● 08.26.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 26/08/2023: Software Patents Threat as Sylabs ‘IP’ Abused Against Rocky Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 8:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos experimented with the old adage that brevity is the soul of wit. That’s right; this week, they’re all Quick Hacks, and that’s to make room for a special series of interviews that Elliot recorded at CCCamp with the pillars of US hackerspace creation. This one’s really special, do have a listen.

• This morning I pondered how much will noise reduce when I power off that server?

• From the comfort of my living room, directly above the rack in the basement, I powered it off. At first, I was disappointed. I could still hear that repetitive whine. After considering powering off one of the other hosts, I realized the noise I heard was the ceiling fan. After switching that off, I could no longer hear the rack. I thought I could hear a wee bit of fan noise, but the noise from the main host was definitely gone. The window, 6ft to the right, was cracked open a bit. Cars going past on the street were louder than what I could hear.

• It’s also so much fun talking with people who are using GPUs not for bullshit, but to… render things! As in, making movies! The rest of the industry is slurping up entropy and electricity to generate rubbish and chain together tulip blocks, but these people actually put smiles on faces.

• He had set off from the Shandong Peninsula with a helmet, a life jacket, a telescope and a compass, according to the Coast Guard. He also had five containers of fuel, which he’d tied to the watercraft and used to keep the tank filled during the 14-hour journey, the Coast Guard said.

• A 35-year-old dissident who served jail time for wearing T-shirts likening Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Hitler fled to South Korea in a daring 300-kilometer (185-mile) escape over the sea by jet ski. [...]

• These days, the modern way to game the pop charts for maximum impact is not to set up a thousand streams on your laptop to play all at once. Instead, it involves getting people to pay money for a song on iTunes as a way to emphasize status. You don’t need many to make an impact.

• [Mike Engelhardt] is a name that should be very familiar to the hardcore electronics nerd. [Mike] is the developer responsible for LTSpice, which is quite likely the most widely used spice-compatible simulator in the free software domain. When you move away from digital electronics and the comfort of software with its helpful IDEs and toolchains, and dip a wary toe into the murky grey waters of analog or power electronics, LTSpice is your best friend. And, like all best friends, it’s a bit quirky, but it always has your back. Sadly, LTSpice development seems to have stalled some years ago, but luckily for us [Mike] has been busy on the successor, QSpice, under the watchful eye of Qorvo.

Education

• After the Taliban shut down women’s colleges and universities in December last year – at gunpoint in some places – this online classroom has become the only place for women like Ferhana to meet and study literature, business administration and computer science, among other courses.

Hardware

• Today, the 2x (new-to-me 12TB HDD) arrived. They are already mounted in their drive cages and installed.

• When wired networking or data connections can’t be made, for reasons of distance or practicality, various wireless protocols are available to us. Wi-Fi is among the most common, at least as far as networking personal computers is concerned, but other methods such as LoRa or Zigbee are available when data rates are low and distances great. All of these methods share one thing in common, though: their use of radio waves to send data. Using other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum is not out of the question, though, and [mircemk] demonstrates using light as the medium instead of radio.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Japan began releasing wastewater from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday despite angry opposition from China and local fishermen.

• Japan began releasing wastewater from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday, prompting a furious China to ban all seafood imports from its neighbour.

• China is among the lead critics of the decision.

• I dug up a somewhat sloppily produced pdf published by the who that purports to be a changelog of variant classifications. The list seems incomplete, because there are variants that change classification before being assigned a classification, and some variants are assigned a classification but then don’t get mentioned in the rest of the document, which spans more than two years.

• Here is a brief summary of the relevant variant changes listed in the document.

• Parents who limit their kids’ screen time, it seems, may be doing them a service: a new study has found that babies who spend a lot of time looking at iPads and other screens experience developmental delays.

• Published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association of Pediatrics, this new research out of Japan suggests that watching screens may limit infants’ practicing of real-life motor skills that they glean from mimicking the people near them.

