● 08.13.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links Leftover 13/08/2023: Microsoft Cortana’s Death

Posted in News Roundup at 12:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• Maybe it’s just because my own opinions have been changing recently, but I get the feeling that there seems to be a general resurgence of analogue over digital. Film photography is having a moment, so are mechanical watches it seems, and the act of writing in a physical notebook also seems to be growing in recent years. That’s in no way a definitive list, but it’s just a few things I’ve noticed.

Science

• The astrophysicist Jane Rigby talks about the beauty of space, the possibility of life on other planets, and how the Webb sees hidden parts of the universe.

• So the room-temperature superconductor was a super disappointment, but even though the claims didn’t stand up in the end, the even better news is that real science was done. A paper making extraordinary claims came out, the procedure to make LK-99 was followed in multiple labs around the world, and then it was tested. It didn’t turn out to conduct particularly well at all. After a couple weeks of global superconductor frenzy, everything is back to normal again.

Education

• Mianzhi Wang, a graduate of a doctoral program in electrical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has created an old-school text-style simulator for the graduate school experience. Make wise choices, and you can indeed graduate. While the engineering aspect of the creator’s experience tends to emphasize conference papers more than was prevalent in my own biomedical PhD, it’s not that far off. Getting my simulated PhD took a bit longer though than my real life one (not that much longer, unfortunately). Try it for yourself at the link below: [...]

• The Taliban barred women from campuses last December, triggering global outrage. Girls had been banned from school beyond sixth grade soon after the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. Afghanistan is the only country in the world with bans on female education.

Hardware

• There was a time when soldering stations were unusual in hobby labs. These days, inexpensive stations are everywhere. [Kerry Wong] looks at the TS1C station, which is tiny and cordless. As he points out, cordless irons are not new, but modern battery technology has made them much more practical. However, this iron doesn’t actually have a battery.

• Flight simulator software has been available for about as long as desktop PCs have been a thing, but modern incarnations such as 2020’s Microsoft Flight Simulator have really raised the bar — not only graphically, but in terms of interactivity. There’s a dizzying array of switches and buttons that you can fiddle with in your aircraft’s virtual cockpit, but doing it with the same keyboard that you use to hammer out code or write Hackaday articles doesn’t do much for immersion.

• We’ve always admired Curta mechanical calculators, and would be very hesitant to dismantle one. But [Janus Cycle] did just that — and succeeded. A friend sent him a Curta Model 2 calculator that was frozen up. Just opening the case involved percussive force to remove a retaining pin, and once inside he discovered the main shaft had been slightly bent. No doubt this calculator had suffered a drop at some point in the past.

• [Fred] has a Casio PB-700 pocket calculator / computer, complete with the companion docking station featuring a four-color pen plotter, model FA-10, and a microcassette tape recorder, model CM-1. He really wanted to see what this plotter could do, but there were no demos that he could find. So despite only having one working pen, [Fred] took matters into his own hands and proceeded to make his own.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The state of Texas is questioning the legal rights of an “unborn child” in arguing against a lawsuit brought by a state prison guard who says she had a stillborn baby because of working conditions. She says prison officials refused to let her leave work for more than two hours after she began feeling intense pains that she believed were signs of early labor. The argument from the Texas attorney general’s office appears to be in tension with positions it has previously taken in defending state laws. The agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Its claims came in court filings arguing against a federal lawsuit brough last year by Salia Issa.

• A federal appeals court had signed off on a deal that would shield members of the wealthy Sackler family from lawsuits in exchange for billions for those harmed by the opioid epidemic.

• A federal appeals court had signed off on the agreement, which would shield members of the wealthy Sackler family from opioid-related lawsuits in exchange for billions to resolve thousands of claims.

• Supply side challenges include a potential limit on rice shipments from Vietnam.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• The CPUC session drew commenters from all sides of the issue, with some calling robotaxis unsafe menaces while others lauded them as solutions to everything from climate change to road rage.

• Driverless cars have gotten stuck in the middle of roads, blocked bus lanes or even interfered in police or firefighter operations.

• We examine three liability regimes, tying them to common examples of red-teamed model behaviors: defamation, speech integral to criminal conduct, and wrongful death. We find that any Section 230 immunity analysis or downstream liability analysis is intimately wrapped up in the technical details of algorithm design. And there are many roadblocks to truly finding models (and their associated parties) liable for generated speech.

