● 08.15.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links Leftover 15/08/2023: More Windows Breaches and Legal Problems for Internet Archive

Posted in News Roundup at 4:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• Hilarity aside, it’s a fascinating glimpse at the future of passenger vehicle transportation. Inside the autonomous vehicles of tomorrow, drivers are no longer stuck behind the wheel, allowing them to, well, do other things.

• Agóta Kristóf’s The Notebook trilogy, which begins with The Notebook, continues with The Proof, and ends with The Third Lie, tells the story of two identical twin boys, Klaus and Lucas, living in a small town with their grandmother during a nameless war and successive occupations. Throughout the first novel, the twins perform “exercises” to strengthen and improve themselves: They go hours without speaking or moving; they starve themselves; they pretend to be deaf and dumb; and they write down descriptions of their exercises in a big notebook that they hide in their grandmother’s attic. When writing in their notebook, they reject “adjectives and things that are not real, that have their origin in feelings.” This is because “the composition must be true.” Words that denote subjective emotions like love must be avoided in favor of “the faithful description of the facts.” They strive for an objective writing, something flat and scientific that reflects a direct, unadorned relationship with the world as it is.

Education

• Write about what you learn. It pushes you to understand topics better. Sometimes the gaps in our knowledge only become clear when explaining things to others.

• Writing about what you learn is more than just a method of documentation; it’s a powerful tool for deepening understanding and revealing the gaps in one’s knowledge. This practice pushes us to explore topics more thoroughly and to articulate their thoughts in a coherent and precise manner.

• Suppose you’re writing code (or defining a protocol) that involves interchanging messages, and those messages include text for humans to read. You owe it to the world to make any such text Unicode, so that the humans can use Korean or Arabic or whatever else they live in. It turns out to be non-obvious how to say “do Unicode right.” Today’s ongoing piece exists to tell you how.

Hardware

• I’ve ported and tested two new boards, and merged them into the lbmk master branch. They will be available in the next regular release: [...]

• The government is open to the idea of giving foreign companies more time to set up manufacturing units provided they submit a clear, detailed and graded roadmap of their make-in-India plans for specific products such as laptops, personal computers and servers, a senior government official said.

• The companies have sought up to 12 months to set up local factories.

• The huge diversity of sensors and other hardware which our community now has access to seems comprehensive, but there remain many parts which have made little impact due to cost or scarcity. It’s one of these which [Enginoor] has taken for the sensor in a 3D scanner, an industrial laser displacement sensor.

• Can you really save energy by carefully choosing the colors displayed on a TV screen? Under some conditions, yes. Or at least that’s the conclusion of a team at the BBC that looked at reducing the energy consumption impact of their output by using what they call Lower Carbon Graphics. In short, they’re trying to ensure that OLED displays or those with reactive backlights use less energy when displaying BBC graphics, simply by using more black.

• Digital cameras are a ubiquitous consumer and professional product here in 2023, and because of the wide availability of parts it’s relatively straightforward to construct one for yourself. Four decades ago though, film was king, but that hasn’t stopped [Georg Lukas] from building a digital camera for the 1984 market. The hardware is definitely from recent years, the extremely affordable ESP32-cam board that many of us will have worked with already. Meanwhile the 1984 part lies in the recording format, it makes EGA 16-colour low-res pictures and stores them in the archaic TGA file format.

• For some of us, unused hardware lying around just calls to be used. It seems like [Miles Goodhew] heard the call, and wanted to put a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client to use — in this case as a wireless router. It seems simple enough. OpenWrt supports x64_64 targets, and the thin client has 2G of ram and 8G of flash. It should make for a very capable router.

• A speaker project isn’t usually very different, but we couldn’t help but notice [Electronoob’s] latest speaker not for its audio performance but because it features dancing ferrofluid and is an unusual work of art. The housing is 3D printed and includes some translucent portions for LEDs.You can see and hear the speaker at work in the video below.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• For one thing, offline is where the world actually happens. It’s where the thoughts and ideas of the internet become reality. Where the distractions fade away. Reading a paper book will always bring me more joy than a digital one. Listening to a cassette tape, or even an iPod, will always be more pleasurable and intentional than a random Spotify playlist. Writing in a notebook, or even a plan old text editor with the wifi turned off will inevitably be less distracting and drive more focus than something in the browser like Google Docs.

