● 08.21.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 21/08/2023: Education Crisis and Demise of Robotaxis

Posted in News Roundup at 1:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• With Backend Development, a developer finds thousands of interesting options to develop, deploy and manage these server-side applications. As technology is growing over time, developers also shifted their ways of creating them.

• One of the significant changes seen in recent trends is people shifting toward Linux for backend development even though Windows is still the top-used Operating System in the market.

• For Herman, getting his identification was no easy matter. Like many defense workers, including some of the foreign-born, he ran into issues over his birth certificate. Nonetheless, Cmdr. C.H. Abel, captain of the Port of Baltimore, signed off, noting regulations at the time said nothing regarding cats. In addition to pursuing vermin, entertainment was listed as one of Herman’s duties. Rare for his kind, he was said to allow everyone to pet him.

• “That’s it,” said Chief Boatswain A. M. Talbot, who was in charge of Pier 4 in 1943. “He’s an ambassador of good will, a diplomat.”

• Later on, I started learning some Linux, and had my first encounter with Vim (or Vi, can’t remember). I had to search on the internet how to use it, and this was at the time where you would ask pretty much anything and someone would RTFM you. I felt really dumb.

• And that was my first experience with a modal text editor.

• A modal text editor has multiple modes of operation, and the keys’ functions change depending on which mode it is in. While TurboC and nano aren’t modal text editors, Vi and Vim are.

• Without further ado, let’s get into the history.

• Also, the nostalgic craft of miniatures in China.

Science

• “Chandrayaan-3 is set to land on the moon on August 23, 2023, around 18:04 Hrs. IST. Thanks for the wishes and positivity! Let’s continue experiencing the journey together,” ISRO announced on X (formerly Twitter).

• Live actions will available on ISRO website, its YouTube channel, Facebook, and public broadcaster DD National TV from 17:27 IST on Aug 23, 2023.

• Something big went wrong.

Education

Axios ☛ Why young people can’t get enough of subtitlesIt’s a controversial moment for anyone watching a show or movie together: Subtitles or no subtitles? For most young people, it’s an easy choice.Why it matters: TikTok helped normalize captions for young media consumers, who are turning regularly to subtitles as part of their streaming habits.More than half of Gen Z and millennial media consumers prefer subtitles, according to new survey results from YPulse. While subtitles haven’t always been seen as a first choice, they’ve grown in ubiquity — especially with the rise of online videos that include automatic captioning.

• By the numbers: There are tens of thousands of teacher vacancies in the U.S. — and more than 160,000 jobs are filled by under-qualified teachers, according to research from Tuan Nguyen, a professor at Kansas State University’s College of Education.

• In addition to covering a wide range of topics and audiences, graphic novels can explain tough topics without alienating student averse to STEM—science, technology, engineering and math. Even for students who already like math and physics, graphic novels provide a way to dive into topics beyond what is possible in a time-constrained class.

• In our book “Using Graphic Novels in the STEM Classroom,” we discuss the many reasons why graphic novels have a unique place in math and physics education. Here are three of those reasons: [...]

• South Korea hopes to attract international students to tackle the nation’s rapidly declining school-age population.

Hardware

• [Ovidiu] cares for their house plants, trying to dial in the perfect soil humidity and light levels. However, many cheap monitors tend to rust after a few weeks of sitting in a damp, slightly acidic environment. By creating a custom plant monitor with a removable probe, not only can [Ovidiu] integrate better with their Home Assistant setup, but it will also be less wasteful.

• Liquid crystal and Organic LED displays have revolutionized portable computing. They’re also made of glass. Which presents a problem: How do we get electrical signals from fiberglass circuit boards to the glass displays? The answer is double-sided adhesive tape. But we’re not talking about packing tape here. As [Breakingtaps] explains,  this tape has a trick up its sleeve.

• We’re no stranger to homemade CPUs on these pages, but we think that [Jiri Stepanovsky]’s 16-bit serial CPU might be a little special. Why? It has an astonishingly low chip count, with only 8 ICs in total. How on earth does he do it?

• Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shared a pre-print paper on generalized robot training within a small “practical data budget.” The team developed a system that breaks movement tasks into 12 “skills” (e.g., pick, place, slide, wipe) that can be combined to create new and complex trajectories within at least somewhat novel scenarios, called MT-ACT: Multi-Task Action Chunking Transformer. The authors write:

• Not every project has to be an AI-powered particle accelerator using lasers. Sometimes simple projects can be very satisfying, and a simple project can be a great gateway to introduce a friend or a child to our hacker ways. That’s why we noticed [Crazy Science’s] bubble machine upcycled from a CD and a water bottle. It isn’t likely to figure in anyone’s Ph.D. dissertation any time soon, but that isn’t the point

• Chinese YouTuber stumbled upon SK hynix-made NAND for Apple when opening a ShineDisk SATA SSD.

• This is a cautionary tale as much as a shaggy dog story. But overall is an item of clothing, and I’m happy with how things turned out.

• I’ve been lucky that most of my second-hand vintage computers didn’t arrive smelling awful. Oftentimes these machines meet ignominious ends for many years, as many of you can attest if you’ve rummaged through your attics. If it’s not mildew or mould, it’s something worse.

• This streak of luck ended with the 1987 Commodore 64C I bought last December. I downplayed it in my post, but the smell hit me as soon as I opened the shopping box. It was a delightful (cough) concoction of wet cardboard, burnt paper, and mildew.

• AAEON EPIC-ADN9 SBC is powered by an Intel Processor N50/N97, Core i3-N305, or Atom x7425E Alder Lake N-series processor and equipped with up to four 2.5GbE networking ports and two SATA III ports for storage. The board also comes with a SO-DIMM slot taking up to 16GB DDR4 memory, mSATA storage, three display interfaces including HDMI and DisplayPort, and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, and offers expansion capabilities via M.2 and mPCIe sockets as well as headers.

• Chinese customs found 780 Intel processors hidden inside a bus engine with an estimated worth of over $137,000.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Water quality tests showed higher than acceptable levels of bacteria in the Seine River. It’s the third time this month organizers have been forced to cancel a swimming event in the waterway.

• Scientists have recently discovered pathways from the bone marrow of the skull through the brain’s outermost surface of the protective membranes, the meninges, permitting immune cell movement and challenging the notion that the skull and the brain have no direct interchange.

• The Air Koryo flight from Pyongyang was initially expected to land at Beijing’s Capital Airport.

• More young Hong Kong doctors in their 30s have been leaving the city’s public hospitals to join private health care practices, the Secretary for Health Lo Chung-mau has said, exacerbating an existing shortage of medics in the public sector.

• We asked people about their experiences of self-funded healthcare, and reveal what to know if you’re considering it

• The ratio of workers adopting telework arrangements dropped to 22.2%, the lowest since the Covid-19 outbreak.

• Thousands of tonnes of grain stored in the Ukrainian port of Odessa were destined for some of the world’s hungriest people.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group has warned that it expects a drop in sales both during the current quarter and for the whole year.

• Datacenter and client device sales are slumping and are expected to be down from spending levels in 2022, according to the latest prognostications for worldwide IT spending from market researcher Gartner. But thanks to exploding budgets for software and services, the market for IT spending across all categories is anticipated to grow at a fairly healthy rate this year – and will do better in 2024, if Gartner is right.

• On Friday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which regulates the safety of the driverless cars, asked Cruise to halve the number of vehicles it was operating in San Francisco. The Cruise vehicle’s collision with a fire truck the day before had injured a passenger in the driverless car. Earlier in the week, another Cruise vehicle got stuck in newly poured concrete on another city street.

• the lot has three signs hung up with instructions on how to pay, because every single lot in town supports one to five different competing parking lot apps. there’s one sign that says you can use Park Mobile, and gives a lot ID, and then on another wall there’s a sign that says you can use PayByPhone, with a different lot ID, and then there’s a huge sign with a QR code that encourages you to Scan Here To Park, as if it’s the official primary method for doing so. It is not, it’s just another app.

• And since so much has been written about the robotaxis at this point, I usually point to an existing explanation of the problems with robotaxis, like Safe Street Rebel’s statement, instead of winging it myself. The SSR statement highlights the labor, surveillance, accessibility, and car-trip-generating aspects of autonomous vehicles, as does the SF Bicycle Coalition’s statement.

• But there’s a more subtle safety issue I want to draw out. It comes down to incentives and human responsibility.

• The California Department of Motor Vehicles has asked Cruise, the autonomous vehicle unit of General Motors, to reduce its fleet of driverless cars in San Francisco by 50% after two recent collisions involving its vehicles. Cruise has agreed to comply with the request and will operate no more than 50 robotaxis during the day and 150 at night.

