● 08.09.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 09/08/2023: New NVIDIA Driver and GNU/Linux Market Growth

Posted in News Roundup at 9:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA GPU owners may want to go and grab some updates as driver 535.98 is out now. This is a pretty small release for their Production Branch, which is suitable for everyone to install and use containing a bunch of needed bug fixes.

Instructionals/Technical

• While the Raspberry Pi does not support receiving Wake-on-LAN packets, it is more than capable of sending them.

• There are various ways you can utilize this functionality. In our network, we have a Raspberry Pi set up to power back on a NAS after a power outage has occurred. While both are plugged into a UPS, it allows the more power-hungry NAS to safely shut down and be powered back on when everything is safe.

• In this post, we will look at some hands-on experiments that demonstrate the various Emacs commands that can be used to sort lines in different ways. The Emacs documentation about sorting text is available at GNU Emacs Manual: Sorting Text. From within Emacs, this documentation can be reached by typing M-: (info “(emacs) Sorting”) RET. This post here is going to focus on a subset of the commands documented there along with examples that illustrate the behaviour of these commands. After following the 12 experiments presented below, you should get a fairly concrete idea about how the various sorting commands function.

• Needless to say, building a package manager is not an easy task. In fact, Sam Boyer has written a great article about the problems involved. So I won’t going to dwell on it.

• This article explains the design choices and implementation details that allowed me to actually build a working package manager in a couple of weeks (mostly evenings and nights, to be honest). I tried to leave out most of the SQLite specifics, so hopefully you can apply this approach to any package manager should you decide to build one.

• As I discussed in Part 1 I’ve converted this site over to pure IPv6. Well at least as pure as I could get away with. I still have some problems though, chief among them that I cannot send emails with the Ghost CMS. I’ve switched from Mailgun to Scaleway which does have IPv6 for their SMTP service.

• FreeCAD is a 2D and 3D computer aided design software for architectural, mechanical and technical drawings. Today, FreeCAD is used by architects to draw house/building, manufacturers to produce parts with CNC machines, as well as hobbyists to create things with 3D printers. It is licensed under GNU LGPL license and available gratis on Ubuntu.

Games

• Linux has surpassed macOS as the second-most used operating system on Steam according to the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey from July. While Linux remains a distant second place to top dog Windows, it’s still seen a rapid increase in adoption among Steam users almost entirely attributable to the Linux-based Steam Deck.

• As Ars Technica points out, the Deck’s SteamOS version of Linux accounts for a whopping 42% of reported Linux users on Steam, with Arch Linux lagging far behind in second place at 7.94% adoption. Windows still absolutely dominates the overall field at 96.21% of users, with all versions of Linux at 1.96% and macOS hanging out down at 1.84%.

• Return to Part 1: Dumpster Diving

• The summer season is coming to an end; students are heading back to school and tech deals are popping up from left to right. Capcom has seen fit to get in on the season with the Capcom End of Summer Steam Sale. With platforming legends like Mega Man and entire Arcade Collections receiving deep discounts.

• UPDATE 18:15 UTC: this is now official see the latest article.

• Oh hell! Time for another few runs then I think. Jupiter Hell, one of my favourite roguelikes with seriously slick movement design now has modding support. ChaosForge team, the developer of Jupiter Hell, gained recognition for creating Doom, the Roguelike (known also as DRL.) They built the Jupiter Hell as a spiritual successor to DRL.

• Taking a look at the most-played games on Steam by player-count, here’s how many of them should be playable on Steam Deck and desktop Linux. Checking via the Steam Deck Verified rating (either Verified or Playable), and then the ProtonDB / Linux Native rating for desktop Linux.

• After it was leaked a bit too early, Valve have now confirmed and put up all three Steam Deck models to buy refurbished direct from the Steam store. On the official main Steam Deck website, if you scroll down a bit there’s a new link leading to the Valve Certified Refurbished Steam Deck page where you can order one.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In an era where remote work has become the norm and the need for seamless remote computer control has intensified, the KDE development team has devised a solution for modern desktops and display server Wayland.

• Enter KRdp, the cutting-edge RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) library designed to revolutionize remote control of Plasma Wayland sessions. With an innovative approach leveraging existing technologies and focusing on performance, KRdp is poised to reshape how we interact with our remote computers.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Debian Family

• I totally missed news that Debian has made RISC-V a supported architecture – and somewhat selfishly I’m hoping some of you missed it to so this post isn’t so late it’s moot!

• Debian 13 “Trixie” will be the first version of the Linux distro to officially support 64-bit RISC-V hardware. That “officially” is an important qualifier; while it’s already possible to run Debian on RISC-V hardware those efforts have hitherto been “ports”.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• You might remember us covering last year that Rhino Linux would be the successor of the now-defunct ‘Rolling Rhino Remix’.

• After much waiting, its first stable release is here!

• Let’s dig in and see what Rhino Linux has to offer.

Devices/Embedded

• I really don’t like the fact that my oven connects to China and Russia just to check if it has an internet connection. If that is the only thing it’s doing.

• The support department isn’t very helpful as well, they have no clue what I’m talking about and refuse any help. Probably because there isn’t a hardware malfunction.

• But for the average consumer, replacing an electrical system is a lot more daunting than swapping out a thermostat. So how should the average person think about making their energy infrastructure smart?

• Mixtile recently announced that their Core 3588E SO-DIMM Rockchip-based modules are available to preorder with an 18% discount for a limited time. This embedded device can be configured with up to 16GB RAM + 128GB eMMC and it’s compatible with the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 NX carrier boards.

Open Hardware/Modding

• For anyone unfamiliar, a lathe usually has a chain of gears linking the spindle/chuck to the lead screw that drives the carriage backwards and forwards along the bed. The gears can be changed to alter how far the carriage moves for each rotation of the spindle. For example, to cut the thread on an M6 screw, the gears would be setup so that the carriage moves 1mm for each rotation.

• I have successfully avoided sound programming for all my programming life. Even when I tried making games, sound was always an afterthought. However, recently I got a new pair of headphones, and wondered: “what makes sound good?”, or “how much of the quality can be improved by hardware?”, and even “what is the structure of a sound file?”. If you’re looking for answers to all these questions — sorry, you are in the wrong place. I don’t have them (yet). But I can offer something equally fun: make your computer play a note by writing less than 100 lines of C code.

• NUT stands for Network UPS Tool and allows a device like your Raspberry Pi to communicate with a UPS and monitor it.

• Best of all, NUT lets you broadcast UPS information to other NUT clients. This server functionality allows other systems to access your UPS information and react accordingly.

• Zakariya dedicated nearly a full term (three months) of extracurricular activity time to achieving this remarkable success. Countless hours were spent searching through bins and thrift stores for discarded items. The team’s determination and keen eye meant that they could identify speakers that were still in working condition, despite being discarded by others.

• What if I told you that you might never need to draw a new footprint again? Such is my friend’s impression of the tool that she’s shown me and I’m about to show you in turn, having used this tool for a few projects, I can’t really disagree!

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• For the firs time ever, I am going to present a single, very long, video class with the title shown above.

• This session will be streamed and recorded live on August 31, starting at 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST, 09:00 PDT) and is expected to take about two and a half hours. Due to many uncertainties, the stream might of course be longer even if the end recording might get edited down a little.

Mozilla

• To keep things ticking over nicely a scheduled update to the open source email client is rolling out. The update brings a bunch of bug fixes to bear, plus a couple of minor UI tweaks.

• Thunderbird 115.1 hides the Quick Filter bar by default. I think this gives the e-mail client (in whatever layout you’re using) a sleeker presentation. Still it’s only hidden by default not removed; the Quick Filter bar is still included and you can show/hide it with a mouse click or a key press.

Education

• Flying somewhere high above the earth is a small satellite that, for the next week, will be target #1 for five teams of hackers at this year’s DEF CON conference.

