● 08.11.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 11/08/2023: More Microsoft Breaches and Windows TCO Stories

Posted in News Roundup at 4:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• An independent Scotland could take as long as eight years to rejoin the EU following Scottish independence, an official Scottish Government report found.

• The undated but pre-Brexit report, released following a successful appeal to the Scottish Information Commissioner who ruled the information was wrongly withheld from the public, covered “post-Brexit routes to membership of the EU”.

• How can you spot an engineer? It can be tricky, but it is a little easier in Canada. That’s because many Canadian engineers have been through the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer and wear an iron or steel ring to symbolize their profession. The ring has a very odd history that originated in 1922 as the brainchild of Professor H. E. T. Haultain. While he may not be a recognizable name, at least one famous person was involved with creating the Ritual.

Science

• With this upgrade, NOAA’s twin supercomputers, located in Manassas, Virginia, and Phoenix, Arizona, will now operate at a speed of 14.5 petaflops each, and together, the forecast system can process 29 quadrillion calculations per second.

• The boost to NOAA’s Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System (WCOSS) through increased computing power and storage will help improve U.S. forecast model guidance in the coming years by allowing more data to be fed into and analyzed by the system.

• The new Sunway supercomputer built by the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi (an entity blacklisted in the U.S.) employs around feature approximately 19.2 million cores across 49,230 nodes, reports Supercomputing.org. To put the number into context, Frontier, the world’s highest-performing supercomputer, uses 9472 nodes and consumes 21 MW of power. Meanwhile, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi does not disclose power consumption of its latest system.

• Interestingly, the new supercomputer seems to be based on the already known 390-core Sunway processor that derive from the Sunway SW26010 CPUs and have been around since 2021. Therefore, the new system increased the number of processors, but not their architectural efficiency, so its power consumption is likely to be gargantuan. Meanwhile, actual performance of the machine is unknown, since scaling out has its limits even in the supercomputer world.

• Russia is back in the space race. At 10 a.m., local time, on Friday, August 11, a Soyuz-2.1b rocket launched from Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur region carried the Luna-25 mission into a partial orbit around Earth before the spacecraft began its five-day autonomous flight to the Moon. (Ahead of the launch, local officials in the Khabarovsk region even evacuated a small town in the mission’s flight path, just in case one of the booster rockets landed here.) Luna-25 is the “successor” to the USSR’s 1976 lunar mission, and it is post-Soviet Russia’s first-ever “soft landing” attempt on the Moon.

Education

• Municipalities where many students live are pinning their hopes on the return of “hosts” to solve the shortage of student housing. The municipality of Wageningen and the university there announced a campaign on Thursday asking residents to temporarily rent out vacant rooms to students.

• It used the customary for students to live in someone else’s house.

Hardware

• Companies will need a licence to import laptops, tablets, personal computers and servers into the country.

• In its first of two major rollouts this July, Altitude Angel announced that it would begin rolling out a purpose-built, low-altitude aviation surveillance network. That makes it possible to detect drones and other low-altitude aircraft, a crucial step in enabling automated drone operations beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) so drones can safely fly without crashing into each other.

• And just a couple days later, Altitude Angel released a drone flight approval platform, which allows drone pilots to submit requests to fly in the controlled airspace of what for now is about 120 airports. From there, airport operators can easily approve (or decline) flight requests digitally, in some cases giving the operator an almost instantaneous answer.

• Here’s what you need to know about the two new Altitude Angel product launches, and what it means for the future of the UK drone industry: [...]

• For the last ten to fifteen years, optical drives have been fading out of existence. There’s little reason to have them around anymore unless you are serious about archiving data or unconvinced that streaming platforms will always be around. While there are some niche uses for them still, we’re seeing more and more get repurposed for parts and other projects like this tabletop laser engraver.

• You want to join two shafts. What do you need? A coupler, of course. If the shafts don’t line up, you might consider an Oldham coupler. But what if the shafts are at a 90-degree angle to each other? Then you need a Hobson’s coupler. [Robert Murray-Smith] has the 3D printed hookup for you and a video that you can see below.

• [michimartini] over on Hackaday.io loves playing with multivibrator circuits, and has come across a simple example of a ring oscillator. This is a discrete transistor RC-delay design utilizing five identical stages, each of which has a transistor that deals with charging and discharging the timing capacitor, passing along the inverted signal to its nearest neighbor. The second transistor isn’t strictly needed and is only there to invert the signal in order to drive the LED. When the low pulse passes by the LED lights, without it you’d see all the LEDs lit bar one, which doesn’t look as good.

• Once ubiquitous, the incandescent light bulb has become something of a lucerna non grata lately. Banned from home lighting, long gone from flashlights, and laughed out of existence by automotive engineers, you have to go a long way these days to find something that still uses a tungsten filament.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Yes, Orac is still recharging his Tarial cell this week (i.e., is on staycation). He is working on some new Insolence, but is finding a strange lack of his usual motivation, something that sometimes happens when he’s on the recharger. He was, however, amused by this little game by Flo & Joan that, somehow, he had never encountered before and therefore presents to you A Song For Antivaxxers for your amusement until his motivation succeeds in distracting him from his contemplation of the black hole of conspiracy theories in general.

• It has already been called “the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history.” Armed with little more than sticks, teams of counter-narcotics brigades travel the country, doing somethi…

• Professor Andrew Przybylski from the Oxford Internet Institute is one of the best, most important researchers out there providing thorough, comprehensive, empirical evidence that every tech moral panic is not supported by the data. We’ve covered his work before, including the complete lack of evidence that social media makes kids unhappy, how there’s actually some positive correlation between people playing video games and feeling better (the opposite of what most seemed to believe), and how mandatory internet filters to stop porn don’t work.