• Hotmail users worldwide have problems sending emails, with messages flagged as spam or not delivered after Microsoft misconfigured the domain’s DNS SPF record.

Windows TCO

• The attack is the work of the Ragnar_Locker ransomware team, a group that has been around since at least 2020. Ragnar Team has generally not attracted as much media attention as some other groups, and inspection of their leak site does not reveal any other medical entities as victims — or at least as victims who did not pay their ransom demands.

Security

• Cybercriminals who obtained sensitive data regarding patients’ personal health are using the material as blackmail following a crippling cyber attack perpetrated earlier this month against Maayanei HaYeshua Medical Center in Bnei Brak.

• According to an Israel Hayom report, many prominent Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) politicians, including government ministers and MKs, as well as well-known rabbis and scholars, had sensitive data regarding their health stolen in the breach.

• One of the targets of the blackmail, Minister of Health and Minister of Interior Moshe Arbel (Shas) made a public statement about a medical procedure he recently underwent after he was approached by the hackers.

• Suspected North Korean hackers have targeted a joint US-South Korea military exercise being held this week though classified information has not been compromised, South Korean police said on Sunday.

• South Korean and US forces will on Monday begin 11-day Ulchi Freedom Guardian summer exercises to improve their ability to respond to North Korea’s evolving nuclear and missile threats. […]

• The hackers were believed to be linked to a North Korean group that researchers call Kimsuky…

• This month, my DShield sensor captured for the first time this request: /systembc/password.php. I checked back for the past 6 months and only have noticed this request this 5 times this month from 4 different sources. According to some references, this is likely the SystemBC Remote Access Trojan (RAT), all 4 IPs are part of the Digital Ocean ASN and only one has been reported as likely malicious.

• Experts share their perspectives on the challenges facing cloud infrastructure and how policy can encourage better security and risk governance across this critical sector.

• Iraqi authorities on Sunday ordered the shutdown of LED advertisement screens installed across Baghdad after a hacker managed to show a pornographic film on one, security forces said, announcing the arrest of a suspect.

• The au Domain Administration, the organisation that administers the Australian domain namespace, now says attackers who claimed they had breached its network have provided evidence of the breach.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• This is the story of how I handled troubleshooting the redirect URL for OAuth2 in Appsmith, which contained the host as localhost instead of the actual domain name when hosted on Google Cloud Run. This is a story of how Forwarded and X-Forwarded-* headers were propagating through multiple reverse proxies and how they can be confused.

• Three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology figured out how to hack the fare cards for Boston’s subway system and were set to tell a conference how they did it. But a judge silenced the students. Wired.com’s Kim Zetter says the ruling is a misuse of the anti-hacking law.

• Now, after two years of work, that pair of teens and two fellow hacker friends, Noah Gibson and Scott Campbell, have presented the results of their research at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas. In fact, they not only replicated the MIT hackers’ 2008 tricks, but took them a step further. The 2008 team had hacked Boston’s Charle Ticket magstripe paper cards to copy them, change their value, and get free rides—but those cards went out of commission in 2021. So the four teens extended other research done by the 2008 hacker team to fully reverse engineer the CharlieCard, the RFID touchless smart cards the MBTA uses today. The hackers can now add any amount of money to one of these cards or invisibly designate it a discounted student card, a senior card, or even an MBTA employee card that gives unlimited free rides. “You name it, we can make it,” says Campbell.

• Interesting research: “An Empirical Study & Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs“: [...]

Privacy/Surveillance

• A shimmering, 1.5-metre-long golden ballgown stood pride of place in a Shanghai exhibition hall Thursday — and for the cool price of US$13,700, your dog could be the lucky animal to leave Pet Fair Asia wearing it.

Confidentiality

• First, the Quantum Village need more cryptographers; both in attendance and as speakers.

• This includes aspiring cryptographers and students. You’re likely better at discussing security threats and understanding how cryptography-relevant quantum computers will impact society than you give yourself credit for. Many of you have exactly the knowledge and experience needed to mount an honest opposition to quantum optimism.

• To make the intermingling of the two villages seamless, I’d like to ask the DEFCON event staff to place the two villages next door to each other in 2024, if possible.

Defence/Aggression

• The Patriot Legal Defense Fund is a fundraising effort launched about a week ago by high-level members of the Trump team, the stated goal of which is to help pay the legal expenses of Trump’s political allies and staffers. Many of those allies and staffers are currently mired in the numerous, ongoing legal investigations into the former President, and are beset by court-related costs. While the Patriot fund has notably said it won’t be paying the legal bills for Trump or his family, The Daily Beast recently flagged some potential ethics issues involving the group that are probably worth looking into.