• The annual Hack-A-Sat capture the flag (CTF) competition held at Aerospace Village at the annual DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas is the first time an on-orbit satellite will test contestants mettle while bringing together hackers who don’t typically work on space systems.

Licensing / Legal

• The AI and quantum spin-out from Alphabet uses the Sandwich framework for the Cryptoservice module in its SandboxAQ Security Suite, currently used by several U.S. government agencies, global banks, telcos, and tech companies. The framework is designed to simplify cryptography management and give developers greater observability and control.

• “Modern cryptography management and cryptographic agility are becoming increasingly more essential for businesses of all sizes; however, there has been a distinct lack of open-source tools for developers to support these features,” Graham Steel, head of product for the company’s Quantum Security Group, said in a statement.

Programming/Development

• [Hugo Leisink] is a programmer who contributes to Open Source projects. In their spare time, they have been developing a web-browser-based operating system called Orb. It is available for the princely sum of zero cheeseburgers and doesn’t need a high-spec machine to run smoothly. The project is built using PHP and Javascript, which allows it to run efficiently on most desktop devices. There are a number of apps included, which are again written in a combination of PHP and js, together with a few written using webasm.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• I think there are two parts to getting comfortable: motivation and resources. I’ll start with a couple of motivations and then list some resources.

• a “killer app”

• A few people mentioned a “killer command line app” that motivated them to start spending more time on the command line. For example: [...]

Leftovers

• Service level indicator guides the optimization. Valid scopes that optimization.

• In both cases, the flare emerged from the same sunspot, cataloged as region 3386. Although sunspots are not the same as flares, there is a relationship between the two solar phenomena. More sunspots mean “more activity and a higher probability of flares,” Consuelo Cid Tortuero, a senior scientist at the Spanish National Service of Space Meteorology, recently explained.

• Ever seen a restaurant where they display fake models of the food on the menu? We never thought much about how shokuhin sampuru — the Japanese name — were made until we watched [Process X]’s video showing a 71-year-old artist creating food models. We aren’t sure what we — or you — would do with this information, but it is a striking process, and there must be something you could do with it. We suggest turning on the English captions, but you’d probably enjoy watching the unusual craftsmanship even with no words.

Science

• An unexpected hybrid we never knew about.

• But the knife cuts both ways.

• On August 7, the Latvian Employers’ Confederation (LDDK) sent an invitation to the Ministry of Education and Science (IZM) to encourage changes related to tax incentives available to the employer to cover the higher education costs of the employee.

• We didn’t see this one coming.

• One day, this could help millions.

• Astronomers have found that free-floating planets far outnumber those bound to a host star.

• U.S. scientists at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced Sunday that they achieved net energy gain in a nuclear fusion reaction for a second time — this time a higher energy yield.

• And where to find them.

• The Moon isn’t as round as you think.

Education

• The Ministry of Education and Science (IZM) proposes to create a separate financial program, along with the reform of the school network, to support local governments and schools located at the external borders of the European Union, the IZM said in a statement on August 4.

• That pinged my brain super hard because I read a full biography on Claude Shannon a couple of years ago, and it went deep into his invention of information theory. Here’s the basic idea.

• The survey revealed that 49.3% of students in rural India have access to smartphones. However, among the parents whose children have access to gadgets, 76.7% stated that their children primarily use mobile phones to play video games.

• Of the students with access to gadgets, 56.6% used the devices for downloading and watching movies, while 47.3% used them to download and listen to music, the survey said. Only 34% use the gadgets for study downloads, and 18% accessed online learning via tutorials.

Hardware

• It’s 1,125 pounds. It’s been spraying pesticides and other chemicals over farms in Central and South America. And now, it’s coming to the U.S. That’s the Pyka Pelican Spray craft — and it just became the largest-ever, automated electric aircraft in the U.S. to receive Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) authorization for commercial operation.

• The cost of a drone light show certainly varies particularly based on the number of drones involved. At one point Intel sold drone light shows starting at $99,000, but easily topping $300,000 for shows involving more than 500 drones. Some smaller, independent companies charge less though. For example, Texas-based Verge Aero says its drone shows usually cost between $50,000 to $200,000 for a customized, outdoor drone light show.

• Polish YouTuber WorkshopFromScratch finally got fed up with tripping over piles of garden detritus and decided to have a go at building a woodchipper (Video, embedded below). Since they had a ‘small’ 1.5kW gearmotor just lying idle (as you do) it was an obvious fit for a machine that needs torque rather than supersonic speed. The video is a fabulous 20-minute journey through the workshop showing just about every conceivable metalworking tool being used at some point.

• [jgpeiro] is no slouch when it comes to building small, affordable oscilloscopes out of common microcontrollers. His most recent, based on an RP2040 with two channels that ran at 100 MSps, put it on the order of plenty of commercially-available oscilloscopes at this sample rate but at a fraction of the price. He wanted to improve on the design though, making a smaller unit with a greatly reduced bill-of-materials and with a more streamlined design, so he came up with this STM32-based oscilloscope.

• These days, you have a certain expectation for computer keys on a keyboard. Of course, there are variations and proponents of different mechanisms and noise levels. However, back in the late part of the 20th century, it was a different world. Computers came with a bewildering and sometimes befuddling array of keyboards. Since the IBM Selectric was the king of typewriters, we assumed the IBM PC keyboard would be spectacular, but it wasn’t. The PC Jr was even worse! Atari experimented with flat keyboards to save costs, and many computers had keys more reminiscent of calculator keys than you would imagine. The market voted. In general, a keyboard that wasn’t really a keyboard was the kiss of death for a computer. Case in point: the Commodore PET with its infamous chicklet keyboard, which gets a detailed examination in a recent post from [Norbert Landsteiner].

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Laure Fuerstenberg promised her husband, Leo, that he wouldn’t die in pain. But when his organs started failing, his hospice care providers were nowhere to be found. The on-duty nurse had muted her phone and missed 16 of Laure’s calls.

• It’s easy to get started at home.

• The bright spots on the map struck us like a lightning bolt.

• He is part of a small army of volunteer “river walkers,” who spend their days on the banks of Michigan’s most polluted rivers, warning anglers of the risks that come from eating contaminated fish and advising them on how to fish safely.

• “I believe that one of the things we can do is to educate people about things in the environment that can help protect their health,” Bridgforth said.

• In a state where industrial pollution has tainted the tissue of fish in waterways from metro Detroit to the Upper Peninsula, they have their work cut out for them.

• Legroom is a precious commodity, and airlines are aware of this. After all, there is a finite amount of space on planes. In order to get the maximum number of people on board, you have to either innovate — for instance, by designing slimmer seats — or you have to shrink the seat pitch. Airlines have done both. Plus, they now give you the option to spend some more money to upgrade for more legroom, allowing you (and your wallet) to choose how comfortable you want to be.

• At some point, I got fed up with Instagram. I couldn’t bring myself to care about any of it — about the filtered lives of celebrities or people I barely knew in high school. It’s a little amusing, but I thought I was doing the very smart, very adult thing by cutting down my screen time and moving on. Now I know that what I really wanted was just distance from my old self, the one that existed within the borders of those three-by-three-inch squares. She looked happy and healthy, blissfully ignorant of what was to come. And I couldn’t really remember what that felt like anymore.

• Med-PaLM 2 is based on Google’s large language model PaLM 2, and is fine-tuned on medical information. The system can generate written answers in response to medical queries, summarize documents, and retrieve data. Google introduced the model in April, and said a select group of Google Cloud customers were testing the software.

• One of those testers is VHC Health, a hospital in Virginia affiliated with the Mayo Clinic, according to Senator Warner. In a letter to Google chief Sundar Pichai, Warner said he was concerned that generative AI raises “complex new questions and risks” particularly when applied in the healthcare industry.Google, you’re not unleashing ‘unproven’ AI medical bots on hospital patients, yeah?

