● 08.05.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 05/08/2023: Hospitals Vandalised by Microsoft Windows En Masse

Posted in News Roundup at 1:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• Ben Tanaka, the anti-hero of Adrian Tomine’s bleakly hilarious graphic novel Shortcomings (2017), has a secure place in the great American literary tradition of bad boyfriends. This is a crowded lineage that runs from Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams to Norman Mailer’s Stephen Rojack, from Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog to John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Philip Roth just by himself created a veritable squadron of undesirable mates—chief among them Alexander Portnoy, Nathan Zuckerman, and the incandescently wicked Mickey Sabbath.

• Rocket stoves are an interesting, if often overlooked, method for cooking or for generating heat. Designed to use biomass that might otherwise be wasted, such as wood, twigs, or other agricultural byproducts, they are remarkably efficient and perform relatively complete combustion due to their design, meaning that there are fewer air quality issues caused when using these stoves than other methods. When integrated with a little bit of plumbing, they can also be used to provide a large amount of hot water to something like an off-grid home as well.

• You could practically hear the collective “PHEW!” as NASA announced that they had reestablished full two-way communications with Voyager 2 on Friday afternoon! Details are few at this point — hopefully we’ll get more information on how this was pulled off, since we suspect there was some interesting wizardry involved. If you haven’t been following along, here’s a quick recap of the situation.

• The film opens at The Laemmle Royal in LA August 4.

• The infamous cancelled-during-the-first-episode show, a lost-media legend, is on YouTube, which makes it the perfect time to analyze its legacy.

Science

• A rare late Bronze Age arrowhead made from meteoric iron was discovered in Swiss archaeology collections two years ago. The team is now convinced that the arrowhead is made from Estonia’s Kaalijarv meteorite, which fell on the island of Saaremaa around 1,500 BCE.

• I truly believe that Coding can adequately be used to teach difficult subjects like Physics, Chemistry, Electronics, Economics, and so much more. Methods of sampling and simulations can easily model probability distributions and calculus can also be modeled by small time-step computations. Just these two small approximations can make many subjects instantly accessible. Similar tricks to approximate other Mathematical tools can undoubtedly be designed or discovered. The end result, I believe, has the potential to become glorious!

Hardware

• When [Michael] over at the Teaching Tech YouTube channel bought a hobby injection molding machine a long time ago, one of the plans he had with it was to use it for grinding up waste bits of PLA filament for injection molding. Since the machine was bought from a US shop and [Michael] is based in Australia it required some modifications to adapt it to the local 220+ VAC mains, followed by adding a PID temperature controller and a small compressor to provide the compressed air rather than from a large shop compressor.

• We all know that 3D printing has been a boon for people with different life challenges. But the Ford Motor Company in Mexico wants to help dogs that need mobility assistance. They’ve designed and released P-Raptor (we presume the P is for perro), a wheelchair for pooches with rear legs. The web page is in Spanish, and translating it didn’t seem to work for some reason, but if you have any Spanish, you can probably work it out, or cut and paste just the text into your favorite translator.

• For a lot of us, soldering has become so ingrained that it’s muscle memory. We know exactly when the iron is hot enough, how long to leave the tip in contact with the joint to heat it up, and exactly where to dab in the solder to get it to flow. When you’re well-practiced it can be a beautiful thing, but for those who don’t do it frequently, soldering can be frustrating indeed.

• Usually when we talk about flip-flops here we mean the circuit. But in this case, it is [Jeandre Groenewald’s] 3D-printed shoe design called Sloffies. The shoes use TPU, and the matching package prints in PLA. Of course, you have to pick the size to fit your feet, and there’s an OpenSCAD file that allows you to customize the strap.

• The move is a response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, it and stems from concern that even consumer or industrial-grade drones might be used for military purposes. For what it’s worth, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s government says it is neutral in the war. But in response to reports that both sides might be using drones in battle and for reconnaissance, China has turned to export controls on certain types of drones in an effort to prevent either side from using its drones.

• Many of the major drone manufacturers including Autel and Yuneec are based in China. And then there’s no ignoring the largest of them all: DJI. Products from those companies (as well as other Chinese drone makers) could be affected.

• Export controls will take effect Tuesday to prevent use of drones for “non-peaceful purposes,” the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement. It said some drone exports still will be allowed.

• China is a leading developer and exporter of drones. DJI Technology Co., one of the global industry’s top competitors, announced in April 2022 it was pulling out of Russia and Ukraine to prevent its drones from being used in combat.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The Environmental Protection Agency approved a component of boat fuel made from discarded plastic that the agency’s own risk formula determined was so hazardous, everyone exposed to the substance continually over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer. Current and former EPA scientists said that threat level is unheard of. It is a million times higher than what the agency usually considers acceptable for new chemicals and six times worse than the risk of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking.

• Federal law requires the EPA to conduct safety reviews before allowing new chemical products onto the market. If the agency finds that a substance causes unreasonable risk to health or the environment, the EPA is not allowed to approve it without first finding ways to reduce that risk.

• The Idaho Hospital Association and Idaho Medical Association didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. But speaking to NPB, a spokesperson for the Idaho Hospital Association characterized the letter as unexpected. “It really seemed like an unusual request going around the Department of Health and Welfare to get information that is protected by state law,” they said. “Other than that, we really don’t have a comment.”

• You’re not imagining it.

• The arrival of two shots that protect infants against respiratory syncytial virus could give parents some peace of mind from the leading cause of hospitalization of U.S. children under the age of 1.

• Here’s what we know about who should get the flu, Covid and R.S.V. vaccines, and when.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• UEFI is a mini-operating system that sits on top of a computer’s hardware and firmware. Instead of being stored in firmware, as is the BIOS, the UEFI code is stored in the /EFI/ directory in non-volatile memory. Thus, UEFI can be in NAND flash memory on the motherboard or it can reside on a hard drive, or even on a network share.