• The United States must strengthen its ties to Indian Ocean nations to counter China’s maritime presence in the Indo-Pacific.

• Concerns about Trump-like ambivalence, not so much China, have led to Friday’s summit, experts say.

• August 17, 2023 6:40 AM

• It is expected to launch joint initiatives on tech and defence, amid concerns about China, N. Korea.

• Australia is embarking upon a major military overhaul in an effort to keep would-be foes such as China at arm’s length.

• China has officially handed over the main stadium for the 2023 Pacific Games to the Solomon Islands.

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

• On the night of August 20, “a drone attempted to fly into Moscow from the south,” reported the city’s mayor Sergey Sobyanin. According to him, Russian air defenses stopped the attack.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the Netherlands will provide Ukraine with 42 American-made F-16 fighter jets after Ukrainian pilots complete their training.

• President Zelenskyy, who traveled to both countries to finalize the deals, says the move will boost Ukraine’s confidence and motivation. He vowed to retaliate for a Russian missile strike on a theater Saturday that killed 7 and wounded scores.

• This is part 3 in a series.   Read part 1 here.  Read part 2 here. When the Cold War officially ended suddenly in 1991 Washington had one more chance to pivot back to the pre-1914 status quo ante.

• The decision to close the border with Belarus must be uniform in all the Baltic States, otherwise, it will be possible to bypass the border, Defense Minister Ināra Murniece (National Alliance) said in an interview with Latvian Television on August 21.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• On a visit to Denmark and the Netherlands on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hailed the decision by the two countries to hand over F-16 planes to help Ukraine battle the Russian invasion as “historic”.

• United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine Denise Brown condemned a Russian missile strike in the city of Chernihiv on Saturday. The Saturday strike on the northern city came as many citizens were leaving church on the Eastern Orthodox holiday of the Transfiguration of the Lord.

• Two major Moscow airports temporarily suspended flight arrivals and departures on August 21 following claims by the Defense Ministry that a Ukrainian drone had been shot down over the Moscow region.

• Crimea is facing a shortage of gasoline after Ukraine last month bombed the only bridge connecting the Russian-controlled peninsula to Russia.

Environment

• The country has witnessed a “26-percent decrease in tree cover since 2000″, according to data from Global Forest Watch.

• Ten kilometers (six miles) from Jaabar, the same fate has befallen the trees of Tuwayhina.

• The first thing to understand is the magnitude of the problem. Hawaii is a volcanic chain of islands, Maui being one of the larger ones, but it is isolated. Maui is 5,800 km from the US mainland, and no closer to Japan, Australia, or New Zealand. Whatever is not held as a spare inside the Hawaiian Islands, or cannot be repurposed from them, must come a long way. So, bringing in technology of any kind becomes about how quickly flights or ships can arrive with the necessary cargo.

• Telecommunications equipment like routers and switches for a local community are neither cheap nor small. Neither are the reels of fibre and cable required to connect houses in a town, poles, pit liners and pipes, or satellite dishes. There’s a likelihood that ‘spares’ for these things are simply not available in sufficient numbers for a catastrophe like this.

• Though California has had hurricanes before, it’s extremely rare because cold water flows from Alaska typically make the Pacific coast an unsuitable environment for them. Hurricanes rely on water surface temperatures higher than 26 Celsius to form and grow powerful. Hilary, a Category 4 storm as of Saturday afternoon, is expected to make landfall on Sunday morning, likely in northern Mexico around Baja California, according to the National Hurricane Center.

• New rainfall records were set across Los Angeles County after Tropical Storm Hilary crossed into Southern California near Palm Springs on Sunday evening after earlier making landfall in Mexico.

• The big picture: It’s rare for a tropical storm to hit the region. The storm is bringing the likelihood of “catastrophic and life-threatening flooding” to parts of the U.S. Southwest through Monday, while prompting unprecedented tropical storm warnings for Los Angeles and San Diego.

• Deadly floodwaters inundated streets across Mexico’s arid Baja California on Sunday as Tropical Storm Hilary moved ashore carrying torrential rain into Southern California, and concerns mounted that flash floods could strike in places as far north as Idaho that rarely get such heavy rain.

Energy/Transportation

• Indonesia has the world’s largest nickel reserves, is increasingly caught in the conflict between the United States and China.