• At Idaho’s public universities, professors who teach, discuss, or write about abortion may now face up to 14 years of imprisonment under Idaho’s abortion censorship law, the No Public Funds for Abortion Act (NPFAA). The law, which prohibits the use of any public funds to “promote” or “counsel in favor of abortion,” has shut down academic inquiry about abortion — one of today’s most urgent social, moral, and political issues — across university classrooms and campuses in the state. Idaho’s abortion censorship law works in tandem with anti-abortion officials’ aggressive enforcement of the state’s abortion laws — among the harshest in the country — to silence speech advocating for abortion access.

• Violence prevention workers described feuds that started on Instagram, Snapchat and other platforms and erupted into real life with terrifying speed. “When I was young and I would get into an argument with somebody at school, the only people who knew about it were me and the people at school,” said James Timpson, a violence prevention worker in Baltimore. “Not right now. Five hundred people know about it before you even leave school. And then you got this big war going on.”

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Just weeks after the release of the Vatican’s official guide to AI ethics — a surprising project developed in collaboration with the very secular folks over at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics — Pope Francis is making his AI concerns clear once again, using this year’s World Peace Day to issue a call for AI responsibility and caution.

• A new site, Prosecraft.io offered to lend a helping hand to struggling writers, using AI algorithims to analyze the text of thousands of books from their favorite authors. On Monday, it was abruptly shutdown by its creator.

• It turns out — not surprisingly — that those authors never got a say in letting their copyrighted text get scraped wholesale, just to be graded on meaningless criteria like “vividness” and the use of passive voice.

• Robots.txt. You can use robots.txt to block GPTBot from accessing your website, or parts of it. To disallow GPTBot to access your site you can add GPTBot to your site’s robots.txt: [...]

• WormGPT, a private new chatbot service advertised as a way to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write malicious software without all the pesky prohibitions on such activity enforced by the likes of ChatGPT and Google Bard, has started adding restrictions of its own on how the service can be used. Faced with customers trying to use WormGPT to create ransomware and phishing scams, the 23-year-old Portuguese programmer who created the project now says his service is slowly morphing into “a more controlled environment.”

• After attracting a massive number of users out of the gate, Meta’s Threads has reportedly experienced a material community-size falloff. Meanwhile, more than a few commercially prominent artists have thus far decided against using the Twitter alternative.

• I do understand why so many people, especially creative folks, are worried about AI and how it’s used. The future is quite unknown, and things are changing very rapidly, at a pace that can feel out of control. However, when concern and worry about new technologies and how they may impact things morphs into mob-inspiring fear, dumb things happen. I would much rather that when we look at new things, we take a more realistic approach to them, and look at ways we can keep the good parts of what they provide, while looking for ways to mitigate the downsides.

Windows TCO

• Microsoft Corp. today issued software updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related products, including multiple zero-day vulnerabilities currently being exploited in the wild.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation is excited to announce that Software-Enabled Flash (SEF), an open source project, will be showcased at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) in San Jose, California. This marks a significant milestone in the evolution of flash cloud storage, offering hyperscalers unprecedented control over their flash-based storage capabilities.

Security

• EFF’s activists, technologists, and lawyers fight so you can use technology on your own terms. Wrongheaded tech policies endanger your rights to communicate privately and securely, and to express yourself creatively on the web. But you’ll help protect these rights for everyone when you become an EFF supporter.

• A series of patches has landed in the mainline kernel, including one for gather data sampling mitigation and one to disable the AVX extension on CPUs where microcode mitigation is not available. “”This is a *big* hammer. It is known to break buggy userspace that uses incomplete, buggy AVX enumeration.””

• Not to be left out, AMD processors suffer from a return-stack overflow vulnerability, again exploitable via speculative execution; this patch, also just merged, describes the problem and its mitigation.

• “When you have a vulnerability like this, essentially this software-hardware contract is broken, and the software can access physical memory inside the hardware that was supposed to be abstracted away from the user program,” Moghimi told CyberScoop in an interview. “It violates a lot of assumptions we make in general about operating system security.”

• The implications of the flaw are huge. Intel has likely sold billions of processors that include the vulnerability, which has existed since at least 2014. The flaw affects both personal and cloud computers, and the vulnerability can likely be used to break the isolation that ought to exist between data belonging to users on a cloud computing device.

• Downfall attacks targets a critical weakness found in billions of modern processors used in personal and cloud computers. This vulnerability, identified as CVE-2022-40982, enables a user to access and steal data from other users who share the same computer. For instance, a malicious app obtained from an app store could use the Downfall attack to steal sensitive information like passwords, encryption keys, and private data such as banking details, personal emails, and messages. Similarly, in cloud computing environments, a malicious customer could exploit the Downfall vulnerability to steal data and credentials from other customers who share the same cloud computer.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (libhtmlcleaner-java and thunderbird), Red Hat (dbus, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), SUSE (chromium, gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-base, gstreamer-plugins-good, gstreamer-plugins-ugly, kernel-firmware, libqt5-qtbase, libqt5-qtsvg, librsvg, pcre2, perl-Net-Netmask, qt6-base, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (firefox).

• Aqua Security on Tuesday reported that at least 60% of the Kubernetes clusters they researched were breached and had an active campaign with deployed malware and backdoors.

• In a release Aug. 8, Aqua Nautilus researchers explained that the exposures were caused by two misconfigurations, which emphasized how known and unknown misconfigurations are actively exploited in the wild and can have harmful consequences to corporate networks.

• Police in Northern Ireland have been involved in a data breach ‘of monumental proportions’ affecting thousands of officers and civilian staff.

• The major breach reportedly involves names, ranks and other personal data from employees of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), but does not involve the officers’ and civilians’ private addresses, it is understood.

• Containing the surnames of more than 10,000 staff, the data was mistakenly divulged in response to a Freedom of Information request and appears to cover everyone within the service, from chief constable Simon Byrne down.

• The listing indicates that the data were downloaded today and will be published on August 13 (presumably if there is no payment by then).

• DataBreaches sent an inquiry to Oregon Sports Medicine seeking confirmation or denial of the claims and additional information but no reply was received.

• SOCRadar has a recent article on 8Base, a group that has been around since 2022 but has seemingly become more publicly active in recent months. The Hacker News also provides coverage that includes links to a number of articles about the group.

• A new vulnerability in the PaperCut MF/NG print management software can be exploited for unauthenticated, remote code execution.

• CISA has unveiled its Cybersecurity Strategic Plan for the next 3 years, focusing on addressing immediate threats, hardening the terrain, and driving security.

• Colorado Department of Higher Education targeted in a ransomware attack that resulted in a data breach impacting many students and teachers.

• The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has issued a call to action to beef up security of a little-known but important piece of software that can be found in every computer.

• A top officer apologises for the breach affecting police and employees in Northern Ireland.

• Skidmap is a piece of crypto-miner detected by Trend Micro in September 2019 while it was targeting Linux machines. The malicious code used kernel-mode rootkits to evade detection, it differs from similar miners because of the way it loads malicious kernel modules.

• Trustwave researchers spotted a new, improved, and dangerous Skidmap variant, which was designed to target a wide range of Linux distributions, including Alibaba, Anolis, openEuler, EulerOS, Steam, CentOS, RedHat, and Rock.

• “The malicious nature of this malware is to adapt to the system on which it is executed,” Trustwave security researcher Radoslaw Zdonczyk said in an analysis published last week.

• InstallAware X16 launching on Friday this week builds packages 16 (sixteen) times faster using its new Parallel Build Engine, recompiles Windows setups for macOS and Linux.

• Mozilla VPN is a service offering security, reliability, and speed on every device, “everywhere you go.” However, if you use SUSE Linux, wherever you go there’s a dangerous security flaw in the service’s client putting everything at risk.

