● 08.12.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 12/08/2023: More Microsoft Security Breaches

Posted in News Roundup at 12:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• Historians may note that World War II was the last great “movie war.” In those days, you could do many things that are impossible today, yet make for great movie drama. You can’t sneak a fleet of ships across the oceans anymore. Nor could you dig tunnels right under your captor’s nose. Another defining factor is that it doesn’t seem we seek out superweapons anymore.

• But we don’t often see these two together in close proximity. The creation and the disruption are spaced out in time and distance, so the creators of new technology need not grapple with the disruption viscerally. Software developers at Airbnb and Uber sit behind 4K monitors and sling code into the world, while hotel workers, neighbors, and taxi drivers deal with the real-world consequences, unseen by their disruptors. And the changes that take longer, that slowly put people out of work, we struggle to connect to the real-world changes since the creation and disruption are so spread out. The original developers of the newsfeed on Facebook surely did not anticipate the… disruption… to democracy and journalism that would have come from it over a decade later.

• I hate being introspective. But I’m told it’s good for me. A few months ago, I handed in my notice to Cabinet Office. And now I’m no longer a Civil Servant.

• It’s hard to sum up those 2,462 days. Every day brought new challenges. I saw my work presented to the highest offices in the land, discussed on the nightly news, cancelled due to General Elections, and implemented across the nation. I represented my country across the world, helped protect it from attacks both digital and biological, and tried to speak a little truth to power.

• In a recent blog post, [Benjamin Breen] makes an interesting case that 2023 might go down in history as the start of a scientific revolution, and that’s even if LK-99 turns out to be a dud. He points to several biomedical, quantum computing, and nuclear fusion news items this year as proof.

• Sports betting is back in the spotlight following ESPN’s giant deal with Penn Gaming.

• Shortly before that transaction was announced, Axios spoke with DraftKings CEO Jason Robins, whose company is solidly in second place for market share (behind FanDuel) and whose share price has climbed over 150% so far this year.

Science

• The first lunar mission in Russia’s post-Soviet history was launched at 2:10 a.m. Moscow time (just after midnight GMT) today, from the Vostochny spaceport in the Russian Far East.

Hardware

• Troubleshooting a circuit is easy, right? All you need is a couple of hands to hold the probes, another hand to twiddle the knobs, a pair of eyes to look at the schematic, another pair to look at the circuit board, and, for fancy work, X-ray vision to see through the board so you know what pads to probe. It’s child’s play!

• Building a weather station is a fairly common project that plenty of us have taken on, and for good reason. They can be built around virtually any microcontroller or full-scale computer, can have as many or few sensors as needed, and range from simple, straightforward projects to more complex systems capable of doing things like sending data off to weather services like Weather Underground. This weather station features a few innovations we don’t often see, though, with a modular and wireless design that makes it versatile and easy to scale up or down as needed.

• Arm has been in talks with about 10 companies, including Amazon.com, Intel, Alphabet and Nvidia, about investments ahead of its IPO.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The future of fast food is already here with AI already taking orders and the first “underground delivery system” on the way.

• Why it matters: The push for more efficient drive-thrus at some of the country’s biggest chains reflects massive consumer demand for quicker service.

• The lawsuit also accused the Atlanta-based Delta of not delivering refunds in a timely manner.

• When Covid-19 was at its worst in Hong Kong, a palpable fear pervaded the city: people were afraid not only of the virus, but of being forced into isolation.

• Suicides have risen in the United States for the second straight year, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows. In 2022, there were nearly 50,000 estimated deaths attributed to suicide in the U.S. An increase in suicide was found across most demographics, but numbers did decline for Native Americans as well as people between the ages of 10 to 24.

• The rate for nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses involving days away from work resulting from intentional injury by other person in the private health care and social assistance industry was 10.4 per 10,000 full-time workers in 2019, up from 6.4 in 2011. This is nearly five times higher than in overall private industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• The alarming find was made by a team of scientists from Beijing Anzhen Hospital in China, who analyzed the heart tissue of 15 patients who underwent cardiovascular surgery, according to the study published by the American Chemical Society.

• The saga of the Sacklers, a multigenerational billionaire crime family of mass-murdering dope-peddlers, is an enraging parable about how the wealthy, the courts, and sadistic high-powered lawyers collude to destroy the lives of millions, profit handsomely, and evade justice.

• But there’s an unexpected twist to this tale. After the Sacklers procured a sham bankruptcy that denied their victims the right to sue while leaving their fortune largely intact, the Supreme Court – yes, this Supreme Court – saw through the scam and froze the process, pending a full hearing: [...]

• Maxwell shared her concerns on social media, helping launch an online controversy which led NEDA to announce on May 30 that it was indefinitely disabling Tessa. Patients, families, doctors and other experts on eating disorders were left stunned and bewildered about how a chatbot designed to help people with eating disorders could end up dispensing diet tips instead.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• “I have been teaching various computer classes or computer related classes since 1994,” Randall said. “For the past four years, I have been teaching in labs that have been operating Windows 3.1, 95 and 98. For these years, I have been hearing from a few other teachers, but mostly from IT professionals, that Windows is very powerful. To be honest, I haven’t seen it. As a teacher, all the of the multimedia applications that I have run seem to operate best on a Mac.”

• As generative AI continues to advance, expect a deluge of new human-named bots in the coming years, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer-science professor at Brown University, told me. The names are yet another way to make bots seem more believable and real. “There’s a difference between what you expect from a ‘help assistant’ versus a bot named Tessa,” Katy Steinmetz, the creative and project director of the naming agency Catchword, told me. These names can have a malicious effect, but in other instances, they are simply annoying or mundane—a marketing ploy for companies to try to influence how you think about their products. The future of AI may or may not involve a bot taking your job, but it will very likely involve one taking your name.

• On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission, or CPUC, voted 3-1 to let self-driving car companies expand their programs and start charging passengers like taxis.