• Commercial industrial agriculture is responsible for providing food to the world’s population at an incredibly low cost, especially when compared to most of human history when most or a majority of people would have been involved in agriculture. Now it’s a tiny fraction of humans that need to grow food, while the rest can spend their time in cities and towns largely divorced from needing to produce their own food to survive. But industrial agriculture isn’t without its downsides. Providing inexpensive food to the masses often involves farming practices that are damaging to the environment, whether that’s spreading huge amounts of synthetic, non-renewable fertilizers or blanket spraying crops with pesticides and herbicides. [NathanBuildsDIY] is tackling the latter problem, using an automated drone system to systemically target weeds to reduce his herbicide use.

• More than a year after COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in South Africa were lifted, SA Military Health Service (SAMHS) personnel were recognised for their contribution to managing the pandemic. The recognition took the form of commendation certificates presented to military medical officers and personnel by Lieutenant-General Peter Maphaha, SA National Defence Force (SANDF) Surgeon-General.

• The World Health Organization has classified the EG.5 strain as a “variant of interest” but adds there is no reason to assume it poses any more of a health risk than other variants of the virus.

• Henrietta Lacks’ descendants accused a biopharmaceutical company in a lawsuit Thursday of unjustly profiting from the Black woman’s tissue, which was harvested without her knowledge or consent and later used for medical breakthroughs.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Changes in the terms of service for the communications platform Zoom, made in March 2023, were due to an internal process failure that would be fixed, the founder and chief executive of Zoom, Eric Yuan, has said.

• Baidu, TikTok-owner ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba have made orders worth $1 billion to acquire about 100,000 A800 processors from the US chipmaker to be delivered this year, the FT reported, citing multiple people familiar with the matter.

• The source can be difficult to diagnose, and while a bad connection is often the culprit, it could also be down to your router.

• To help banish the broadband blues, we run through some potential router problems to get you back up and running.

• Mesh networks are an advanced whole-house solution that create a seamless net of wi-fi wherever you want the internet to be. Extenders are simpler solutions that give your router more reach more cheaply.

• In this guide we’ll delve into the differences between the two systems, so you know which is right for you, and we’ll recommend the top models.

• WhatsApp, used by billions around the globe for text-based chatting, video, and voice calls, has announced that it is introducing a feature that allows users to share their screens during a video call. Beta testing of the feature is complete, and Meta has started rolling it out in phases across Android, iOS, and Windows desktop platforms.

• Apparently, the provisioning certificate that Xcode provides only lasts one week! I would need to rebuild the app through Xcode and upload it to my iPhone every week to continue to use it.

• Or, I could pay the $99 yearly Apple Developer Fee 😭

• This will provide me the ability to use my app for up to one year on my device.

• How do you consume text generated by LLMs with code? You might try prompt engineering to “format the answer in JSON”, but that won’t work all the time. Or you might try a variety of tricks to extract the answer or the field out of the text generation, but that’s also prone to error.xs

• The vulnerabilities and their exploitation was demonstrated at the Zero Day Initiative’s Pwn2Own Toronto hacker contest in December 2022, where participants earned a total of nearly $1 million for hacking smartphones, printers, routers, NAS devices, and smart speakers.

• Both vendors have pushed out patches (in some cases automatically) and published advisories to inform customers about the vulnerabilities. Synology released one advisory and WD published three advisories, in December, January and May.

• Manipulated and misleading content is not a new phenomenon. But AI enables increasingly accessible, sophisticated, and hyperrealistic content creation that—while it can be used for good, in artistic expression or accessibility improvements—can also be abused to cast doubt on political events, or to defame, harass, and exploit.

• And in his interview with the WaPo, the tech and society chief conceded that as a result of AI, “bad things could happen” — a convenient and ultimately meaningless position on the future of AI that leaves pretty much any outcome still on the table.

Windows TCO

• “As the risk of cyberattacks [sic] and data breaches escalates, it’s imperative for the government to rethink its approach. Strengthening the rules and mechanisms that reinforce data protection must be prioritized, creating an environment where citizens’ data remains shielded from harm.”

• The first thing one would do in order to turn OneDrive into a double agent, then, would be to hijack someone’s account – a task Yair said was relatively easy once he managed to achieve an initial compromise of a Windows machine.

• OneDrive, it turns out, stores all of its log files in a directory for the signed-in user. Those logs, in turn, contain session tokens that Yair said he was able to pull out of the log file once he snagged a copy and parsed it. With the stolen token, Yair was able to get to work.

• Armed with a compromised or obtained guest account and a Power Apps trial license (available free to anyone who wants one from the Power Apps website), all an attacker needs to do is log in to Power Apps and switch directories to the target tenant they’re a guest user on, and voila: they can see a list of all the Power Apps connections their account has access to, and can even create applications inside the tenant. With enough work, the attacker can potentially make off with gobs of internal data.

Security

• We saw that VerifyHostKeyDNS is reliable, but doesn’t save the fingerprint in the file `~/.ssh/known_hosts`, which can be an issue if you need to connect later to the same server if you don’t have a working DNSSEC resolver, you would have to trust blindly the server.

• However, you could generate the required output from the server to be used by the known_hosts when you have DNSSEC working, so next time, you won’t only rely on DNSSEC.

• Fat client applications running on (usually) Windows are still extremely common in enterprises. When I look at internal penetration tests or red team engagements for any larger enterprise, it is almost 100% guaranteed that one will stumble upon such an application.