• For the past few months, the Linux version of the Mozilla VPN client has been affected by a dangerous security issue within the software’s authentication process. The bug could easily be exploited to do very nasty things with the system and users’ accounts, but Mozilla still has to provide a proper fix. The maximum embargo period of 90 days is over, so the developers have now disclosed the full details about the vulnerability.

• Mayanei Hayeshua Medical Center in Bnei Brak was hit by a cyberattack on Monday night, Israel’s Health Ministry announced on Tuesday morning. The hospital’s administrative computers were shut down in what was described as a ransomware attack.

• The ultra-Orthodox hospital, located east of Tel Aviv, said medical equipment was not affected by the attack and that patients are being treated. But the ministry instructed that the center’s outpatient clinics and imaging centers not accept patients and that the public not go to its emergency room until further notice.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Among other things, processing facial data would require an individual’s consent.

• Starting on September 1, 2023, the FSB will gain round-the-clock access to user data collected by Yango, a Yandex-owned ride-hailing and delivery app also operating under the brand name Yandex Go. The order that will give Russia’s secret police extraordinary new powers of surveillance has already been signed by the country’s prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin. It won’t be just the residents of Russia who come within the scope of surveillance, since Yango’s services are also available in Israel, Europe, and a number of other countries. Together with the Finnish journalist Jussi Konttinen, Meduza’s correspondents Svetlana Reiter and Denis Dmitriev investigated how Yandex plans to circumvent international data protection laws, and who will be affected most by its deepening cooperation with Russia’s system of mass surveillance.

• A U.S. judge rejected Google’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit claiming it invaded the privacy of millions of people by secretly tracking their internet use.

• U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on Monday said she could not find that users consented to letting Google collect information about what they viewed online because the Alphabet unit never explicitly told them it would.

• In response to a Freedom of Information (FoI) request, the PSNI had shared names of all police and civilian personnel, where they were based and their roles.

• The details were then published online, before being removed.

• Apologising to officers, Assistant Chief Constable Chris Todd said the error was “unacceptable”.

• This source data included the “surname, initial, the rank or grade, the location and the departments for each of our current employees across the police service”, he added, noting that every serving police officer and member of police staff’s data has been compromised.

• The details were accidentally published on the FoI directory, What Do They Know, for a period of time before being taken down.

• The spreadsheet in question contained standard statistical information on the strength of the PSNI, with details of how many officers it has at each rank.

• However, a second tab in the spreadsheet contained multiple entries in relation to more than 10,000 individuals. For each individual, there are 32 pieces of data meaning that in total, there are about 345,000 pieces of data in the file.

• The spreadsheet, which has been seen by the Belfast Telegraph after we were alerted to it by a relative of a serving officer, includes each officer’s service number, their status, their gender, their contract type, their last name and initials, details of how much of the week they work, and their rank.

• Finland’s Data Protection Ombudsman has ordered taxi service Yango, owned by Russian tech giant Yandex, to stop the transfer to and processing of personal customer data in Russia.

• The temporary order will enter into force on 1 September and will remain in force until the end of November, according to a release issued by the Ombudsman’s office on Tuesday.

• But Zoom is now facing new backlash over this policy, which surfaced over the past few days on social media. In response, Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer, wrote in a blog post on Aug. 7 that while the company retains the ability to manage its data and make changes to its systems “without questions of usage rights,” it won’t do so without user permission.

• Zoom promised to be transparent about how it trains its models on “service generated data,” but still insisted that it retains the rights to use the data any way it wishes. The company has also been unclear about what kind of user generated data it exerts these rights over. Zoom wants to have it both ways—reassuring users that they are in control while maintaining its rights in the fine print.

• The [intruders] accessed copies of voter registries which included the names and addresses of any U.K. voters registered between 2014 and 2022. The information accessed by the hackers also included email addresses among other information, potentially putting information associated with tens of millions people at risk. The agency noted that “much” of the data is already in the public domain, but that it “is possible however that this data could be combined with other data in the public domain, such as that which individuals choose to share themselves, to infer patterns of [behavior] or to identify and profile individuals.”

• When scrolling through Facebook or Instagram, users are automatically shown ads that the platforms’ algorithms think they’ll be interested in. This system only works thanks to the processing of huge amounts of personal data, which is supposed to increase the number of clicks on an ad. The problem is that, until now, users haven’t been asked for their consent. That could change. In a surprise announcement last Tuesday, Meta made the long overdue promise to finally ask its users for their consent before showing them behavioral ads – at least if they live in the European Union, EEA or Switzerland.

• According to Meta, the change is due to a new interpretation of the GDPR by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). Not only does this statement leave open what this supposed new interpretation is all about. It also fails to mention that Meta has been involved in a number of legal disputes over its advertising business in the past five years – resulting in multiple changes to the legal basis for its use of personal in the space of a year.

• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new feature through a Facebook post and on his Instagram channel. It will allow users to share documents, photos, and even their shopping cart with contacts on video calls.

• Universities answering this call to defend private access to an uncensored web will receive prizes while helping millions of people around the world and providing students and faculty a vital learning experience.

• “Journalists, political and social activists, attorneys, businesspeople, and other users all over the world rely on Tor for unfettered, unmonitored access to knowledge and communications,” EFF Senior Staff Technologist Cooper Quintin said. “Anonymous speech always has been a pillar of democratic society, letting us discuss anything without fear of retribution. And facilitating this discussion can be a great educational opportunity for students and faculty alike.”

• Made up of volunteer-run relays, the Tor network allows human rights defenders and organizations, at-risk communities, and people experiencing online censorship or government surveillance to browse the unrestricted internet with as much privacy and anonymity as possible. A Tor relay is a computer that’s a part of the anonymization process; a Tor bridge is a relay that’s not publicly listed, in order to circumvent censorship in countries that block IP addresses of known relays.

• In 2011, we launched our first Tor Challenge, which resulted in 549 new relays. By 2014, after we launched our second Tor Challenge, we had counted 1,635 new relays. This time around, we’re focusing on getting more Tor relays onto college campuses. Universities are especially well-suited for Tor relays because they often offer fast internet, have lots of technical expertise available (including professors, students, and IT teams), and value freedom of expression. Setting up a Tor relay on your college campus will help make Tor faster and better, because the more relays that exist, the better the experience of using Tor gets for everyone.

• Tor is a network and software package that consists of two parts: a web browser you can download to browse the internet, and a volunteer network of computers that make the Tor software work. Using Tor is as simple as downloading the Tor Browser (give it a try yourself, if you haven’t used Tor before, it’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux). Browsing the web is a little slower than you might be used to with Tor, but otherwise works exactly like any other web browser. The Tor Browser also gives you access to Tor onion sites—hidden websites that provide end-to-end encryption and anonymity—that help circumvent censorship. EFF, along with Certbot and our Surveillance Self-Defense guides, are all available as Tor onions.

• The second part is the volunteer-run network of computers that anonymizes web traffic. Tor protects your identity by hiding the source and destination of your internet traffic, which helps prevent anyone from knowing who you are or what you’re looking at. Tor does this by routing your web traffic through “relays,” which, like the name implies, receive the traffic and pass it along to the next relay. Anyone can run a Tor relay on just about any computer, but because relays need a lot of bandwidth, it’s not always easy (or possible) to do so. Universities often don’t have the sorts of bandwidth limitations the rest of us may contend with, so they’re a good fit for relays.

• Potential misuse of health data could lead to real harms in harassment, discrimination, and legal consequences for those seeking health services in California, including reproductive and gender affirming healthcare data. And if information is sold to local, state, or federal agencies, that puts our Fourth Amendment rights at risk.

• That’s why EFF is a proud supporter of S.B. 362, authored by California State Senator Josh Becker. It allows people to easily and efficiently make one request to delete their personal information held by all data brokers registered in California. It is also known as the California Delete Act and is sponsored by Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and Californians for Consumer Privacy. It will improve everyone’s privacy rights and make California’s consumer privacy laws more user-friendly.

