● 08.08.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 08/08/2023: Rhino Linux 2023.1 Release

Posted in News Roundup at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Graphics Stack

• Well, it happened! The open source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs named NVK has been officially merged into Mesa. This means it will be available as an experimental option in the Mesa 23.3 release due in a couple of months (not the upcoming 23.2 release). Note: this is not made by NVIDIA directly but various open source devs.

Instructionals/Technical

• As you can see, the disk I/O in the simple Go version takes only 14% of the running time. In the optimized version, we’ve sped up both reading and processing, and the disk I/O takes only 7% of the total.

• My conclusion? If you’re processing “big data”, disk I/O probably isn’t the bottleneck. A little bit of measurement will likely point to parsing and memory allocation.

• The second problem with monitoring for specific narrow signals of interest in your logs is that you have to know what they look like. It’s easy to say that we’ll monitor for the Prometheus host agent crashing and systemd restarting it, but it’s much harder to be sure that we have properly identified the complete collection of log messages that signal this happening. Remember, log messages are unstructured, which means it’s hard to get a complete inventory of what to look for short of things like reading the (current) program source code to see what it logs.

• If you want to make containers under Linux, plenty of high-level options exist. [Lucavallin] wanted to learn more about how containers really work, so he decided to tackle the problem using the low-level kernel functions, and he shared the code with us on GitHub.

• So why are there still spam calls?

• Unfortunately, STIR/SHAKEN is far from universal. The FCC made STIR/SHAKEN implementation mandatory for US telephone carriers as of June 30, 2022. That was over a year ago, but the FCC issued numerous exemptions to small and rural carriers with difficulty affording the required equipment (remember that telephone switches can have fifty year service lives and there is some very old equipment still in use), and besides, the FCC mandate applied only to the United States.

• This tutorial will help you setup The Onion Router (TOR) anonymity software on your computer system with Debian 12 or Ubuntu 22.04 for use as a proxy with browser and any other internet-based applications you want. Please note that Tor works using address “localhost” and port number “9050″. Enjoy!

• SSH (Secure SHELL) is an open-source and trusted network protocol that is used to log in to remote servers for the execution of commands and programs.

• It is also used to transfer files from one computer to another computer over the network using a secure copy (SCP) command and rsync command.

• Logical Volume Management (LVM) is a powerful tool that greatly simplifies disk space management. With LVM, the task of allocating additional space to a file system becomes effortless.

• Whenever a file system requires more space, it can easily draw from the available free space in its corresponding volume group. As a result, file systems can be dynamically resized to accommodate our specific needs.

Games

• Here’s another fun open source reimplementation for you: VCMI is for running Heroes of Might and Magic III on modern systems with plenty of enhancements and a new release just went out.

• The Jackbox Party Pack 10 was announced recently, giving another set of amusing games to play with friends and family and it’s coming in October. With full Native Linux support just like pretty much everything from the Jackbox team.

• One of the biggest RPG releases of all time on Steam, Baldur’s Gate 3 has now been given the Steam Deck Verified badge of approval from Valve.

• Ready for some story time? If you’re into Visual Novels, there’s a good chance for you to find something new to play on Steam in their Visual Novel Fest. Running now until August 14th at 10 AM PT / 5PM UTC, you can also claim a daily reward just for showing up with the first being an animated Steam profile avatar.

• Indie developer Orangepixel currently has two really fun looking games worth looking into, both offering full Native Linux support and they both have newer demos available to try out.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• The routed IPSec mode we reported on earlier has now been committed to -current by David Gwynne (dlg@), likely to be a prominent item for the upcoming OpenBSD 7.4 release.

• Some time ago, I discovered and used searx on OpenBSD . This worked quite well but there were a few annoying bugs that I couldn’t solve. Mainly using OpenSearch with Firefox and timeouts with some Big Tech search engines. After struggling enough, I decided to switch to SearXNG . It has some cons compared to SearX but, regarding my needs and beliefs, the pros win.

• The original documentation for Linux is available here . I’m doing it on OpenBSD 7.3.

• IPv6 has a the concept of link scope. From IPv6′s point of view a bridge interface is a single link (just like multiple hosts connected to a physical Ethernet switch), but if there are IP addresses configured on the member interfaces of a FreeBSD bridge the kernel considers these interfaces as their own links with associated link scope. This will cause IPv6 to break. The only correct configuration is to have no IP addresses configured on the member interfaces. The IP addresses belong exclusively on the bridge interface itself. The member interfaces should be treated as pure Ethernet (OSI layer 2) interfaces instead of both OSI layer 2 (Ethernet like) and OSI layer 3 (IP).

• A further complication is that the bridge has to have unmodified access to the Ethernet frames, but most 1Gb/s and faster as well as virtual network interfaces have offloading features like TSO and LRO to rewrite the small (by modern standards) 1500 byte Ethernet frames into “fake” larger frames to reduce the CPU overhead of processing the packet inside each frame. While useful to IP hosts these offloading features have to be disabled to bridge Ethernet or route and filter the IP packets inside.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In the ever-evolving landscape of Linux distributions, the arrival of Rhino 2023.1 has created a buzz among enthusiasts and users alike. This brand-new Linux distribution brings a long-awaited feature, infusing the Ubuntu-based foundation with the innovative rolling distribution model.

• After six betas, the distribution developers released the first stable version, Rhino 2023.1, today, so we can’t wait to bring you our impressions of it.

• Rhino Linux is a rolling-release Linux distro based on Ubuntu. It is a community-based project and not an official Ubuntu flavour. I’m not sure if there’s any linage to the “Rolling Rhino” project ex-Ubuntu desktop manager Martin Wimpress created in 2020.

• Following a series of successful beta builds (which passed me by, I confess) Rhino Linux 2023.1 is now available to download. This snapshot release is available for 64-bit Intel/AMD systems and ARM64, with specific builds provided for Pine64 and Raspberry Pi devices.

• Balancing high performance operations against the need to reduce total operating costs is a classical dilemma faced by both large and small organisations. This dilemma becomes particularly important when you choose the foundation of your IT infrastructure: the operating system.

• A recent case study by Tech Mahindra, the multinational IT services and consulting firm, details how their partnership with Canonical enabled them to shift the balance for a major Fortune 500 life insurance company.

Devices/Embedded

• The Home Assistant Community store or more commonly known as HACS is a powerful UI that you can add to your setup. Using the store, you can easily install custom third-party elements such as custom devices via integrations, themes, custom cards, and other Lovelace user interface elements.

• You will likely need to install this add-on at some point, as plenty of smart devices are not supported by the official packages. However, I recommend learning more about Home Assistant before installing HACS.