• Titled “The Perils of Not Being Attractive or Athletic: Pathways to Adolescent Adjustment Difficulties Through Escalating Unpopularity,” this new paper published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence looks at the way middle school students think about themselves and their peers. Spoiler alert: in spite of reports that kids these days are a little nicer, these tykes sound totally mean.

• The longitudinal study focused on nearly 600 kids from unidentified areas in both Florida and Lithuania who were aged 10 to 13 at the beginning of the research. Conducted over a 12-week academic year, the adolescent participants were asked three times per week to both identify which of their classmates were unattractive, unpopular, and unathletic and also to self-report their own feelings of loneliness and instances of alcohol misuse.

• When Rebeca Macri became pregnant this past June, she was terrified that her job would put her pregnancy at risk. As a certified nursing assistant, lifting patients and heavy loads in nursing homes was part of her regular duties, and she’d had two prior miscarriages while working in the same role. So, right away, she asked her employer if she could avoid heavy lifting while she was pregnant. Her employer’s first response was to tell her to go home without pay until she could lift again and to apply for unemployment benefits in the meantime. But she had a new law on her side: the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which requires employers to accommodate the needs of pregnant workers. She informed her employer about the PWFA and insisted on continuing to work without endangering her pregnancy. Days later, the nursing home reversed course and granted her request.

• It was a multibillion-dollar strike, so stealthy and precise that the only visible sign was a notice that suddenly vanished from a government website.

• In August 2017, a federal agency with sweeping powers over the health care industry posted a notice informing insurance companies that they weren’t allowed to charge physicians a fee when the companies paid the doctors for their work. Six months later, that statement disappeared without explanation.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• After sinking billions of dollars into robotaxis, these companies are under pressure to show significant revenues.

• The researchers found four vulnerabilities in an infrastructure management platform from a company called CyberPower and five in power distribution units from Dataprobe that allowed for remote code injection.

• Quinn said that they were looking to find out how an attacker can compromise complex data centers that rely on many different types of software and an intricate supply chain to provide services to millions of clients.

• Tesla, Inc., the clean-energy company that’s about more stuff than just some of the world’s most desired electric cars, is seemingly on the lookout to improve its datacenter infrastructure. According to a new job listing on Tesla’s corporate website (spotted by Elektrek), the company is looking to hire a “Sr. Engineering Program Manager, Data Centers.” That hire is usually a good step for any company planning to operate datacenters built on custom or proprietary silicon – perhaps Tesla is looking to build a dojo for its Dojo AI accelerators?

• So it isn’t exactly surprising that hackers at this year’s Def Con in Las Vegas have turned their sights on AI chatbots, a trend that’s taken the world by storm, especially since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public late last year.

• The convention hosted an entire contest, NBC News reports, not to identify software vulnerabilities, but to come up with new prompt injections that force chatbots like Google’s Bard or ChatGPT to spit out practically anything attackers want.

Windows TCO

• The Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF) has revealed that the personal information of millions of individuals was compromised in a data breach resulting from the recent MOVEit cyberattack.

Security

• The scanning and enumeration phase is crucial to every penetration tester’s methodology and process. It is important to gather information about the network you are carrying a pentest on before you actually begin testing.

• So what does this really mean? And whar are the best tools to help you during the scanning and enumeration phase of your pentest?

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (gst-plugins-ugly1.0, libreoffice, linux-5.10, netatalk, poppler, and sox), Fedora (chromium, ghostscript, java-1.8.0-openjdk-portable, java-11-openjdk, java-11-openjdk-portable, java-17-openjdk-portable, java-latest-openjdk-portable, kernel, linux-firmware, mingw-python-certifi, ntpsec, and php), Oracle (.NET 6.0, .NET 7.0, 15, 18, bind, bind9.16, buildah, cjose, curl, dbus, emacs, firefox, go-toolset and golang, go-toolset:ol8, grafana, iperf3, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, libcap, libeconf, libssh, libtiff, libxml2, linux-firmware, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, nodejs, nodejs:16, nodejs:18, open-vm-tools, openssh, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, python-requests, python27:2.7, python3, python38:3.8 and python38-devel:3.8, python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9, ruby:2.7, samba, sqlite, systemd, thunderbird, virt:ol and virt-devel:rhel, and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (docker, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, kernel-firmware, libyajl, nodejs14, openssl-1_0_0, poppler, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (golang-yaml.v2, intel-microcode, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-oem-6.1, pygments, and pypdf2).