• We recently got a 4.8kWh solar battery installed. Batteries are still somewhat complex beasties. In order to prevent damage to the internal structure, a BMS (Battery Management System) ensures that each cell in the battery gets a fair share of wear and tear. One side effect of this is that our battery never dips below 10% charge.

• The finding involves what’s known as oscillating superconductivity. Typical superconductor behaviors involve electron partnerships called Cooper pairs moving through materials without losing significant amounts of energy in the form of heat.

• Cooper pairs in oscillating superconductivity happen to move in a kind of wave-like dance. While rarer than ‘normal’ superconductivity, the oscillations occur at relatively warmer temperatures, making the phenomenon interesting to scientists wanting to make superconductivity happen consistently at room temperature.

Wildlife/Nature

• The prehistoric type of fish, which can grow up to 7 feet and 300 pounds, are Federally listed species of concern.

• They used to be abundant in the Great Lakes. Their runs marked the changing of the seasons for native tribes in Michigan. But through overfishing and habitat loss, the lake sturgeon population in the Saginaw Basin is considered extirpated.

• In recent years there has been a growing interest in restoring the population to a self-sustaining level because it can indicate ecosystem health and biodiversity, according to Sturgeon for Tomorrow, a nonprofit focused on ensuring the species’ future.

• Over 1,000 people remain missing nearly two weeks after Hawai’i’s historic wildfires, as state officials warn the death toll will continue to climb while search and recovery efforts continue.

• “This is an unprecedented weather event.”

Finance

Axios ☛ How the affordable housing crunch is hitting college studentsThe affordable housing crunch has not spared students in college towns.Why it matters: Students would need to earn about $72,000 a year to afford rent in America’s most expensive college towns, per a new report from InMyArea.Rent costs range from about $250 per month in some rural towns to more than $1,800 in the priciest California county, the report found.

• : The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) witnessed a mixed bag of placements last year. While a record number of students were hired at the premier institute, there was a drop in the proportion of students who got placed. The salaries have largely remained stuck even as the average size of the pay package showed a marginal increase.

• The institute’s placement report for the academic year 2022-23, which was released this month, shows that a total of 1516 students got jobs – the highest ever in a placement season – including 194 students who accepted pre-placement offers. In 2021-22, the recruiters had hired 1441 students, including 201 who got jobs through the PPO route. However, with more students participating in the placement process, the percentage of students who found employment on campus dropped from last year’s 89% to 82%.

• Market intelligence platform InvestGame has shared a new report on deal activity in the games industry for the first half of 2023. Here are the key findings about the turbulent and generally deteriorating landscape.

• Russia’s Prosecutor General has filed a lawsuit to confiscate a power asset belonging to one of the country’s richest men, claiming his purchase of the company five years ago was corrupt, local media reported.

• He told CNBC that Malaysians should not be made to pay hefty profits to the investment bank.

• A trust linked to one of China’s wealth management giants has failed to make payouts on dozens of products in another sign of trouble in the country’s economy.

• Beijing indicated it was studying the ruling.

• The Cabinet meeting was chaired by Premier Li Qiang.

• Speculation demands to return bribes to China’s health commission are a ‘redistribution’ of ill-gotten gains.

• Singapore authorities have seized assets worth nearly US$750 million in sweeping raids against a suspected international money laundering ring, police said Wednesday. During the operation, which targeted locations across the city-state on Tuesday, the police arrested 10 foreign nationals — from China, Turkey, Cambodia, Cyprus and Vanuatu.

• Coming to Terms with China.

• Marine tracking sites show a number of apparently static vessels in major trading ports

• THE SINGLE LARGEST immigration-related spending cut in the government programme is not found under immigration but under social security, reports YLE.

• Although the section on immigration lays out direct spending cuts worth around 250 million euros, including halving the refugee quota and adopting stricter criteria for residence permits, the largest savings related to immigration are expected to arise from introducing a language requirement to the labour market subsidy.

• The action by the People’s Bank of China, the central bank, the latest in a series of steps to try to spur lending, was more modest than expected.

• A Zinnov and Microsoft study in March noted that gig workers will play an instrumental role in India’s USD 5 trillion economy, with the current 77 lakh gig workforce set to triple to 2.3 crore by 2030, generating USD 250 billion.

• The data center construction business has never been healthier. Despite inhibiting factors such as power availability and demands to reduce the carbon footprint, data center growth is fierce and shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.