• The build-up before the Commission’s vote Thursday was tense. Public comment lasted more than six hours. Much of that testimony was about how autonomous vehicles have impeded emergency operations in the city.

• Two decades later, the technology to construct such scenes has gone from a feat of amazing cinematographic wizardry to common internet filler. Kendrick Lamar used deepfake technology to morph his image into that of “O.J. Simpson, Kanye West, Jussie Smollett, Will Smith, Kobe Bryant, and Nipsey Hussle.” In March 2023, a photograph of “Pope Francis wearing a big white Balenciaga-style puffer jacket” became an internet staple. Unsurprisingly, synthetic media has also been used for military disinformation. In the Russian war against Ukraine, a video depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordering Ukrainian troops to lay down their arms and surrender appeared both on social media and broadcast briefly on Ukrainian news. Some synthetic content has already found commercial adoptions such as the replacement of South Korean news anchor Kim Joo-Ha with a synthetic look-alike on South Korean television channel MBN, or one company’s introduction of internet influencer Lil Miquela, an alleged nineteen-year-old, as their spokesperson. In reality, Miquela is an entirely artificial avatar created by AI media agency Brud. She has over 3 million Instagram followers and has participated in brand campaigns since 2016. She is expected to earn Brud in excess of $1 million in the coming year for her sponsored posts.

• Instead of repeating the technical details which are one Google or ChatGPT query away, this book tries to build a more timeless mental model and attitude towards reliability.

• The idea is to take you from knowing nothing about service levels to using them as a tool to measure and improve reliability.

• Llama was developed with the R&D budget of Meta. Like Unix, it was first generally accessible to the academic community. Now, it’s more permissively licensed for commercial use (although there are still restrictions).

• Is Llama Unix? If so, then what will be the Linux of Llama? A fully permissive license and truly open-source development (maybe with its own BDFL — Benevolent Dictator for Life).

• The framework is a response to a bevy of suggested frameworks by private companies on responsible AI use and regulation as well as more general efforts from Congress and the White House. Last month, top AI companies including Google, Amazon, Meta, and Open AI agreed to voluntary safety commitments that included allowing independent security experts to test their systems.

• But authors of the “Zero Trust AI Governance” framework say that the solutions the private sector have volunteered aren’t enough and the frameworks they put forth “forestall action with lengthy processes, hinge on overly complex and hard-to-enforce regimes and foist the burden of accountability onto those who have already suffered harm.”

• Discussing the dumb thing CNET did in an effort to please the Google Gods: Don’t cull old news content to improve your SEO ranking. That’s your history!

• The preview mode for SQL Server 2022 is only available in its Evaluation edition, which last for 180 days that started on July 27. It now supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 and Ubuntu 22.04.

• Microsoft has been forced to pull an update it issued as part of its August Patch Tuesday after it was found that the patch in question, meant to fix a spoofing vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server, would not install properly on non-English systems.

• Microsoft has pulled Microsoft Exchange Server’s August security updates from Windows Update after finding they break Exchange on non-English installs.

Windows TCO

• Fifteen bugs in Codesys’ industrial control systems software could be exploited to shut down power plants or steal information from critical infrastructure environments, experts have claimed.

• The Cyber Safety Review Board — a public/private entity established via presidential executive order in 2021 in the wake of the SolarWinds breach and launched in early 2022 — will review the incident as part of a broader look at the “malicious targeting of cloud computing environments” and “focus on approaches government, industry, and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) should employ to strengthen identity management and authentication in the cloud,” the agency said in a statement.

• The operation [breaching] top U.S. officials’ emails, announced in July but detected in June by security staff at the U.S. State Department, spurred heavy criticism of Microsoft, particularly because evidence of the breach was only apparent if customers paid for a premium logging tier. Microsoft has since announced that customers will have access to expanded logging and storage capability at no additional cost.

• Over a dozen Codesys vulnerabilities discovered by Microsoft researchers can be exploited to shut down industrial processes or deploy backdoors.

Linux Foundation

• Open Source Summit is a global conference that hosts a collection of microconferences, mini-summits, and co-located events for the open source community. Developers, technologists, and community leaders unite at Open Source Summit every year in North America, Europe, and Asia to collaborate, innovate, and help advance a sustainable open source ecosystem.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (intel-microcode, kernel, and php-dompdf), Fedora (linux-firmware, OpenImageIO, and php), Oracle (aardvark-dns, kernel, linux-firmware, python-flask, and python-werkzeug), SUSE (container-suseconnect, go1.19, gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-base, gstreamer-plugins-good, java-11-openjdk, kernel-firmware, kubernetes1.24, openssl-1_1, poppler, python-scipy, qatengine, ucode-intel, util-linux, and vim), and Ubuntu (dotnet6, dotnet7, php-dompdf, and velocity-tools).

• Beginning in late 2021 and continuing late into 2022, a globally active, extortion-focused cyber threat actor group attacked dozens of well-known companies and government agencies around the world. It penetrated corporate networks, stole source code, demanded payments while rarely following up, lodged political messages in shadowy online forums, and swiftly moved on to its next targets. The cyberattacks were not the work of a nation-state actor, nor did they always involve particularly complex or advanced tooling or methods. Yet the attacks were consistently effective against some of the most well-resourced and well-defended companies in the world. These headline-grabbing incidents were perpetrated by a loosely organized threat actor group known as Lapsus$. Lapsus$ exploited systemic ecosystem weaknesses to infiltrate and extort organizations, sometimes appearing to do so for nothing more than attention and public notoriety.

• HHS Health Center Cybersecurity Center (HC3) has published a new informational handout and guidance on multi-factor authentication (MFA) and smishing. It includes statistics and suggestions for dealing with common obstacles to implementation.

• A significant data breach has compromised the personal information of about 1.47 million Albertans, the Alberta Dental Service Corporation said Thursday.

• In a statement, ADSC said certain data from public dental benefits programs it administers for the provincial government was implicated in a recent cybersecurity breach.