• Researchers discovered 120,000 infected systems that contained credentials for cybercrime forums. Many of the computers belong to hackers, the researchers say.

• Analyzing the data, threat researchers found that the passwords used for logging into hacking forums were generally stronger than those for government websites.

• After pouring through 100 cybercrime forums, researchers at threat intelligence company Hudson Rock found that some hackers had inadvertently infected their computers and had their logins stolen.

• One of the MOVEit victims was the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy & Financing, which was notified by IBM of the data breach.

• According to their notification, the information types included full name, Social Security number, Medicaid ID number, Medicare ID number, date of birth, home address and other contact information, demographic or income information, clinical and medical information (such as diagnosis/condition, lab results, medication, or other treatment information), and health insurance information.

• To assess the extent of implementation of the two recommendations included in our initial audit report, Cyber Incident Response Team (Report 2020-S-58).

• The Monti ransomware, which has both Windows and Linux-based variants, gained attention from cybersecurity organizations and researchers when it was first discovered in June 2022 because of its striking resemblance to the infamous Conti ransomware — not just in name but also the tactics that the threat actors used. The group, operating under the moniker “Monti,” has also deliberately emulated the widely recognized tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of the Conti team, incorporating a substantial number of their tools and even using Conti’s leaked source code. Since its discovery, the Monti group has been continuously targeting companies, exposing them on their leak site.

• They were later instructed by the scammers to download Android Package Kit (APK) files from third-party app stores in order to make purchases.

• This would result in malware being installed on the victims’ mobile devices.

• The scammers then convinced the victims via phone calls or text messages to turn on accessibility services on their Android phones.

• The Medusa Group contacted us to inform them that they have just stopped the DDoS attacks on the IT infrastructure of Borets International Ltd. (Levare). On the website of the Levare we did not find any references regarding the loss of data after the cyber attack of last July 25th.

• We want to remind you that for some days we have been in possession of a video prepared by Medusa where the ransomware group shows an important part of the exfiltrated documents, we have chosen not to share it as much of the data seen in the video could harm both the privacy of employees, but also trade secrets.

• uspect File reports that after negotiations broke down between Medusa and Levare’s negotiators in Texas, the threat actors knocked Levare offline with DDoS attacks. They have also added them to their dark web leak site with a price tag of $500,000.00 and a countdown clock showing nine days left. Proof of claims is also provided on the leak site with screencaps of files.

• At least 4 million Americans had health data stolen after hackers raided a MOVEit file transfer server operated by tech giant IBM.

• One security issue I somehow missed back in July was Zenbleed, an issue with AMD CPUs that’s getting patched up in the Linux kernel and now the Steam Deck is getting a kernel fix for it too.

Privacy/Surveillance

Defence/Aggression

• Notes: Danny Haiphong is an independent international journalist. He’s the co-author of “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence.” His work can be found at dannyhaiphong.com.

• Mr. Trump has already been indicted three times this year, most recently in a federal case brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith that is also related to election interference. But the Georgia case may prove the most expansive legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power, with nearly 20 people informed that they could face charges.

• It could also prove the most enduring: While Mr. Trump could try to pardon himself from a federal conviction if he were re-elected, presidents cannot pardon state crimes.

• Rich countries are gradually cutting carbon emissions — but that won’t be nearly enough to stop climate disasters, like the heat wave now ravaging the planet. We need drastic, state-led action to rapidly decarbonize our economies.

• As a child studying in a madrasa in Afghanistan, Mohammad Khalid Tahir dreamed of waging jihad. By the time he was a teenager, he had joined the Taliban and celebrated when they seized power from the U.S.-backed government two years ago.

• But the high from that victory did not last. Reassigned as a soldier in the capital, he frequently complained that he was bored and longed to return to his life’s purpose, according to his family.

• So this spring, he did — but across the border in Pakistan.