• This report is provided “as is” for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained herein. The DHS does not endorse any commercial product or service referenced in this bulletin or otherwise.

• This document is marked TLP:CLEAR–Recipients may share this information without restriction. Sources may use TLP:CLEAR when information carries minimal or no foreseeable risk of misuse, in accordance with applicable rules and procedures for public release. Subject to standard copyright rules, TLP:CLEAR information may be shared without restriction. For more information on the Traffic Light Protocol (TLP), see http://www.cisa.gov/tlp.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (chromium, kernel, krb5, and rust), and Ubuntu (graphite-web and velocity).

• The province of Nova Scotia is still unsure of how widespread the MOVEit security breach is, nearly two-and-a-half months after first becoming aware of the issue.

• Almost 1000 notifications have been sent out this month.

• “As you start getting into forensics you can find out that that trail can lead back a lot further and sometimes it can take weeks, months, before you really know the full impact,” says cybersecurity expert Scott Beck.

• Officials with the Halifax Regional Centre for Education just sent out notices to parents of students whose data was compromised.

• Sometimes people surprise me. “Impotent” did. He’s gone by a number of usernames online over the past few years. “Everyone knows me under many different aliases. Let’s actually call me mainly Pulpo. I also used ‘Creeper, ‘Impotent,’ ‘Kmeta,’ ‘KmetaNaEvropa,’ and ‘Promise,’ but on my markets, I was usually just ‘Admin.’ The main identities I love are ‘Impotent’ and ‘Pulpo.’ ‘Pulpo’ made me my biggest money. ‘Impotent’ made me the biggest connections,” he told me.

• On his markets? Biggest money? Biggest connections? Who was this guy that I had not been particularly impressed by when he first contacted me as “Dissent Joe” to invite me to Exposed.vc? At the time I first interviewed him about Exposed.vc, he struck me as someone who knew how to get headlines for himself. I was pretty sure he was lying to me about how he got the RaidForums user database that he leaked, and I couldn’t really trust his word on anything at that point, but was he actually smart enough to have made a lot of money?

• The voter registries were accessed over a period of more than a year, the agency said.

• It’s looking more and more likely that a critical zero-day vulnerability that went unfixed for more than a month in Microsoft Exchange was the cause…

• After vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown were discovered in 2018, Intel processors have more vulnerabilities with the Downfall attacks that target the Gather instruction part of AVX2/AVX-512 and impact 6th generation Skylake up to 11th generation Tiger Lake processors introduced as far back as 2014. It does not affect more recent processors, and as somebody who has just purchased a laptop based on a 13th Raptor Lake processor, I guess I can breathe a sigh of relief until the next vulnerability is discovered, but people using hardware with older Intel processors will have to update the OS and suffer from a performance impact, at least for tasks leveraging AVX2 or AVX-512.

• Cryptographic flaws still matter. Here’s a flaw in the random-number generator used to create private keys. The seed has only 32 bits of entropy.

• Seems like this flaw is being exploited in the wild.

• Researchers have trained a ML model to detect keystrokes by sound with 95% accuracy.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Raspberry Pi camera captures a live stream of whoever it is who needs an extra eye to check on their welfare. The video is relayed back to the Raspberry Pi-powered reTerminal, which runs it through TensorFlow machine learning software which has been modified to detect falls.

• Venmo is a strong example of how even as social norms shift on the ways we use technology, the companies and their apps don’t change much. Venmo was founded in 2009 as a music start-up that let users buy songs from bands through a text message. By the time eBay acquired it in 2013, it had become a mobile wallet service that was trendy among younger people who were gung-ho about sharing information about themselves online.

• Michael J. Miraflor tweeted out screenshots depicting what it’s like on the emergency contact side of Apple’s proprietary offerings. As described, Miraflor’s “brother’s girlfriend’s cousin” and his family were on holiday in Maui’s Lahaina area when they suddenly realized their surroundings had “erupted” into flames. Screenshots show how the family member used the iPhone 14′s satellite-based Emergency SOS service to message for help. Despite being in a central tourist area where you’d expect cell service, the family likely lost connection as the fires overtook the infrastructure.

• As part of the survey, the state hopes to learn how many residents would be “willing to share GPS data with a third party” to compute a miles-driven tax.

• But the state does not want to give the impression GPS tracking devices are a foregone conclusion, Ruestman said.

• Though the first negotiated text of the proposed convention, the “zero draft” is deeply flawed, the principle that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” applies here. EFF will be attending the sixth session in New York to participate in those discussions as an observer.

• In previous discussions, we addressed concerns over ambiguous surveillance powers and inadequate safeguards. Now we will delve into the heavily debated chapter on international cooperation. For clarity and depth, our analysis of this chapter will span two posts. This first post covers the historical context of international cooperation mechanisms, the zero draft’s approach in Chapter V, the scope of cooperation, and protection of personal data. In the next post, we’ll continue our analysis of Chapter V of the zero draft, addressing the broad demands of mutual legal assistance, the pitfalls of unchecked and lawless data-sharing, and the challenges of rapid-response mechanisms and jurisdiction for human rights.

• EFF holds observer status in these talks, a notable advancement in transparency compared to other treaty negotiations. This participation affords us significant access to main discussions and numerous opportunities to interact with delegations. Yet, asserting influence remains a challenge. With each country having one vote, achieving consensus among more than 140 countries proves daunting. As observers, we also can voice our concerns weekly in front of all Member States. However, particularly contentious topics are moved to “informals” —sessions exclusive to Member States, excluding us and other multi-stakeholders. Though delegations have the option to consult with us outside these sessions, the real-time exclusion remains a serious concern.