• This tutorial will go through all the methods to install HACS to your Home Assistant installation. You will need to be aware of the type of Home Assistant you are using as it will impact how you install HACS. We will explain this below.

• If you need to install Home Assistant, we have a tutorial that will take you through how to install Home Assistant on the Raspberry Pi.

• After more than two decades covering technology, I’ve seen how large companies can get behind a standard and then sabotage it from the inside, either intentionally or not. I’m not here to say that Amazon, Google, or Apple are intentionally making the rollout of Matter a crummy experience for consumers, but I am here to say that their decisions are making Matter appear broken.

• The Tinker Board 3N is a Single Board Computer based on the 64-bit Rockchip RK3566 System-on-Chip. The device includes dual LAN ports, CAN support and it targets applications such as IoT gateways, digital signage, digital kiosks and other commercial uses.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The T-Watch S3 from LILYGO is an open-source device built around the ESP32-S3 SoC with Wi-Fi and BLE connectivity. The device also includes an 1.54” LCD display with capacitive touch capabilities and Arduino support.

• With a clean motherboard base to work from, it is time to start the repair work!

• Russian diplomats have been expelled from many countries around the world but facilities through which Russian secret services may still obtain valuable information remain, Latvian Television reported on August 6.

• A new RISC-V initiative announced last week by five leading chip players is a direct result of the more aggressive stance Arm is taking in its licensing terms as it tries to increase its revenues as a function of its upcoming IPO and its future as a publicly traded company.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Netnews, sometimes called Usenet, was arguably the first social network. It had a profound influence on online socializing, including helping to give to the world the current slang meanings of words like “spam”, “troll”, and “flame”. It was where many technologies we now take for granted were first announced, including Linux, the World Wide Web, and the graphical web browser. But its design was a function both its design goals and the technological context of the time. I describe those and a variety of other early design decisions, those which were right, those which were wrong, and those which were inevitable.

• I’ve often heard the advice “don’t read the comments”, but actually I’ve learned a huge amount from reading internet comments on my posts from strangers over the years, even if sometimes people are jerks. So I want to explain some tactics I use to try to make the comments on my posts more informative and useful to me, and to try to minimize the number of annoying comments I get.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• It’s not particularly easy or straightforward to make a HTTP based system into a good RPC system. But often you can get away with a basic HTTP based ‘RPC’ system for a surprisingly long time, and it may be the best or easiest option when you’re just starting out.

Education

• The MagPi regular and Raspberry Pi guide writer, Sean has done just about everything with a Raspberry Pi. This #MagPiMonday, we get to know him better and take a walk down memory lane to the early days of Raspberry Pi.

• REx now offers global resource distribution figures for IPv4, IPv6, and Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) and the history of the number of delegations and addresses delegated. REx also provides the list of all delegations currently in place around the world.

Programming/Development

• There’s a nice answer in the Go FAQ about why Go chose this order: “Why are declarations backwards?”. It starts with “they’re only backwards if you’re used to C”, which is a good point – name-before-type has a long history in languages like Pascal. In fact, Go’s type declaration syntax (and packages) were directly inspired by Pascal.

• Do you know what correlates more than anything else with undesirable codebase properties? The size of the codebase.

• Almost everything bad about codebases has a significant relationship with the size of a codebase, measured in logical lines of code.

• I love code.

• I love writing it, studying it, analyzing it, and building things with it. But make no mistake – it’s a massive liability. Always strive to do everything using as little code as humanly possible.

• Well… at what point do we run out of human-readable characters, and what if we used things beyond ASCII?

• Golang has some mechanisms which are helpful for developing software in Cloud Computing environments. These mechanisms address challenges that are ubiquitous in cloud computing environments, such as handling concurrency scenarios or deploying programs in distributed execution contexts. Some of these mechanisms are useful for real-time scenarios as well. When porting them to C++, care must be taken to follow the principles of real-time programming. Despite these extra challenges (e.g. handling memory allocations) it is absolutely possible to achieve our goal. In the first part of this article series we will show how to return multiple values from functions/methods.

• As a programmer, you’re well aware of the importance of data visualization. A well-crafted plot can convey complex information with clarity and impact. In R, creating stunning plots is a breeze, especially when you’re armed with the versatile text() function. This little gem allows you to add custom text to your plots, enabling you to annotate and highlight essential details. Let’s dive into the world of text() and uncover its syntax and potential through some hands-on examples.

Perl / Raku

• So instead of working I’ve been learning Raku.1 It originally got on my radar after I ranted about dynamic languages and a couple of users told me I’d like Raku. I finally checked it out last week to see if it’d make a good “calculator language”. I use a hodgepodge of Python, J, Frink, and Excel to do math and they all have their own big drawbacks, so it’d be nice if Raku could round them out.

• After several days of experiments, I’m at a loss of how to describe Raku. The best I can come up with is that the language was designed by a bunch of really intelligent gremlins. Gremlins who spent a lot of time gathering feedback from other gremlins.

Python

• Summary: This article describes some principles I’ve found useful for designing good Python library APIs, including structure, naming, error handling, type annotations, and more. It’s a written version of a talk I gave in June 2023 at the Christchurch Python meetup.

• I had to take a detour about context managers and iteration so that as many people as possible will be able to understand this article, but we are finally here.

• The goal of all this: learning about this new pattern mixing a custom context managers and a tailor-made iterator.

Leftovers

Science

• Astronomers witnessed our star emitting gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light, that are one trillion times more intense than the visible sunshine we experience here on Earth. This constant gamma-ray flux—which does not pose a threat to life on our planet—is far brighter than expected based on models of the Sun’s behavior, raising new questions about the mechanisms that are fueling the radiant glow.

• As part of the eternal quest within the realm of retrocomputing, storage devices can be one of the most challenging, especially when it comes to firmly obsolete hard drives, such as the CDC Finch drive. This compact 8″ HDD replaced the previous 14″ models with a form factor that was decidedly more portable. These Finch drives being 1980s technology that got run pretty hard before their retirement, it’s little wonder that they’d end up on the repair bench over at [Usagi Electric].

• During the late 1980s NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was busy developing the first ever wheeled robot that would roam the surface of Mars. Due to the long round-trip times of any signals between Mars and Earth, development of the firmware that would control the rover was a major point, with the two teams occupied with the task each picking different levels of autonomy for the rover. In a retrospective, [Ron Garrett] who worked at JPL on the ‘more autonomy’ team describes his recollections.