• According to Synergy Research Group, public cloud providers spent $120 billion on building, leasing and equipping data center infrastructure in 2022, up 13% from the previous year. Hyperscalers Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) all experienced almost 30% revenue growth in their platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings. Their combined data center numbers grew by 15% in 2022, raising their overall data center capacity by 18%.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Luisa González and Daniel Noboa were poised to be the top candidates of Sunday’s election in a country where declining security has been the leading issue for most voters.

• The Bills would give authorities more power to prosecute people for acts against state and military.

• Immigrants are ‘deluded’ and have ‘hard life’ on arrival, Chinese Embassy official says.

• Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an will lead a delegation to an annual forum held in Shanghai.

• Expansion is expected to be high on the agenda at the meeting of the five-nation grouping.

• U.S. officials worry that head winds at home could drive China to be doubly keen to project strength abroad, and to see a U.S.-China thaw as a sign of weakness.

• The 39-year-old Chinese national was a cadre at a ministry and had gone to Japan for studies.

• China on Monday accused a government employee of spying for the United States, the second incident of espionage it has announced in a month. Beijing implemented a revised anti-espionage law last month that gives authorities more power than ever to punish what they deem to be threats to national security.

• Hong Kong national security police have taken away the sister-in-law of wanted activist Nathan Law for questioning, according to local media outlets citing sources. It is the latest move involving family members of the eight overseas pro-democracy figures, who are facing arrest warrants and HK$1 million bounties.

• Since March 2, passengers have been able to reserve a time slot where they can decide at what moment they want to pass through security checkpoints. Due to this, Schiphol has a clearer view of the passenger flows and has been able to avoid long queues at the checkpoints.

• Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will consider at their summit this week whether to admit more countries to their bloc. China wants to expand it, to challenge the West, but the members’ conflicting interests may get in the way.

• Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told prosecutors he doesn’t recall former President Trump “ordering, or even discussing, declassifying broad sets of classified materials before leaving the White House,” ABC News reported Sunday.

• Why it matters: Meadows’ account contradicts Trump’s biggest defense in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.

• All signs indicated that Prime Minister Imran Khan was the most popular political leader in Pakistan.  Yet the country’s military worked behind the scenes to remove him from power through a cash-lubricated parliamentary vote.

• Meta Platforms Inc. is planning to launch a web version of its Threads microblogging platform early in the coming week, according to a Wall Street Journal report today. Despite its limited features, Threads has regularly been referred to as a competitor to X Inc., formerly known as Twitter.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• A steady stream of government and media reports about China’s influence and information operations in Western countries has shed light on covert Chinese police stations in major cities, harassment of places that host dissidents and media disinformation campaigns.

• The reports on China’s influence machine – confirmed to Radio Free Asia’s Asia Fact Check Lab by multiple Chinese media figures in New Zealand – show how Beijing deploys cash, aggressive diplomats and boycotts to produce China-friendly press coverage and deter critical reporting.

• The effort largely targets growing Chinese diaspora communities in Western democracies, and comes as the United States and allies are reassessing their economic ties to China over security concerns.

• “We are now possibly starting to see all kinds of activity. Not military operations, but other kinds of operations. Our consulate in St Petersburg has been closed this autumn. Some people, like the Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu, have recently hardened their language and accused us of all sorts of things. There is constantly more propaganda against Finland from the Russian side, Sauli Niinistö said in the radio programme.

• Russia was expected to increase its hostility already after Finland’s [NATO] application. Niinistö said he believes that Russia did not have time to react then, but that it is only reacting now.

• “Fortunately, Finland is prepared for this. We have gone through these risks,” Niinistö said.

Censorship/Free Speech

• It said the organisation was not aware of the specifics of why its website has been blocked in India; why its Facebook page has been removed; and why its Twitter account has been withheld. “We have not been served any notice nor is there any official order regarding these actions that is in the public domain so far,” it said.

• It said this opaque censorship is “gut-wrenching”. “There isn’t a lot left for us to say anymore. Since 2011, The Kashmir Walla has strived to remain an independent, credible, and courageous voice of the region in the face of unimaginable pressure from the authorities while we watched our being ripped apart, bit by bit,” it added.

• OVD-Info, which monitors repression in Russia, reported that two people were detained in Moscow carrying signs calling for the release of political prisoners. It was not clear if those incidents were related to the Navalny protests.