• Most computers today boot using Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) firmware, or its version-2.x variant, Unified EFI (UEFI). The way EFI computers boot is very different from the way older computers based on the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) boot. This fact is both positive and negative. On the plus side, the EFI boot method is much more flexible and, in theory, easier to configure than is the BIOS boot method. On the minus side, EFI skills and documentation still lags BIOS skills and documentation, so people experienced in the BIOS method of booting often make mistakes when dealing with newer EFI-based computers. Even EFI support in Linux distributions continues to be a source of occasional problems, particularly with respect to obscure or unusual situations.

• I’ve written this set of Web pages with the goal of explaining some of the basics of the EFI boot methods, most notably including how to install and manage EFI boot loaders. This document is broken into a number of sections, as detailed below.

• In 2005, the Unified EFI Forum expanded the original specifications developed by Intel to produce a new standard for updating the hardware and software interface. This consortium includes companies such as AMD, Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, and Microsoft. Two of the largest BIOS makers, American Megatrends and Pheonix Technologies, are also members.

• A computer firmware and operating system are connected by a software program called Unified extensible firmware interface(UEFI), Which is a specification(OS). Although it is compatible with BIOS, UEFI is expected to eventually replace it. The letter UEFI is most frequently used to pronounce the specifications. So let us check out the Disadvantages of UEFI to know more about UEFI.

• As the development of computer technology has progressed, it has become increasingly obvious that the traditional way of booting up the system with BIOS and Master Boot Record, introduced back in the 1980s during the era of the MS-DOS operating system, is no longer able to meet modern requirements. So, several companies including Microsoft and Intel started to develop a modern successor. It was around 2000 when the first specification for Extensible Firmware Interfaces (EFI) was developed. In the years that followed – after the Unified EFI Forum was founded in 2005 – the current UEFI standard gradually emerged.

• Central to the conflict around studios’ use of AI is actors having “informed consent,” which would require studios to request consent for an actor’s AI likeness to be used in any future project by informing them about each intended use before it occurs — and then compensating them for any consented use.

• But without informed consent, even contractually acceptable uses might allow for actors’ digital replicas to appear in content in ways actors don’t want but may not have the rights to deny.

• Yet that’s not where talent concerns end. Actors’ other fight will be against those — whether internet users, brands or businesses — who might misappropriate, manipulate and distribute their visual or audio likeness with AI. Unauthorized deepfakes are likely to proliferate on the internet as off-the-shelf AI tools enable anyone to produce progressively richer and more realistic replicas.

Windows TCO

• Hospitals may feel powerless to stop [successful] cyberattacks and their motivations, but that is far from the case. Hospitals can improve their cyber defense and resilience by appreciating the new foes and risk levels they face, updating cybersecurity and enterprise risk management practices to correlate to the elevated threat level, and communicating the nature and seriousness of ransomware threats to staff, business partners, public policy organizations, law enforcement agencies and legislators.

• [NATO] deployed its first serious cybersecurity defences in 2004. “We quickly realised that we’re always on the back foot,” West said. Nato, like other organisations, mostly relies on commercially available software and applications – all of which have vulnerabilities. “We’re constantly evolving our defences trying to keep up with the evolving threats.”

• In last month’s edition of the 5×5, we featured a group of leading scholars to share their views on cyber conflict in international relations. Contributors discussed the important interplay between the scholarly community and the policymaking sphere, as scholarly debate over cyber conflict’s place in international relations has driven seminal government strategies. For instance, key underpinnings of US Cyber Command’s 2018 decision to shift its strategy away from a deterrence-based approach and toward the concepts of Defend Forward and Persistent Engagement—which has improved effectiveness since—can be traced back to a series of scholarly articles embodied in a recent book by Michael Fischerkeller, Emily Goldman (featured below), and Richard Harknett (featured in last month’s 5×5).

• This time around, we brought together a group of distinguished individuals with past and present cyber policy experience across a range of government organizations to share their perspective on the topic. They address cyber conflict’s fundamental place in international relations, some of their recommended readings for aspiring policymakers, disconnects between scholars and policymakers, and ideas for how both communities can more effectively engage one another.

• Microsoft claims it has completely fixed a critical security issue in its Azure cloud platform, found in March by researchers from security firm Tenable, who then told Microsoft about it. Tenable chief executive and chairman Amit Yoran had claimed in a blog post on Wednesday that it took more than 90 days for Microsoft to effect a partial fix.

• [...]

• “When we find vulns in other products, vendors usually inform us of the fix so we can validate it effectively. With Microsoft Azure that doesn’t happen, so it’s a black box, which is also part of the problem. The ‘just trust us’ lacks credibility when you have the current track record.”

• The ransomware attack happened at Prospect Medical Holdings of Los Angeles, which has hospitals and clinics in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Texas. Prospect Medical is investigating how the breach happened and is working on resolving the issue, the company said in a statement Friday.

• A cyberattack has disrupted hospital computer systems in several states, forcing some emergency rooms to close and ambulances to be diverted, and many primary care services remained closed on Friday as security experts worked to determine the extent of the problem and resolve it.

• The “data security incident” began Thursday at facilities operated by Prospect Medical Holdings, which is based in California and has hospitals and clinics there and in Texas, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.

• A [computer breach] has disrupted hospital computer systems in several states, forcing some emergency rooms to close and ambulances to be diverted.

• Hospitals and clinics in several states on Friday began the time-consuming process of recovering from a [breach] that disrupted their computer systems, forcing some emergency rooms to shut down and ambulances to be diverted.

• Many primary care services at facilities run by Prospect Medical Holdings remained closed on Friday as security experts worked to determine the extent of the problem and resolve it.

• The “data security incident” began Thursday at facilities operated by Prospect Medical Holdings, which is based in California and has hospitals and clinics there and in Texas, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.

• “We have a national Prospect team working and evaluating the impact of the attack on all of the organizations,” Jillian Menzel, chief operating officer for the Eastern Connecticut Health Network, said in a statement.

• Elective surgeries, outpatient appointments, blood drives and other services were suspended, and while the emergency departments reopened late Thursday, many primary care services were closed on Friday, according to the Eastern Connecticut Health Network, which runs the facilities. Patients were being contacted individually, according to the network’s website.