• ADSC learned it was the victim of a ransomware attack and called in cybersecurity experts to assist with containment, remediation, and to conduct a comprehensive forensic investigation into the nature and extent of the incident.

• The city of New Haven suffered a $6 million theft in a cyber attack earlier this year it was announced Thursday. To date, law enforcement officials have recovered over half the money.

• Officials said the cyber attack targeted the Board of Education’s Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer in what was described as a “business email compromise.” Thieves got access to the CEO’s email in late May. In June, they made six successful and one failed attempts to steal money by watching conversations and inserting themselves in the discussion to steal money.

• A notorious ‘phishing-as-a-service’ (PaaS) platform known as ‘16shop’ has been shut down in a global investigation coordinated by INTERPOL, with Indonesian authorities arresting its operator and one of its facilitators, with another arrested in Japan.

• The three arrests, which concluded with actions against a suspect last month, was made possible due to the intensive intelligence-sharing between the INTERPOL General Secretariat’s cybercrime directorate, national law enforcement in Indonesia, Japan and the United States and private sector partners including Cyber Defense Institute, Group-IB, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 and Trend Micro, with added support from Cybertoolbelt.

• The PaaS platform sold ‘phishing kits’ to hackers seeking to defraud Internet users through email scams where victims typically receive an email with a pdf file or link that redirects to a site requesting the victims’ credit card or other personally identifiable information. This information is then stolen and used to extract money from the victims.

• Phishing is considered the most prevalent cyber threat in the world, and it is estimated that up to 90 per cent of data breaches are linked to successful phishing attacks, making it a major source of stolen credentials and information.

• Last week, the White House said it would launch a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency competition focused on using artificial intelligence to fix bugs created, in particular, by open-source software.

• The White House launched a multimillion-dollar cyber contest to use artificial intelligence (AI) to detect and fix security vulnerabilities in the U.S. government’s digital infrastructure in response to hackers’ growing use of AI.

• [BLACK HAT] Googlers have lately found not one but two more security vulnerabilities in Intel and AMD processors that can be exploited to steal sensitive data from a vulnerable computer’s memory.

• Really interesting “systematization of knowledge” paper: [...]

• An unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server appears to have been the entry point for the attackers who breached the systems of the UK Electoral Commission, a fact disclosed by the agency on Wednesday 10 months after it was spotted.

• Teams across Google are working hard to prepare the web for the migration to quantum-resistant cryptography.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, the researchers found that despite CAPTCHAs having “evolved in terms of sophistication and diversity” over roughly two decades, techniques to “defeat or bypass CAPTCHAs” have also vastly improved.

• “If left unchecked, bots can perform these nefarious actions at scale,” the paper reads.

• In a presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Johannes Willbold, a PhD student at Germany’s Ruhr University Bochum, explained he had been investigating the security of satellites. He studied three types of orbital machinery and found that many were utterly defenseless against remote takeover because they lack the most basic security systems.

• Abstract—Satellites are an essential aspect of our modern society and have contributed significantly to the way we live today, most notable through modern telecommunications, global positioning, and Earth observation. In recent years, and especially in the wake of the New Space Era, the number of satellite deployments has seen explosive growth. Despite its critical importance, little academic research has been conducted on satellite security and, in particular, on the security of onboard firmware. This lack likely stems from by now outdated assumptions on achieving security by obscurity, effectively preventing meaningful research on satellite firmware.

• In this paper, we first provide a taxonomy of threats against satellite firmware. We then conduct an experimental security analysis of three real-world satellite firmware images. We base our analysis on a set of real-world attacker models and find several security-critical vulnerabilities in all analyzed firmware images. The results of our experimental security assessment show that modern in-orbit satellites suffer from different software security vulnerabilities and often a lack of proper access protection mechanisms. They also underline the need to overcome prevailing but obsolete assumptions. To substantiate our observations, we also performed a survey of 19 professional satellite developers to obtain a comprehensive picture of the satellite security landscape.

Privacy/Surveillance

• In the complaint, the plaintiffs write that the act employs “the least effective and yet also the most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’ stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors,” and that minors can easily use VPNs or Tor; on-device content filtering would be a better method of restricting access to porn for children, they write. “But such far more effective and far less restrictive means don’t really matter to Texas, whose true aim is not to protect minors but to squelch constitutionally protected free speech that the State disfavors.”

• Previously, both firms were only allowed to offer their services under certain conditions. Cruise was authorized to provide fared passenger service in limited areas of San Francisco from 10 pm to 6 am without the presence of a safety driver and non-fared passenger service throughout San Francisco at any time without the presence of a safety driver.

• How much can you get away with in an autonomous vehicle if they’re effectively window-covered hotel rooms on wheels full of cameras that never stop recording?

• “It was really funny because [the Cruise] got quite hot and fogged up to the point that the windshield was completely fogged over—in any other context, in any other vehicle, that would be an actual problem,” Alex said.

• Unfortunately for the debaucherous among us, robotaxi companies currently use pretty extensive camera surveillance inside and outside of their cars.

• Dahua’s ICC Open Platform guide for “human body characteristics” includes “skin colour/complexion,” according to the report. In what Dahua calls a “data dictionary,” the company says that the “skin colour types” that Dahua analytic tools would target are “yellow,” “black,” and “white.” VOA Mandarin verified this on Dahua’s Chinese website, VOA reported.

Confidentiality

• The key in question decrypts PayPal’s master payment credential table – also known as the giant store of credit card and bank account numbers. Without access to payment credentials, PayPal doesn’t really have a business per se, seeing how we are supposed to facilitate payments, and that’s really hard to do if we no longer have access to the 100+ million credit card numbers our users added over the last year of insane growth.

• This is the story of a catastrophic software bug I briefly introduced into the PayPal codebase that almost cost us the company (or so it seemed, in the moment.) I’ve told this story a handful of times, always swearing the listeners to secrecy, and surprisingly it does not appear to have ever been written down before. 20+ years since the incident, it now appears instructive and a little funny, rather than merely extremely embarrassing.