• Californians have a right to request that companies delete information collected about them. But, logistically speaking, this is difficult. Because California’s privacy laws require people to file requests with each individual company that may have their information, it can be an incredibly time-consuming and tedious process. Furthermore, because data brokers buy, sell, and exchange information with so many companies (and each other), it’s very hard for anyone to know if a particular company has their information and how to make a deletion request.

Confidentiality

• Today we are almost three years into FIPS 140-3 submissions, and while we had a Covid shutdown during some of that time, it doesn’t explain why there have only been seven FIPS 140-3 validations as of last week, the last one nearly six months ago (chart below), and another 189 (and growing) in the validation process. I doubt the vendor community is so incompetent that they couldn’t comply with the minor changes required to get products validated. Add to this that both hardware and software FIPS 140-2 products are likely gone, as the last submission to FIPS 140-2 was March 2022 and those products likely reached end-of-life some time ago.

• Yes, the process will take several years, and you really don’t want to rush it. I wrote this last year: [...]

Defence/Aggression

• P.E. Moskowitz’s article “America’s Suburbs Are Breeding Grounds for Fascism” [June 26/July 3] is an insightful, if still disheartening, addition to the loudening discussions surrounding urban planning in the United States, especially concerning the suburbs.2

• The two tech groups contain many of the same corporate partners, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Airbnb, StubHub, Lyft, and Meta. Chamber of Progress also includes corporate partners like Chime, Circle, DoorDash, Grubhub, Instacart, and Uber. NetChoice contains association members like AOL, Etsy, Hotels.com, Nextdoor, Paypal, Snap, X (formerly Twitter), Yahoo, and TikTok.

• After Montana sought to ban the short-form video platform, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok filed a lawsuit in May in an effort to block the first-of-its-kind state ban under the pretense that it violates the First Amendment rights of the company and its users. A hearing on TikTok’s request for a preliminary injunction is set for October 12.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky charged Russian President Vladimir Putin with trying to “weaponize hunger.”

• African leaders pushed back against Putin more forcefully than ever before.

• “The decision by Russia to exit the Black Sea Grain Initiative is a stab in the back at global food security prices and disproportionately impacts countries in the Horn of Africa already impacted by drought,” Abraham Korir Sing’Oei, a senior foreign ministry official from Kenya, tweeted on July 17.

• Moore believes part of the problem is that “almost every part of American life is tribalized and factionalized,” and that has extended to the church.

• “I think if we’re going to get past the blood and soil sorts of nationalism or all of the other kinds of totalizing cultural identities, it’s going to require rethinking what the church is,” he told NPR.

• The EU Commission wants to conclude a migration defense agreement with Egypt and is upgrading the country’s land and sea borders. However, hardly any refugee boats leave from Egyptian shores for Europe.

• Corruption has been a long-standing challenge in Iran. Iranians have generally blamed foreign powers as the source of corruption in their society. During the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Qajar period, they saw corruption as a byproduct of the Great Game rivalry between the British and Russians to exact favors from the royal court, famously described in Morgan Shuster’s Strangling of Persia. Russophiles and Anglophiles in high places are said to have competed to advance the interest of their patrons and were rewarded for their service. Thereafter and until the 1979 revolution, the culprits became the United States and capitalist imperialism.

• Putting an end to foreign interests—as reflected in the slogan of esteghlal or “independence”—and creating a moral society were advocated as the primary motivations of the 1979 revolution. However, despite the dwindling foreign presence in the nascent Islamic Republic post-1979, which preached a more ethically centered society, corruption has reached new heights and has been ubiquitous from the first days of the regime. The ever-increasing amounts of money and elaborate schemes that routinely involve the closest regime insiders dwarf any pre-1979 reports of corruption.

• Two reports shed light on the growing connection between Islamic State group affiliates in Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

• For the first time, the United Nations Group of Experts on the DRC highlighted organizational links between the insurgents in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province and the Allied Democratic Forces terror group based in the eastern DRC.

• In “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story,” Viola Fletcher recalls the horrific night in 1921 when America’s “Black Wall Street” was burned to the ground.

• Manila summoned Beijing’s envoy Monday after the China Coast Guard blocked and water cannoned Philippine vessels in the disputed South China Sea, President Ferdinand Marcos said.

• The clash, in which a Chinese ship blocked 2 Philippine vessels, is the latest in a hotly contested region of the South China Sea.

• The two countries have been in a long-running dispute over the Second Thomas Shoal.

• Hacking spree described as ‘deep’ and ‘persistent,’ compromising East Asian ally that harbors US military bases.

• Two of the three hopefuls for the top office in ASEAN’s biggest country are pro-Beijing.

• Beijing, meanwhile, calls on Manila to stop using a rusted out WWII era ship as a military outpost.

• Xi Jinping, China’s leader, set out to clean up the military a decade ago. But now his crown jewel, the missile force, is under a shadow.

• The official U.S. bombing survey on what happened in Hiroshima 78 years ago today.

• The US and France have threatened intervention to re-install a pro-Western regime in Niger, which produces uranium needed for nuclear energy, has untapped oil reserves…

• Kursk regional governor Roman Starovoyt reported that a kamikaze drone crashed on the grounds of the Saint Nicholas Monastery in the village of Gornal in the Sudzhansky district.

• Three people were killed in Donetsk as a result of heavy shelling by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, reported the Russian-appointed head of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DNR) Denis Pushilin.

• Pakistani authorities have suspended an anti-polio drive in two volatile tribal districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province after several police officers refused to provide security to medical teams during the door-to-door vaccination campaign.

War in Ukraine and Russia

• A group of Lithuanian MPs have registered draft amendments allowing the courts to deregister or liquidate a religious organisation for national security reasons.

• 15 years ago, in August 2008, the Russian military entered into open conflict with Georgia. Moscow launched an offensive deep into the country before securing a favorable peace treaty and avoiding international isolation. Meduza’s special correspondent Andrey Pertsev spoke with officials who were part of Moscow’s “power vertical” at the time to learn how that invasion differed, in Russian elites’ view, from the invasion of Ukraine.

• I wake up every day thinking about nuclear weapons.

• The original plaque commemorating locals who were killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya has been removed from a monument located in Kuytun, a village outside of the Siberian city of Irkutsk.

• The first Leopard 1 tanks purchased from Belgium by an unknown country have been sent to Ukraine, reports Belgian publication Business AM.

• Exactly 15 years ago, in August 2008, Russia invaded Georgia — Russian troops took the side of the “self-proclaimed republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” which were not completely under Tbilisi’s de facto control. The conflict only lasted five days — the Russian army drove Georgian troops out of the republics, achieved a favorable truce, and avoided international isolation. Since then, there has been a so-called “Zone of Fear” on the border between Georgian-controlled territory and the territory of occupied South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where there are around 70 villages and ten thousand residents. At Meduza’s request, photographer Vitaly Malyshev traveled to the “Zone of Fear” with volunteers from the Georgian project Lifeline.ge to see what marks the 2008 war has left on the area.

• The authorities in Italy have stopped the Investor Visa for Italy program for Russian and Belarusian nationals. The program provides residence permits in Italy in exchange for investments in the country, writes Italian publication Alreconomia.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• They came to pay respects to a paratrooper and Special Forces officer who dared to challenge the Army on its soldiers’ sustained abuse of Iraqi and Afghan men in their custody. The ceremony also offered a morning for his family and supporters to reflect on what they regard as his unnecessary death while awaiting care from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Environment

• This is an overpopulation blog, but its authors have made it clear that overconsumption is a problem too, and that the two are, as it is often said, “two sides of the same coin”. Revisiting the helpful geometric metaphor: just as it doesn’t make sense to discuss whether height or width contributes more to the area of a rectangle, so it needs to be acknowledged that both per capita consumption and human numbers are important in determining total environmental impact. We can debate whether it would be preferrable to have a planet with more humans and a more modest average lifestyle, or the reverse; I have myself made on this blog the argument that countries can (and perhaps should) choose to strive for a lower long-term human population in order to enjoy a larger share of resources per capita. Other species need their fair share too, of course.