• Similar disruptions also were reported at other facilities systemwide.

• The attack began at facilities operated by Prospect Medical Holdings. The company’s facilities in California, Texas, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania were affected by the [computer breach].

Security

• One frustrating aspect of email phishing is the frequency with which scammers fall back on tried-and-true methods that really have no business working these days. Like attaching a phishing email to a traditional, clean email message, or leveraging link redirects on LinkedIn, or abusing an encoding method that makes it easy to disguise booby-trapped Microsoft Windows files as relatively harmless documents.

• Welcome to the July 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports, we try to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit the Contribute page on our website.

Privacy/Surveillance

• One exception to the removal policy is if the user is actively commercializing their explicit images, Sullivan said.

• Google previously allowed people to request the removal of explicit images that were shared without their consent.

• The company also introduced a new dashboard Thursday that tracks when a person’s personal contact information appears in its search results, which the company says will make it easier for users to monitor and request the removal of information about themselves from Google search results. The tool will now alert users when new results pop up containing their contact information.

• “The risk of being [abused] increases drastically when you share too much information about your vacation online,” says Robinson Jardin, head of social media and digital for NordVPN, a cybersecurity software company. “When it comes to boarding passes, the real issue is barcodes. They can be read by pretty much anyone with free software online.”

• The vast majority of airline boarding passes now contain barcodes or QR codes. “And on these barcodes, there’s a lot of information that [malfeasants] can use,” says Jardin. Along with personal identification and contact details, the code will typically contain your reservation number and frequent flier number. It may even include your passport or driver’s license number. This kind of data can be sold on the dark web and ultimately used to steal the victim’s identity, open credit card accounts or make unauthorized purchases.

• People’s aggregate movements–their commutes, visits to friends or loved ones, and trips to the doctor’s office or an attorney– could be compiled over time by a fleet of driverless vehicles, which pedestrians don’t suspect can be deputized by police.

• Autonomous vehicles rely on more than a dozen cameras and sensors situated around the car in order to detect other vehicles, traffic signs, obstructions, and pedestrians. Because the most visible autonomous cars are operated by private companies, there is a lot that we do not know about the storage, security, and access regarding this footage. It is unclear, for instance, how detailed the footage is of pedestrians on the street or whether that footage is run through any image recognition. What capabilities do these vehicles have to collect audio? How long is this footage stored for? Who has access to it? What protections are in place to keep the footage private and safe? How do these companies comply with local and state-wide privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act?

• Another major line of questioning is the relationship between autonomous vehicles and law enforcement agencies. Bloomberg found at least nine warrants served to a self-driving car company in both San Francisco and Maricopa County, Arizona. According to a training document received by Vice in 2022, the San Francisco Police Department wrote: “Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have potential to help with investigative leads…investigations has already done this several times.”

• ShotSpotter has routinely claimed its system of mics and location info is crucial to reducing gun crime. The theory is that if you can hear it, you can respond to it, even if officers can’t physically hear these gunshots themselves.

Defence/Aggression

• As Donald Trump made more threats against opponents in the wake of a third indictment, special counsel Jack Smith asked a judge late Friday for a protective order against the ex-president, seeking to prevent him from publicizing evidence from witnesses.

• “All the proposed order seeks to prevent is the improper dissemination or use of discovery materials, including to the public,” Smith said in a late-night court motion, essentially arguing that Trump’s rantings could have a chilling effect on witnesses in the case.

• When Saudi agents killed Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist critical of the monarchy, in 2018, it briefly rendered the crown prince an international pariah. But he has since sought to demonstrate that he is too powerful to ignore and has rebuilt his relationship with the United States and other allies.

• Patriarch Kirill has continued to defend the invasion despite mounting evidence of Russian war crimes committed in Ukraine. He has remained unmoved by the atrocities uncovered in liberated towns such as Bucha, or the seemingly endless accounts of mass killings, sexual violence, torture chambers, child abductions, and forced deportations throughout Russian-occupied Ukraine. He is silent regarding the constant missile and drone assaults against civilian targets including homes, apartment buildings, shopping centers, churches, hospitals, schools, and grain storage facilities.

• On Thursday, Niger’s ambassador to the USA Kiari Liman-Tinguiri called on the junta to “come to reason” and warned that if Niger collapses, the “entire Sahel” region could fall to jihadists.

• He went on to say jihadist groups could “control Africa from the coast to the Mediterranean” [and thus Europe].

• On Thursday, Upadhyaya let the former president leave his second arraignment in federal court without imposing any travel restrictions or a cash bond on him. But, she also reminded him of the terms of his release and warned him not to break them.

• She also scheduled the next court hearing in the case for Aug. 28.

• France also believed that Niger differs from neighbors’ countries, being a stable country in a turbulent region, as it believes that the ousted President Mohammad Bazoum has the ability to polish the image of the West in front of the Nigerian people.

• Besides being one of the fastest growing platforms since entering the social media fray in 2016, TikTok is notably monopolized by teenagers, which makes it a veritable source of information not to be overlooked by gerontologists. Currently, most studies regarding age stereotypes on social media have examined content on Twitter and Facebook. Our study explores how older adults are portrayed on TikTok and the factors associated with these portrayals. We analyzed 673 videos with the hashtags #Boomer and/or #OkBoomer that received over 5.4 billion views and categorized them into nine topics. Five of these topics (e.g., ’Warmth/Coldness’) were extracted from previous studies on age stereotypes. The remaining four topics were unique to our dataset (e.g., ‘Wealth Gap’). The outcome variable was ‘Negative Age Stereotypes’ which was rated on a binary scale. One in two videos about older adults featured negative content. As hypothesized, videos containing negative age stereotypes were more likely to be about the ‘Values and Beliefs of Older Adults’ (7 times), ‘Negative Encounters with Older Adults’ (8 times) or ‘Older Adults Antagonizing the Young’ (13 times). Conversely, videos which portrayed older adults as ‘Warm’ were 43% less likely to contain negative stereotypes. As the phenomenon of an aging population fast unfolds, it is imperative that society relinquishes its tendency to stereotype individuals on the grounds of age. By examining the possible mechanisms driving negative stereotypes of older adults on TikTok, our study provides the basis upon which such stereotypes can be counteracted. In doing so, it paves the way both to improve the well-being of older persons and to foster intergenerational solidarity.