• [James Stanley] likes to spend time making puzzles and gadgets for escape rooms, and decided for a change to try their hand at a bit of magic. The idea was to construct a ‘magic box’, in which a coin can be placed in one of a number of slots, and then be able to remotely be able to determine the slot by means unseen. Obviously, this is an electronics hack, with a neat package of sensor and radio comms hidden inside a stack of CNC-milled wood. Coin locations are transmitted via Bluetooth to a Bangle.js smartwatch, which vibrates according to the slot occupied, allowing [James] to predict where the coin was placed.The sensor uses capacitive sensing, with a plate below each coin slot acting as one electrode of a capacitor and a copper-clad board hidden in the upper plate acting as the second. The presence of a coin is detected as a change in the capacitance of one of the sensors due to the fact that the plate separation will now be less for that one position. A simple PCB was CNC routed from a piece of plain clad board, with a cut out to solder down a Seeed Studio XIAO-ESP32-C3 module which runs the show and provides Bluetooth connectivity via an external PCB antenna module. Handily this module also handles the lithium battery management.

Education

• The 40 per cent of business leaders who believe Gen Z students are not ready for the workforce followed up their claims in the survey by offering their opinions on why they believe the graduates are unprepared. 70 per cent believe both work ethic and communication skills are the biggest issues which Gen Z graduates face.

• Other factors causing the business leaders to believe in the lack of preparation are entitlement and technological skills, with 51 per cent and 43 per cent believing issues to exist with those two factors respectively.

• They have been banned from attending senior secondary and higher secondary schools, from attending classes in universities, and from working in government and private offices. They have even been banned from visiting parks, gyms, public baths, and beauty salons.

• The latest move to ban even young girls from attending schools comes just weeks after the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, claimed that the group has restored the rights of women.

• I am pleased to have just signed a contract to write this new book for Polity. The first draft is due for mid-2024, so if all goes well this might be out sometime in 2025. I’ll add bits of writing as I go along to this blog under the ‘degrowth’ label. It should be an interesting journey!

Hardware

• In a post on Chinese social network QQ.com last week, Loongson shared the results of tests conducted by the China Electronics Standardization Institute on its 2.5GHz quad-core Loongson 3A6000 CPU.

• Those tests were run using the SPEC CPU 2006 benchmark – a test that stresses a system’s processor, memory subsystem and compiler. It was retired in 2018 – two years before the debut of the Intel silicon with which Loongson claims parity, and five years before these tests.

• “All Client Computing Devices will continue to be shipped until April 2024 and all exiting support contracts around CCD will be fulfilled. This decision is related to Europe only,” the Fujitsu statement added.

• As such, the business in Europe will focus on “driving its existing server and storage business as well as the product related services.”

• TSMC has been in discussions with the German state of Saxony about building a fab in Dresden to make chips for German and Austrian automakers since 2021. The recent report from Handelsblatt, quoting government sources, suggests that the project is nearing approval from the TSMC board of directors. Meanwhile, the German government and the State of Saxony have reportedly already approved subsidies for TSMC in a move that aligns with the EU’s initiative to increase the output of chips in Europe and reduce dependency on Asian chip suppliers.

• Once TSMC’s board approves the venture, the foundry could formally announce the intention and reveal official details regarding government funding. However, the European Commission will make the ultimate decision on this endeavor.

• Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSMC’s (2330.TW) board of directors will decide in favour of building a factory in the German city of Dresden on Tuesday, the Handelsblatt daily reported, citing government sources in Germany.

• The German government will provide 5 billion euros ($5.49 billion) to support the construction of the factory, Handelsblatt’s report said on Monday.

• Some design techniques and concepts from the injection molding world apply very nicely to 3D printing, despite them being fundamentally different processes. [Teaching Tech] demonstrates designing shadow lines into 3D printed parts whose surfaces are intended to mate up to one another.

• In the six months that have passed after the last USB-C article has been released, I have thought up a bunch of ways that these articles could have been improved. It’s, of course, normal to have such a feeling — expected, even. I now believe that there’s a few gaps that I could bridge. For instance, I have not provided enough example circuits, and sometimes one schematic can convey things better than a thousand words.

• We’re always looking for interesting biohacks here on Hackaday, and this new research article describing a calibrated pulse oximeter for different skin tones really caught our attention.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Just because you don’t understand how the world works, doesn’t mean the world doesn’t work properly. And just because the world is broken, doesn’t mean it is broken in the way you think it is.

• The CCDH tested six popular generative AI programs in total, ultimately finding that, on average, the platforms coughed up harmful eating disorder advice 41 percent of the time. That’s a high figure, considering the ideal number, of course, is zero.

• Fowler’s reporting proved to be in consensus with the CCDH findings. When we took our own turn at testing AI chatbots ourselves, our results fell depressingly in line.

• In total, the apps generated harmful advice and images 41 percent of the time. (See their full results here.)

• When I repeated CCDH’s tests, I saw even more harmful responses, probably because there’s a randomness to how AI generates content.

• [Orac note: Orac had a big grant deadline last week, explaining the lack of new material. This week, Orac is recharging his Tarial cells (i.e., is on vacation). There will likely be a new post or two, because blogging is his hobby, but no guarantees. Regular activity should resume in full next week.]

• Law enforcement agencies have long been engaged in the seizure of illicit drugs as part of the racist War on Drugs being waged for years.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• The Purdue team analyzed ChatGPT’s answers to 517 Stack Overflow questions to assess the correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and conciseness of ChatGPT’s answers. The US academics also conducted linguistic and sentiment analysis of the answers, and questioned a dozen volunteer participants on the results generated by the model.

• “Our analysis shows that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers are incorrect and 77 percent are verbose,” the team’s paper concluded. “Nonetheless, ChatGPT answers are still preferred 39.34 percent of the time due to their comprehensiveness and well-articulated language style.” Among the set of preferred ChatGPT answers, 77 percent were wrong.

• The researchers asked language models where they stand on various topics, such as feminism and democracy. They used the answers to plot them on a graph known as a political compass, and then tested whether retraining models on even more politically biased training data changed their behavior and ability to detect hate speech and misinformation (it did). The research is described in a peer-reviewed paper that won the best paper award at the Association for Computational Linguistics conference last month.

• As AI language models are rolled out into products and services used by millions of people, understanding their underlying political assumptions and biases could not be more important. That’s because they have the potential to cause real harm. A chatbot offering health-care advice might refuse to offer advice on abortion or contraception, or a customer service bot might start spewing offensive nonsense.

Windows TCO

• Actually, two things went badly wrong here. The first is that Azure accepted an expired signing key, implying a vulnerability in whatever is supposed to check key validity. The second is that this key was supposed to remain in the the system’s Hardware Security Module—and not be in software. This implies a really serious breach of good security practice. The fact that Microsoft has not been forthcoming about the details of what happened tell me that the details are really bad.