• The Russian Justice Ministry on August 18 added seven more individuals to its foreign agents list, including prominent Kremlin critics Andrei Piontkovsky, Andrei Ilarionov, and Linor Goralik.

• Since 2012, Russia has used the so-called foreign agent law to label and punish critics of government policies. It also has been increasingly used to shut down civil society and media groups in Russia since the Kremlin launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February last year.

• A Canadian minister has repeated calls for Meta to end a ban on news content from the country’s outlets being hosted on Facebook and Instagram as wildfires devastate the country and people flee.

• Attorneys for The 1975 have been working with organizers of Malaysia’s Good Vibes Festival. Future Sound Asia (FSA) organized the festival, which was abruptly cancelled by the Malaysian government after frontman Matty Healy kissed the band’s drummer on-stage. Malaysia has strict laws against homosexuality, which Healy addressed on stage before the kiss.

• When the freedom of speech and of the press die, it will happen by a thousand small cuts. Last Friday night, in the sleepy 1,900-person town of Marion, Kansas, all five police officers in the town were summoned to work because of an urgent need.

• Hong Kong’s national security police reportedly detained and questioned the sister-in-law of Hong Kong fugitive pro-democracy activist Nathan Law-Kwun-Chung on Saturday, according to Hong Kong’s public broadcaster and local media. The wife of Law’s older brother was taken away by the National Security Department of the Hong Kong Police Force after a home raid.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• This is a sermon I gave on Sunday Aug. 20 in Oslo, Norway at Kulturkirken Jakob (St. James Church of Culture). Actor and film director Liv Ullmann read the scripture passages.

• Affidavits signed by a police chief and magistrate to warrant the raid on the Marion County Record were supposed to provide evidence that a reporter committed a crime.

• Instead, they serve as evidence that the local officials abused their power.

• Police Chief Gideon Cody received approval from Magistrate Judge Laura Viar to conduct the Aug. 11 raids on the newspaper office, the publisher’s home, and the home of a city councilwoman after small-town drama erupted over a restaurant owner’s quest for a liquor license. Officers hauled away computers, hard drives and reporters’ personal cellphones during the newsroom raid — inviting worldwide condemnation for the brazen attack on press freedom.

• Egypt is one the world’s top jailers of journalists, along with Turkey and China, according to media watchdogs. Authorities have for years targeted journalists as part of a wide-scale crackdown on dissent and government critics.

• We still need answers and consequences in the case itself. More broadly, the egregious overreach in Marion and the good faith of journalists at the Record made this a perfect national story. Few would think that authorities got this one right. The problem — as journalists across the States Newsroom network told us — is that attacks on a free and fair press are not rare at all. Indeed, such attacks have become distressingly commonplace.

• When powerful people go after journalists and news outlets, they go after everyone. They go after publications’ readers. They go after voters who use information reported to make decisions. They go after other politicians who may have opposing messages or interests.

• In the five days since the raid, the 4,000-circulation paper had become an unlikely symbol of the clash between free speech and creeping authoritarianism, a conflict drawn all the sharper because of its unexpected location: a small town in the rolling Flint Hills of Kansas. Things reached a boil after the paper’s 98-year-old co-owner, Joan (pronounced Jo-Anne) Meyer, whose home had also been searched by police, collapsed and died a day after the raid.

• “Your department’s seizure of this equipment has substantially interfered with the Record’s First Amendment-protected newsgathering in this instance, and the department’s actions risk chilling the free flow of information in the public interest more broadly, including by dissuading sources from speaking to the Record and other Kansas news media in the future,” the media coalition’s letter states.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The European Union (EU) claimed on Friday that Hong Kong experienced declines in autonomy, democracy, and fundamental freedoms in its 2022 report on Hong Kong . The EU also cast doubt on China’s commitment to its  ‘One Country, Two Systems’ principle.

• American sued Skiplagged Inc. in federal court in Fort Worth, Texas, this week, accusing the website of deception. It threatened to cancel every ticket that Skiplagged has sold.

• In a practice called skiplagging and hidden-city ticketing, travelers book a flight that includes at least one stop, but they leave the plane during a layover. Generally skiplagging is not illegal, but airlines claim that it violates their policies.

• This is one reason why many divorced Tajik women apear to support the right of men to marry multiple times: polygamous marriages are mainly sought by high- and middle-income men and many women see this as their only way to secure financial security for themselves and their children.

• Though the state does not recognize polygamous marriages, Sharia law allows Muslim men to have multiple wives. These unions are consecrated by a mullah without the marriage being officially registered with the state.