• Findings reveal that the usage of the hashtags #OkBoomer and #Boomer is highly nuanced, at times explicitly ageist, and at others, emblematic of a phenomenon far more complex than ageism. There is a need to leverage social media as a space to foster interaction between older and younger people. Society is ultimately well served by intergenerational interaction.

• Foreign ISIS women are often depicted as naive wives who followed their husbands to Syria. However, they play a crucial role within the so-called Islamic State. In detention camps in North-East Syria, many are educating their kids in order to keep the “caliphate” alive.

• The Information and Documentation Office of the Women’s Defense Units (YPJ) published footage containing images from illegally possessed phones of detained foreign ISIS women in camps in North and East Syria.

• The footage is accompanied by a statement by YPJ which warns that ISIS is not over just because their territory was defeated and the threat against the whole of humanity continues as long as their ideology is spread and passed down to the next generation.

• Choudary appeared at the Old Bailey today via videolink charged with directing a terrorist organisation.

• He is also accused of being a member of the proscribed organisation Al-Muhajiroun (ALM) and addressing meetings to encourage support for the banned group.

• The trial of radical British preacher Anjem Choudary on a charge of leading a terrorist organization will start in May of next year, a judge said Friday.

• Choudary, 56, is also charged with two other counts under the Terrorism Act: membership in a banned organization, the radical Muslim group al-Muhajiroun, and addressing meetings to encourage support for the organization over the past year.

• The British government outlawed Al-Muhajiroun in 2010. The group has since operated under many names, including the Islamic Thinkers Society, prosecutors said.

• Royal Air Force personnel have returned to the UK after leading NATO’s Baltic air policing mission in Estonia for four months, during which pilots intercepted 50 Russian aircraft and flew for a combined total of more than 500 hours.

War in Ukraine

• Two sea drones carried out an attack on Russia’s Novorossiysk naval base on the Black Sea Friday morning.

• Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law Friday that raises Russia’s official conscription age ceiling from 27 to 30 and leaves the minimum age at 18.

• Journalists from BBC News Russia and Mediazona, working with a group of volunteers, have used open sources to confirm the identities of 29,217 Russian soldiers who have been killed in Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

• A Russian tanker was damaged in an attack by Ukrainian drones in the Kerch Strait, briefly halting traffic on the strategic bridge linking Crimea to Russia’s mainland, a government agency and Russian media reported early Saturday. The incident did not result in any casualties.

• Russia’s defence ministry said early on Friday that it had thwarted an overnight drone attack by Ukraine on Novorossiysk, a Russian naval base on the Black Sea. A Ukrainian intelligence official told Reuters that a Russian vessel was damaged in the attack, although the regional governor had earlier stated that there had been no damage or casualties.

• Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General announced Friday it would investigate whether recent Russian attacks on Odessa and other Black Sea ports constitute war crimes, according to a report from Reuters. The ports are major exporters of grain, a key food source for some of the world’s poorest countries.

• The Conflict Observatory released a new report on Wednesday that found that Russia has promulgated a series of laws to accelerate the application process for Russian citizenship while simultaneously penalizing those who did not apply for citizenship in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.

• Lithuania provided Ukraine with helicopters, anti-aircraft guns and armoured vehicles in 2023, the Defence Ministry said on Friday.

• An oil tanker was damaged in what Moscow said was a Ukrainian drone attack overnight in the Kerch Strait, close to a bridge that links Moscow-annexed Crimea with Russia.

• Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called for an investigation into an attack last month on the Ukrainian town of Lyman that killed nine people and injured a dozen others, saying the apparent use of cluster munitions in the attack make it a possible war crime.

• Russian soprano Anna Netrebko on August 4 sued the Metropolitan Opera in New York and general manager Peter Gelb, alleging defamation, breach of contract, and other violations related to the opera’s decision to drop her following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• A team from the International Atomic Energy Agency has “observed no mines or explosives on rooftops of Unit 3 & 4 reactor buildings” of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant

• Journalists from the BBC and Mediazona have identified the names of 29,217 Russian military members killed in Ukraine since February 2022.

• A Ukrainian naval drone carrying 450 kilograms of TNT struck the Russian Navy base at Novorossiisk in the Black Sea, causing extensive damage to a Russian warship docked there, sources in the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) told RFE/RL.

• A pro-Russian activist who works for a politician from the far-right AfD party, sought support from Moscow for a lawsuit against the German government, DER SPIEGEL has learned. They aim of the legal complaint was to delay German arms deliveries to Ukraine.

• Ukraine has also suffered the destruction of a large number of its weapons.

• Previously, Ukrainian President Zelensky accused Russia of planning an attack against the plant, but provided no evidence to support his accusation.

• Nevertheless, Putin and leaders of seven African countries involved in a peace mission on Ukraine agreed to continue their dialogue.

• Allies can be exasperating. But try being invaded by your neighbor and lectured by everyone else.

• The attack damaged the warship hundreds of miles from Ukrainian-held territory, as Kyiv increasingly tries to bring the war home to Russia.

• The seaport is one of Russia’s largest by volume and among the biggest in Europe, crucial to the export of Russian grain, oil, and other products to countries around the world.

• A Russian court on Friday sentenced imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny to 19 more years in prison after convicting him of several extremism-related charges that the Putin critic says are politically motivated, AP reported.

• Aidana Tastanova is a Kazakhstan national and a 3rd year law student attending the Moscow State Institute of International Relations under a Kazakh government scholarship.  On July 12,

• Lithuania declared more than 1,000 citizens of Russia and Belarus living in the country to be threats to national security on August 4 and said it was stripping them of their permanent residency status.