• They are not calling it a ransomware attack, and they are not naming the threat actors that have claimed responsibility at this time, but they note that there was no ransom demand.

• Targeting victims in English-speaking countries, as well as Bulgaria, China, and Vietnam, the gang uses a Yashma ransomware variant that downloads a ransomware note from an account dubbed “nguyenvietphat” on the code sharing platform Github, evading some endpoint detection and antivirus software, Cisco’s report finds.

• We have a response to that sort of thing: “Somebody must’ve messed that up.”

• It transpired that the corporate disk image, on which every single PC in the company was based, had Microsoft’s IIS web server enabled. That’s a bad idea and it wasn’t Bruce’s fault that it was running.

• Rhysida is a new ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group that has emerged since May 2023. The group drops an eponymous ransomware via phishing attacks and Cobalt Strike to breach targets’ networks and deploy their payloads. [...]

• Rhysida is a 64-bit Portable Executable (PE) Windows cryptographic ransomware application compiled using MINGW/GCC. In each sample analyzed, the application’s program name is set to Rhysida-0.1, suggesting the tool is in early stages of development. A notable characteristic of the tool is its plain-text strings revealing registry modification commands.

• DataBreaches called both entities when the listing appeared and emailed them again recently to ask whether they had been hit by Karakurt. Neither entity responded or posted anything on their respective websites about any breach.

Security

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Our local libraries, The Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System, issue pieces of plastic with barcodes printed on the back assigned to your borrower account. These cards are not strictly necessary in 2023; most everything at Seattle libraries is self-service, including circulation, and these self-service entrypoints usually have a way to type in a library barcode manually. But having the barcode is far more convenient, and I’d like to have it without having to keep yet another plastic card I rarely use in my wallet.

• So I put it on my phone, in my iPhone’s Wallet app. This became extremely silly extremely quickly, so I’ve decided to document it here for myself and others.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A shocking story of wrongful arrest in Detroit has renewed scrutiny of how facial recognition software is being deployed by police departments, despite major flaws in the technology. Porcha Woodruff was arrested in February when police showed up at her house accusing her of robbery and carjacking. Woodruff, who was eight months pregnant at the time, insisted she had nothing to do with the crime, but police detained her for 11 hours, during which time she had contractions. She was eventually released on a $100,000 bond before prosecutors dropped the case a month later, admitting that her arrest was based in part on a false facial recognition match. Woodruff is the sixth known person to be falsely accused of a crime because of facial recognition, and all six victims have been Black. “That’s not an accident,” says Dorothy Roberts, director of the University of Pennsylvania Program on Race, Science and Society, who says new technology often reflects societal biases when built atop flawed systems. “Racism gets embedded into the technologies.”

• If you’re scratching your head at this point, we don’t blame you. This is pretty abstract! We’ll unpack it a little below – and then we’ll explain why this is a bad idea that Google should not pursue.

• But first…

• When your web browser connects to a web server, it automatically sends a description of your device and browser, something like, “This session is coming from a Google Pixel 4, using Chrome version 116.0.5845.61.” The server on the other end of that connection can request even more detailed information, like a list of which fonts are installed on your device, how big its screen is, and more.

• Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 5.0 or later to 5.16.

• The company was founded back in 2003 by well-known technology investor Peter Thiel, along with Joe Lonsdale and Karp. It sells data analytics software and services, primarily to government agencies, including the Defense Department, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and several intelligence agencies.

• Luckily, we have someone I’d consider the Worldcoin expert on staff here at MIT Technology Review. Last year investigative reporter Eileen Guo, with freelancer Adi Renaldi, dug into the company and found that Worldcoin’s operations were far from living up to its lofty goals and that it was collecting sensitive biometric data from many vulnerable people in exchange for cash.

• [...]

• What’s more, the company was using test users’ sensitive, but anonymized, data to train artificial intelligence models, but Eileen and Adi found that individuals did not know their data was being used that way.

• “They’re asking us to believe them, to trust them,” said Andrew Bailey, a [cryptocurrency] expert at Yale-NUS College, a collaboration of Yale University and the National University of Singapore. “I don’t think I should have to trust anyone like that when it comes to sensitive information.”

• Zoom updated its Terms of Service on Monday after a controversy over the company’s policies about training AI on user data. Although the policy literally says that Zoom reserves the right to train AI on your calls without your explicit permission, the Terms of Service now include an additional line which says, essentially, we promise not to do that.

• On Sunday, people started posting screenshots of a portion of Zoom’s terms of use that states users consent to the company’s use, collection, and storage of “service generated data” for any purpose, including for “training and tuning of algorithms and models.” The TOS defines this data as telemetry, product usage data, diagnostic data, and “similar content.”

• Another portion of Zoom’s TOS states that users grant the service the right to use “customer content” (i.e., content generated by users) for the purposes of “machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing,” among many other uses.

• Meta Platforms, previously known as Facebook, is set to be fined 1 million crowns (USD 98,500) per day by Norway’s data protection authority, Datatilsynet.

• The fine is slated to commence on 14 August, following the company’s failure to address identified privacy breaches. Datatilsynet had initially cautioned Meta about privacy concerns on 17 July and provided the company until 4 August to rectify the issues at hand. The regulator’s key concern pertains to Meta’s practice of harvesting user data, including physical locations, to facilitate targeted advertising.

• Worldcoin has no problem attracting eyeballs. More than 2.2 million people have signed up, getting their irises scanned in exchange for a digital ID and, in some countries, free [cryptocurency].

• Facebook owner Meta Platforms will be fined 1 million crowns ($98,500) per day over privacy breaches from Aug. 14, Norway’s data protection authority told Reuters on Monday, a decision that could have wider European implications.

• The regulator, Datatilsynet, had said on July 17 that the company would be fined if it did not address privacy breaches the regulator had identified.

• In 2014, NYC officials decided to replace the city’s dated pay phones with “information kiosks” providing free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging, and a tablet for access to city services, maps and directions. The kiosks were to be funded by “context-aware” ads based on a variety of data collected from kiosk users and NYC residents just passing by.

Defence/Aggression

• France has been hit harder by jihadism than any European state. The Mirail alone provided dozens to France’s Isis exodus – the largest contingent of any Western country. As with last month’s rioting, the allure of jihadism among some French Muslims was put down to socio-economic marginalisation and the rigid demands of laïcité (state secularism). France holds a special place in the jihadist imagination, which demands that it be targeted for both atrocities and recruitment. The movement’s origins in Europe stem in large part from the overspill of Algeria’s bloody civil war, while Andrew Hussey notes how the former al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri loathed France both for the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and for providing Israel’s nuclear reactor. Later, in 2016, the official Isis spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, instructed followers to kill the “spiteful and filthy French” however they could.