Defence/Aggression

• In Ethiopia, homosexual acts are punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The East African country whose population of close to 120 million is split between Christianity and Islam is largely conservative, and while LGBTQ+ people have long suffered abuse, activists say the hostility has reached a new level.

• “TikTok is being used to incite violence,” said Bahiru Shewaye, cofounder of House of Guramayle. Bahiru said several videos have been reported to TikTok but “we are still waiting for them to take action.”

• To understand Russia’s current obsession with Ukraine, it is important to recognize that Russia was never a state in the common usage of the term. Unlike the modern Turkish state that emerged from the Ottoman Empire, or Great Britain, which acquired and lost an empire, Russia never had an identity separate from empire. As British historian Geoffrey Hosking observed, “Britain had an empire, but Russia was an empire.”

• World War II bombs are still regularly found during earthworks in Poland, which was the site of heavy fighting

• The decree is part of the Taliban’s response to Islamabad’s accusations that Afghan fighters are involved in attacks on Pakistani forces by the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other jihadist groups who shelter inside Afghanistan.

• More young people now get news from social media than they do from publishers themselves, according to research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

• Further research by Ofcom reveals one in three 16–24-year olds in the UK use Tiktok to access news [sic].

• Andrew Nickels, of Carmel, a suburb of Indianapolis, appeared Friday in federal court in Detroit on one count of making a threatening interstate communication, the U.S. Justice Department said in a release.

• Ivan Korolev, a lieutenant in the Russian armed forces, illegally crossed the border into Lithuania and requested political asylum, reports BBC News Russian, who Korolev himself contacted.

• Videos shared on social media on August 8 provide a closer look at the floating border barrier installed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott and aimed at keeping illegal migrants from entering the US. These controversial installations, near which a body was recently found, are equipped with spiky metal discs manufactured by Cochrane Global.

• Violence has erupted all around Cape Town following last week’s announcement of a disruptive taxi strike against new local legislation allowing authorities to impound irregular vehicles. In the absence of this critical mode of transportation, commuters living in nearby townships have been left stranded – an issue that has primarily impacted Cape Town’s Black residents.

War in Ukraine

• Russian forces destroyed 20 Ukrainian drones launched onto the Crimean Peninsula early on Saturday, Russia’s defence ministry said. There were no casualties and no damage as a result of the attempted attack, the ministry said on the Telegram messaging app. It was not immediately clear what was targeted in the reported attacks on the Russian-annexed peninsula.

• President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Friday that the heads of all Ukraine’s regional military recruitment centres were being dismissed from their jobs amid concerns about corruption. The mass sacking came as Ukraine urged civilians near the northeastern front line to evacuate on Thursday as Russia ramped up an assault to capture territory already seized once during the conflict.

• Ukrainians in Lithuania complain that they have no way to develop their businesses because banks refuse to give them loans and government support is limited.

• McGovern, who briefed seven US presidents, gives a frightening dose of reality for the direction the world is heading.

• Russia’s military continued to bombard a besieged town in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region as Moscow reported drones had targeted occupied Crimea.

• Western instructors don’t understand the kind of war or enemy that we’re fighting, say Ukrainian soldiers

• Multiple Telegram channels shared a video Friday in which a Russian soldier at a military airfield in the Rostov region complains that numerous injured soldiers, including some who are unable to walk, were left waiting on the tarmac after their flight to Moscow was postponed due to a drone attack on the city.

• Journalists from BBC News Russian and the independent outlet Mediazona, working with a team of volunteers, have used open sources to confirm the identities of 30,003 Russian soldiers who have died in the full-scale war against Ukraine.

• When the Russian military invaded Ukraine in February 2022, this was done partly from Belarusian territory. By late March, however, those troops retreated back across the Belarusian border, and Minsk has since been a relatively demure partner to Russia, leaving warfare to Moscow while Belarus itself struggled to regain its economic balance, threatened by the collapse of oil export to Ukraine. Meduza’s special correspondent Elizaveta Antonova traces the precarious history of Ukraine’s efforts to keep Belarus out of the war, and how Kyiv’s pragmatic choice of allies has led Ukraine to encourage the right-wing forces opposing Belarus’s current president Alexander Lukashenko, rather than establish ties with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s democratic government-in-exile.

• A Russian-controlled court in the Crimean city of Alushta has fined three women for “discrediting” the Russian army and forced them to apologize after they publicly danced to a song by Ukrainian comedian and singer Verka Serduchka.

• On the morning of August 11, Russia carried out a military strike on Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region, reported the regional head Svitlana Onyshchuk. She said that several people were injured and one child was killed in the attack.

• Russia’s bailiff service has issued data on debt-relief granted to former Russian inmates who served in the Storm Z unit in the war in Ukraine.

• Nataliia Bilovol’s cafe is not a normal pit stop. She and her team serve up 2,500 free meals a day and loving motherly care to Ukrainian soldiers.

• Alexander Dudka, the Russian-appointed head of the village of Lazurne in the annexed part of the Kherson region, said that village residents without Russian passports will not be given medicine “purchased from the Russian budget.” This was reported by the Telegram channel Sirena.

• Muscovites heard a blast near the Zhivopisny Bridge over the Moskva River this morning, when a UAV flying from the direction of Istra, a western suburb of the Russian capital, blew up in the area, shedding remnants over a local park.

• Volodymyr Zelensky announced Friday that the heads of all of Ukraine’s regional military enlistment offices have been dismissed.

• A fruitful decadelong program of U.S.-Ukrainian cooperation in space has ended, a victim of Russia’s war against Ukraine and other forces.

• President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was removing all 24 regional recruitment chiefs, as corrupt draft evasion schemes put the confidence of the public and Ukraine’s Western backers at risk.