• Right now, however, the situation is so dire that we cannot afford to choose just one: both overall population and overall consumption need to go down – as quickly as possible – if humanity and the biosphere are to stand a chance at all.

• An increase in the illegal mining of rare earth metals in northern Myanmar is being driven by demand from neighboring China for terbium and dysprosium – elements that are used in the production of electric vehicles, area residents and environmental activists said.

• The practice is rampant in Kachin state, where successive governments have failed to regulate mining for gold, jade and other rare metals for generations. The number of unsanctioned operations ballooned after the military’s Feb. 1, 2021, takeover amid conflict between junta troops and armed resistance forces in the region.

• Instead, the joint declaration issued on Tuesday in the Brazilian city of Belem created an alliance for combating forest destruction, with countries left to pursue their own individual deforestation goals.

• The failure of the eight Amazon countries to agree on a pact to protect their own forests points to the larger, global difficulties at forging an agreement to combat climate change.

• Two other swimming events — a training session Friday and Saturday’s women’s race — had already been postponed due to water quality issues.

• The World Aquatics statement referenced plans by Paris Olympics organizers to improve water quality in the Seine in the leadup to next year’s Games.

Energy/Transportation

• The US-EU Trade & Technology Council must work to align climate efforts with geoeconomic goals and leverage new technologies to drive the green transition.

Wildlife/Nature

• Forest fragmentation is a big problem.

• Once it bites, it won’t let go until its meal is dead.

• The biggest hurdle in eradicating malaria is that the parasite is highly adaptable and resistant, and nascent vaccines are only partially effective. Genetically-engineered bacteria have long been touted as potential malaria-enders but they’re complex to develop.

Finance

• Blaze Ward’s latest Milestone Publishing Newsletter talks about the importance of owning your platform, as greatly as possible. I mostly agree with it, except for the part about moving to Shopify. They’re an external vendor, they will enshittify. I can do everything with Woocommerce and Bookfunnel that Shopify can do, and Woo’s open code makes it enshittification-resistant. I can replace Bookfunnel if need be.

• Between 15 and 29 May, 2.15 million euros were frozen or seized, 103 people were arrested, 1,110 suspects were identified and 208 bank accounts were blocked.

• When the FDIC put Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank…

• The economy has been hit by Brexit, Covid and the Ukraine war, a think tank says.

• Like many people, the news of Al’s Formal Wear shutting its doors unexpectedly was shocking, especially for the family whose father created the brand in Fort Worth.

• “I am very, very sad that the company is closing,” said Rebecca Sankary Bodzy, whose father Al Sankary started the business.

• Her father, who was born and raised in Fort Worth, started Al’s Formal Wear in 1952 on 311 Main St. in downtown Fort Worth.

• Employees of Al’s Formal Wear were left shocked and jobless after an emergency Microsoft Teams meeting on Saturday. During the meeting, they were informed that all stores would be closed immediately. Managers were instructed to notify customers to pick up any ready orders, and employees were told to remove their personal belongings from the stores.

• On Monday, the parent company of Al’s Formal Wear, Dapper & Dashing, sent an email confirming the layoffs and the permanent closure of the stores. Employees reported being locked out of the company email and computer system.

• Settling the ongoing dispute over its $1.2 billion term loan B (TLB) may prove to be more expensive for Byju’s. The distressed edtech major may have to cough up an additional $50-60 million to service the increased interest rate it has offered to finalise the new terms of the disputed TLB, sources who have apparently calculated the additional interest payout told ETtech.

• While slow growth has caused the rhetoric around Chinese economic reform to turn more practical throughout Q2 2023, concrete actions have been insufficient.

• Under pressure from Beijing, Chinese schools have been told to do more to secure jobs for students, who are facing bleak prospects.

• Emergent BioSolutions, the producer of the opioid overdose-combating nasal spray NARCAN, will cut 400 positions, the company announced Tuesday, while Tyson Foods announced plans to close four facilities, eliminating thousands of jobs—as employers continue to reduce their headcounts well into 2023 amid lingering recession fears (see Forbes’ layoff tracker from the first quarter here).

• Dell Technologies (Dell) is reducing the size of its core sales teams as the tech giant adopts a new partner-driven go-to market model.

• According to news outlets, including CRN, the new model will allow the company to pay its employees “more to sell storage products through the channel.”

• “We don’t make these decisions lightly, and we’ll support those impacted as they transition to their next opportunity,” a Dell spokesperson told CRN.

• San Francisco, August 8: 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.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The new channel draws together video shot by the company’s reporters around the UK.

• August 08, 2023 1:40 PM

• The state govt will restore and amend 1972 legislation to ensure protection of important sites.

• Ethnic violence in the state of Manipur stirs new demands for the safety and appreciation of women and girls.

• The Bulgarian National Assembly on August 7 approved changes in the Criminal Code and the law on protection from domestic violence following a shocking case of abuse against an 18-year-old woman that sparked mass protests.

• El Gomati is very concerned by how effectively the Kremlin — along with Islamist and radical right-wing extremists — is instrumentalizing Quran burnings to stir up anger and even violence against Sweden both in the Muslim world, and, he fears, perhaps among Muslims in Europe. “They feed on these events and they use them,” he warned. “If these events [are] not happening they don’t have material to tell people to go and bomb yourself in the middle of of Europe.”

• Last week’s decision to prosecute Donald Trump for trying to overturn the result of the 2020 US election reminded me of the dirty tricks in the FSFE election process. In 2017, the FSFE Fellows elected me as the Fellowship representative. The German candidate, Florian Snow, came third out of seven candidates. A few months later, Matthias Kirschner used his position as president to appoint Florian Snow as an unelected member of the General Assembly. In other words, Kirchner gave Snow all the same rights and powers as the person who had earned those rights at the ballot box.

• As the fallout from Bill C-18 continues, a coalition of Canadian media outlets – News Media Canada, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, and the CBC – have filed an application with the Competition Bureau seeking an inquiry into Meta’s decision to block news links in response to the bill’s mandated payments for links approach. There is unquestionably a need for greater competition work with respect to Internet platforms, but a case grounded in refusal to link is not the place to start. Indeed, this complaint is exceptionally weak as it misstates Bill C-18, implausibly claims that Meta has substantial control over the news industry in Canada, contradicts the government on the choices presented by its legislation, and risks creating a mandated requirement to link that could result in other sectors forcing platforms to display more contentious content.

• As a person who has an immigrant spouse (who entered the United States legally and has always been here legally), I have insights into the US Immigration System and what the Democrat and Republican position on the issue is.

• Nothing in the Clean Air Act forbids farmers and independent repair shops from making emissions and other repairs to agriculture equipment, EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a letter to the National Farmers Union on Aug. 4.

• Equipment manufacturers often say the Clean Air Act doesn’t allow farmers and independent repair shops to repair emissions equipment, raising concerns about liability for improper or even potentially dangerous repairs.

• Regan went a step further in telling the group the Clean Air Act actually encourages such repairs.

• Donald J. Trump has been trampling presidential precedents right and left as he slouches toward Washington. Among them: the first indicted candidate ever. Also: the first candidate who wants to be president so he can pardon himself.

• As Donald Trump continues to rack up criminal charges, there is ongoing interest in addressing the threat he poses to American democracy by seeking to keep him off the ballot. One possible means to this end that the prosecutorial choices of special counsel Jack Smith have seemingly foreclosed is to convict him of plotting an insurrection, which would trigger the 14th Amendment’s ban on letting those who “engage in insurrection or rebellion” hold public office.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The recent explosion of generative AI brings many potential benefits to society, but along with these come just as many risks.