• Facial recognition tech is faulty. It’s an unavoidable fact, especially when it comes to women and minorities. No matter how good the tech, the potential for false positives and negatives remains. And pre-existing biases are amplified by things the tech simply can’t do well: reliably identify people who aren’t white and male.

• The government of Moldova has suggested banning ride hailing apps from sharing passenger data with countries outside of the E.U., Moldova MP Alexander Trubka told publication NewsMaker.

Defence/Aggression

• One observer says it’s the ‘military’s attempt to dominate and control all departments.’

• A coup in Niger could shape the future of a West African regional bloc and the presidency of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the newly elected leader of Nigeria.

• Yes. Not only has the United States made a significant investment—over $500 million in military assistance and roughly $2 billion in humanitarian and development aid over a decade, stretching across three administrations of both parties, as well as lives sacrificed, something we should not forget—but that commitment has paid off in gains on both the security and human development fronts. The first six months of this year saw the lowest levels of extremist violence in Niger since 2018—and this was at a time when the Global Terrorism Index recorded jihadist activity spiking across the rest of the Sahel.

• PA news agency analysis of Government figures since current records began on January 1 2018 showed that, as of Tuesday, 99,960 people have arrived in the UK after making the journey.

• The researchers traveled to Kyiv in late July and inspected the wreckage of two attack drones that were used in combat in southeastern Ukraine. Both appeared to be Iranian Shahed-136s, but they contained electronic modules that match components previously recovered from Russian surveillance drones, according to the report.

• Additionally, the materials used to build the two drones and the internal structure of their fuselages differed greatly from those known to have been made in Iran, the researchers said.

• Those vessels are very weak, easily capsize and often disintegrate not long after setting out to sea, Mr. di Giacomo said. “They are the most fragile boats that we have ever seen in the central Mediterranean in many years,” he noted, adding that it was “scandalous” that traffickers employed the boats, particularly when there were forecasts of rough conditions, as was the case in the strait in recent days.

• Each defendant faces eight felony counts including ranging from conspiracy and election law forgery to forgery and uttering and publishing.

• “Because Texas has a federal constitutional right to defend itself against invasion from even non-state actors, the Court should construe the Rivers and Harbors Act narrowly to avoid a collision between that constitutional right and the federal statute.”

• The constitutional provision at play here is somewhat obscure. Article I, § 10, cl. 3 provides, “[n]o state shall, without the Consent of Congress, . . . engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.” The Invasion Clause, on its face, seems to give the states additional authorities when they are “actually invaded.” Governor Abbott argues that he, as the Commander in Chief of the state, has the power to determine whether there is an invasion. And Abbott has made such a declaration.

• When Twitter failed to turn over data by the January 27 deadline, a court found Twitter in contempt. “Although Twitter ultimately complied with the warrant, the company did not fully produce the requested information until three days after a court-ordered deadline,” according to judges with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “The district court thus held Twitter in contempt and imposed a $350,000 sanction for its delay.”

• The Post story focuses on Twitter’s stonewalling — which, given that it took place this year, I presume was driven by Elon Musk. But I’m keenly interested in what the search warrant was after. It wasn’t Trump’s tweets, which are public. So the obvious conclusion: his direct messages. Trump, famously, does not use email and, until this year, apparently didn’t use text messaging either. But did he send or receive DMs on Twitter? And was he stupid enough to put anything incriminating in them? Is he about to be hoisted with Twitter’s unencrypted petard?

• Fernando Villavicencio, who with the Guardian’s Luke Harding and Dan Collyns fabricated the notorious Guardian front page lie that Paul Manafort and Julian Assange held pro-Trump meetings in the Ecuadorean Embassy, has been shot dead in Ecuador.

• The Perpetual Wars You Aren’t Supposed to Notice.

• Four people described as accomplices to the pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk have been found guilty of conspiracy to stage a coup in Ukraine. A Ukrainian court sentenced all four defendants to prison terms ranging from five to 10 years.

• Nuland met with Moussa Salaou Barmou, who has previously received training from the US military.

• 12 people are missing after an explosion that hit an optics plant in Sergiyev Posad, a city in Russia’s Moscow region, on Wednesday, according to the country’s Emergency Situations Ministry.

• West African leaders from ECOWAS, backed by the United States and France, met today to consider military action to restore the ousted Niger President Mohamed Bazoum following last month’s military coup. Neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso have threatened that any intervention in Niger would amount to a declaration of war on them, as well. This comes as leaders of the coup in Niger have appointed a 21-member cabinet as they forge ahead with building a new government. The coup “is a consequence of the militarization of Nigerien society” by the United States and France, which both have strong military presence in the region, explains Horace Campbell, chair of the Global Pan African Movement, North American delegation. He notes anti-French sentiment is a powerful force in Niger and across Africa as people reject the former colonizer’s influence: “The French are inordinately dependent on the exploitation and plunder of Africa.”

• As the world marks 78 years since the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we speak with two activists arrested while protesting the placement of U.S. nuclear weapons in the Netherlands, Germany and other European countries as a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for NATO’s so-called nuclear sharing program. “We’re very concerned about the legality,” says Susan Crane, who was arrested Tuesday during protests at the Volkel Air Base in the Netherlands. We also speak with John LaForge, co-director of Nukewatch, who just served a 50-day sentence in Germany for a similar protest at the Büchel Air Base. “The attempt to interfere with the threatened use of these weapons is justified as an act of crime prevention,” says LaForge. Actions are planned today at Büchel Air Base in Germany.