• The Ukrainian Air Force said that three other missiles were aimed at military airfields in the western part of the country.

• Russian businessman Petr Aven – who holds a Latvian passport – was among four high-profile figures targeted by fresh sanctions from Washington August 11.

• The U.S. Treasury Department has added Russian tycoons Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven — founders of Alfa-Bank — to the sanctions list.

• The ouster of Mohamed Bazoum by Niger’s military presents an important opportunity to Russia’s Wagner group.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• That Carey’s job is funded by corporations that stand to lose so much from Biden’s cancellation of federal student loans deserves a disclosure from Vox. Instead, the closest readers get is Casey noting that when asked for comment, a loan cancellation activist told him to “shill for student loan companies elsewhere”—followed by his ludicrous rebuttal that student loan companies “haven’t made federal student loans since 2010.”

• A coalition of news organizations and the ACLU of Arizona sued state and county government officials in federal court arguing that the law was unconstitutional. EFF filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs in the district court.

• We are happy to report that the court in the case, Arizona Broadcasters Association v. Mayes, recently entered a stipulated permanent injunction in favor of the plaintiffs, pursuant to a settlement between the parties. The order prevents Arizona government officials from enforcing the law.

• The court’s order includes strong language in favor of the right to record the police. The order declares that the law violates the First Amendment because “there is a clearly established right to record law enforcement officers engaged in the exercise of their official duties in public places.” This conclusion reflects Ninth Circuit precedent (of which Arizona is a member), as well as that of several other circuits.

Environment

• You might think those conditions would have been alleviated by Dora: Hurricanes usually mean water, and wet things do not burn as easily. But even this dynamic is shifting. An investigation by researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa found that 2018’s Hurricane Lane brought both fire and rain to Hawaii at the same time, complicating the emergency response—dry and windy conditions spread the fire on the edges of the storm, while elsewhere, rainfall led to landslides. In 2020, researchers pointed out that Lane was only one of three documented cases of a hurricane worsening wildfire risk. With Dora, we likely have a fourth.

• Fossil fuel and corporate lobbying groups blocking action on climate change are also fighting labor protections meant to safeguard workers from its intensifying effects. As record-high temperatures kill the workers who grow our food, deliver our packages, and build our homes, industry lobbying has stalled heat safety measures in Congress and at least six states, according to a Lever review.

• Typhoon Khanun has caused floods in seven districts and left at least three people dead in Russia’s Far Eastern region of Primorye.

• We speak with Kaniela Ing, national director of the Green New Deal Network and seventh-generation Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiian, about the impact of this week’s devastating wildfires and their relationship to climate change. The catastrophic fires have destroyed nearly all buildings in the historic section of Lahaina, which once served as the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom. What is now being described as the worst natural disaster in Hawaii’s history was created by conditions such as dry vegetation, hurricane-level winds and developers redirecting water and building over wetlands, which are directly related to the climate crisis. “Anyone in power who denies climate change, to me, are the arsonists here,” says Ing. “We’re living the climate emergency.”

• We speak to a fire scientist about how the climate emergency fueled this week’s historic wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui. “This is something that is absolutely unprecedented,” says Clay Trauernicht, a professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management, University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where he focuses on wildland fire management in Hawaii and the Pacific. He explains how colonial landscape changes to the islands — prioritizing monocrop agriculture and land use for tourism — paired with the worsening atmospheric effects of climate change have set the conditions that sparked the devastating wildfires and allowed them to rage indiscriminately.

• The mudslide, which also damaged two residences, was caused by torrential rain.

Energy/Transportation

• After a grinding more-than-six-hour meeting late Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission agreed to allow self-driving cars courtesy of General Motors and Google to go out at all hours of the day and night throughout San Francisco. The commission voted 3-to-1 in favor of the measure.

• Now, robotaxi companies Cruise and Waymo are allowed everywhere they please within San Francisco city limits, without a safety driver present. Previously, Cruise was limited to specific areas of the city from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. without a safety driver present, but was allowed out any time with a driver present. Waymo was similarly allowed fared passenger service everywhere with a safety driver.

• For the supposed freedom of driving to be real, there would need to be only a few people with cars. If only 1 in 50 city dwellers had cars, there would be enough space for parking. Traffic wouldn’t back up. It would offer a big advantage over everyone else in getting around (provided that everyone else was prevented by law, custom, or the threat of violence from getting in the way). But as soon as car ownership becomes widespread, that’s gone. The cars overwhelm the space. It’s a geometry problem. It’s why 50 years ago, André Gorz observed that “the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratized. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it.” By coincidence, that same year, 1973, San Francisco passed its Transit First policy.

• Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, is headed to jail after his bail was revoked.

• Driving the news: The judge listed a series of ways that Bankman-Fried toed the limits of his bail conditions during the hearing Friday afternoon in explaining his decision.

• According to reports coming from inside the courtroom, Kaplan told the court that it was probable Bankman-Fried had tried to “tamper with witnesses at least twice.” The ex-FTX CEO was remanded to federal custody, where he is slated to remain until his trial date, currently set for Oct. 2. It’s currently unclear where he will be held, but Inner City Press reported he could either be going to Putnam County Correctional Facility or MDC-Brooklyn.

• Mr. Bankman-Fried, 31, had been under house arrest at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, Calif., since he was arrested in December on fraud charges stemming from FTX’s implosion. But at a hearing on Friday, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan said that arrangement would have to end, after prosecutors argued that Mr. Bankman-Fried had twice tried to interfere with witnesses in the case, including by giving documents to reporters.

• FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sent to jail Friday to await trial after a bail hearing for the fallen cryptocurrency wiz left a judge convinced that he had repeatedly tried to influence witnesses against him.

• U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ordered Bankman-Fried’s bail revoked after prosecutors said he’d tried to harass a key witness in his fraud case last month when he showed a journalist her private writings and in January when he reached out to the general counsel for FTX with an encrypted communication.