• [...] The textbook contains a completely rewritten history from 1970 to 2000, reducing the general history section and expanding parts about Asia, Africa, and Latin America. [...]

Censorship/Free Speech

• The factual backstory (just a snippet), as summarized in the Post’s notice of removal to federal court: In its Complaint, Plaintiff asserts a claim for defamation and a claim for conspiracy to defame against the Post. Compl. at ¶¶ 21-32. Plaintiff operates a social media platform called “Truth Social.”

• US District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan dismissed former President Donald Trump’s counter-defamation suit against author E. Jean Carroll on Monday. Carroll has accused Trump of sexual assault, with a jury finding that Trump did sexually assault Carroll and defamed Carroll by accusing her of lying.

• Since August 7, numerous Russian Internet users have reported experiencing technical problems with VPN services. The issues have affected customers of mobile operators like MTS, MegaFon, Beeline, Tele2, Yota, and Tinkoff Mobile, while VPNs on fixed line providers like Rostelecom seem to be operating fine, according to the site SecurityLab.

• While I can comprehend the fact that Donald Trump has access to money (even if it’s unlikely he’s playing with house money at this point), I cannot understand how he hasn’t been reduced to a pro se litigant at this point. This man has a headful of bad legal ideas and somehow — despite his regular refusal to pay them for their services — still finds lawyers willing to advocate on his behalf.

• A federal judge on Monday threw out a counter defamation lawsuit former President Trump filed against writer E. Jean Carroll after she won her sexual abuse suit against him earlier this year.

• An injunction could mean the song is removed from online platforms to prevent the city’s residents from seeing it.

• The UtusanTV site could not be accessed by users in Malaysia since Monday morning.

• A Tibetan writer who wrote a book that criticized Chinese rule in Tibet has been released from prison after serving a four-year sentence for “creating disorder among the public,” a Tibetan source told Radio Free Asia.

• The mullahs’ maladministration over four decades has left Iran struggling with deforestation, desertification, water scarcity and countless other examples of environmental degradation. Climate change is exacerbating these environmental issues and turning them into a matter of life and death for the Iranian population, now 85 million strong.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• “Investigations indicate that over the past year more than 100 journalists have been arrested. Nevertheless, the flow of information continues uninhibited, always finding its way, much like water,” Montajabi said.

• “This dark era persists, with the system’s main agenda being the arrest, elimination, expulsion, and now the recent trend of exiling journalists,” Montajabi said.

• Liberty’s legal action also succeeded in arguing that the act’s regime for sharing bulk personal datasets with other states was unlawful under the European Convention on Human Rights, which the UK still follows despite Brexit.

• “I guess all of corporate book publishing is beholden to investors above all else but this really makes it blatant,” said one literary podcaster.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Hong Kong national security police have taken the parents of a wanted activist for questioning, marking the latest move in authorities’ investigation of eight overseas pro-democracy figures issued with arrest warrants and HK$1 million bounties. The parents of US-based Anna Kwok were taken to a police station on Tuesday morning, local media outlets reported.

• Young people in Asia don’t want to work in factories anymore, and that has implications for global consumers.

• Driving the news: The Wall Street Journal reports that Asia is having a big problem staffing its factories with younger workers.

• The purpose of an online declaration that called on candidates to endorse the five demands advocated in the 2019 extradition bill protests was to show “will for resistance,” a Hong Kong activist has said at a high-profile national security trial relating to 47 pro-democracy figures.

• Who’s considered a terrorist in the Philippines? The designation of activists and Indigenous leaders as “terrorist individuals” has sparked calls to revisit the country’s approach to domestic security.

• The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office and the Interior Ministry have issued official warnings about a new form of telephone fraud in which Russians are pressured or tricked into setting fire to military enlistment offices.

• In a significant departure from its previous stance on remote work, Zoom, the trailblazing video communications company, has directed its workforce to return to the office. Once hailed for championing remote work during the pandemic, Zoom’s latest move raises questions about the sustainability of remote work and echoes a broader industry trend towards re-establishing in-person work environments.

• This keeps coming up in different contexts, so I thought I might write a short (ha, as if I can write short things!) blog post that I can point to on various occasions. I spend a lot of time here on Techdirt highlighting why your favorite solution to (*waves hands*) some big societal problem won’t work, and will probably make things worse.

• Union spokesman Amir Fleishmann called it an “underhanded” tactic.

• “We feel confident that it is not going to work,” he told The Detroit News. “Our members are not going to be scared by these threats the university continues to make.”

• It is the latest salvo in a labor dispute that’s been ongoing since a strike by the Graduate Employees’ Organization began in March, near the end of spring term. The union negotiates on behalf of more than 2,000 members, though not all walked off the job.

• Fall classes begin Aug. 28.

• The University of Michigan is threatening to replace 2,300 graduate student instructors and staff assistants who continue to strike when the fall semester begins later this month.

• In an email sent Monday to graduate student instructors and graduate student staff assistants, Provost Laurie McCauley wrote that student employees who participate in the work stoppage will be subject to losing their post for the entire fall semester.

• Workers told Motherboard that the policy was first announced on Thursday, during a previously scheduled all-hands meeting, and that it was the first time they had heard from management since the unionization was announced.

• “We announced our union on July 20 and then we heard literally nothing from Grindr management until Thursday, when they announced that we all had two weeks to decide whether we were going to move across the country or get fired,” said Quinn McGee, a trust and safety product manager and organizer at Grindr United CWA. “As soon as George [Arison, Grindr’s CEO] stopped talking, one of my colleagues began to ask a question about all of us suddenly having to uproot our lives—and they cut the call.”

• In May last year, a trial court had barred [PDF] the claim that the SaaS provider benefited from Backpage.com’s venture that it knew, or should have known, was engaged in illegal sex trafficking.

• Over the course of the past 12-18 months, mainstream media has been reporting a tension between employers and paid workers over appropriate attitudes. Employers insists there must be in-office time spent with colleagues to ensure productivity and robust teams. The response from workers has run a spectrum between the Great Resistance and what the Huffington Post christened the Great Regret. The BBC suggests that flexible remote-work arrangements are a key job benefit to the workforce. Most recently in June, a new book from Princeton University Press refocused attention on Thoreau’s consideration of earning one’s livelihood and what makes the effort worthwhile.

• Zoom, the video conferencing pioneer, is asking employees who live within a 50-mile radius of its offices to work onsite two days a week, a company spokesperson confirmed in an email. The statement said the company has decided that “a structured hybrid approach – meaning employees that live near an office need to be onsite two days a week to interact with their teams – is most effective for Zoom.”

• “Three years into the Biden administration, the number of people held in ICE detention continues to grow, and private prison companies hold an increasingly tight grip on the mass immigration …

• Procedural abortion is basic reproductive health care that is safe, immediate and viable even past the first trimester.

• Matt Manion recalls the countless “closed-door meetings” conducted with the door wide open so the whole lab could hear their boss berate her workers, tell them that they’re not good enough, that her word alone can dictate their entire career.

• Students rights are limited on school grounds. But they don’t cease to exist. And what they do off-campus is subject to even fewer limitations.

• A federal lawsuit brought by Iraqi torture survivors appears finally headed to trial after a federal judge refused to dismiss the case last week. The Iraqis are suing the U.S. military contractor CACI, which provided interrogators at Abu Ghraib, the notorious Iraqi prison where the men were tortured by U.S. guards. The lawsuit, which alleges CACI was complicit in that torture, was first filed in 2008. Since then, CACI has attempted 18 times to have the case dismissed. Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing the torture survivors in the case, says the men suffered a range of abuse including sexual humiliation, beatings and more. “They’re all suffering the aftereffects, psychological and physical, of their time at Abu Ghraib,” he says.