• ChatGPT “hallucinates.”1 That is, it often generates text that makes factual claims that are untrue and perhaps never even appear in its training data. It can get math problems wrong. It can get dates wrong. But it can also make things up. It makes up sources that don’t exist, as one lawyer found out to their chagrin when they cited nonexistent cases in a legal brief.2 It makes up quotes. And it can make up false claims that hurt people. Ask it what crimes a particular person has committed or been accused of, and ChatGPT might get it right, truthfully saying, for instance, that Richard Nixon was accused of destroying evidence to hide a burglary committed by his campaign, or truthfully saying that it is unaware of any accusations against a person. But it will also sometimes tell a false story about a crime. ChatGPT 3.5 (but not 4.0), for instance, says that one of us (Lemley) has been accused and indeed found liable for misappropriating trade secrets. (He hasn’t.) Others have falsely been accused by ChatGPT of sexual harassment.3

• The data from enterprise customers is clear but conflicted: While 94% of customers say they’re spending more on artificial intelligence this year, they’re doing so with budget constraints that will steal from other initiatives.

• Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, Communications, and Mass Media has barred its employees from using Apple smartphones and tablets in any professional capacity, reports Interfax, citing ministry head Maxut Shadayev.

• Microsoft has shut down its Cortana app for Windows 11. A new update is rolling out for Cortana that simply disables the digital assistant three years after Microsoft also discontinued its Cortana apps for iOS and Android.

• If you attempt to launch Cortana on Windows 11 you’ll now be met with a notice about how the app is deprecated and a link to a support article on the change. Microsoft is now planning to end support for Cortana in Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams Display, and Microsoft Teams Rooms “in the fall of 2023.” Surprisingly, Cortana inside Outlook mobile “will continue to be available,” according to Microsoft.

• Microsoft has finally killed Cortana on Windows 11 – its Windows Phone-era assistant that debuted on desktop with Windows 10. Cortana app was the tech giant’s response to Siri in 2014, and Microsoft published a series of advertisements targeting Apple’s powerful assistant.

Windows TCO

• A growing number of businesses, universities and government agencies have been [compromised] in a global cyberattack by Russian cybercriminals and are now working to understand how much data was compromised.

• While the scope of the attack is not yet fully known, officials at the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said Thursday that “several federal agencies… have experienced intrusions” and suggested a number of businesses could be impacted as well.

• Separately, state agencies said late Thursday that millions of people in Louisiana and Oregon had their data compromised in a security breach. The states did not blame anyone in particular for the hack but federal officials have attributed a broader hacking campaign using the same software vulnerability to a Russian ransomware gang that calls itself Clop.

• On the one hand, cybersecurity’s popularity is understandable. Bad actors continue to innovate, and threats continue to proliferate. The cybersecurity needs of organizations continue to multiply as a result.

• On the other hand, why haven’t the vendors gotten a handle on cybersecurity by now? After all, they’ve been working on the problem for years. Given the expanding exhibit floor at Black Hat, there appears to be no shortage of cybersecurity vendors ready to address the problem.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• HashiCorp moves to a business source license for all its future product releases that prohibits use for commercial purposes, renewing questions about open core business models.

Security

• The golden age of Windows ransomware appears to be here, judging by the statistics provided by content delivery network Akamai in its latest State of the Internet report that spans the period from October 2021 to the end of May 2023.

• The Xen Project has released one or more Xen security advisories (XSAs).

• We have published Qubes Security Bulletin 093: Transient execution vulnerabilities in AMD and Intel CPUs (CVE-2023-20569/XSA-434, CVE-2022-40982/XSA-435). The text of this QSB and its accompanying cryptographic signatures are reproduced below. For an explanation of this announcement and instructions for authenticating this QSB, please see the end of this announcement.

• Intel Arc A770 and A750 vulnerabilities allow authenticated users to enable denial of service or information disclosure.

• Intel has addressed 80 vulnerabilities affecting its products, including 18 high-severity privilege escalation and DoS flaws.

• Google researcher Daniel Moghimi first reported CVE-2022-40982 and the resulting data leak attacks to Intel in August 2022, but it’s taken nearly 12 months to disclose the flaw.

• A microcode update has been released to address the issue

• Weekly cybersecurity news roundup that provides a summary of noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar for the week of August 7, 2023.

• Northern Ireland’s top police officer apologized for what he described as an “industrial scale” data breach in which the personal information of more than 10,000 officers and staff was released to the public.

• MoustachedBouncer is a cyberespionage group that targets foreign diplomats in Belarus via ISP adversary-in-the-middle attacks.

• A new executive order restricting outbound investment seeks to address narrow national security threats posed to the United States by China.

• .

• The White House is set to unveil restrictions on US investment in sensitive Chinese technology, Reuters reported, in an effort to limit the flow of US capital and know-how to China.