• Many argue that the PTI crackdown robs voters of free and fair elections and has also allowed the army to reassert its control over the country’s fragile democracy. But veteran journalist Zebunnisa Burki finds hope in the awakening of PTI supporters, who tend to be younger.

War in Ukraine

• Convoy, the private military company created by the Kremlin-appointed head of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, is financed in part by Russia’s VTB Bank and by a company owned by businessman Arkady Rotenberg, according to a new investigation from Dossier Center. The mercenary group reportedly has received more than 300 million rubles (or more than $5 million) from these sources.

• Poland’s Internal Security Agency has detained two Russian nationals who had allegedly been hanging recruitment posters for Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group in public places around Krakow and Warsaw.

• Seven people, including two children, were killed in a shelling attack in Ukraine’s Kherson region on Sunday, Governor Oleksandr Prokudin reported on Telegram. According to Prokudin, Russian troops shelled the region 83 times, firing nearly 400 shells, including 23 on the city of Kherson. The Ukrainian authorities declared August 14 a day of mourning for the victims.

• Washington and Helsinki are in the process of establishing a new defense cooperation agreement that would see expended deployments of American soldiers and Finland hosting war games.

• During an appearance on The Jimmy Dore Show, 2024 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson and host Jimmy Dore debated…

Environment

• The outbreak of wildfires last week in Maui, Hawaii — a state known for its beaches and rainforests but typically not fire — is now the nation’s deadliest such event in more than 100 years. The fires burned thousands of acres and killed nearly 100 people, a greater death toll than any wildfire in California, where summer blazes are common. Hundreds remain missing in Maui, and the death toll is expected to rise.

• During the two-week trial in June, attorneys for the youths presented evidence that the increase in carbon dioxide emissions was causing temperatures to rise, droughts and wildfires to increase and snowpack to slim down. Attorneys argued the changes were harming the youths’ physical and mental health.

• Montana is a major producer of coal, oil and gas that is shipped elsewhere. It is also home to pipelines and other infrastructure needed to ship those fuels.

• In an unprecedented ruling, a state judge has sided with a group of youth climate activists who sued the state of Montana over its promotion of fossil fuels, which the young environmentalists said harms their right to a “clean and healthful environment.”

• The first-of-its-kind ruling in “Held v. Montana” — which found that Montana’s fossil fuel boosting violated the state constitutional rights of its 16 plaintiffs, aged five to 22 — could set an important judicial precedent.

• A Montana judge on Monday sided with young environmental activists who said state agencies were violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by permitting fossil fuel development without considering its effect on the climate.

• The ruling in the first-of-its- kind trial in the U.S. adds to a small number of legal decisions around the world that have established a government duty to protect citizens from climate change.

• Typhoon Khanun brought heavy rains to the Primorsky region, in Russia’s Far East, after it hit Japan and North Korea late last week. Dozens of settlements have been cut off from road access, a number of municipalities have declared states of emergency, and the water in rivers has reached critical levels. According to regional emergency services, on the morning of August 12, 543 private homes, 1,393 household farm plots, and 40 sections of roadway “remained flooded” across 17 municipalities. Problems with communications systems have also arisen in the region. Rescue workers began mass evacuations of residents of affected areas. By the evening of August 12, the regional government counted over 60 settlements impacted by heavy rain and flooding.

• A Montana court ruled in favor of 16 young people who put their state government on trial in June in the first constitutional climate trial in U.S. history. In an order issued Monday, Judge Kathy Seeley in the First Judicial District Court of Montana found that the state had violated youth plaintiffs’ constitutional rights, including the right to a clean and healthful environment, because of Montana’s pro-fossil fuel policies, which require the state to disregard climate change and greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews.

• “As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today’s ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos,” Julia Olson, chief legal counsel and executive director of Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit law firm that represented the youth plaintiffs, said in a statement. “This is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy, and for our climate. More rulings like this will certainly come.”

• We speak with leading climate scientist Michael Mann about the devastating Maui wildfires and how the climate crisis makes such disasters more frequent and more intense. “This is the climate crisis. It’s here and now,” says Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, pressure is mounting for President Biden to declare an official climate emergency.