• Some 1,164 Belarusian and Russian nationals have been deemed a threat to Lithuania’s national security, meaning they were not able to renew or claim their residency permit or visa.

• A military court in Moscow has sentenced Zelimkhan Mazayev, who is wanted in the United Arab Emirates on suspicion of involvement into 2009 killing in Dubai of Sulim Yamadayev, to eight years in prison on a terrorism charge.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law on August 4 that raises the maximum age for mandatory one-year military service for men to 30 from 27.

• The strike, near a bridge vital to Russia, is the second Ukrainian sea drone assault on one of the country’s ships in two days.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Journalists from the BBC and Mediazona have identified the names of 29,217 Russian military members killed in Ukraine since February 2022. [...]

• The exchange, written in Russian, is part of a record that includes Sergiyenko’s emails, documents and messages. The documents were leaked to DER SPIEGEL and the investigative platform The Insider.

• At first glance, the communication seems like harmless banter between acquaintances. But before long, formulations begin to appear that even Western intelligence agencies may find interesting. “Has anything happened in terms of active measures?” the mysterious contact asked a few weeks later. “Not easy, but we’re getting there,” Sergiyenko replied.

• “Active measures” is the term Russia has used for clandestine attempts to influence the policies of other countries through disinformation, propaganda and other dishonest methods since Soviet times. And that is precisely the kind of operation described in the documents supplied to DER SPIEGEL. They indicate that Germany was the target.

Environment

• Climate activist Greta Thunberg pulled out of a much-anticipated event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Friday, citing a sponsor’s “heavy” investments in fossil fuel and accusing them of “greenwashing”.

• “Tropical forests can be really sensitive to reductions in rainfall,” said Daniela Cusack, lead author and an associate professor in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability, “and they have some of the largest stores of carbon on Earth. As climate is drying, that carbon is vulnerable.”

• Climate change is reducing rainfall in some places and causing more year-to-year variation. Some tropical forests already have been documented as drying.

• “All of that carbon that’s stored in rainforests right now is like a bank,” Cusack said. “We’re banking all that carbon and anything that releases that carbon is going to exacerbate climate change and impact everybody.”

• According to a 2007 paper, a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia would send 150 million tonnes of black soot into the stratosphere, resulting in global average surface cooling of 7 C to 8 C that would persist for years. Even after a decade, the world would still be 4 C cooler.

• This would be a massive problem for global food production. Countries at higher latitudes, like Canada, would be particularly hard hit by nuclear winter, since much of the country is already too cold for significant agriculture.

• “Until I stumbled upon this data set, it was almost impossible to make that comparison with any kind of reliability,” Bromirski said.

• To go back further, Bromirski gathered a team of undergraduate students to analyze daily seismic readings covering decades of winters. It was a slow, painstaking process that took years and involved digitizing drums of paper records. But he said it was important in learning how things have changed over nearly a century along California’s coast.

• Rescue workers have recovered seven dead bodies after a Thursday evening mudslide that descended on Shovi, a mountain resort in the Racha region of the Republic of Georgia.

Energy/Transportation

• The chair of the Office for Students (OfS), Conservative peer Lord Wharton, has been urged to “immediately” cut ties with a major oilfield inspection company.

• Lord Wharton is a consultant for OES Oilfield Services, which describes itself as “one of the world’s leading oilfield inspection companies”. He was also formerly an adviser to Consumer Choice Center – a US-based pressure group with links to the Koch fossil fuel empire that has come under fire for advocating against green reforms in the EU without being registered as a lobbying firm.

Wildlife/Nature

• However, these laws and regulations cannot adequately protect cetaceans. There are three main problems.

Overpopulation

• I asked them about what drives human-wildlife conflict, in their view, when and how they experienced it, how it affected their livelihood or well-being, and what could be done to prevent it in the future.

• Incidents of human-wildlife conflict had become common in the two villages, but I found that the victims’ experiences were underreported. I also found that the conflict was driven by habitat losses that pushed wild animals from the park to seek food and water outside. Changing weather patterns also played a role in tensions between wild animals from the park and residents of Kiduhi and Mbamba. Other research has linked changing patterns like this to climate change.

• The canal relies on rainwater to move ships through a series of locks that function like water elevators, raising the vessels up and over the continent between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

• However, a water shortage due to low rainfall has forced operators to restrict the number of vessels passing through, which is likely to result in a $200 million drop in earnings in 2024 compared to this year, canal administrator Ricaurte Vasquez said Thursday.

• There’s mounting evidence that indigenous peoples are the best protectors of rainforests in the world, regularly outperforming forest protection entities like national parks. And scientists have found that the Darien’s rainforests capture an unusually high amount of carbon, a key component to neutralizing the effects of greenhouse gas emissions in the fight against climate change. But it’s one thing for this evidence to appear in scientific studies, and another for it to be accepted as an ironclad truth by the policymakers and government officials with the power to determine land titles.

Finance

• If you’re flexible on where you back me, I built my own Patreon at https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/product-category/patronizer/. I usually do a soft sell on the whole “ditch the middleman” thing because lots of you have reasons for using Patreon, but this latest mess impels me to bring it up.

• Two simultaneous issues with payments on Patreon are causing problems for both creators and fans.

• Some Patreon creators are unable to access their earnings due to an issue with a payout provider. The issue first began earlier this week with creators saying their payout attempts were failing.

• At the same time, some Patreon subscribers are getting notices that their payments are being flagged as fraudulent by their banks. As a result, fans are seeing canceled subscriptions, with some saying they’re unable to see the list of creators they were subscribed to before. On Reddit, one creator said they suddenly lost hundreds of subscribers on August 1st.

• There is no broad constituency for junk fees. Scam artists (including scam artists in the C-suites of Fortune 100 companies) love them, sure, but junk fees make everyone else furious.

• What’s a plutocrat to do? Well, it turns out that culture war bullshit can make right wingers point (metaphorical) guns at their own junk – all plutocrats need to do is put the word out that getting rid of junk fees is “woke” and low-information right-wing thumbsuckers will demand the right to be charged junk fees.