• CISA has added CVE-2023-38180, a zero-day vulnerability affecting .NET and Visual Studio, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog.

• SAP has fixed over a dozen new vulnerabilities with its Patch Tuesday updates, including a critical flaw in its PowerDesigner product.

• This week, the Polish Central Cybercrime Bureau (Centralne Biuro Zwalczania Cyberprzestępczości) under the supervision of the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Katowice (Prokuratura Regionalna w Katowicach) took action against LolekHosted.net, a bulletproof hosting service used by criminals to launch cyber-attacks across the world.

• A ransomware attack continued to disrupt some services Friday at two Connecticut health care systems owned by Prospect Medical Holdings.

• Eastern Connecticut Health Network, which operates Manchester Memorial Hospital and Rockville General Hospital in Vernon, and Waterbury Health, which operates Waterbury Hospital, reported on their websites Friday that some services and locations continued to be temporarily closed nearly a week after their parent company reported being hit by a ransomware attack.

• Another police force has admitted a data breach after the names and salaries of all its staff were accidentally published online.

• Cumbria Police said that on March 6 it found out information about pay and allowances had been uploaded on its website following a “human error”. The force’s admission comes after an “industrial scale breach of data” in Northern Ireland this week which saw some details of around 10,000 officers and staff published online for a number of hours.

• Florida Healthy Kids is a state-created entity that provides health and dental insurance for Florida children aged 5-18. On Friday, they joined the unhappy ranks of those affected by the MOVEit breach that has affected more than 600 organizations already. In this case, it was their vendor, Maximus, who issued the notification.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Indian lawmakers approved a data protection legislation that “seeks to better regulate big tech firms and penalize companies for data breaches” as several groups expressed concern over citizens’ privacy rights.

• Zoom said Friday it was further updating its terms of service to make clearer that it won’t use customer conversations and other data to train its own or third party AI systems.

• Why it matters: Customers have come to rely on Zoom for a wide range of internal and external meetings and changes the company made to its terms earlier this year had stoked fears that sensitive information could be exposed.

• Porsha Woodruff thought the police who showed up at her door to arrest her for carjacking were joking. She is the first woman known to be wrongfully accused as a result of facial recognition technology.

• The ministry said in a statement the decision to lift the ban came after “the company that owns the platform responded to the requirements of the security authorities that called on the company to disclose the entities that leaked citizens’ data.”

Confidentiality

• Unlike Tor, Veilid doesn’t run exit nodes. Each node in the Veilid network is equal, and if the NSA wanted to snoop on Veilid users like it does on Tor users, the Feds would have to monitor the entire network, which hopefully won’t be feasible, even for the No Such Agency. Rioux described it as “like Tor and IPFS had sex and produced this thing.”

Defence/Aggression

• Nearly 80 years after the first atomic test in New Mexico, a consortium of “downwinders” are documenting the bomb’s impact on their community and organizing for restitution.

• French authorities have noted a marked increase in attempted crossings to Britain

• Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids holding office by former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion. Because of a range of misperceptions and mistaken assumptions, Section Three’s full legal consequences have not been appreciated or enforced. This article corrects those mistakes by setting forth the full sweep and force of Section Three.

• “When we started out, neither of us was sure what the answer was,” Professor Baude said. “People were talking about this provision of the Constitution. We thought: ‘We’re constitutional scholars, and this is an important constitutional question. We ought to figure out what’s really going on here.’ And the more we dug into it, the more we realized that we had something to add.”

• He summarized the article’s conclusion: “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.”

• Matthew Garrett in TechRights (before his ban) called himself “Snowball”, allegedly as a reference to Animal Farm.

• Yes, I have read Animal Farm, and it describes perfectly what’s going on in Illinois. Emergency Decrees. Democrat Inner Party members with FOID cards shooting back at THEIR carjackers.

• The law makes it harder to record and observe police activity.

• A total of 18 suspected gang members were on trial in the case, 12 of whom also received suspended prison sentences.

• Niger is shaping up to be the surprising frontline of the new Cold War.

• People who recall how the United States and its NATO partners (along with their propaganda mouthpieces in the news media) generated public support for a proxy war in Ukraine may be experiencing a sense of déjà vu.

• A cousin of the jailed former head of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee (KNB) has been sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of bribery and embezzlement amid President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev’s crackdown on predecessor Nursultan Nazarbaev’s allies.

War in Ukraine

• Lithuania has also sent additional forces to the Belarusian border, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė has said following Poland’s announcement earlier this week of plans to deploy 2,000 additional troops to reinforce security on its eastern border with the neighbouring country.

• Poland is planning to move up to 10,000 additional troops to the border with Belarus to support the Border Guard, Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said on August 10.