• The death toll from the Maui wildfires is now about 100 and is expected to continue to climb in what is now the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century and the worst natural disaster in Hawaii’s history. As recovery efforts continue, many residents are asking why Hawaii’s early warning system, with about 80 alarms on the island of Maui alone, did not get activated to alert residents about the approaching flames. We speak with Kaleikoa Kaeo, professor of Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawaii Maui College, who gives a history of colonialism in Maui and how the transformation of the island for mass tourism, such as changes to agriculture and water management practices, helped to turn the area into a tinderbox. “Our people who have lived there since time immemorial are suffering because of the consequences that have been imposed really from outside foreign forces,” says Kaeo.

• Marine heatwaves can “inject a lot of chaos” as they remake ecosystems and cost coastal economies billions.

Energy/Transportation

• Beyond mimicking its predecessor, LED technology brings a whole new suite of capabilities and could let us rethink our entire relationship with light. LEDs are inherently dimmable. They can integrate into surfaces directly, turning walls and ceilings into light sources. Their power consumption can still fall further too.

• But one of the LED’s most important traits is its tunability, in both light and color. Optimizing the shade and scope of light rather than blanket illumination could improve safety, productivity, comfort, and health. We’re only beginning to grasp the possibilities.

• The 12 DOE projects will focus on collaborations among fusion scientists, applied mathematicians, and computer scientists to maximize the use of high performance computing, including exascale computers.

• The fate of the massive nuclear power plant in the crosshairs of Europe’s largest war in decades has made for worrisome headlines since Russia launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly 18 months ago. As fighting intensifies not far from the plant, fears of a disaster have not abated.

• On August 10, the main power line delivering electricity to the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant was disconnected twice, forcing it to rely on its last remaining off-site power line.

• “As people try to decide how to disengage from a fossil fuel-intensive life, looking at that historical moment can teach us how we might adapt,” she said. “We can’t look around and say this is what the world looks like after fossil fuels. We can say what the world looks like without whale oil. There once were generations of people who didn’t think they could live without it. It offers the opportunity to see how things look after something has ended.”

• Russia’s Transport Ministry has proposed getting rid of the requirement for transportation information such as bus stop and metro station announcements to be provided in English in addition to Russian. According to a draft order published on the site regulation.gov.ru, the change would affect both “audio and visual” information for passengers.

Wildlife/Nature

Overpopulation

• Dagestan’s ongoing utilities crisis saw another major protest on Sunday night. The residents of Karaman-2, a settlement outside of the region’s capital Makhachkala, blocked the federal Makhachkala–Astrakhan highway, trying to draw attention to the dire water-supply situation in the area.

• According to some participants, their homes had been without running water for the whole summer. Around 200 people took part in the protest according to the local police, halting highway traffic and clashing with the frustrated drivers.

Finance

• After laying off around nine per cent of its workforce in February, Secureworks is pulling out the axe again.

• In a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the cybersecurity company said it plans to reduce its headcount by approximately 15 per cent and “implement certain real estate‑related cost optimization actions.”

• “[We intend] to rebalance investments cross-functionally in alignment with [our] current strategy and growth opportunities,” the filing reads.

• With many companies scaling back their staffing levels this year, a new study found that more than half of employees would be willing to accept a pay cut to avoid losing their jobs.

• According to a survey conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 60 per cent of workers who were recently laid off would have accepted a wage reduction of five per cent.

• If steeper cuts were necessary, around one-third of respondents claimed that they would have been open to their employer slashing their wages by as much as 25 per cent.

• Amazon.com Inc. devices chief Dave Limp plans to retire — the latest senior leader to announce his departure from the e-commerce and cloud computing giant.

• John Clifton Davies, a convicted fraudster estimated to have bilked dozens of technology startups out of more than $30 million through phony investment schemes, has a brand new pair of scam companies that are busy dashing startup dreams: A fake investment firm called Equity-Invest[.]ch, and Diligere[.]co.uk, a scam due diligence company that Equity-Invest insists all investment partners use.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Ecuador is reeling from the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, who was shot dead Wednesday after a campaign rally in the capital Quito less than two weeks before the August 20 general election. Villavicencio was running on a platform opposing corruption and organized crime. Authorities have arrested six Colombian nationals and say they are members of a drug trafficking group, but many questions remain about who was behind the murder. “We see that there are clear links between the current government and these mafia organizations,” says vice-presidential candidate Andrés Arauz, who is running mate to Luisa González of the Citizen Revolution Movement. “We need to take care of our democracy. We are really in a moment of great despair in Ecuador.” Arauz ran for president in 2021 and previously served as director of Ecuador’s central bank and a minister in former leftist President Rafael Correa’s government.