• Three weeks ago, we learned that the Credentials and Certification Committee of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) had voted strip two COVID-19 quacks, Drs. Pierre Kory and Paul Marik, of their board certifications. In my discussion a couple of weeks ago I noted that there appeared to be less than met the eye to this decision; first, because this decision was announced not by the ABIM but rather by the antivax quack organization founded by Kory and Marik, the  the ivermectin-promoting Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, or FLCC (apparently after the two quacks had received letters from the ABIM) and, second, because a perusal of the ABIM website demonstrated that Dr. Kory was still board-certified in internal medicine and pulmonary and critical care medicine (which he still is as of early this morning), while Dr. Marik’s certification status was listed as “inactive” (which it also still is as of early this morning). As a reminder, the reason that Dr. Marik’s status was listed as “inactive” is because you need a valid state medical license to be board-certified, and Dr. Marik had let his license lapse in 2022, leading to his inactive status.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• The debate was quite fun to watch, but also frustrating.

• What irked me about the debate—and all similar debates—is that they fail to isolate the disagreements. 90% of the discussion ends up being heat instead of light because they’re not being disciplined about: [...]

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• Users however are directed to address Code Llama in English as the model hasn’t been put through safety testing in other languages and might just say something awful if queried in an out-of-scope language.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (tryton-server), Fedora (youtube-dl), SUSE (clamav and krb5), and Ubuntu (cjose and fastdds).

• Rackspace Technology Inc. spent $10.8 million on expenses related to a ransomware attack in December that blocked thousands of customers from accessing their emails and related data, according to regulatory filings.

• The San Antonio-based cloud computing company paid for costs to “investigate and remediate, legal and other professional services, and supplemental staff resources that were deployed to provide support to customers,” according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

• Pôle emploi, France’s governmental unemployment registration and financial aid agency, is informing of a data breach that exposed data belonging to 10 million individuals.

• One of the oldest historical societies in the state of Ohio was hit with a ransomware attack that leaked the sensitive information of thousands, according to a statement the organization released this week.

• The Ohio History Connection is a statewide history nonprofit chartered in 1885 that manages more than 50 sites and museums across the state. It houses the State Historic Preservation Office as well as the official state archives.

• In sending a Wells Notice to SolarWinds’s CISO, the SEC has put CISOs generally on high alert that the agency is focused on how such professionals may be involved in company missteps concerning cybersecurity issues. Managing cybersecurity at a large company often involves multiple layers of personnel involved in different aspects of complex processes, and the SEC may face challenges in investigating, and possibly charging, future CISOs. CISOs and their companies—working with counsel—should take care to design processes to detect cyber incidents and have appropriate governance around evaluating and escalating them, so that the people who are responsible for making disclosure decisions can receive timely and accurate information.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• There is a useful axiom to keep in mind whenever you are crafting a message for someone else, whether writing a book, filming a video, or drafting an email.

• Simple ideas travel farther than complex ones

• Most of us intuitively understand this. But sometimes we forget as we get into the details of whatever we are doing. That’s why I like to keep the idea of fidelity vs transmission in mind.

Privacy/Surveillance

• These types of personalized ads, which use data to tailor marketing to users’ online activities and interests, can be effective for finding the right consumers. Under a federal privacy law, however, children’s online services must obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from users under 13 to target them with ads — a commitment YouTube extended to anyone watching a children’s video.

• Now Fairplay, a prominent children’s group, is challenging the company’s privacy statements. The group said it had used advertising placement tools from YouTube’s parent company, Google, to run a $10 ad campaign this month targeted at different groups of adults, exclusively on children’s video channels.

• That’s because Big Tech companies, most headquartered in the U.S., are now subject to a pioneering new set of EU digital regulations. The Digital Services Act aims to protect European users when it comes to privacy, transparency and removal of harmful or illegal content.

• Here are five things that will change when you sign on: [...]

• We’ve noted repeatedly how the hyperventilation about TikTok privacy is largely just a distraction from the U.S.’ ongoing failure to pass even a basic privacy law or meaningfully regulate data brokers.