• Three years ago, Lithuania welcomed thousands of Belarusians fleeing repressions at home. Now that their residence permits are up for renewal, they find the atmosphere much more hostile.

• Surveillance by the State Border Guard shows possible aggression on the border, but border guards, along with other services, are prepared to protect the border, the Chief of Border Guard Guntis Pujāts said in an interview to Latvian Radio on August 3.

• On Thursday, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda met with Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on the Polish side of the so-called Suwalki Gap, where they stressed the two countries were closely monitoring the movements of Wagner mercenaries in Belarus.

• Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and the head of the Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation Alexey Likhachev toured Russia’s Central Testing Grounds on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, says a Defense Ministry press release.

• On August 12, six Odesa beaches officially opened for swimming, reports regional governor Oleh Kiper.

• Lessons in Western self-sabotage from the Ukraine War.

• The White House lumped the Ukraine funds in with $12 billion for domestic disaster relief and $4 billion for border security

• On August 12, Ukraine’s Armed Forces (AFU) attacked the Crimean Bridge twice, say the Russian authorities. Sergey Aksyonov, governor of Russian-annexed Crimea, says that two rockets were shot down during the initial attack. Later on August 12, Aksyonov reported that an additional rocket was shot down during a second attack on the bridge. Russia’s Defense Ministry has reported that the Russian military shot down two S-200 guided anti-aircraft missiles that had been converted into strike weapons. The ministry said that the missiles were intercepted in the air and destroyed without damage or casualties.

• 20 drones attacked annexed Crimea overnight on August 12, reports Russia’s Defense Ministry.

• A St. Petersburg court has ordered the arrest of a foreign national, Davronbek Yuldoshev, in connection with attempting a terrorist attack, reports the court’s press service.

• Last winter, Russia launched a six-month bombing campaign to methodically destroy Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure. With a new winter heating season now fast approaching, is Ukraine prepared for a repeat?

• Russian air defence systems destroyed a Ukraine-launched unmanned aerial vehicle over Belgorod, which is north of the Ukraine border, early on Sunday morning, the Kremlin has reported. Russia’s defence ministry said that there had been no casualties or damage caused by the attack, but these reports could not be independently verified.

• Russia’s defence ministry said Saturday that Ukraine tried to strike the Crimea bridge over the Kerch Strait with S-200 missiles, but that there were no casualties or damage. The ministry said earlier today that Russian forces had destroyed 20 Ukrainian drones launched onto the Moscow-annexed peninsula, also with no casualties or damage.

• While Ukraine continues to occupy a regular spot in news reporting, western outlets and politicians still overlook the main reason for the war. In order to make sure such a conflict cannot happen again in the future, we must understand the deep-rooted societal norms that allowed Russia to invade in the first place. Lesia Ogryzko at Ukraine’s Center for Defence Strategies think tank, writes for the New Eastern Europe magazine.

• Several civilians were killed by Russian shelling in southern Ukraine as fighting continued in both the south and the east of the country, Ukrainian authorities reported on August 13.

• At least 500 children have been killed and over 1,000 injured since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General’s Office reported on August 13.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on August 12 said Ukraine needs more demining equipment and the ability to manufacture such equipment itself.

• Authorities in Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odesa have announced that they are opening six beaches for swimming for the first time since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

• At least two people were killed in Russian military strikes in Ukraine on August 12 as Moscow said Ukraine had sent drones to attack Crimea and fired missiles at the bridge connecting the peninsula to Russia.

• Most military experts doubt that they would have, and say that Kyiv can still prevail without them.

• The Kerch Strait Bridge is a critical strategic asset that allows Moscow to move troops and equipment from Russia to Crimea and from there to the front lines in Ukraine.

• Troops advanced 10 to 12 miles along two main lines of attack in Kyiv’s drive to reach the southern coast and sever Russian supply lines, while explosions echoed at the vital Kerch Strait Bridge.

• In its hunt for weapons, Ukraine has rolled back anticorruption rules and turned to people once seen as relics of an anything-goes era.

• A Russian fighter jet crashed on August 12 in Russia’s Kaliningrad region during a training mission, killing the two pilots on board, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

• Poland’s defense minister says his country has increased the number of troops protecting its border with Belarus as a deterrent amid “destabilizing” actions by its pro-Russian neighbor. Mariusz Blaszczak met in Jarylowka, in eastern Poland, on Saturday with some of the troops recently deployed close to the Belarus border. He insisted that the increased military presence is purely a deterrent move, not a hostile act, as Minsk and Moscow are claiming. Blaszczak said this week that up to 10,000 Polish Army and Territorial Defense troops will be stationed on the border.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Elon Musk and other private jet owners may soon be able to stop the public from learning about their flights, thanks to the FAA reauthorization bill recently passed by the House.