• Kaplan said there was probable cause to believe Bankman-Fried had tried to “tamper with witnesses at least twice” since his December arrest, most recently by showing a journalist the private writings of a former girlfriend and key witness against him and in January when he reached out to FTX’s general counsel with an encrypted communication.

• The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, is the new moderator of the PBS program Washington Week, which will now be called Washington Week With The Atlantic. I talked with Jeff about this new partnership, which launches tomorrow night on PBS at 8 p.m. ET.

• The two best days in a boat owner’s life are the day they buy it, and the day they sell it. At least, that’s the common saying among people who actually spend money to buy a boat. [saveitforparts], on the other hand, looks like he’s going to have many more great days on this boat than that since he cobbled it together nearly for free, and he won’t even need to purchase any fuel for it since it runs on solar power.

• The U.S. Department of Energy has announced that a subsidiary of U.S.-based oil company Occidental Petroleum will receive a grant to develop a commercial-scale direct air capture (DAC) facility in southern Texas.

• It is one of two DAC projects selected under a $1.2 billion federal program to scale up DAC, which the Energy Department has called the “world’s largest investment in engineered carbon removal in history.”

• BP donated tennis tickets worth a total of more than £4,200 to a government minister and two MPs, parliamentary records reveal.

• The oil and gas supermajor, which recorded bumper profits of £22 billion last year, gifted Wimbledon tickets to Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) Westminster leader Stephen Flynn, and Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy Paul Scully, worth £1,500 and £1,560 respectively.

Wildlife/Nature

• In Lahaina, the area in west Maui that is of historical importance to Indigenous people, entire neighborhoods were wiped out by this week’s historic wildfires, including the Na ‘Aikane o Maui Cultural Center, which had a massive archive that was lost to the flames. We are joined by Noelani Ahia, a Kanaka Maoli activist, who describes the community’s reaction to the destruction of Indigenous cultural documents, art and artifacts. “In the blink of an eye, it was burned to the ground, and all of those things were lost,” says Ahia. She also describes mutual aid efforts now underway and notes, “T​he people on the ground know what the community needs.”

• Aid to Maui victims and their pets can be sent to the Hawaii Community Foundation and Maui Humane Society.

• From Maui, we hear from a survivor of Hawaii’s historic wildfires, which have taken at least 55 lives to date. Vixay Phonxaylinkham, a resident of California, was on vacation with his wife and five children when they had to jump into the ocean to escape the raging fires and floated on a piece of wood for hours. “We stuck together. We held on. We’re not going to die this way. We’re here. We’re alive,” said Phonxaylinkham.

Finance

• I set some money aside in funds each month, but I also have a savings account that I keep at about €5,000. I call it my buffer account. This is where I borrow money from when I need it. I can repay the loan at any rate I want, and there is no interest or late fees. In a way I am my own bank for the purpose of payday loans.

• If you’ve ever wondered where the term “banker’s hours” came from, look back to the booming post-war economy of 1950s America. That’s when banks were deluged with so many checks, each of which had to be reconciled by hand, that they had to shut their doors at 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, just to have a hope of getting all the work done at a reasonable time. It was time-consuming, laborious, error-prone work that didn’t scale well, and something had to be done about it.

• Russian bailiffs have begun canceling the debts of former prisoners fighting in Ukraine as part of Defense Ministry units, the independent outlet Verstka reported on Friday, citing Federal Bailiff Service files.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Iran is one of more than 20 countries formally seeking to join the economic bloc currently comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

• The appointment comes the week after Drummond and three other senior executives left Vice following the company’s acquisition out of bankruptcy by a consortium of its lenders.

• Wired parent company Condé Nast said Drummond will be responsible “for overseeing the vision and content across all platforms… in addition to leading editorial teams in Italy, Japan, Mexico, the UK and US”.

• It’s important to note that toxic individuals operating a troll farm and excluding themselves from their own Code of Conduct only applies to “Liberia” Chat. Their ban makes no difference anywhere else even if they could ultimately enforce it somehow.

• That’s one reason why they want to replace IRC with something else. Then they can forcibly ban you from EVERY room on the service, because it’s all centralized, even if the room moderators don’t approve.

• Authoritarians always want ultimate power and the last say on every decision.

• Blocking of news links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada has becomes increasingly widespread in recent days, leading to a growing number of public comments from media outlets and reporters expressing surprise or shock about the scope of the link blocking. Indeed, outlets with blocked links include university student newspapers, radio stations, and foreign news outlets. While there may have been some errors (Facebook has a page to seek review of any blocked link decision), the inclusion of a very wide range of Canadian and foreign news outlets is no accident. Rather, it reflects the government’s Bill C-18 approach, which effectively covers all news outlets worldwide whose links are accessed in Canada. The Canadian government could have adopted a more targeted approach – for example, limiting the scope to news links from those news outlets eligible to negotiate agreements with Internet platforms under the law – but it instead went for the broadest possible approach that includes foreign news outlets with little or no connection to Canada.

• Luna-25 is due to lift off on Friday from Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Russian Far East, just a few weeks after India launched its lunar lander, Chandrayaan-3, from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in the Bay of Bengal. Advertisement

• Both missions will try to land on the Moon’s south pole on, or around, August 23. It’s not yet clear which nation will get to the lunar surface first.

• This week marked almost 50 years since Richard Nixon tersely gave up the presidency after he was charged with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and other offenses likely familiar to a mouthy, crooked real estate developer who later wrote the disgraced leader he was nonetheless “a great man.” When Nixon was pardoned for his crimes, many say the action paved the way for the deplorable fan and wannabe tyrant now deemed somehow both far lesser yet more pernicious than Tricky Dick ever was.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A court in the city of Mytishchi near Moscow sentenced environmental activist Aleksandr Bakhtin to six years in prison on August 11 on a charge of distributing fake news about the Russian armed forces.