• Here’s an example: one especially pernicious form of junk fee is the “swipe fees” that credit-card companies charge merchants. In an increasingly cashless age, these companies – dominated by the Visa/Mastercard duopoly – have figured out how to scrape 3-5% out of every single retail transaction in the entire fucking economy.

• A 76-year-old retired former engineer was found dead in his apartment in Russia’s Leningrad region on Thursday, the day after he tried to set the local draft office on fire.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• As Fellowship representative, I had tried to start a discussion about these funds at the 2017 annual meeting. I put forward several motions for discussion. Each motion was submitted as a separate topic for the meeting agenda. Spitefully, the FSFE president, Matthias Kirschner, merged all the motions into a single motion and had the group vote it away.

• Altman isn’t the only tech leader to warn about the influence of AI on elections. In June, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google’s parent Alphabet, expressed his fears that next year’s US elections will be “a mess” because of AI and misinformation. Misinformation around the election, Schmidt said, will be rampant as new tools are continually making more advanced AI much more accessible.

• It wouldn’t be the first time AI has caused trouble in the run-up to an election. Meta was implicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a firm improperly gained access to Facebook user data and used AI to deploy targeted advertising to influence voting patterns in the 2016 US presidential vote. To stave off a similar threat, Rep. Yvette Clarke introduced a bill in May that would require politicians to disclose when they use AI in political ads.

• As humans become more AI-dependent, the technology holds the potential to undermine democracy and collective decision-making. AI development is the most exciting thing in tech, but it could quickly become the biggest problem in global politics.

• On the same day as Nokia’s announcement of a manufacturing facility with Sanmina Corporation, a research note from New Street Research Policy Advisor Blair Levin, the Nokia plant, a new Corning plant and a limited waiver of Buy America rules for the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program expected later this summer will now make it possible for BEAD subrecipients to comply with the Buy America mandates.

• Facebook’s parent Meta has started blocking access to news feeds in Canada, something it threatened to do after the country passed an online news law that forces digital platforms to cut deals with publishing firms.

• Google has said it will wait until the law is in place — expected by the end of the year — before it starts removing links to Canadian news from its platform.

• The notice gave no reason why the ban was being put in place, but India has been touting its mantra of “make in India” for a while now and looking to step up manufacturing within the country.

• The most interesting thing is that the whole thing will be produced in Hunan, China. Then 3 days later India mandates a licensing requirement for Apple, Dell and other laptop/tablet manufacturers. And all of these in the guise of ‘Make in India’. It is similar how India has exempted Adani and the Tatas from buying as much solar cells as are needed and then sell the same in India. Reliance will be basically monopolizing the laptop business. And if people think that projects like Raspberry Pi, Arduino etc. will be exempted they have another think coming.

• The primary objective behind the move seems to provide a push for local manufacturing as the country aims to become the global manufacturing hub of the world.

• By restricting imports of these high-demand electronic devices, the government is not only focused on reducing reliance on foreign markets but also boosting local manufacturing capabilities.

• State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said Friday that the body’s members support President Vladimir Putin’s idea that all public officials should drive Russian-made vehicles.

• Last Wednesday, Nigerien military officers announced they had overthrown President Mohamed Bazoum, a close ally of the United States and France. ECOWAS, an economic bloc of West African countries, has threatened to take military action unless the coup is reversed by Sunday. But the leader of Niger’s new military junta has vowed to defy any attempts to restore the former president to power, while Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea — all, like Niger, former French colonies that have undergone military coups in the past three years — have warned against any foreign intervention in Niger. Meanwhile, Niger’s new leaders have announced the country will end military cooperation with France, whose outsized presence in its former colony is a major source of resentment in the resource-rich but still poverty-stricken nation. We speak to Nick Turse, an investigative journalist and contributing writer for The Intercept. He recently revealed that one of the leaders of the coup in Niger, Brigadier General Moussa Salaou Barmou, was previously trained by the U.S. military, as were the leaders of nearly a dozen other coups in West Africa since 2008. We also speak to Olayinka Ajala, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at Leeds Beckett University, who says Niger and its neighbors must tread carefully in order to avoid a “very bloody” military conflict.

• On Thursday, former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to trying to overturn the results of his 2020 election loss. Trump appeared before a magistrate judge in Washington’s federal courthouse two days after he was indicted. A key part of the election interference charges Trump faces relates to a Civil War-era rights law that protects the right of citizens to have their vote counted. We speak with Carol Anderson, author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, about Trump’s attempt to wipe out the votes of Americans of color and the intimidation of Black voters and election workers. “This is the kind of terror that is reminiscent of what happened during Reconstruction that led to the KKK Act that Trump is charged with,” says Anderson. “That kind of terror was the intimidation of Black people who were exercising the right to vote.”

• A federal lawsuit has extended the deadline and opened the process to DeKalb County residents, but the city is fighting back.

• Dobbs will throw many lives into disarray. Lationna Halbert’s is one of the first.

• Over 1,000 Palestinians are currently being held under Israel’s administrative detention policy without charge or trial.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• A new documentary film argues that the second-largest website on the planet is flooded with misinformation. Is that right?

• Thousands of people descended on the Manhattan park after Kai Cenat, a popular YouTube and Twitch streamer, promised to hand out free game consoles.

• Through its WeChat account, people could easily connect to a platform run by the Ministry of State Security that allows anyone to submit reports of potentially criminal activities. The platform is available in Chinese and English versions, and allows “informants” to remain anonymous if they wish.

• Disinformation, misinformation and absent information all cloud civilians’ understanding. Officials from each side denounce devious plots being prepared by the enemy, which never materialize. They claim victories that can’t be confirmed — and stay quiet about defeats.

• None of this is unique to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Any nation at war bends the truth — to boost morale on the home front, to rally support from its allies, to try to persuade its detractors to change their stance.