• Why it matters: Such information has proven useful to journalists and other researchers — but some plane owners, including Musk, have argued that it can pose a security risk.

• The big picture: Private plane information has long been public record.

• Why the European Union’s ambitious new rules should be tweaked to allow journalists to access Big Tech data.

Environment

• A climate case brought forward by two NGOs last year may have marked a watershed moment in the history of environmental litigation in Finland, according to environmental experts.

• If this all sounds too familiar, it is. We’ve been through this scenario with 9/11. We’ve been through it with Covid. The minute the government starts talking about a state of emergency is the minute we can expect to start losing more of our freedoms. The amount of tracking and surveillance we are under is becoming absurd. One wonders how much worse it can get. A lot worse. As the disasters multiply, the closer we get to the 2024 presidential election, the harder the governmental boot will push down upon our heads.

• Apparently, July 4 was the hottest day on Earth in as many as 125,000 years, breaking a record that was set the day before. Wow.

• In a warming world, marine creatures are in danger of suffocating. Gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide dissolve better at colder temperatures, so that means the warmer the water, the less oxygen is available to breathe.

• Conversely, higher temperatures also cause an increase in metabolism, which in turn means animals have to breathe even more than usual, said Diego Kersting, a marine scientist with Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC). That combination also heightens the risk of death by starvation for marine life.

• The study concludes that Antarctica is likely to face considerable stress and damage in the coming decades. Twelve countries including the U.K., U.S., India and China pledged to preserve the continent’s fragile environment through the Antarctic Treaty in 1959. The study says some countries risk breaching the terms of this agreement without urgent action to reduce emissions.

• “Nations must understand that by continuing to explore, extract and burn fossil fuels anywhere in the world, the environment of Antarctica will become ever more affected in ways inconsistent with their pledge,” lead author Martin Siegert, a professor at the University of Exeter, said in a statement Tuesday.

• Several dangerous conditions have combined to make the Maui wildfires especially destructive. Climate change is increasing the likelihood of more extreme weather events like this one, experts say.

• “Fossil fuel interests see a clear benefit in promoting direct air capture as a means to preserve the dominance of dirty fossil fuels,” said one advocate.

Energy/Transportation

• The news is rife with claims of the next great thing in clean energy generation, but most of these technologies never make it to production. Whether that’s due to cost issues, production, or scalability, we’re often teased with industry breakthroughs that never come to fruition. Multi-layered solar panels, wave and tidal energy, and hydrogen fuel cells are all things that are real but can’t seem to break through and overtake other lower cost, simpler, and proven technologies. One that seems to be bucking this trend is the liquid metal battery, which startup Ambri is putting into service on the electrical grid next year.

• 2 days ago we took our fourth trip up to the farm to take a look at the site. Its over 400 miles a day of driving to do the round trip, so not something done lightly. Luckily this time we had arranged to be there when it was super-sunny, which is always a nicer way to visit a solar farm. Sun might mean no mud, but it doesn’t change the fact that this is a farm full of grazing sheep. 2 days later and I still have not got all of the sheep crap off my boots.

• While a solar panel mounted to the top of a roof, lamp post, or the side of a building will produce power, it is nowhere near optimal for achieving the maximum efficiency possible. To get better results, panels are often mounted to pivots and linear actuators/servo motors that continually move to always face the sun. But as Fulvio points out, these motors can be heavy and require extra batteries to function, which is what inspired him to create the mysoltrk to address this shortcoming. Fulvio built his “reinvented” tracker to be small, solid, and sturdy enough to survive outdoors on a balcony or any other space-constrained area like a garden.

• This ambitious project aims to bridge two of the United States’ largest metropolitan areas through a 240-mile route that promises to cut travel time to under 90 minutes.

• Texas Central and Amtrak have submitted applications to several federal programs in connection with further study and design work for the potential Dallas to Houston segment, including the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure Safety and Improvements (CRISI) grant program, the Corridor Identification and Development program, and the Federal-State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail (FSP-National) grant program.

• On Friday, at a hearing in New York City, Judge Lewis Kaplan revoked SBF’s bail based on American prosecutors’ concern that SBF was trying to tamper with the pending trial by sharing personal writings stored in Google Docs from Caroline Ellison, former CEO of FTX-affiliated Alameda Research and a former romantic partner, with the New York Times.

• The Conservative Party received a £2 million donation in March from a petrochemicals executive whose business interests include a Russian textiles plant, DeSmog can reveal.