• Albicker’s study looked into the communication and language used by 164 Finnish municipalities on social media platform Twitter, now known as X, and found that posts in English received the most visibility, reactions and retweets.

• Let’s stick to the practical for starters. We all know what Windows is, what it does, and why it has such a special place in our hearts – Maya OS is new. It is also “developed by government agencies within six months [and] is capable of preventing cyber threats and malware attacks,” according to reports. It’s actually Ubuntu with a Windows-like front end and some extra endpoint security.

• That doesn’t seem so bad. Although the system is expected to roll out across the many parts of the Ministry of Defence and armed forces, the migration is staged, with each part going through its own evaluation process. Sane so far. If you look at the rolling news of new vulnerabilities and attacks, then yes, Linux on the desktop is far less malware-y than Redmond’s legacy-laden lash-up. If that’s because there are fewer targets to attack with a Linux desktop, it doesn’t make it not true. That’s not the point.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The cable-news industry that Americans know today is a cautionary tale in what happens when democracy collides with consumerism. For years, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News raked in profits while amplifying partisan rancor in varying ways. Starting in 2015, CNN pumped its ratings by playing up Donald Trump, whose presidency then buoyed all three cable-news giants. But now CNN is in turmoil after a recent change of ownership and the departure of its president, Chris Licht, after 15 months. After the 2020 election, Fox News amplified false claims about voting irregularities rather than offend its disproportionately pro-Trump audience—and subsequently settled a defamation suit by Dominion Voting Systems for more than $700 million. These cable-news networks have long relied on receiving fees from cable companies for each basic-cable subscriber. Now the networks need to replace that income with subscription dollars as more and more Americans cut the cord, and the scramble for money does not bode well for investment in deep, factual reporting about the United States and the rest of the world.

• Algeria has banned the movie “Barbie,” which had been showing at some cinemas in the country for several weeks, an official source and the local 24H Algerie news site said on Monday.

Censorship/Free Speech

• I’ve talked before about the utter stupidity (and danger) of trying to turn the internet into Disneyland: a safe space for little kids, where they’ll never encounter any content that makes them upset, but plenty of states (and many people in Congress) are trying to do it anyway.

• I was as opposed to that war at the age of 17 as I am at age 70. But there’s something I failed to see in my youth that I recognize today: the one piece of common ground between the book banners and me. We both believe that books matter, that they have the power to change a young person’s life. Like it or not, we belong to the same minority, the minority of those who believe in the power of literature in a post-literate age.

• Although motivated by the specific situation at Cornell, the policy recommendations are not specific to that university. The report makes for useful reading and lays out a valuable agenda for faculty across the country.

• These principles are especially crucial today when the prevailing culture tends to focus on free speech as a right pertaining only to those topics NOT in dispute and congratulating itself as a free speech champion when everyone agrees, and when speakers dutifully repeat the established viewpoint as bestowed by the university and suppress those views that are contrary to it, oftentimes under the heading of misinformation or hate speech. Thus, not all speech on all issues is suppressed, only that which is most needed: speech that challenges the established viewpoint. Such an approach of speech suppression is not new, but rather seems to raise its censorious head in every generation forcing each new generation to say, “not on my watch.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The free press is supposed to be free. That’s what the First Amendment means. Journalists have a long-acknowledged, supported-by-decades-of-precedent right to publish information that may make the government uncomfortable.

• Another day, another avalanche of news from the flabbergasting raid on the Marion County Record.

• If you’re just getting up to speed this morning, law enforcement officials converged on a newspaper in this small community on Friday and carted off computers and cellphones. Such raids should not — and mostly do not — happen in the United States. For one thing, they’re almost always illegal. For another, they strike at our fundamental First Amendment rights.

• Kansas Reflector’s first story covers most of the basics. We added follow-ups on Saturday and Sunday. Here’s a roundup of other news, commentary and questions about the raid.