• But Europe’s largest land war in decades — and the biggest one since the dawn of the digital age — is taking place in a superheated information space. And modern communications technology, theoretically a force for improving public knowledge, tends to multiply the confusion because deceptions and falsehoods reach audiences instantly.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The day before the sentencing, Navalny’s team released a statement by him on social media in which he said he was expecting a long, “Stalinist” sentence and instructed people to “think about why such a demonstratively huge sentence is needed. Its main purpose is to intimidate. You, not me. I will even say this: you personally, reading these lines.”

• A Russian court convicted imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny of extremism charges and sentenced him to 19 years in prison Friday. Navalny is already serving a nine-year term on a variety of charges that he says were politically motivated.

• Longtime Russian dissident and critic Alexei Navalny was sentenced to an additional 19 years in prison Friday on а number of extremism-related charges after a closed-door hearing. The sentence prompted condemnation from multiple countries, international organizations and human rights groups.

• A Russian court has found imprisoned opposition politician Aleksei Navalny guilty on charges of extremism after a closed-door trial.

• Aleksei A. Navalny, who is already in prison, was sentenced for supporting “extremism,” amid intensified suppression of dissent in Russia.

• A court of appeals in Russia’s southwestern city of Krasnodar has canceled the sentence of pianist Mikhail Selitsky for the “Putin Is A Thief” graffiti he painted on a building in the city.

• The Kremlin’s ban on gender-affirming care signals an acceleration of Russia’s authoritarian drift, with treatment of trans people as a signal to distinguish Russia from the West.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on August 4 that introduces penalties for people who work with unregistered international or nongovernmental organizations.

• A Moscow court sentenced Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny to 19 years in prison Friday on charges of “creating an extremist organization” and “inciting extremism,” among others, according to Mediazona.

• A Moscow court sentenced opposition figure Alexey Navalny to 19 years in prison on charges of “extremism” on Friday, Russian state media reported. He will serve his sentence in a “special regime” prison colony, the category of correctional institution with the toughest conditions for inmates in Russia.

• On August 4, Alexey Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in a “special regime” prison colony for activities that the Russian authorities classify as “extremism.” A Moscow court deemed Russia’s most popular opposition leader a “particularly dangerous recidivist” and shaved just one year off the sentence state prosecutors had requested.

• At the conclusion of Alexey Navalny’s trial (arranged to take place right at the penal colony where Russia’s most popular opposition figure is currently imprisoned), the politician was sentenced to what many call a “Stalinesque” and draconian prison term: 19 years. Yet no one seems to be surprised by the harshness of the sentence, since it fits neatly into a pattern of similarly inhumane sentences for other opposition figures, like Ilya Yashin or Vladimir Kara-Murza. Meduza’s special correspondent Margaria Liutova spoke with a Russian political scientist specializing in the study of post-Soviet authoritarianism, who agreed to share his thoughts about political persecution in today’s Russia on condition of anonymity. In our condensed translation, his remarks have been edited lightly for clarity.

• Lots of discussion about Wikipedia’s public utility has occurred since its inception. On one hand, it’s true: just about anyone can make edits to the information, unlike physical encyclopedias or websites owned by the former purveyors of these informative hardbound reams of paper.

• Mozilla’s Open Policy & Advocacy blog has news about a worrying proposal from the French government:

• The state of Texas was sued in a federal district court by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade group representing the adult entertainment industry, and a slate of other companies including subsidiaries of Canadian firm MindGeek (owner of Pornhub). Other plaintiffs include the parent companies of popular adult sites like XVideos and Bang Bros, and a “Jane Doe” representing the adult content creator community. The lawsuit is seeking to block the implementation of House Bill 1181, a measure that would implement mandatory age verification and require porn sites to plaster “public health” warnings as if users are trying to access a beer or e-cigarette website.

• A few weeks ago, the Progress Action Fund released a political ad in Ohio that went somewhat viral on social media. I saw one person refer to it as “the most effective political ad” they’d ever seen.

• Donald Trump can’t win consecutive elections. And he certainly can’t win lawsuits. Pretty much every bit of litigation Trump has engaged in since he was elected president has been tossed out on its proverbial ear, the completely expected outcome for lawsuits engaged in angrily, but not coherently.

Civil Rights/Policing

• President Biden is calling for his Cabinet to “aggressively execute” plans for federal employees to work more in their offices this fall after years of working remotely, according to an email sent Friday to every Cabinet member and obtained by Axios.

• For generations, many of Michigan’s Native American children were shipped to one of five boarding schools in the northern half of the state where they weren’t allowed to speak Anishinaabemowin, the root language of what are now the 12 federally recognized tribes based in the state.

• Today, Anishinaabemowin is considered an endangered language. There are pockets of native speakers in Minnesota and the Dakotas, but among Michigan’s roughly 130,000 tribal-affiliated residents, there may be no one born in Michigan still alive for whom the language is their native tongue.

• Influencers have been able to join SAG-AFTRA since 2021, when the guild ratified its Influencer Agreement. Though it’s unclear exactly how many influencers are actually guild members, the contract offers social media creators who meet certain criteria a navigable path toward union representation. For these creators, their responsibility to the union is clear: They should abide by union rules, including not working for or promoting struck companies or their projects.

• But even non-union influencers — who significantly outnumber those who are members — have been conscripted into the bid to starve out Hollywood. SAG-AFTRA recently stated that non-union creators who promote a struck company could be blocked from joining the guild at a future date.

• Creators now face a challenging predicament, as they find themselves torn between a need or interest in earning money today and their potential future in the union as actors taking on Hollywood roles.

• Generative AI has been at the forefront of the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, as the unions repping Hollywood’s writers and actors want specific guarantees from studios (including Amazon Studios) about limiting AI’s use in productions. For example, SAG-AFTRA leaders have accused studios of wanting to scan background actors and then use their AI-generated likeness without consent in perpetuity. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers denies that, saying its proposal includes a provision requiring producers to obtain a performer’s consent for any use of a “digital replica” or alterations to their performance.

• The United States imposed restrictions on Tuesday for Hungarian passport holders under its Visa Waiver Program amid concerns that foreign nationals have used fraudulently obtained travel documents, the Washington Post reports. Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) validity for Hungarian passport holders will be reduced to one year, and it will only be valid for a single use.

