish courts during the last few years.

• On 25 July 2023, the Court of Appeal handed down its decision in Teva & Sandoz v Astellas[1] concerning the validity of Astellas’ patent to mirabegron for use in the treatment of overactive bladder (“OAB”).

• The law of appellate jurisdiction routes almost every patent appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.  This result is by design to ensure more national uniformity in application of the U.S. patent laws.  The court’s recent decision in Teradata Corp. v. SAP SE, 22-1286 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 1, 2023) provides an exception to the general rule.  In its decision, the Federal Circuit held it lacked jurisdiction over Teradata’s appeal because the patent infringement allegations only been raised in a permissive counterclaim.  Although the counterclaims might have been compulsory if compared against Teradata’s original complaint, during the litigation Teradata narrowed its claims in a way that caused separation from the counterclaims.

• After a brief partnership pursued under an NDA, SAP began offering a product similar to that of Teradata.  Teradata then sued for trade secret misappropriation and antitrust violations.  SAP responded with denials and also added patent infringement counterclaims.

Trademarks

• More than a decade ago, it came to our attention that the NFL was out in the streets of New Orleans threatening small businesses for the crime of using New Orleans related language alongside the use of images of the fleur de lis. Those actions were quite silly, given that the symbol and much of the language in question is part of the broader and general culture surrounding New Orleans, but that didn’t keep the NFL from trying to appropriate all of that culture for its own purposes, no matter whether the “offending” uses did anything to actually confuse the public into thinking the NFL or Saints were somehow involved.

• The USPTO refused to register the proposed mark WHALEHEAD BREWERY, finding the mark to be primarily geographically descriptive of beer. The examining attorney maintained that “this wording references a beach area in Corolla, North Carolina,” and the term WHALEHEAD “is well known to the purchasing public as evidenced by its ‘Outer Banks icon’ status.” Applicant contended that “when considered beyond local usage, the term ‘Whalehead’ loses any geographic meaningfulness and becomes obscure to the relevant public.” How do you think this appeal came out? In re Whalehead Brewery, LLC…

• The USPTO deemed the term “snkrs” to be generic or merely descriptive of “operating an online marketplace featuring footwear and clothing; on-line retail store services featuring footwear and clothing; retail store services featuring clothing and apparel; Pop-up retail store services featuring clothing and footwear; providing consumer product information and related news in the field of sneaker” and for “Providing recognition and incentives by the way of awards and contests to demonstrate excellence in the field of fashion and sneaker collection,” and so it refused to register the proposed marks SNKRS, in standard character and design form, in the latter case absent a disclaimer of “snkrs.”

Copyrights

• With 40 million monthly visits, YTMP3.nu is one of the largest YouTube ripping sites on the web. Copyright holders regularly send takedown notices hoping to remove the site from search engines, but they’re not alone. In a new lawsuit filed at a California federal court, YTMP3.nu is suing several competitors for sending false DMCA notices to Google.

• President Putin has signed off on legal amendments that threaten to destroy online anonymity, crush free speech, and stifle innovation. Starting this year, internet platforms must verify new users’ identities via state-approved systems, before granting access. VPN circumvention advice will constitute a crime, certain Gmail use will be banned, and non-state-approved hosting companies will be rendered illegal.

• Dua Lipa faces yet another copyright infringement lawsuit over ‘Levitating,’ this time for the allegedly unauthorized use of a talk-box recording in three of the song’s remixes.

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