• Amit Lohia, dubbed the “Prince of Polyester” by Forbes, made the donation on 29 March – the second largest amount handed to the party so far this year.

Wildlife/Nature

• Hong Kong’s marine authorities have vowed to stepped up actions against the improper use of bright light for fishing activities, as an environmental NGO urged the government to consider imposing heavier penalties including revoking fishing boat licenses.

• “This will only get worse until there is a global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,” said one expert.

• The Pere Lachaise in Paris, the most visited cemetery in the world thanks to celebrities buried there, is welcoming crowds back after years of Covid restrictions with a back-to-nature setting that helps them keep cool in the summer heat.

Overpopulation

• The UN World Food Program (WFP) has warned that without urgent funding, it will be forced to cut food aid to millions of Afghans grappling with hunger and food insecurity.

• Water scarcity has been a long-standing issue in Iraq due to climate change and government mismanagement. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported about Iraq’s water shortage in 2019, citing government mismanagement as one of the major reasons for the full-blown crisis in 2018. The series of mismanagement include poor management of upstream water sources, inadequate regulation of pollution and sewage, and chronic neglect and mismanagement of water infrastructure.

Finance

• The money held in Novo Banco was ordered to be delivered and immediately returned to the Venezuelan Government.

• The economic spotlight this week will be on wage growth and jobs.

• The Australian Bureau of Statistics will release its wage price index on Tuesday.

• Hungary used its veto to shelter Belarusian oligarch Alexander Moshensky from EU sanctions. Iceland also used its lobbying efforts for the businessman with close ties to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Euractiv reports.

• Moshensky’s assets include prominent food manufacturers Santa Bremor and Savushkin Produkt which are mainly known for their fish and caviar products The “fish king” of Belarus has enjoyed diplomatic and business relations with Iceland for over two decades now.  In 2006, Moshensky became the country’s honorary consul in Belarus.

• My Ex Texted Me About An Emergency Meeting on the Seattle Housing Market. (Going Down the Toilet.)

• My ex, John, texted me about an emergency meeting.

• He works as a real estate agent in the Seattle, Washington area.

• He says his bosses are panicking because “luxury” tenants are not paying up, they’re having to start evicting people who were seen as a “very safe bet”, and the number of new leases they’re signing is down by 2/3rds.

• WeWork may have “substantial doubt” about its long-term survival, but one thing appears clear: The iconic co-working company’s woes don’t extend into the sector at large.

• Driving the news: This week, WeWork shook investors by declaring it may have to file for bankruptcy — a ignominious fall from grace for a company once valued at $47 billion.

• Paying consumer debts is basically optional in the United States (permalink) The vast majority of America’s debt collection targets $500-2,000 credit card debts.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The vehicle is a key part of the justice’s just-folks persona. It’s also a luxury motor coach that was funded by someone else’s money.

• Alphabet has stepped up buybacks and expanded its repurchase authorization to $70 billion in April. But last quarter, the firm spent $15 billion on its own shares, barely half of the cash it brought in.

• The fusion of politics, news, and entertainment has given prominence to comics like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Bill Maher…

Censorship/Free Speech

• August 10, 2023 5:30 PM

• Under Malaysian law, such a ban can be issued if it jeopardises public order, morality or security.

• Future Sound Asia, the company behind Malaysia’s Good Vibes Festival, is reportedly preparing to take legal action against The 1975 unless the group coughs up over £2 million (currently $2.54 million) in allegedly owed damages during the coming days.

• A teenager turned away by a bar in one of Manhattan’s fanciest hotels started a campaign to sully its reputation, a lawsuit says. The hotel is suing him for defamation.

• CCDH research shows hate proliferating on “X” under musk; The Sparrow Project joins over 60 organizations and experts worldwide to stand with CCDH

• Belarusian singer Patrytsia Svitsina, who in 2020 refused to accept a scholarship from authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka, citing her “moral principles,” has been handed a parole-like sentence on a charge of “actively participating in actions that blatantly disrupt social order.”