• “According to the American authorities, there are criminals who have obtained Hungarian passports because the verification of the identity of those applying for Hungarian citizenship was not adequate prior to 2020,” Matthew Miller, spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said during a press conference on Tuesday. “We were trying to work with the government to give them an opportunity to correct the situation. It is not a step we wanted to take today. We engaged with them for multiple years (…) working through possible changes they could make, and they refused, “Miller added.

• Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, the director of the Norway-based NGO Iran Human Rights, told RFE/RL upon viewing the videos that they served as a reminder of “statements made under pressure.”

• “Unfortunately, forced televised confessions or statements are not uncommon in the Islamic Republic,” said Amiry-Moghaddam, whose organization documents executions, rights violations, and the systematic crackdown on human-rights defenders in Iran.

• Forced passportisation violates established international humanitarian law principles. Article 45 of the Hague Convention (IV) stipulates that the occupying power shall not compel the inhabitants of the occupied territory to swear allegiance to the hostile power. Article 69 of the Additional Protocol I also provides that the occupying power shall ensure the provision of clothing, bedding, means of shelter and other supplies essential to the survival of civilians of the occupied territory. International human rights treaties such as the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also provide for the recognition of legal, national identity and the associated rights of a national identity.

• The severe nursing shortages in hospitals across the country has turned one of the most important jobs in the medical profession into a nightmare. Nurses at a major hospital in New Jersey fight bac…

• The Biden administration had ordered Texas officials to take down the buoys due to humanitarian concerns.

• From Gramsci’s political thinking and practical strategizing come a set of ideas that arguably have only grown more salient with time.

• Fordham law professor and constitutional law expert Julie C. Suk argues that women’s full emancipation will require changing the legal and political institutions created by our Constitution.

• This again would be somewhat of a mature post. So children, please refrain from reading.

• When I hear the above words, my first thought goes to Aamir Khan’s Season 1 Episode 2 in Satyamev Jayate. This was the first time that the topic of child sexual abuse was bought in the forefront in the hall rather than a topic to be discussed in the corner. Unfortunately, that episode is still in Hindi and no English subtitles available even today shows a lack of sensitivity in Indian’s part to still come to terms with Child abuse that happens in India.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• IP addresses have been in the news a lot lately and not for good reasons. AWS has announced they are charging $.005 per IPv4 address per hour, joining other cloud providers in charging for the luxury of a public IPv4 address. GCP charges $.004, same with Azure and Hetzner charges €0.001/h. Clearly the era of cloud providers going out and purchasing more IPv4 space is coming to an end. As time goes on, the addresses are just more valuable and it makes less sense to give them out for free.

• So the writing is on the wall. We need to switch to IPv6. Now I was first told that we were going to need to switch to IPv6 when I was in high school in my first Cisco class and I’m 36 now, to give you some perspective on how long this has been “coming down the pipe”. Up to this point I haven’t done much at all with IPv6, there has been almost no market demand for those skills and I’ve never had a job where anybody seemed all that interested in doing it. So I skipped learning about it, which is a shame because it’s actually a great advancement in networking.

• Now is the second best time to learn though, so I decided to migrate this blog to IPv6 only. We’ll stick it behind a CDN to handle the IPv4 traffic, but let’s join the cool kids club. What I found was horrifying: almost nothing works out of the box. Major dependencies cease functioning right away and workarounds cannot be described as production ready. The migration process for teams to IPv6 is going to be very rocky, mostly because almost nobody has done the work. We all skipped it for years and now we’ll need to pay the price.

• More than 600 communities across the U.S. have decided to build their own broadband networks after decades of predatory behavior, slow speeds, and high prices by regional telecom monopolies.

Monopolies

• The case is actually three consolidated cases where the plaintiffs sued the leading app stores: Google Play, Apple’s AppStore, and Facebook. The plaintiffs’ claims relate to the app stores offering “social casino” apps, where users can buy virtual gambling chips with real money but can’t ever cash out any chips they win. The plaintiffs argue that these apps amount to illegal gambling. The app stores not only offer and promote these social casino apps, they also facilitate the in-app purchases (also called microtransactions) for the virtual gambling chips.

• At issue on appeal is the part of Section 230 that provides immunity to internet websites, apps, and services when they are sued for user-generated content. Section 230 is the foundational internet law that has, since 1996, created legal breathing room for online intermediaries (and their users) to host or share third-party content. Online speech is largely mediated by these private companies, allowing all of us to speak online, access information, and engage in commerce, without requiring that we have loads of money or technical skills.

• In this case, the plaintiffs are arguing that Section 230 should not apply to the app stores for promoting or recommending the social casino apps, nor for facilitating the in-app purchases for virtual gambling chips. Both the apps and the chips are types of third-party content.

Copyrights

• Ah, copyright. Eric Goldman alerts us to to a new bit of copyright nonsense. Jieun Kiaer, an Oxford professor of Korean linguistics, recently published an academic book called Emoji Speak: Communications and Behaviours on Social Media. As you can tell from the name, it’s a book about emoji, and about how people communicate with them:

• After years of gathering online, the CC community is clearly eager to gather in person for CC’s 2023 Global Summit during 3–6 October in Mexico City, demonstrating that the work to open knowledge and culture is more popular and important than ever. We received 184 compelling responses to our call for proposals and over 300 requests for funding assistance to attend. Now people are receiving notifications about the success of their session proposals and scholarship applications and starting to plan their travel.

• When a Twitter user posted copyrighted photos for the purpose of criticizing a private-equity billionaire, Twitter stepped in to challenge a DMCA subpoena that aimed to strip that person of their anonymity. A new DMCA subpoena targeting three Twitter users, including one who isn’t anonymous at all, is certainly controversial. The demands listed in the subpoena are nothing short of extraordinary.

• Pirate eBook repository Z-Library has launched browser extensions that should make it easier for users to find the site if its current domains are seized in the future. While the site doesn’t explicitly mention the U.S. Government crackdown, it likely plays a key role in the decision to make these extensions available.

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