• Father Gulshan Barkat, who teaches church history at the National Catholic Institute of Theology in Karachi, described the blasphemy allegations as a “false accusation” and said the local mosques were also to blame because loudspeakers erected on minarets had earlier in the day called on Muslims to gather and “attack the churches and Christian community.”

• “The emotion of our Muslim brethren flares up very quickly, even at hearsay,” he said.

• Videos and photos posted on social media show an angry mob descending upon a church, throwing pieces of bricks and burning it. In another video, two other churches are attacked, their windows broken as attackers throw furniture out and set it on fire.

• In the videos, several policemen are seen watching the situation without intervening to stop the vandalism.

• Around 96% of Pakistan’s population is Muslim. Other countries, including Iran, Brunei, and Mauritania also impose capital punishment for insulting religion [sic].

• Even though Pakistan has yet to sentence anyone to death for blasphemy, a mere accusation can result in widespread riots, causing lynchings and killings

• Pakistan is among the countries where blasphemy is a crime punishable by the death sentence.

• In collective bargaining, a “last, best and final offer” is a formal proposal that one side presents to the other and includes all benefits and compromises. This is usually done to allow union members to vote to accept or reject an employer’s best-case proposal. It is the culmination of the collective bargaining process and indicates that no further negotiation will be undertaken.

• The offer makes concessions on a variety of issues, many of which were brought up in GEO’s original bargaining platform. The offer includes offering birthing parent graduate students up to 12 weeks of paid leave, lower out-of-pocket maximums on mental health care and physical therapy copays, expanded gender-affirming benefits and the creation of a $20,000 per year International Graduate Workers Assistance Fund.

• The offer comes after nine months of contentious negotiations between the university and the union. The dispute reached a critical point when GEO members walked off the job in late March and remained on strike through the remainder of the winter term.

• Cases alleging sexual assault from Michael Jackson can now pursue further litigation against his companies rules a US appeals court judge. A Californian appeals court ruled that lawsuits from two men who allege that Michael Jackson molested them as children are free to pursue litigation against companies owned by the singer, who died in 2009.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• In a traditional mobile network, you have a Base Transceiver Station (BTS) but you are familiar with it being referred to as a base station. This is what your device with a sim card connects to for mobile internet, calls, or sms.

• This BTS connects to a Base Sation Controller (BSC) which manages multiple BTSs so in essence the BTS is a slave of the BSC. The BSCs then report to the Mobile Switching Centre (MSC) which then routes traffic into and out of the network, so an MSC will facilitate the exchange of traffic between 2 different networks, for example, traffic between Econet and NetOne.

• We have launched a new series of books opening up Low-tech Magazine’s archive by theme. The first volume collects all articles on digital technology and is available in our bookstore.

• We were told that the internet would dematerialize society and decrease energy use. Contrary to this projection, it has become a massive infrastructure and a rapidly growing energy consumer. In this series of articles, Low-tech Magazine examines the reasons behind the ever-expanding resource use of digital communication and what we can do about it. The internet isn’t an autonomous being. Its growing energy use results from decisions made by software developers, web designers, marketeers, publishers, and internet users. By placing communications in a historical context and with the development of its lightweight, off-the-grid, and solar powered website, Low-tech Magazine challenges our high-tech approach to sustainability and highlights the possibilities of alternative solutions.

• Telco Singtel Optus is the most distrusted brand in Australia for the last 12-month period, the market research firm Roy Morgan says, adding that this was the first time any company had taken the top spot from Facebook/Meta since it started issuing the measure of trust and distrust in 2018.

• In a statement, Roy Morgan said Facebook/Meta, Telstra, News Corp and Amazon rounded off the top five distrusted companies.

• The research firm said the change in the top rank occurred after the Optus data brach in September 2022, at which time there was an immediate and sharp increase in distrust for the brand.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Yet, the specs span hundreds of pages. The public API of the TPM2 Software stack comprises close to 1200 functions and required 80K lines of code to implement.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Two of the largest U.S. library associations representing over 100,000 libraries are protesting efforts by large copyright holders to influence foreign copyright law. Specifically, the associations oppose ongoing critique of South Africa’s proposed copyright legislation, labeling it bizarre, condescending, and Orwellian.

• Class action Bored Ape NFT lawsuit against Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg, Post Malone, and Madonna expands to include Sotheby’s. A lawsuit filed by investors who regret their purchase of a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT…

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