• New York City Mayor Eric Adams has announced a plan to house as many as 2,000 asylum seekers at a tent complex on Randalls Island in the East River. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers have been sent to New York since last year and must wait 150 days to file for a work permit, leaving them no options to make a stable living. As the Adams administration claims the city has surpassed its ability to shelter new arrivals, migrants have been stuck in the city’s shelter system for months or repeatedly been forced to sleep in the streets, including last week when dozens waited outside Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel for days, sleeping shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk, in hopes for a bed and shelter. We speak with Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition and NYIC Action, who calls for an investment in public resources and to support people as they move out of the shelter system into permanent housing. “We want to flip this on its head and actually support people to get out as quickly as possible.”

• As in past years, EFF staff attorneys will be present to help support speakers and attendees. If you have legal concerns regarding an upcoming talk or sensitive infosec research that you are conducting at any time, please email info@eff.org. Outline the basic issues and we will do our best to connect you with the resources you need. Read more about EFF’s work defending, offering legal counsel, and publicly advocating for technologists on our Coders’ Rights Project page.

• EFF staff members will be on hand in the expo areas of all three conferences. You may encounter us in the wild elsewhere, but we hope you stop by the EFF tables talk to us about the latest in online rights, get on our action alert list, or donate to become an EFF member. We’ll also have our limited-edition DEF CON 31 shirts available! These shirts have a puzzle incorporated into the design. Try your hand at cracking it!

• We get an update from the Texas border, where human rights advocates are condemning Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” for its human rights abuses. Texas troopers have reportedly separated over two dozen migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border in a major change of policy. This comes amid a deadly heat wave and after the first deaths linked to floating barrels wrapped in razor wire that Abbott put in the Rio Grande to block asylum seekers from crossing. “We’re calling for an end to the use of all of these detractions that are getting in the way of people being able to seek protection,” says Marisa Limón Garza, executive director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, which is based in El Paso, Texas.

• In an escalation of tensions, the Biden administration has deployed thousands of U.S. Marines and sailors to the Middle East in order to deter Iran from seizing oil tankers and other commercial ships near the Strait of Hormuz. The move comes after the Navy said Iran tried to seize two commercial oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman last month, after seizing dozens more since 2019. Iran responded by equipping its Navy with drones and missiles. “It’s really baffling to see why we’re taking such immense risks that could bring the U.S. into war for achieving things that are of little value when it comes to peace and stability in the region or U.S. interests in the region,” says Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who says the Biden administration is risking a new war for stronger relations with Saudi Arabia. He argues the Biden administration has made critical mistakes in its relations with Iran by continuing Trump administration-era maximum-pressure sanctions.

• Russian Baptist pastor Yury Spiko, the former vice president of the Baptist World Alliance, has been charged with spreading “disinformation” about the Russian military, the Moscow branch of the Russian Investigative Committee reported on Tuesday.

• Around the country, automated systems are being used to inform crucial decisions about people’s lives. These systems, often referred to as “risk assessment tools,” are used to decide whether defendants will be released pretrial, whether to investigate allegations of child neglect, to predict which students might drop out of high school, and more.

• The developers of these tools and government agencies that use them often claim that risk assessments will improve human decisions by using data. But risk assessment tools (and the data used to build them) are not just technical systems that exist in isolation — they are inherently intertwined with the policies and politics of the systems in which they operate, and they can reproduce the biases of those systems.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Every six months or so the FCC announces it has taken some major new step to thwart annoying robocalls. Yet Americans still receive more than 4.5 billion such calls every month, the vast majority of FCC fines are never collected, scammers elude meaningful accountability, and the problem persists.

Monopolies

• Amazon’s meetings with the Federal Trade Commission, known as “last rites” meetings, are typically a final step before the agency votes on filing a lawsuit.

• When I was a baby writer, there were dozens of large NY publishers. Today, there are five – and it was almost four. A publishing sector with five giant companies is bad news for writers (as Stephen King said at the trial, the idea that PRH and S&S would bid against each other for books was as absurd as the idea that he and his wife would bid against each other for their next family home).

• But it’s also bad news for publishing workers, a historically exploited and undervalued workforce whose labor conditions have only declined as the number of employers in the sector dwindled, leading to mass resignations: [...]

Software Patents

• > [...] (and I wonder, parenthetically, why FreeBSD and NetBSD are willing to support ZFS, but OpenBSD is not).

• Stuart already told you this:

• “Not likely to happen.

• Even if there was an implementation written, patents are involved (use is granted via the CDDL but that’s not an acceptable license for OpenBSD).”

Trademarks

• It appears I slightly exaggerated the state of the Taco Tuesday trademark saga in my last post. After decades of ridiculous bullying coming from Taco John’s concerning the trademark it somehow was granted on “Taco Tuesday” — a term that is generic on its face, became more generic over time, and is also at least partially descriptive — Taco Bell’s war on the trademark finally caused Taco John’s to relinquish the trademark entirely. And, in that post, I declared the whole saga over.

• The Russian state media group Rossiya Segodnya (“Russia Today,” not to be confused with the network RT) has applied to trademark the brand Echo of Moscow, according to the state news agency TASS.

Copyrights

• Earlier today someone managed to hijack our Twitter / X account. The original @torrentfreak handle was deleted and the new account now appears as @ethereumfdn with all of our followers still attached. Obviously it can’t be trusted.

• By masquerading as legitimate music rightsholders, two men managed to extract over $23 million in revenue from YouTube’s Content ID system. Both were arrested and pleaded guilty. The first defendant was previously sentenced to 70 months in prison. The second defendant, who reportedly initiated the scheme, now requests a lower 46-month term, promising to stay out of trouble.

• In 2022, MindGeek subsidiary MG Premium prevailed in its legal battle against the operator of Daftsex and several other pirate sites. MG was awarded $32m in damages and permission to seize domain names but to date, nothing has been paid, and the sites are still in business. Mindful that his injunction is being ignored, a U.S. judge has just held the persistent pirate in contempt of court and declared MG Premium the new owner of his pirate domains.

• As you may have noticed, I used the word copyrighted for the title of this story. And it’s not without reason. I think this story could have been fairly decent even without the copyright part, so before we get to the nitty gritty stuff – I can 100% confirm that Brave lets you ingest copyrighted material through their Brave Search API,to which they also assign you “rights”.

• OpenAI, the maker of machine learning models trained on public web data, has published the specifications for its web crawler so that publishers and site owners can opt out of having their content scraped.

• The newly released technical document describes how to identify OpenAI’s web crawler GPTBot through its user agent token and string, which get emitted by the company’s software in the HTTP request header sent to ask a server for a web page.

• Amid all of the excitement and trepidation surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), there is one big question for our industry that seems to rise above the rest: Are scholarly publishers primed to become the critical content suppliers for the big Generative AI companies such as OpenAI, AI21 Labs, NIVIDIA, and Anthropic?

• As evidence of its interest, Disney has 11 current job openings seeking candidates with expertise in artificial intelligence or machine learning.

• The positions touch virtually every corner of the company – from Walt Disney Studios to the company’s theme parks and engineering group, Walt Disney Imagineering, to Disney-branded television and the advertising team, which is looking to build a “next-generation” AI-powered ad system, according to the job ad descriptions.

• Join Creative Commons in NYC on 13 September 2023 for a full-day symposium focused on the intersection of generative artificial intelligence, cultural heritage, and contemporary creativity.

• We started this project by asking a fundamental question: “What climate data exists, and what can I do with it?” To reach an answer, we conducted a landscape analysis to better understand the permissible uses of existing large climate data sets. We surveyed a range of organizations that provide climate data on behalf of national, intergovernmental and/or global populations and are both publishers and sources of climate data. This approach enabled us to assess the current status of major sources of climate data and propose practical ways in which it can be shared more effectively. We hope this initial analysis provides clarity to researchers, policymakers, educators, civil society organizations and advocates.

• In this Special Episode of the Open Culture Voices series, CC hosts a conversation among five open culture experts from around the world:

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