• Today in Tedium: In the past, I’ve been effusive of my praise of CNET, a news outlet that (along with Wired) pioneered digital journalism, for one specific reason: Its archives have been kept safe from meddling. It is one of the most in-depth archives of news that we have from the early years of the internet, and it is arguably of the most important flavor—day-to-day, standard issue news content. But its ownership picture has changed in recent years, with the media holding company Red Ventures purchasing it (and its subsidiaries, most notably ZDNet, which hasn’t been attached to Ziff Davis for more than 20 years) for $500 million back in 2020. Red Ventures has made some controversial moves with the CNET property, most infamously bringing AI into the mix, but the latest move was like a dagger to the heart: Gizmodo revealed that the company was actively culling its utterly massive archives for search-engine optimization reasons. I’ve talked about killing sites before, but in today’s Tedium, let’s talk culling, and why it’s often just as bad. — Ernie @ Tedium

• The sole arrest pertaining to Krentel’s demise was that of a man who criticized the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office’s (STPSO) slow-going investigation of the case, which remains unsolved. If that sounds unconstitutional, it’s because it is: On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit confirmed that Jerry Rogers Jr.’s suit against Sheriff Randy Smith, Chief Danny Culpeper, and Sgt. Keith Canizaro may proceed, as they violated clearly established law when they arrested him for his speech.

• Rocky Horror is so much of its time, right down to Frank-N-Furter’s startlingly aggressive eduction Janet and Brad, I’m surprised those forces that have banished so many cultural artefacts of a bygone age haven’t taker the laser gun to the show and the movie, which is bursting with “triggering” material (ironically, a certain Australian actor had his career ended for throwing himself too enthusiastically into his role).

• However, unlike West Side Story, which has come under assail for what some consider its retrograde elements, Rocky Horror has long been a part of indie/outsider culture, right down the midnight screenings that still take place around the world. Could you really make politically correct a show which is beloved because it is a slap in the face of mainstream culture? It would make no sense.

• The still-effective DSA contains offenses and punishments for electronic communications, including information and data spreading as well as receiving. For example, Section 28 of the act, regarding the publication and broadcast of information in any electronic format hurting one’s religious values, carries a penalty of up to five years in jail maximum. Section 29, the transmission of defamatory information, carries a penalty of up to three years imprisonment.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• “This kind of action by police – which we sadly see with growing frequency worldwide – has a chilling effect on journalism and on democracy more broadly,” said Ginsberg. “The actions of the police and the judiciary in this case must be thoroughly and swiftly investigated.”

• Police in a central Kansas town raided the local newspaper’s office Friday and seized computers and employees’ personal cellphones – an action that advocates say violates federal laws protecting the media.

• Law enforcement officers with the Marion (Kan.) Police Department and the Marion County Sheriff’s Office on Friday took the Marion County Record’s computer file server, other computers and phones, along with other equipment, the Record reported.

• They refused to say when the items, necessary for publishing next week’s issue of the Record, might be returned. The newspaper has obtained equipment to ensure publication and is working to re-create material for the paper.

• Legal experts contacted by the Record termed the raid unheard of in America and reminiscent of what occurs in totalitarian regimes and the Third World.

• The Record is expected to file a federal suit against the City of Marion and those involved in the search, which legal experts contacted were unanimous in saying violated multiple state and federal laws, including the U.S. Constitution, and multiple court rulings.

• A Kansas newspaper whose offices were raided by an entire police department on Friday says its 98-year-old co-owner has now died after she was left “stressed beyond her limits.”

• “Based on the reporting so far, the police raid of the Marion County Record on Friday appears to have violated federal law, the First Amendment, and basic human decency,” according to a statement from Seth Stern, director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation.

• Meyer, whose father worked at the newspaper from 1948 until he retired, bought the Marion County Record in 1998, preventing a sale to a corporate newspaper chain.

• As a journalism professor in Illinois, Meyer said, he had graduate students from Egypt who talked about how people would come into the newspaper office and seize everything so they couldn’t publish. Those students presented a scholarly paper at a conference in Toronto about what it has done to journalism there.

• “That’s basically what they’re trying to do here,” Meyer said. “The intervention is just like that repressive government of Egypt. I didn’t think it could happen in America.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• India Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah presented three landmark bills in India’s Parliament on Friday. The three bills would significantly shift Indian criminal law away from British colonial-era laws. The first of the three newly introduced bill was the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which seeks to replace the Indian Penal Code of 1860.

• The proposed UN Cybercrime Convention could empower tyrants, shatter security, and harm political and social activists, journalists, security researchers, whistleblowers, and millions more around the world for decades to come, we told a packed house at DEFCON in Las Vegas on Thursday – but it’s not too late to stop this bad treaty from being adopted.

• Delegations from Member States as well as observers from civil society will convene August 21 at UN Headquarters in New York City for a two-week negotiation session on the convention’s “zero draft.” The zero draft is the first full text, the result of State-led negotiations that began in February 2022. EFF will be there again this month to lobby Member States and provide expert opinion to ensure the protection of your rights.  If the Member States can’t reach total consensus on the text, it could go to a vote by the Member State governments in which a two-thirds majority would be required for adoption. A concluding session is scheduled for early next year in New York City.