• Two years later, the Taliban not only has reneged on that pledge [sic[, but intensified its crackdown on what was once a vibrant media landscape in Afghanistan.

• Here is a look of what happened to Afghan media and journalists since the 2021 takeover: [...]

• On Thursday, Haseeb Hassas, a correspondent employed by Salam Watandar radio stationed in the northern province of Kunduz, was taken into custody. Simultaneously, Faqir Mohammad Faqirzai and Jan Agha Saleh, who were affiliated with Kalid Radio, an autonomous broadcasting entity, were similarly detained by Taliban security personnel in Jalalabad, the prominent city of the eastern Nangarhar Province. Operatives of the Taliban’s spy agency, the Islamic Emirate General Directorate of Intelligence detained Faqirzai, Saleh, and Hassas on allegations of contributing to exiled media outlets. However, the authorities have refrained from issuing an official statement on this matter.

• Search and seizure of the tools to produce journalism are rare, and the editor of the paper, Eric Meyer, said that the newspaper did nothing wrong. First Amendment experts, press freedom advocates and dozens of news organizations have condemned the raid. The Society of Professional Journalists said on Monday that it would cover up to $20,000 in legal fees for The Marion County Record.

• Mr. Rhodes said in the letter to the police chief that the devices seized contained information from and the identities of confidential sources, which was protected by federal and state laws. Mr. Rhodes demanded that the department not review information on the devices until a court hearing was scheduled.

• On Friday, city and county police raided the Record’s office, “forcing staff members to stay outside the office for hours during a heat advisory” and disallowing them from making any phone calls, the paper reported. They seized the newspaper’s file server as well as “personal cell phones and computers” and “other equipment unrelated to the scope of their search.”

• On July 28, 2023, three masked men in a pickup truck threatened to kidnap Sahiana Maman Hassan, editor of the news magazine Le Témoin de l’Histoire, in Niamey, Niger’s capital, according to the journalist and Ibrahim Harouna, president of the Press House, a local media association, who both spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

• Hassane, also known as Soufiane Hassane, said he suspected the men targeted him because his media outlet had supported President Mohamed Bazoum, who was ousted in a coup on July 26. Bazoum’s 2021 election marked Niger’s first peaceful, democratic transition since independence from France in 1960.

Civil Rights/Policing

• But it’s their slew of bans on Afghan girls and women that dominated the Taliban’s second year in charge. They barred them from parks, gyms, universities, and jobs at nongovernmental groups and the United Nations – all in the space of a few months – allegedly because they weren’t wearing proper hijab — the Islamic head covering — or violated gender segregation rules. These orders followed a previous ban, issued in the first year of Taliban rule, on girls going to school beyond sixth grade.

• Here is a closer look at Taliban rule and where they are headed.

• Through email and video interviews, they spoke with DER SPIEGEL about what has become of their lives in the two years since the country’s new rulers have pushed women out of public life. They speak of the end of their dreams, depression, economic struggle, disappointment with the West and their fury with the Taliban. And they also write about what the West and the security forces of the toppled republic were unable to provide, but the Taliban can: Security.

• But two years since it overran the country and ousted the Western-backed Afghan government, the hard-line Islamists have failed to live up to their promises [sic] and have instead severely curbed women’s freedoms, waged a brutal crackdown on dissent, and reintroduced their brutal form of justice.

• The Taliban’s theocratic government has imposed restrictions on every aspect of life in Afghanistan, including people’s appearances, freedom of movement, right to work or study, and access to entertainment.

• A Delaware man was ticketed after he flipped off local police—and newly released body camera footage appears to show that officers knew the citation was unlawful but decided to punish him anyway.

• The law has been issued hastily and without sufficient examination of its legal aspects, social implications, and its impact on human rights. More specifically, it imposes penalties of imprisonment and hefty fines for vague and unspecified crimes such as ‘character assassination,’ ‘spreading false news,’ and ‘blasphemy.’

• The draft cybercrime law also grants unrestricted authority to the public prosecutor and the executive authority to block social media platforms and issue orders to control their content without the need for a judicial decision—limiting access to specific platforms in Jordan. Additionally, the law imposes restrictions on encryption and anonymity in digital communications, preventing individuals from safeguarding their right to freedom of opinion and expression and their right to privacy.