• US government documents admit the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering.

War in Ukraine

• Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Meduza has adopted a consistent antiwar position, holding Russia responsible for its military aggression and atrocities. As part of this commitment, we regularly update an interactive map that documents combat operations in Ukraine and the damage inflicted by Russia’s invasion forces. Our map is based exclusively on previously published open-source photos and videos, most of them posted by eyewitnesses on social media. We collect reports already available publicly and determine their geolocation markers, adding only the photos and videos that clear this process.

• The Polish authorities have decided to deploy a total of 10,000 troops on the country’s border with Belarus, the news agency Polska Agencja Prasowa reported on Thursday, citing the country’s defense minister, Mariusz Błaszczak.

• According to Israeli outlet Calcalist, Yandex is in negotiations to sell it’s taxi service Yango Israel. The move is likely a result of an order from the Russian government that will apparently allow the FSB to gain round-the-clock access to user data collected by Yango, beginning on September 1, 2023. As reported by a joint investigation between Meduza and Finnish journalist Jussi Konttinen, the order has already been signed by the country’s prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin.

• We speak with Ukrainian peace activist Yurii Sheliazhenko, whom Ukrainian authorities have charged with justifying Russian aggression, days after his Kyiv apartment was raided and searched. Sheliazhenko is executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement and has vocally opposed any escalation of the conflict, calling for a ceasefire and peace talks to end the war. “It is total nonsense that a pacifist is accused in justification of war,” Sheliazhenko told Democracy Now! in an interview just after he returned from being interrogated. He notes the security services are under the authority of President Volodymyr Zelensky, and says “direct involvement” from the leader in suppressing peace activism “is inappropriate in [a] democratic society.”

• Responding to critical publications in Meduza and other media, billionaire tech executive and Yandex mastermind Arkady Volozh has released a public statement of his views on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, his early vision for Yandex, and his business activities since the start of the war.

Environment

• Yes, as U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres recently put it, the era of “global warming” should be considered over, since we’re now clearly living at the beginning of a time of “global boiling.” And as you sit there sweating and reading this, if that doesn’t strike you as extreme, consider something else: Fossil fuel companies are still bringing in staggering profits (even if poor Shell’s second-quarter profits in 2023 were down to a mere $5.1 billion) as they—yes!—continue to expand their oil and natural gas operations globally. And can you blame them? After all, the companies whose executives have long known what their products would do to this planet and even sometimes responded by funding think tanks that promoted climate change denial, have little choice but (if you’ll excuse the phrase) to cover their assets. Meanwhile, last year, China, at the forefront of the alternative energy boom now underway, also granted permits to build, on average, two new coal plants a week (while burning more coal than the rest of the planet combined).

• The explanation is as straightforward as it is sobering: As the planet heats up, no place is protected from disasters.

• The story of this week’s blaze arguably began decades ago, when Hawaii started experiencing a long-term decline in average annual rainfall. Since 1990, rainfall at selected monitoring sites has been 31 percent lower in the wet season, and 6 percent lower in the dry season, according to work published in 2015 by researchers at the University of Hawaii and the University of Colorado.

• The wildfires destroyed over 2,000 acres of private and state land on Maui and threatened more than 35,000 people in the area, Green said Wednesday.

• Californians hate it when people are stunned by fire. I was one of the many wildfire rookies on the East Coast earlier this summer when the sky turned orange and the early-morning light cast evening shadows and whole cities smelled like campfires. And that was just because of the clouds of smoke drifting over from Canada. Still, the experience was newly apocalyptic to me. We’ve been living like this for years, the Californians complained. We told you it was coming for you too. They were right, of course. I wish they hadn’t been.

• We live in an age of too much emotion, too much performative reaction, too much certainty, and entirely too much pessimism. All this shouting at one another has the effect of drowning out what actually deserves attention and concern, to say nothing of how it hurts our ability to come together and solve existential problems. But also—and this is a by-product of human resilience and adaptability, qualities that otherwise serve us well—sometimes understanding a phenomenon intellectually is not enough; it’s just not the same as the perspective you get when the flames are licking at your own door.

Energy/Transportation

• US passenger railroad Amtrak is breathing new life into private high-speed train maker Texas Central Partners’ dreams to launch a Dallas-Houston line. The ambitious plan of connecting two of the five largest US metropolitan areas, which has been a decade in the making, proposes a 240-mile (380 kilometer) route that would be covered in under 90 minutes one way.

• The state-owned enterprise and the private company have submitted applications to several federal grant programs, seeking funding to research and design a high-speed rail service between Dallas and Houston, the two announced yesterday (Aug. 9).

• Power demand reached yet another record-high on Wednesday, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s power manager. According to ERCOT, power use hit a preliminary 83,961 megawatts (MW) on Wednesday. This is the ninth energy use record that Texas has broken this summer, Reuters reported. The state broke an earlier record just two days prior after power use hit a preliminary 83,854 megawatts (MW), Reuters reported, citing data from ERCOT.

• When the Alberta government announced in early August a six-month pause on new renewable energy projects, it caused immediate chaos within the sector, plunging into uncertainty 100 developments awaiting approval and investments worth $25 billion. Industry leaders say they weren’t warned or consulted.

• “It was a done deal before we had a chance to convince the minister that the industry doesn’t need a moratorium,” Vittoria Bellissimo, president and CEO of the Canadian Renewable Energy Association (CanREA), said in reaction. “I think it was a mistake,” she told CBC.