• It’s something of a “new normal” here — as it is around the nation. No longer are just books under fire, but also the library administrators, teachers and long-beloved librarians who are defending them. They’re being shouted down by parents, vilified on billboards, reported to the police, and trolled online, leaving many fearing for their safety.

• “I had an actual death threat,” says Livingston Parish school librarian Amanda Jones, her voice breaking as she recalls one particular post: “We know where you work + live….u have a LARGE target on ur back. Click… Click… See you soon.”

• Unfortunately, after the Taliban took control of the region, they decided the Buddhas had to go. Their reasoning? They considered the statues to be idolatrous and a violation of their strict interpretation of Islamic law. Demolition began on 2 March 2001.

• Subsequently, student councils across Iran reported an uptick in the number of “telephone summons” for students likely to stage protests. In some instances, when students failed to respond, security forces reached out to their families.

• Here on Techdirt we’ve chronicled the rise of a bunch of terrible age verification laws, including many focused specifically on adult content. We’ve also highlighted how MindGeek, the company behind a bunch of largest adult content sites, including Pornhub, have started geoblocking entire states in response to these problematic laws, while the Free Speech Coalition has been suing to get these laws tossed out as unconstitutional.

• KOSA is fundamentally a censorship bill. Politicians are justifying it by harping on something we all know—that there’s content online that’s inappropriate for kids. But instead of letting tricky questions about what online content is appropriate at what age be decided by parents and families, politicians are stepping in to override us.

• Alexey Navalny, the opposition politician sentenced to 19 years in prison last week, has released his first extended piece of writing since the trial, expressing a deep disappointment with the past two decades of democratic politics in Russia. We’re publishing the full English text of Navalny’s essay that first appeared on his website under the title “My Fear and Loathing.”

• “Is It a Platform? Is It a Search Engine? It’s Chat GPT!,” by Prof. Beatriz Botero Arcila, just published in our symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Speech; more articles from the symposium coming in the next few days.

• The federal judge overseeing the case involving former President Trump’s alleged efforts to subvert 2020 election results agreed Friday to the defense’s proposal for a more limited scope of the protective order, but argued that Trump’s right to free speech is “not absolute,” according to multiple reports.

• >

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• On Thursday, August 10, officials from the General Directorate of Intelligence, the Taliban’s intelligence agency, stormed the office of the independent Killid radio station in Jalalabad city, in eastern Nangarhar province, and detained its manager Faqirzai and reporter Saleh, according to the non-profit Afghanistan Journalists Center (AFJC)and a journalist with knowledge of the situation who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation by the Taliban.

• Separately, also on Thursday, Taliban intelligence operatives entered offices of the independent Uranus TV network in Kunduz city in northern Afghanistan and detained Hasib Hassas, a journalist at the independent radio Salam Watandar, according to the AFJC and another journalist who spoke with CPJ anonymously due to fear of Taliban reprisal.

• The group that was founded in 1983 and now includes more than 950 members, mostly in the U.S., announced the name change at its annual conference in Winnipeg, Canada. The decision was made after Indigenous members voted 89-55 in favor of the name change. About 400 Indigenous members were eligible to vote.

• “Such unprincipled arrests can be considered as pressure on journalists,” said NAI, an Afghan media advocacy group, in a statement on August 11.

• “If such arrests continue, they will create an atmosphere of fear for journalists and make freedom of expression and access to information in Afghanistan a serious challenge.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• A world of hair, makeup and manicurists have been idled by the Hollywood strikes at a time when they were still rebuilding from the covid shutdowns. And many don’t have a Plan B. In more than a dozen interviews with The Associated Press, many fear they’ll lose their homes and health insurance. They’re not alone as the writers and actors strikes drag on. The entertainment industry has hundreds of journeyman job descriptions impacted by the strikes, from script supervisors to costume designers. Says one Los Angeles-based hair stylist: “Hair is what I love. There’s really nothing else.”

• Several of the union’s concerns were still not met in the university’s latest proposal, said Amir Fleischmann, GEO contract committee chair, prior to the Friday meeting. Voting took place in person and online. With nearly 500 GEO members in attendance during a membership meeting Thursday night and almost 1,000 total votes cast, “it was a pretty clear, decisive margin. … We voted that the Aug. 2 offer was not good enough, that we needed a little bit more.”

• Our Sheffield warehouse was plundered in the dead of night, and the thieves made off with a good haul of stuff. While we’ll be circumspect about the details, we can say they were pretty professional how they went about getting in and used some basic but effective ninja skills to exfiltrate the wares.

• Once the alarms tripped, the police were on-scene within minutes, but the tea-leaves had vanished into the night. While we’ve mostly tidied up from the ordeal, it’s a bunch of stress and extra things to do that no one needs. I think that’s the feel of the last few years for most people though!

• Writers and actors are also on edge because of the threat poised by studio deployment of artificial intelligence. The writers fear it will degrade the script-making process while many actors worry that AI has the potential to capture and manipulate an actor’s image, thus threatening an Orwellian future unless the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) wins a set of well-defined guardrails protecting their personae.

• Gordon Brown, the former prime minister of the UK and the UN’s special envoy for global education, has called the Taliban’s attack on women’s rights and lives a “crime against humanity.”

• Brown slammed the Taliban during an interview with BBC Radio 4 on Thursday. He spoke at length about the kind of restrictions and exclusions women in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan have been forced to endure.

• The Taliban has put several restrictions on women since it took over Afghanistan in August 2021. Most of its diktats target women and their presence in public life.

• Cops love shooting dogs almost more than they like casually violating constitutional rights. Even the DOJ called cop-on-dog violence an “epidemic.”

• When Judy Kalepp became the municipal court judge in Abbotsford, Wisconsin, more than a decade ago, she was shocked to see how many Latinos were ticketed for driving without a license. She asked herself: Couldn’t they just get licensed and stop breaking the law?

• Then she got to know some of the drivers, mostly Mexican immigrants who lived and worked in the community. Despite not speaking Spanish, she was able to communicate with many of them and learn that they were undocumented and prohibited by state law from getting driver’s licenses.