• For European jihadists, France is the country that most closely resembles all they reject: the birthplace of enlightenment ideas, the home of secularism. For some, the objections are a matter of moral taste: it is a land of seduction, of bon vivants, a place where pornstars become celebrities and where breasts are visible from beaches to newsstands. Even the very personification of the Republic, Marianne, bears her flesh. It is no coincidence that the deadly attacks of November 2015 explicitly targeted places of life, enjoyment and mingling between sexes and creeds.

• I spent a month in Russia, a country almost as large as the United States and Canada combined, searching for clues that might explain its nationalist lurch into an unprovoked war and its mood more than 17 months into a conflict conceived as a lightning strike, only to become a lingering nightmare. The war, which has transformed the world as radically as 9/11 did, has now taken 200,000 lives since Feb. 24, 2022, roughly split between the two sides, American diplomats in Moscow estimate.

• TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, filed a suit in May seeking to block the first-of-its-kind U.S. state ban, arguing it violates the First Amendment free speech rights of the company and users.

• A hearing on TikTok’s request for a preliminary injunction is set for Oct. 12.

• Advances in artificial intelligence have tremendous potential to have positive impacts on science and health. Tools like ChatGPT are revolutionizing how society works and learns, and artificial intelligence applied to biology has led to solving the decade-old protein folding problem and is transforming drug discovery. However, as artificial intelligence raises the ceiling of biological engineering and helps distribute these powers to a tremendous number of individuals, there is a serious risk that it will enable ill-intentioned actors like Aum Shinrikyo, to potentially devastating effect. As I have discussed in a recent preprint paper, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, as well as novel AI-powered biological design tools, may significantly increase the risks from biological weapons and bioterrorism.

• The U.S. struck a similar tune as ECOWAS and the E.U., condemning Bazoum’s overthrow and calling for the restoration of Niger’s democracy while also suspending partnered activities with the Nigerien military. “We strongly condemn any effort to detain or subvert the functioning of Niger’s democratically elected government, led by President Bazoum,” said U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in a statement.

• But unlike ECOWAS and the E.U., the U.S. has neglected to call the overthrow a “coup” to avoid the legal ramifications of that declaration. According to Section 7008 of the annual Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, the U.S. is prohibited from sending foreign aid “to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup d’état or decree,” with an exception if the aid “is in the national security interest of the United States.”

• Two North Korean hacker groups had access to the internal systems of Russian missile and satellite developer NPO Mashinostoyeniya for five to six months, cyber security firm SentinelOne asserted on Monday. The attack illustrates potential North Korean efforts to advance development of missile and other military tech via cyber espionage.

• The [crackers] announced that the registry’s databases had been “destroyed” and that they’d gained access to “all the data on the places of residence and property of the inhabitants of the capital of the damned aggressor country that unleashed a war with a peaceful state.” “Information about civil servants, politicians, military and special services representatives supporting the war with Ukraine has been transferred to the Defense Forces of Ukraine,” the attackers claimed.

• Lithuania’s Christian Orthodox church, which is now subordinate to the Patriarchate of Moscow, has been criticised for allegedly supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an accusation rejected by the heads of the church.

• However, five priests have since been expelled from the organisation in what they said were reprisals due to their anti-war stance.

• Congress spent the last “military spending” debate rehashing the culture wars — not the nearly $1 trillion Pentagon budget itself.

War in Ukraine

• By studying the most recent Google Earth photos from Vagzhanovo, a major open-air military storage depot in Russia’s Buryatia, The Moscow Times has concluded that more than 40 percent of the tanks and other equipment stored at the depot before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have been taken out of storage.

• On March 20, Russian draftee Alexander Samoilov was found dead near the village of Chervonopopivka in the self-proclaimed “Luhansk People’s Republic” with rope marks on his neck. Earlier that month, after abandoning his post and getting drunk with other soldiers, he had been taken to a military commandant’s office and held captive there. In the days before his death, he repeatedly called his brother and said his superiors were threatening to kill him if he didn’t confess to a crime. The Russian media outlet People of Baikal recently told Samoilov’s story. Meduza has translated it into English.

• Zelensky administration advisor Mykhailo Podolyak said Monday that one of the most challenging issues at this weekend’s talks in Saudi Arabia was the fact that not all participating countries understand why the war can’t end until Russia is fully out of Ukraine’s territory.

• In the first seven months of 2023, the Russian authorities opened at least 82 criminal cases for treason, espionage, and “cooperation on a confidential basis,” according to journalists from the independent outlet Holod, who calculated the number of cases mentioned in open sources.

• In July, The Economist released an extended special report called “Battlefield Lessons,” authored by the publication’s defense editor, Shashank Joshi. Analyzing what makes the Ukraine war different from past wars, Joshi predicted that it would also have an effect on the warfare of the future. In an extended interview with Meduza, published in Russian, Shashank Joshi elaborates his insights from the special report, talking in-depth about the advantages and predicaments of the two clashing armies, which lessons from Ukraine could be adopted by NATO forces elsewhere, and why this might be far harder than it sounds. The original interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• So I went on this journey just from curiosity of some isolated island and left with confusion on why people put fake reviews on locations. Thankfully, discovering a few interesting people who travel to all corners of the world while doing so.

• 16 August 2023 will be the 30th anniversary of Debian. It is being promoted as Debian Day and it is also the anniversary of the Debian Day Volunteer Suicide. There has never been any independent inquiry into the death.

• [...]

• The rules of the US federal court system require that parties pro-actively file their evidence with the court. All documents filed in court become public records.

Environment

• Water is another key component of the manufacturing process and a finite resource that requires conservation. “As of last year, Intel has treated and returned to communities 107 per cent of the water that we use,” Zouain said. “We have also made significant progress on waste. Only 6 per cent of the waste generated by our global operations goes to the landfill; we aim get to zero waste to landfill by 2030.” This reduction has been driven by effective recycling, repurposing of materials and minimising Intel’s impact on the environment.

• On July 3 this year, the atmospheric CO2 in parts per million(ppm) was 419.3. The safe level is 350 ppm, and this was passed in 1990. The new level represents a 23.7 per cent increase in the past ten years. As a disappointed teacher would declare: “We’re not doing very well, are we?”

• Zoom out: Multiple economists told Axios that the long-term threat of climate change to food supply and consequences for costs of major crop commodities increasingly calls for deliberate climate mitigation and adaptation measures.