• At DEFCON, we highlighted the foremost dangers posed by the zero draft, and the direction in which negotiations seem to be headed. The proposed treaty features five chapters: criminalization, or the categorization of acts deemed a crime under this treaty; domestic and cross-border spying powers, for example, the powers and limits to conduct surveillance both within their borders and across international boundaries; and two additional chapters on technical cooperation and proactive measures.

• The World Bank insists that the law undermines the institution’s efforts to democratize access to development, as “inclusion and non-discrimination are at the core (…) Our goal is to protect sexual and gender minorities from discrimination and exclusion in the projects we finance. These measures are under discussion with the authorities”, to which he adds that until laws guaranteeing these rights are passed, public financing will not continue on their part.

• With actors and screenwriters on strike, Hollywood is shut down for the foreseeable future. Los Angeles isn’t a pure company town, but the industry is inextricable from the city in many ways.

• While on strike, actors are barred from publicizing any studio projects they’ve appeared in. Their absence could affect movie theaters and the festival circuit.

• The University of Michigan offered the Graduate Employees’ Organization its fifth contract proposal, including a signed promise to continue the Rackham Plan through 2026, on Aug. 2.

• The James Patterson-ghostwriter strike of 2003, and other labor disputes that are threatening to curtail access to new cultural content.

• The Taliban, who shot their way to power in Afghanistan two years ago, have thrown women out of their jobs, banished them from sports, and banned girls above the age of twelve from going to school.

• They have also banned video games, foreign films, and music as “idolatrous.”

• And now, they have begun to burn musical instruments.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• CNET deleted thousands of old articles to improve the sites performance in Google Search results, adding to the controversy brought on by its latest editorial strategy — layoffs and experiments with articles written by artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.

• Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show that the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then increased the pace, Gizmodo learned.

• A CNET representative confirmed to Gizmodo that the company culled stories, but declined to share exactly how many stories it took down.

• The world typically thinks of online content as something that lives forever, but that is not necessarily true — at least not at CNET. And it’s all in the name of better search engine optimization (SEO) to improve performance and ranking on Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) offers protection mechanisms for virtual machines in untrusted environments through memory and register encryption. To separate security-sensitive operations from software executing on the main x86 cores, SEV leverages the AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP). This paper introduces a new approach to attack SEV-protected virtual machines (VMs) by targeting the AMD-SP. We present a voltage glitching attack that allows an attacker to execute custom payloads on the AMD-SPs of all microarchitectures that support SEV currently on the market (Zen 1, Zen 2, and Zen 3). The presented methods allow us to deploy a custom SEV firmware on the AMD-SP, which enables an adversary to decrypt a VM’s memory. Furthermore, using our approach, we can extract endorsement keys of SEV-enabled CPUs, which allows us to fake attestation reports or to pose as a valid target for VM migration without requiring physical access to the target host. Moreover, we reverse-engineered the Versioned Chip Endorsement Key (VCEK) mechanism introduced with SEV Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP). The VCEK binds the endorsement keys to the firmware version of TCB components relevant for SEV. Building on the ability to extract the endorsement keys, we show how to derive valid VCEKs for arbitrary firmware versions. With our findings, we prove that SEV cannot adequately protect confidential data in cloud environments from insider attackers, such as rogue administrators, on currently available CPUs.

• For a few weeks now we have been hearing concern in the Web community in regard to Web Environment Integrity, and are asked more and more about it. Our silence is due to the fact that the Web Environment Integrity API is not being worked on in W3C, nor has there been any submission to W3C for W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) review.

• In the rest of this article, I want to take the opportunity to explain generally how new work is brought to the World Wide Web Consortium, and how several W3C work groups coordinate what we call “horizontal review”. This review and other safeguards we have in place, transcends a particular technology by focusing on aspects that impact people and the Web: Web accessibility, architecture, internationalization, privacy, and security.

• HP all-in-one printer owners, upset that their devices wouldn’t scan or fax when low on ink, were handed a partial win in a northern California court this week after a judge denied HP’s motion to dismiss their suit.

• The plaintiffs argued in their amended class action complaint [PDF] that HP withheld vital information by including software in its all-in-one printer/scanner/fax machines that disabled non-printing functions when out of ink and not telling buyers that was the case.

Monopolies

• Live Nation faces a class action investor lawsuit as several law firms investigate whether the live events giant lied to investors by failing to disclose anti-competitive business practices.

Copyrights

• Record labels including UMG, Capitol and Sony have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in the United States targeting Internet Archive and founder Brewster Kale, among others. Filed in Manhattan federal court late Friday, the complaint alleges infringement of 2,749 works, recorded by deceased artists, including Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby.

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.