Wildlife/Nature

• County of Maui spokesperson Mahina Martin says the fire was widespread in the historic community of Lahaina.

• Ackerman wants to know what the latest science says about how owl species stack up against the cleverest birds. In relation to their body size, owls have large brains, an anatomical characteristic thought to have evolved in tandem with “parental provisioning” of offspring. Indeed, owl nestlings hatch before they can hunt or scavenge, dependent on food supplied by adults to provide the energy their brain tissue needs to grow. Yet for the most part, the brainpower of owls is enchained to the activity of their senses, rather than to the sort of intelligence found in birds that display inventiveness, selfhood, superior powers of recall, or numeracy. Some 75 percent of an owl’s cortexlike forebrain is dedicated to hearing and vision, faculties so astounding in range and exactitude that they might seem, to us, a variety of natural magic.

• Owl species deemed “eared” or “horned” don’t actually have external ear pinna the way we do, or bony horns like antelope. The flareable tufts of feathers, called “plumicorns,” they sport atop their head might be used to gesture to other owls, or perhaps to help conceal an owl by breaking up its rounded outline, making it appear more like the stump of a rough or broken branch. Though their true ears are mere apertures hidden under their feathers, owls’ reactivity to sound has few equivalents in the animal kingdom. The great grey owl can not only pick up the swish of a vole’s footfall coming from a passage cored into a snowbank, but also figure out the elevation of the sound source, so as to strike through the snow and hit that very point. In some owl species, a portion of the hearing nerve branches into the optical lobe of the brain, which scientists speculate could mean that these owls form a visual signal of something heard but out of sight.

Overpopulation

• Fact: There is a real possibility that global fertility could rise if the big high-fertility countries don’t reduce fertility as fast as their proportion of the global population is rising. I’m hopeful that they are starting to take population growth seriously and might start making progress, but this will be because people are acknowledging the threats posed by population growth, not because everything is doing fine on autopilot.

Finance

• Rapid7 employees in sales, engineering, customer success and support, recruitment and other areas of the company who were caught in the vendor’s layoffs have taken to LinkedIn to post about the search for their next roles.

• The Boston-based security vendor announced this week cuts of about 18 percent of its workforce—about 470 employees.

• CEO Corey Thomas (pictured) has promised in public remarks that the company will invest more in working with MSPs.

• Forget the purported MMA cage match between Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, the owner of the social media company formerly known as Twitter, now known as X. The real action is the fight between Musk and Special Counsel Jack Smith over former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account—which took place in secret for months.

• Musk was ultimately forced to submit to the search warrant, and also had to pay hundreds of thousands in court-ordered fines.

• In American politics, and probably in general, you blame the last guy for everything that’s going wrong. Business works this way too.

• When I was a child, I was a big fan of Babylon 5, still am.

• (It’s being considered for a reboot.)

• The author/producer, J. Michael Straczynski, managed to pull off a five season story arc, unheard of on shows like Star Trek, which were always so annoying in that they were off to some totally new thing every week like a Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers.

• Sure, Star Trek had it’s great moments, but it’s got at least four or five bad or middling episodes for every great one.

• Every Star Trek show also seems to suffer from one character that steals the show. Is obviously more capable than the others, more intelligent, and gets treated like a damn kitchen appliance.

• [...]

• Meanwhile, Walmart basically encourages MOAR of these people to apply while they cut your hours if you show up every day, never late, don’t do anything wrong, and do half again as much work as one of the usual suspects.

• Russia’s Interior Ministry is experiencing a “critical” personnel shortage, Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev said at an agency meeting on Thursday.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• X, the company formerly known as Twitter, was found in contempt of court after delaying the delivery of information related to the @realDonaldTrump account amid an investigation into former president Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.

• X Corp., formerly Twitter Inc., has just been fined $350,000 for contempt of court after the social media giant refused to hand over Donald Trump’s Twitter data to a special counsel investigation.

• The warrant, obtained in January, is the first known example of prosecutors directly searching Donald J. Trump’s communications in the federal inquiry into the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

• The cybersecurity framework — along with NIST’s Risk Management Framework — is used by federal agencies to plan for and mitigate cybersecurity risks. The latest draft comes as the Biden administration ramps up its focus on addressing cyber-supply chain risk, including through the use of attestation forms and software bills of material.

• In addition to expanding its scope, the latest draft has added a sixth function — govern — in addition to the document’s five existing functions: identify, protect, detect, respond and recover. It also provides additional specific guidance on how small firms should best implement the framework.

• This week, Verizon shut down Bluejeans, an also-ran videoconferencing service the company bought for $400 million in 2020 as a panic-buy to keep up with Zoom. As they lit that $400 mil on fire, Verizon praised its own vision, calling Bluejeans “an award-winning product that connects our customers around the world, but we have made this decision due to the changing market landscape”: [...]

• Pretty much every time Verizon wanders outside of its core competencies (operating telecom networks, lobbying to hamstring competition, undermining the most basic of regulatory oversight), the telco amusingly falls flat on its face. It’s quite honestly starting to get a little weird.

• Yet the FSFE is simply a facade for a bunch of highly paid corporate lawyers who are freeloading.

• Using a non-profit organization to recruit unpaid labour in this manner is far worse than astroturfing, it puts FSFE and the lawyers into the domain of modern slavery.

• Not only are the Legal Network participants freeloading, some of them are even plotting against the very principles and philosophy that encouraged people to donate or volunteer in the first place. In the third email below from Max Mehl, we can see that LLW / Legal Network participants see the GPL as an inconvenience. This is the mindset of people who want to obfuscate code so we can’t see what the code is really doing.