• Saturday’s event was astonishing because the water gushed so quickly, raising the river’s flows to about 1 1/2 times the highest previously recorded — so much that it washed away sensors that researchers had placed to study the glacial outburst phenomenon.

• “The flows were just way beyond what anything in the river could withstand,” Hood said.

Energy/Transportation

• A widely useful, easy-to-manufacture superconductor capable of running at normal temperatures would be an enormous breakthrough. Several commentators have compared it to the 1947 invention of the transistor, a technology without which the decades of subsequent progress in computing would not have been possible. Even if LK-99 itself is not that breakthrough, its emergence has revived public interest in superconducting generally, and serves as a useful reminder of how valuable progress in this area could be.

• Even as EVs promise a better climate, many people assume that these cars will just suck up energy until there’s nothing left, like giant appliances running all day long, causing power plants to work overtime to compensate. And once their batteries are charged, they can struggle under extreme temperatures. Scott Case, the CEO and co-founder of Recurrent, a start-up that delivers reports on battery health for EV buyers, notes that EVs can lose about 30 percent of their range when temperatures go over 100 degrees. “There’s no battery technology that’s going to change physics,” he told me.

• With this in mind, Texas is something of a bellwether for a future that many more of us will soon live in as our reliance on electric cars grows, all while temperatures skyrocket permanently upward. You can imagine the nightmare scenario: EVs become a drain on electric grids as the heat gets worse, contributing to widespread blackouts, and then their depleted batteries turn the cars into bricks on wheels. Such a dramatic future may not come to pass, but we will not be able to maintain the status quo: A more extreme climate, combined with the relative complexity of EVs, will require drivers to change their relationship to energy consumption in general, and car manufacturers to reconsider what they build and how.

Wildlife/Nature

Finance

• Dell Technologies will lay off some members from its sales teams as part of a new partner-driven market strategy. The company, however, did not confirm if these layoffs are part of or in addition to the 6,650 job cuts it announced earlier this year. Dell, however, confirmed that it “will cut jobs among its core sales teams as it adopts a new partner-led model that pays its direct sales force more to sell storage products through the channel,” reports CRN.

• “Some members of our sales team will leave the company. We don’t make these decisions lightly, and we’ll support those impacted as they transition to their next opportunity,” a Dell spokesperson was quoted as saying. “We’re always assessing our business to remain competitive and ensure we’re set up to deliver the best innovation, value and service to our customers and partners,” the spokesperson added. Microsoft Layoffs: Tech Giant Reportedly Lays Off 1,000 Employees, Mostly in Sales and Customer Service Teams in Fresh Round of Job Cuts.

• Two weeks after shuttering operations, freight company Yellow officially filed for bankruptcy on Monday.

• The closure of Yellow and the elimination of 30,000 jobs is a massive assault on the working class by Wall Street, escalating a wave of layoffs this year. This is the latest in the continuing jobs bloodbath by the corporate oligarchy, which has eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs.

• In the tech industry alone, nearly 225,000 jobs have been slashed so far. In January, Amazon announced that it would cut 18,000 jobs from its office staff followed by another 9,000 in March. Microsoft added to the carnage with 10,000 layoffs. Meta (the parent company of Facebook) announced another 10,000, and Google’s parent company Alphabet announced 12,000 job cuts. Dozens of other companies in the tech sector cut large portions of their staff.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• What started as the regional academic networking community with a mailing list of 26 contacts (the CCIRN Asia Pacific members), the APNIC of today serves 2.6 billion Internet users, more than half the global Internet. APNIC economies also comprise more than half the global IPv6 capability.

• Despite many changes in technology and policy worldwide, APNIC has remained committed to: “A global, open, stable, and secure Internet”.

• A group opposed to sports utility vehicles (SUVs) said its supporters have “destroyed” car tyres at a dealership in an “act of retaliation” after two young girls were killed in a crash at a school.

• The group, who call themselves Tyre Extinguishers, posted video online of the raid on the garage based in Exeter which said happened “after a Land Rover killed 2 innocent girls in Wimbledon in July”.

• They said on Twitter it was a kind of revenge for the deaths of Nuria Sajjad and Selena Lau, both eight, who were killed when a Land Rover crashed into them at Study Preparatory School in south west London last month.

• The Tyre Extinguishers claimed responsibility for drilling the tyres of 60 vehicles at Jaguar Exeter in Devon on Sunday night.

• In a post on Monday, the group said the move was an “act of retaliation” following the deaths of two eight-year-old girls after a Land Rover crashed through a fence at The Study Prep School in Wimbledon, south-west London last month.

• Given the large population in the UK of Pakistani origin, the lack of serious media coverage of the overthrow and incarceration of Imran Khan, and the mass imprisonment of his supporters, is truly extraordinary.

• The incident was only one in a litany of instances of generative AI spreading falsehoods, not to mention financial scams, nonconsensual porn, and more. Tech companies are marketing their AI products and potentially reaping enormous profits, with little accountability or legal oversight for the real-world damage those products can cause. The federal government is now trying to catch up.

• Zach Kirkhorn—chief financial officer of Tesla—is stepping down from his position as of Friday (Aug. 11). Vaibhav Taneja, the company’s chief accounting officer, is set to succeed him and will handle both roles simultaneously.

• Margaret Rose Bostelmann’s ideals are clear from one glance at her well-kept ranch-style house in central Wisconsin.

• A large American flag is mounted near the front door, and a “We Back the Badge” sign on her front lawn announces her support for law enforcement. Bostelmann, a Wisconsin elections commissioner, said she voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and added: “I will always vote Republican. I always have.”

• We look at the fight for reproductive rights in the United States with Dorothy Roberts, director of the University of Pennsylvania Program on Race, Science and Society, who has long warned against the criminalization of pregnancy and has been hailed as a pioneer in the reproductive justice movement. A judge in Texas ruled Friday the state’s abortion ban was too restrictive in cases of dangerous pregnancy complications, allowing doctors to perform abortions in such instances without risk of criminal prosecution, but the state’s Attorney General’s Office filed an immediate appeal and effectively blocked the order. This comes as Ohio voters head to the polls this week to vote on a ballot measure that could raise the threshold for changing the state’s constitution to 60%, an effort fueled by right-wing activists to prevent a simple majority of voters from enshrining abortion rights later this year. “We’re in a battle in this nation on this question of being free or being compelled to give birth,” says Roberts.