• The Los Angeles Housing Department has sent warning letters to the owners of 17 buildings meant for low-cost housing, demanding that they stop renting rooms to tourists in violation of city law.

• It’s a fact: You can violate a government employee’s rights while being a government employee. Sure, it’s more tricky than violating rights as a government employee (when targeting non-government employees), but it can still be done.

• The New Orleans Museum of Art generated a storm of controversy when it announced on Instagram its recent hire of Amanda M. Maples as its new curator of African art. Why? Maples is white. Responses fell along two lines: demanding shared ancestry between artworks and those who curate them, and demanding racial representation in a predominantly Black city. (New Orleans’s population is 59 percent Black.)

• In recent years it’s been difficult to keep track of all the pundits or policy wonks on the American right who turn out to have secret—and often not-so-secret—lives as white supremacist provocateurs. This was certainly true during the Trump administrations, which had a weakness for appointing racist figures such as Sebastian Gorka and Darren Beattie. This was also true of nearly a dozen staffers associated with Tucker Carlson and his former show at Fox News. And it now applies to staffers and influencers in the circles around the presidential campaigns of both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. These stories sometimes—although not invariably—end with the racist staffer being fired.

• I am not sitting at my desk drinking from a Judge Tanya Chutkan coffee mug while a votive candle to special counsel Jack Smith burns on my coffee table. I own neither; it’s not my way.*

• Three years ago we had the CEO of Jungle Scout, Greg Mercer, on our podcast, to debunk the claim that Amazon was unfairly competing with third party sellers in the Amazon marketplace. It’s become somewhat accepted wisdom that Amazon is engaged in some sort of predatory behavior, looking at what products sell well with data that only it has, and then coming in with competing products that undercut those sellers.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• You can find links to the graphs for all of the TLDs for which I could find data here; there’s also a page with all TLDs sorted by domain count. The scripts as well as the individual data and HTML files are also pushed to this GitHub repository.

• We’ve documented in detail how the series of mergers (AT&T—>Time Warner—>Discovery) that created the Warner Brothers Discovery entertainment empire may just be one of the most destructive, pointless, and incompetently managed “business” transactions in modern media history.

• Conde Nasty Rolls Out Updated Reddit and Breaks SeaMonkey Rendering. We call them (Conde Nast) “Conde Nasty” at TechRights for a number of reasons.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Microsoft has long been one of several companies that attempted to monopolize repair in a bid for profit, particularly when it has come to the company’s game consoles. But in recent years the company appears to have realized that with state and federal lawmakers and regulators cracking down on this behavior, it might be smart to stop swimming upstream when it comes to “right to repair.”

Monopolies

Patents

• The Federal Circuit’s new decision in Rembrandt Diagnostics, LP v. Alere, Inc., 2021-1796 (Fed. Cir. Aug 11, 2023) complements the court’s recent decision in Axonics, Inc. v. Medtronic, Inc., 2022-1532 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 7, 2023). Ordinarily, an IPR petitioner must stick to the arguments and reasoning that it sets forth in the original petition.  These two cases take a contrary position and permit the petitioner to shift as late as the  final reply brief. The court permits these changes only if responsive to new arguments by the patentee and sufficiently linked to previously raised arguments.

Trademarks

• The Delhi High Court has held that global search giant Google cannot avail of protection under the safe harbour clause of the Information Technology Act, 2000, if it uses a trademark as a keyword in its advertisement program.

• It will also be held liable for trademark infringement in such cases, the court added.

• The USPTO refused to register the proposed mark S!MPLY for “Footwear, primarily made of ethylene-vinyl acetate; Slip-on shoes, primarily made of ethylene-vinyl acetate,” finding confusion likely with the registered mark SIMPLY for “Dresses; Jumpsuits; Rompers.” Applicant Simply Southern argued that its mark, when said aloud,”is literally: ‘s, exclamation point, m, ply (or p-l-y).” As to the goods, it asserted that there was no evidence that dresses, jumpsuits, or rompers are made with ethylene-vinyl acetate. How do you think this appeal came out? In re Simply Southern Holdings, LLC, Serial No. 90728560 (August 3, 2023) [not precedential] [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Thomas Shaw).

Copyrights

• What do you think would happen if I tried this? I stroll into a bank and see a wad of cash within arm’s reach behind an unoccupied teller window. I grab the dough and start walking out the door with it when a police officer, very rudely, stops me. “I’m entitled to take this money,” I say. “Because nobody at the bank told me not to.”

• If you think my defense is implausible, then you don’t work for Google. This week, the search giant said that it wants to change copyright laws so that it can grab any content it wants from the Internet, use it as training data for its AI products, and argue “fair use” if anyone objects to the plagiarism stew Google’s cooking up. Google’s figleaf to copyright holders: they’ll find a way to let you opt-out.

• In 2022, rightsholders obtained permission in Austria to block several pirate site domains and a list of IP addresses that actually belonged to Cloudflare. ISPs had no choice but to comply with the court’s instructions which took out countless Cloudflare customers in Austria. According to reviews conducted by local telecoms regulator TKK, the IP address blocking violated net neutrality regulations and will no longer be allowed.

• Z-Library has launched a petition calling on the U.S. Attorney General and Argentina’s Minister of Foreign Affairs to stop the criminal prosecution, labeling it as illegal. The shadow library asks its supporters to sign a petition which stresses that the site is essential to ensure freedom of information and the progress of science.

• This is and will keep happening. As complicated a landscape as copyright law is, the idea of automating the policing of copyright infringement without creating all kinds of collateral damage is simply absurd. Our pages are absolutely brimming with example after example of all kinds of entities issuing copyright claims and strikes on all kinds of platforms in error, with the blame always being laid at the feet of the copyright “bots” that screwed up. Apparently the wider world is okay with this kind of collateral damage clown show, since it sure doesn’t appear to be changing.

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