• Bonnier News, already the biggest news publisher in Sweden, has ambitions to transform the journalism business globally – starting with Ireland.

• It has taken a minority stake in Ireland’s Business Post Group and has ambitions to replicate its home-grown success globally.

• During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.

• Like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include…

• A new report from the outlet T-invariant identifies the adult children of Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yury Trutnev as the founders of the Student Patriotic Society (SPO), a student organization at Moscow State University (MGU) that raises money for Russian ultranationalists fighting against Ukraine. In the summer of 2023, Trutnev’s son, Andrey, transported armored vehicles onto which SPO activists had “personally welded anti-shrapnel protections” and “modified drones” to the Donbas. Schoolchildren, university students, and even MGU cafeteria workers have transferred money to the bank account of Trutnev’s daughter, Maria, to support volunteer soldiers at the front. With T-invariant’s permission, Meduza is publishing a translation of the investigation. The original article has been condensed and edited for clarity.

• So, you might have heard the news about how Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a warrant for Donald Trump’s Twitter account data, that Twitter resisted, and was fined $350,000 before handing over the data, and (finally) that Twitter lost an appeal about all of this, leading to most of the details being unsealed by the DC Circuit.

• How to use social media without it using you

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• It turned to the Psychological Defense Agency, a part of the Ministry of Defense that its government created last year. The agency has become the first line of defense for a country facing a sustained information attack from abroad.

• The country’s leaders are borrowing from an old Cold War strategy to steel the country’s 10 million people for the possibility of “total war” with the Soviet Union. Today’s main threat — though not the only one — is the Soviet Union’s successor state, Russia. According to the agency’s officials, the Kremlin has targeted Sweden with a concerted online campaign on social media and elsewhere to discredit the country and undermine its bid to join the NATO alliance.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The warning to the CCDH follows a string of other legal threats from Musk, targeting both his competitors and those trying to hold Twitter to account. On Monday (7 August), X Corp – Twitter’s parent company – accused the European Climate Foundation of colluding with the CCDH, giving them illicit access to Brandwatch, a tool that allows users to monitor tweets. Last month, he threatened legal action against Meta’s Twitter rival app, Threads. The platform accused the company that owns Facebook of hiring ex-Twitter employees to illegally access “trade secrets”. In December even a Twitter user whose account used public flight records to track the movements of Musk’s private jet was threatened with a lawsuit.

• Here’s an excerpt from the article, by free speech historian Jacob Mchangama, writing in Time: [...]

• Despite these and other demonstrable merits of free speech, the recent steps taken by Denmark and Sweden reveal a concerning trend. Bowing to intimidation from politically authoritarian and religiously oppressive states sets a perilous precedent and gives oppressive regimes potential leverage to further undermine democratic principles. To sweeten this bitter pill the Danish government has been less than factual in its messaging. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that burning “sacred books” does not constitute an expression, despite established case law to the contrary. The government has also said that Denmark and Sweden are global outliers when it comes to permitting the desecration of “sacred books” even though both Norway and the Netherlands protect such symbolic expression. There are already also strong reasons to believe that the OIC will not be appeased by the proposed Danish legal restrictions, however rationalized.

• Owners or sellers of rainbow-coloured timepieces made by the Swiss watchmaker Swatch face three years in prison in Malaysia, the interior ministry has said, as the Muslim-majority country rails against LGBTQ+ symbols it says could “harm morals”.

• Homosexuality is outlawed in Malaysia and LGBTQ+ people face discrimination.

• The ban has been published in the Federal Gazette — which makes it official — as part of a printing law that includes distribution and possession, citing concerns that such products were detrimental to the nation’s morality.

• Malaysia, which is predominantly Muslim, already criminalizes same-sex relationships, with punishments ranging from caning under Islamic laws to 20 years in prison for sodomy under colonial-era civil laws.

• These fundamental flaws remain in the bill, and EFF and many others continue to oppose it. We urge anyone who cares about free speech and privacy online to send a message to Congress voicing your opposition.

• Russian Internet users have submitted more than 5,000 denunciations against their neighbors and acquaintances on a parody app called My Denunciation, according to the Telegram channel Mozhem Obyasnit, which was given access to the app’s database by its creators.

• “The Malaysian Government is committed to stopping the spread of elements that could be harmful to morality, as well as the interest of the public and nation, in society,” said the Home Ministry.

• Anyone found in possession of such Swatch products face up to three years in jail or a fine of up to 20,000 ringgit ($4,375), it warned.

• The ban has been published in the Federal Gazette — which makes it official — as part of a printing law that includes distribution and possession, citing concerns that such products were detrimental to the nation’s morality.

• Malaysia, which is predominantly Muslim, already criminalizes same-sex relationships, with punishments ranging from caning under Islamic laws to 20 years in prison for sodomy under colonial-era civil laws.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Allegations regarding the deliberate targeting of journalists are not new and first surfaced in the early months of the Russian invasion. In April 2022, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting published a dispatch entitled Ukraine: Journalists “Are Russia’s First Target,” which detailed the deaths of journalists in Ukraine during the first weeks of the war.

• In February 2023, International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders and the Institute of Mass Information found that at least 26 journalists were deliberately targeted with rifle or artillery fire during the first year of the war. Reporters Without Borders has since filed multiple war crimes complaints against Russia with the International Criminal Court concerning 44 alleged acts of abuse and violence involving over 100 journalists and journalistic infrastructure.