• The State of Montana vs. TikTok case escalates as two tech groups with backers, including major tech giants Google, Amazon, and Apple, weigh in. On Monday, two tech groups weighed in, backing TikTok in its lawsuit to prevent enforcement of a statewide ban on the short video-sharing app in Montana.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The Russian authorities have unveiled a new set of general history and Russian history textbooks for 10th and 11th graders. The books were presented at a press conference on Monday by Education Minister Sergey Kravtsov and Putin aide Vladimir Medinsky, who helped write them along with Anatoly Torkunov, the rector of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, as well as Alexander Chubaryan, the research supervisor of the Institute of General History at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The regime’s brutal crackdown on public demonstrators and dissent has seen thousands of people arrested, including journalists, lawyers, activists, digital rights defenders, and others voicing opposition to the government.

• The woman revealed that two policemen in plain clothes came to her house on June 28. They told her that a complaint had been filed against her for anti-government posts. She was eventually taken to the Ministry of Internal Affairs department in Krasnodar, where she was questioned for her social media posts.

• But now the library is under attack. Would-be censors were marshaled on Facebook by a young mother of two—and a onetime library worker in the nearby townlet of Prescott—named Jessica Ruffcorn. Motivated by religious and political objections to the content of certain books, Ruffcorn and her followers are demanding that the “offensive” materials be removed from the children’s section and placed on the highest shelves in the adult section, preferably with warning labels pasted onto their covers. The effort began with a hit list of a handful of books, which soon grew to a dozen. At last count, the number exceeded 100 volumes. According to a representative of Moms for Liberty, the group has no chapter in the area and is not involved in the campaign, but many of these titles have also been identified by Moms for Liberty as being particularly objectionable.

• A Moscow court has registered a lawsuit seeking to terminate the parental rights of Marina Ovsyannikova, the former employee of the Russian state TV network Channel one who ran on stage with an anti-war banner during a live broadcast in 2022.

• Under the proposed new law, journalists would face fines, rather than jail sentences, for defamation, and suspects would receive bail, Law Minister Anisul Huq said, according to news reports. Many sections of the Digital Security Act are likely to be incorporated in the new law, while sections that can be misused will be omitted, he said.

• The Basmanny district court in Moscow on August 7 sentenced writer Dmitry Glukhovsky to eight years in prison on a charge of discrediting the Russian military in his online posts condemning Moscow’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. [...]

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• “The use of lies takes place in a larger effort to turn the public against alternate sources of authority,” she said. Those sources might include independent courts, legislative bodies and law enforcement agencies. Or — it may be the fourth estate.

• “If you’re looking to see if somebody’s going to be a strongman, what you find is even when they start campaigning, they immediately start trying to turn the public against the press, saying [the press is] biased and that they are the truth teller against the establishment,” said Ben-Ghiat. As that leader’s supporters increasingly come to believe that he is the only source of truth, she said, they will be primed to believe his claims of a stolen election.

• De Vries’ killing was the most serious attack on journalist safety in a country where press freedom has long been taken for granted. In today’s Netherlands, journalists covering protests have been attacked by demonstrators – and occasionally detained by police — and face a torrent of online harassment. Combined with threats to crime reporters amid a rise in illegal drug trafficking, such incidents have dimmed the reputation of the Netherlands – along with other countries in the European Union – as one of the world’s safest places for journalists.

• On a fact-finding and advocacy mission to the Netherlands from June 26 to 30, CPJ met with journalists, press freedom advocates, experts, and government officials about ways to keep journalists safe in an increasingly hostile media climate.

• Key takeaways from CPJ’s visit: [...]

• The purchase, which closed on Monday 31 July, was followed by the departure of four senior US-based editorial staff: senior vice president of global news and entertainment Katie Drummond, Motherboard editor in chief Jason Koebler, executive editor Emanuel Maiberg and senior director of global news operations Matthew Schnipper.

• Private investment firm KKR has reached an agreement to acquire Simon & Schuster from parent company Paramount Global for $1.62 billion.

• A private equity firm’s acquisition will be viewed negatively by many who will be concerned that KKR will put profits over literature. Others, however, will see KKR’s as better than S&S being bought by one of its competitors. The government trial that blocked the PRH deal made clear that most industry members did not want S&S to be acquired by another member of the Big 5; HarperCollins, which bid for S&S when it was first placed up for sale, was also bidding for the publisher in the newest sale process.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Amazon hired at least two union-busting consulting firms specifically to prevent its drivers from joining the International Brotherhood of Teamsters over the course of 2022, according to six reports filed to the Department of Labor and obtained by Motherboard. This is notable because Amazon claims that the drivers who deliver its packages are not its employees.

• “We have a promise to the FedEx workers. Nakliyat-İş union will not sign an agreement which is not approved by 80 percent of the workers. We will go on strike. It is not our aim to go on strike. Our aim is to get decent sallary, ours is a class struggle,” he said.

• University of Michigan officials have informed graduate student instructors and graduate student staff assistants that employees who participate in a strike this fall will be subject to replacement for the entire semester.

• Graduate employees engaged in the work stoppage also will “likely be removed from the system as a course instructor and will lose access to the Canvas site(s) for the course,” according to an email message from Provost Laurie McCauley sent Aug. 7.

• The message, sent as the university readies for the start of the fall term in three weeks, comes amid an ongoing contract dispute with the Graduate Employees’ Organization, the union representing GSIs and GSSAs. The union’s prior contract expired on May 3.

• Oh, the irony of the remote work company asking its employees to return to the office. Had the notice been fictionalized for a novel about the post-pandemic culture wars, critics would certainly call its satire a touch heavy-handed. If your company wants to power the remote-work revolution, shouldn’t it lead by example? Perhaps Zoom’s executives—and the other Big Tech bosses building products for this age of work—don’t believe in it themselves.

• This is the third case in Detroit in which an African-American has been falsely arrested after police used the highly controversial technology. Although all the cases expose a serious flaw in policing, this one is perhaps the most concerning. The woman, Porcha Woodruff, a mother of three and a licensed aesthetician and nursing school student, was eight months pregnant when cops showed up at her door in February to tell her she was being taken to the station on a charge of robbery and carjacking.

• This is a class war and don’t ever let anybody tell you differently.

• Hundreds of workers rallied on Thursday.

• Employees have been picketing since Wednesday calling for their wages to keep up with inflation.

• We want a livable wage.

• In interviews with CNN, officials who track cartels explained that although cash remains traffickers’ currency of choice, [cryptocurrency] has gained traction because, as IRS Cyber and Forensics Services head Jarod Koopman notes, it “eliminates the potential for hand-to-hand transactions.”

• In his latest encounter with reality – SAD! – America’s disgraced, lying, multiple-indicted “perpetual defendant” was charged in a 4th jurisdiction with a 4th grievous crime of trying to overthrow democracy. Astoundingly, he’s still whining and criming: Sack the judge, move the trial, attack the four prosecutors (coincidentally, 3 of them black) doing their jobs. But belated accountability looms. Former Capitol cop Mike Fanone: “Donald Trump spent his entire lifetime fucking around and he’s about to find out.”