• We urge the King of Jordan to reject the 2023 Cybercrime Law until there is sufficient consultation on its provisions with individuals, civil society, and political parties to ensure its compliance with human rights and address the existing shortcomings.

• The long nightmare of oppression of Palestinians is not a tangential issue.

• An entire generation of Palestinian children has been born through sperm smuggled by Palestinian prisoners behind bars. Israel refuses to recognize these children.

• Amidst an ugly rise in anti-LGBTQ hate – note to right-wing bigots who missed the memo: words matter – hundreds of New Yorkers have turned out to honor O’Shae Sibley, a black queer dancer stabbed to death by a white teenager as he and his friends were joyfully dancing to Beyoncé at a Brooklyn gas station. Asserting “the power of community” and their right to exist – and dance – allies insist, “No one should have to live in fear of violent attacks (for) being themselves.”

• In 1960, when he was only 16 years old, Robbie Robertson had to lie to the border guard when he made the most important journey of his life, which took him from his native Toronto, Canada to Fayetteville, Ark. Robertson was heading south on the invitation of the swashbuckling rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, who was looking for a new guitarist or bassist to join his backup band, the Hawks. Robertson couldn’t tell American immigration that he was entering the United States looking for a job, so the teen rocker said he was going to visit his brother in Arkansas. Robertson was an only child.

• On Wednesday, August 9, nearly 5,000 fellows at the National Institutes of Health were informed that the agency has accepted their petition to hold an election to affiliate with the United Auto Workers (UAW).

Monopolies

• If you hadn’t noticed, it’s not just good enough for a publicly traded company to provide an excellent, affordable product that people like. Wall Street demands improved quarterly returns at any cost, which, sooner or later, causes any successful company to begin cannibalizing itself to feed the “growth for growth’s sake” gods. Mergers, price hikes, offshored labor, whatever it takes.

Copyrights

• In the middle of this mess are writers, whose job is to produce the books that contain much of the world’s best information. Despite that central role, they are largely powerless — a familiar position for most writers. Emotions are running high.

• Six thousand writers signed a petition supporting the lawsuit, and a thousand names are on a petition denouncing it. The Romance Writers of America and the Western Writers of America joined a brief in favor of the publishers, while Authors Alliance, a group of 2,300 academics whose mission is to serve the public good by widely sharing their creations, submitted a brief for the archive.

• Universal Music, Sony Music, and others are officially suing the Internet Archive for allegedly infringing upon a substantial number of works via its “Great 78 Project.”

• The mentioned major labels (as well as Universal’s Capitol Records and Sony’s Arista Music), Concord Bicycle Assets, and CMGI Recorded Music Assets only recently submitted the more than 50-page copyright infringement action to a New York federal court.

• Besides the non-profit Internet Archive, the rightsholder plaintiffs named as defendants Internet Archive founder and chief executive Brewster Kahle, the Kahle/Austin Foundation (allegedly Kahle’s “preferred vehicle for funding his favored projects”), and audio engineer George Blood as well as his namesake company.

• On Friday, the Internet Archive put up a blog post noting that its digital book lending program was likely to change as it continues to fight the book publishers’ efforts to kill the Internet Archive. As you’ll recall, all the big book publishers teamed up to sue the Internet Archive over its Open Library project, which was created based on a detailed approach, backed by librarians and copyright lawyers, to recreate an online digital library that matches a physical library. Unfortunately, back in March, the judge decided (just days after oral arguments) that everything about the Open Library infringes on copyrights. There were many, many problems with this ruling, and the Archive is appealing.

• BREIN is systematically taking down pirate IPTV services, especially those that cater to Dutch consumers. The anti-piracy group recently closed the books on a multi-year case against the once-largest IPTV service in the Netherlands. While the matter had a successful outcome, it took multiple trips to court to wrap things up neatly.

• After a four-year legal process that began before the coronavirus pandemic, Italian film production company Lux Vide has emerged with a $1.86m judgment against the operator of file-hosting platform Easybytez. A Michigan district court found Sven Hansche liable for 748 violations of copyright law and was guided on damages awarded in lawsuits against IPTV providers Nitro TV and Area 51.

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