• This pattern of printing-press closures and consolidation has been playing out across the country over the past several years, prompting numerous local news outlets to scramble to keep publishing even if that means having their papers printed at facilities in other states or even other countries. When some presses close, existing alternatives may not be feasible for every paper printed there, which is why Wood and others are seeking new solutions.

• “While it’s a dire situation for publishers, there is opportunity in our nonprofit organizations being able to assist and pull together resources to provide a pathway for new printing presses to come online,” Wood says.

• Such efforts, though, are being met by fierce industry headwinds. Not every newspaper can wait for new printing presses to emerge. As much as “digital first” has long been a mantra throughout the industry, many publications, particularly those in small communities, still require print to survive.

• Wood says she spoke with one Colorado publisher whose paper has 40 online subscribers. “Those 40 online subscribers are not going to sustain a news business,” she says.

• “Barış Pehlivan did not deserve to be imprisoned over his reporting three years ago, and he definitely does not deserve to lose eight more months of his life behind bars,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities must stop arresting members of the press and instead provide a safe environment where journalists can do their job without fear of judicial retaliation.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• The percentage declines with every subsequent age group and generation. About 53% of those 18 to 29 said they’ve heard or read a great deal about King’s speech.

• About 16% of those young adults said they hadn’t heard much or anything about the speech — by far the largest percentage of any age group.

• For months, Iranian authorities did little to enforce the law on women covering their hair, but now the country’s theocracy is pushing to make businesses the new battleground over the mandatory headscarf. The effort comes ahead of the first anniversary of nationwide protests that erupted after the Sept. 16 death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the country’s morality police. A crackdown by security forces that followed saw more than 530 people killed and over 22,000 arrested.

• There’s a massive gap between how the policed view “reasonable” policing and the view held by those who do the policing. While most of us would prefer more accountability, transparency, and de-escalation, those who claim to “serve and protect” seem to prefer the polar opposite.

• Massachusetts is now poised to make calls for prison inmates and their families free. The decision comes after decades where the government’s coddling of prison telecom monopolies resulted in inmate families being charged an arm and a leg simply to chat briefly with their incarcerated loved ones.

• Earlier this week, Amara Harris had one last chance to take a plea deal. For $100, she could have avoided a trial, the testimony of her former high school classmates and deans, and the stress of not knowing whether a jury would believe her when she said she had mistakenly picked up a classmate’s AirPods — not stolen them. It would’ve been over.

• Instead, as she had for more than 3 ½ years, she chose to fight. Like other families and students across Illinois who have been ticketed by police for alleged behavior at school, Harris and her mother saw the system as unfair and capricious.

• Late on August 9, Makhachkala residents blocked one of the city’s main streets in protest against the authorities’ inaction with regard to power outages in the capital of Dagestan. Some of the protesters said their homes had been without electricity for three days, and no help was coming.

Monopolies

• Plus: Ohio Issue 1 defeated, Supreme Court pauses order vacating gun regulations, and more…

Trademarks

• Applicant Exhart Environmental’s application to register the product configuration shown below as a trademark for “non-metal garden stakes sold wholesale; Decorative garden accessories, namely, figurines of plastic sold wholesale” failed to achieve lift-off. The Board agreed with Examining Attorney Bridget Watson that Exhart’s proof of acquired distinctiveness was insufficient to justify registration. In re Exhart Environmental Systems, Inc., Serial No. 90006864 (August 8, 2023) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Michael B. Adlin).

• The Board dismissed this Section 2(d) opposition to registration of BRAINY ACTS for educational publications in the field of early childhood development, finding confusion unlikely with the registered mark BRAINY BABIES for children’s interactive educational books. The goods overlap, and as to those goods the Board must presume that they travel in the same ordinary trade channels and will be marketed to the same classes of consumers. The first DuPont factor proved to be the hurdle that tripped up Opposer Small Fry. Small Fry Beginnings, LLC v. Evelyn Williams English, Opposition No. 91269989 (August 7, 2023) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Martha B. Allard).

Copyrights

• The Russian operator of YouTube rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com voluntarily dismissed his appeal against the RIAA this week. According to his attorney, the operator ran out of money so is unable to fund a legal battle in a foreign court. As a result, the $83 million DMCA circumvention verdict stands.

• After broadcaster DISH filed a lawsuit against DataCamp that aimed to hold the company liable for the infringements of its IPTV customers, the company came out swinging. After concluding that DISH has no standing to sue, DataCamp revealed details of private settlement talks and the prospect of a “scam judgment.” Interestingly, settlement negotiations are suddenly back on.

• The whole process began, though, back in 2019. That’s when the news broke that Swift’s old record label — Big Machine Records, which she left in 2018 — had been sold to music megamanager Scooter Braun. The sale gave Braun the rights to all the master recordings for Swift’s old music, meaning that anyone who wanted to license one of Swift’s old songs to play in a TV show or movie or an ad would have to ask for Braun’s permission and pay him a licensing fee. And given that Braun used to work with sworn Taylor Swift enemy Kanye West, Swift was devastated. In an emotional Tumblr post, she called the news “my worst case scenario.”

• Not long afterward, in an interview with CBS’s Tracy Smith, Swift said that she planned to sidestep Braun by rerecording everything in the songbook that he now owns, meaning all the songs she had released prior to her August 2019 album Lover.

• Over the coming months, Borchetta and Swift entered a dispute over her masters. Swift explained in a later Tumblr post: “For years I asked, pleaded for a chance to own my work. Instead I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in. I walked away because I knew once I signed that contract, Scott Borchetta would sell the label, thereby selling me and my future. I had to make the excruciating choice to leave behind my past.”

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.