• The family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black cancer patient whose cells were taken by Johns Hopkins University Hospital without her consent in 1951, has reached a deal over the unethical use of her cells with pharmaceutical company Thermo Fisher Scientific. Henrietta Lacks’s family has denounced the racist medical system that allowed the biotech company to make billions in profit from the “HeLa” cell line, which helped produce remedies for multiple diseases, including the first polio vaccine. Details of the settlement were not made public, but the plaintiffs celebrated the lawsuit’s resolution last Tuesday, on Henrietta Lack’s birthday. For more on the case and the history of medical racism in the United States, we speak with Dorothy Roberts, director of the University of Pennsylvania Program on Race, Science and Society. She is the author of several books, including Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. “What happened to Henrietta Lacks didn’t just happen to her. It’s part of a long history of experimentation and exploitation of Black people in biomedical research,” says Roberts.

• We speak with acclaimed scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw about her new book #SayHerName, which honors the stories of 177 Black women and girls killed by police between 1975 and 2022 whose deaths received little media coverage or other attention. “We can’t give these women back to their families, but we can make sure that they are not lost to history,” Crenshaw tells Democracy Now! She also discusses the ongoing right-wing “attack on Black knowledge,” such as Florida’s new education curriculum that claims slavery had “personal benefit” for enslaved people, as well as the recent death of civil rights scholar Charles Ogletree.

• The Conversation Editor’s note: This article contains plot spoilers for “Barbie.”

• Is ‘Barbie’ the female empowerment movie the culture needed? Or does it convey a pseudo-feminist, reductive message for young women? Or is it conservative??

• Around 2 a.m. on July 31, Minnesota State Patrol trooper Ryan Londregan fatally shot Ricky Cobb II…

• There are no incentives in place to encourage accurate reporting of force deployment by law enforcement agencies. Tracking use of force means agencies are basically generating evidence for civil rights lawsuits. That’s why force reporting is, at best, inconsistent.

• There’s nothing particularly novel when it comes to showrunners of media properties blaming all these damned kids and their internet for why their productions aren’t as successful as they wanted. Everything from broadway productions to viewership of the damned Olympics have had young people and social media blamed for declining or terrible viewership/attendance numbers. In nearly every case where you dig into this, however, you find that this blame game is exactly that. Sometimes the product just sucks, or the proper marketing hasn’t been undertaken, or the product just sucks, or you’ve misjudged what the audience wants, or the product just sucks.

• Cops really hate policing protests that target police. But that has been the reality since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin ripped the bandage off an unhealed wound by placing his knee on the neck of unarmed black man George Floyd, choking the life out of him during an act that played out like an anthropomorphized version of systemic racism.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Centrality and fragmentation appear to be two completely opposite problems – and yet today’s Internet seems to be in danger of both at the same time. In this guest post, Geoff Huston shares his views on this apparently contradictory state of affairs.

• WEI criticism: The Brave browser team has added its voice in opposition to Google’s proposed Web Environment Integrity (WEI) standard, likened to a Web DRM. It adds to criticism from Vilvaldi and Mozilla.

• Cable executives spent years denying that “cord cutting” (ditching traditional TV) was real. For years they insisted it was a “fiction,” or that it was a fad that would end once Millennials started procreating. Whatever gave them permission to not meaningfully evolve their often predatory, anti-competitive business strategies.

• Well this is dumb.

• Arkady Volozh, a co-founder and former CEO of the now-divided IT giant Yandex, has updated his entrepreneurial biography — and Russia is vanishing from his story.

Monopolies

• CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a closed-source low-level API that interfaces software with NVIDIA GPUs.

• CUDA is a major moat for NVIDIA. It’s part of why NVIDIA GPUs command such a premium over other hardware (and are perpetually in short supply).

• A few reasons why the monopoly exists: [...]

• The European Commission said today it’s opening a full-scale investigation into Adobe Inc.’s proposed $20 billion acquisition of Figma Inc., a provider of cloud-based design tools.

• According to the European Commission, a preliminary review of the deal triggered major concerns that it could significantly reduce competition in the global market for interactive product design tools, and also shut out competitors.

Trademarks

• There’s an interesting thing that happens all too often in trademark cases, whereby people seem to flip the underlying argument. We see it in cases where someone opposes the registration of a certain trademark, and the party seeking the trademark complains that the government is trying to “censor” them or limit their speech, when more accurately granting the trademark is more likely to limit everyone else’s speech.

Copyrights

• Another faction within academia sees generative AI as an enemy. In the age of large language models, a student’s writing assignment can no longer reliably confirm whether they’ve understood a topic or read a text. Weekly reading responses and discussion posts, once a staple of higher education, seem useless. Some instructors are trying to adopt countermeasures. One SUNY Buffalo faculty member told Kelly Ahuna that he would keep his weekly online quizzes but employ technology that tracks students’ eye movements to detect potential cheating. Others seem to hope that prohibition alone can preserve the familiar pre-ChatGPT world. Most instructors at Bryn Mawr College have declared that any use of AI tools counts as plagiarism, says Carlee Warfield, the head of the school’s honor board. Darren Hick, a philosophy professor at Furman University, told me he refuses to abandon take-home essays. In his view, in-person exams aren’t real philosophy. They leave no time for rumination and serious engagement with a thinker’s work. “It’s gimmicky,” Hick said. “My pedagogy is good, my students learn, and I don’t like the idea of having to upend what’s been a tradition in philosophy for millennia because somebody has a new technology that students can use to cheat.”

• Each month throughout 2023, we will be spotlighting a different CC-licensed illustration from the collection on our social media headers and the CC blog. For August, we’re excited to showcase “Sharing Is Growing” by Olga Mrozek. The piece, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, was inspired by a quote from Medhavi Gandhi, founder of The Heritage Lab:

• In a period of less than nine months, Google received requests to remove over a billion links to pirate sites from its search engine. This is a significant increase compared to recent years, but not necessarily a new trend. More than a quarter of all reported links, relating to a single website, were sent by MindGeek, the parent company of PornHub.

• Following a report last week that UK broadcaster Sky had obtained a High Court piracy-blocking order, it transpires that the Premier League obtained a similar order just days later. The orders are yet to appear in public, but we’re informed that the Premier League will be able to block pirate IPTV services during the 2023/2024 and 2024/2025 seasons. Interestingly, the Sky order seems to cover a much shorter period but does identify six pirate IPTV services by name.

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