• In 2014, the Supreme Court made it clear: phone searches require warrants. While it did note the case involved a search “incident to an arrest,” the precedent was undeniable. If a phone search attached to an arrest requires a warrant, it would logically follow that any phone search by law enforcement — even those not subsequent to an arrest — requires a warrant.

• One of the fun aspects of our global community is that there are plenty of events at which we can meet up, hang out, and do cool stuff together. They may be in a Las Vegas convention center, a slightly muddy field in England, or a bar in Berlin, but those of us with a consuming interest in technology and making things have a habit of finding each other. Our events all have their own cultures which make each one slightly different from others.

Confidentiality

• I attended a presentation at Crypto and Privacy village about Decentralized Identity, its goals, and current weaknesses. We cover verifiable credentials, where information is signed by an issuer, held by a person or thing with identity, and given to verifiers which can trust that verifier. Governments are interested in decentralized identities. I feel that without deep government support, decentralized identities will not succeed. Lastly, we cover mitigations, such as a smart agent. It is like a smart wallet, but more general. We have a long way to go before this technology is ready for the everyday person.

• This talk summary is part of my DEF CON 31 series. The talks this year have sufficient depth to be shared independently and are separated for easier consumption.

Defence/Aggression

• Videos show China Coast Guard ships trying to cordon off boats in a Philippine resupply convoy.

• After daring sea escape, ethnic Korean Kwon Pyong turns himself in to Incheon authorities

• Tennessee’s Republican-dominated state Legislature is still facing public outcry over the state’s permissive gun laws in the wake of Nashville’s Covenant School shooting, which killed three 9-year-old children and three adult staff members in March. Since then, the state House, under the control of Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton, has censured its own representatives and deployed state troopers to crack down on public participation. Earlier this week, Republicans imposed new penalties on lawmakers believed to be too disruptive and banned visitors from carrying signs — a ban that has since been challenged by the ACLU for violating the First Amendment. Amid the new rules, visitors can still carry guns into the building. For more, we’re joined by Tennessee state Representative Justin Jones, one of three Democratic representatives expelled by the state Legislature earlier this year for joining gun violence protests on the House floor. We speak to him about his return to the Legislature after being reinstated in a special election last month, and his continued struggle in “the people’s house” against what he describes as “authoritarian” rule.

• Former President Donald Trump was booked Thursday at Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail on 13 felony charges for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. He paid $20,000, or 10% of his $200,000 bond, through a local bail bondsman, allowing him to be released after about 20 minutes at the jail. He is expected to face trial as early as October. In Atlanta, we speak with two guests: Carol Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University and the author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, among other books on race and civil rights in American politics, and Hugo Lowell, a reporter for The Guardian who has closely covered Trump’s criminal case in Georgia. Anderson discusses the Trump campaign’s use of a long legacy of racism and voter suppression in an attempt to “overthrow democracy” via an “assault on Black humanity,” while Lowell shares what’s next for Trump and his 18 other co-defendants, including former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and lawyer Kenneth Cheseboro, who first suggested the plot to create fake electors.

• Xi’s absence sparks speculation about his health, or that he needs to confront crisis back home

• “Should we work together to maintain peace and stability, or just sleepwalk into the abyss of a new Cold War?” President XI Jinping asked.

• The invitation came after a tumultuous year of domestic unrest and economic gloom, and follows a pivot by the country toward Russia and China.

• The bloc must not become a battleground for influence amid the great power rivalry between the US, China and Russia, Dr Sri Mulyani Indrawati said.

• Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya said her country’s independence has come under its “greatest threat” ever because of the rule of authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

• The Russian Investigative Committee said on Friday that it had recovered 10 bodies from the scene of the plane crash that presumably killed Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.

• The Kremlin appears to be sending the signal that no degree of effectiveness can protect someone from punishment for disloyalty.

• The Kremlin and its proxies rebuffed suggestions that it was responsible for destroying a plane that reportedly carried the chief of the Wagner mercenary group.

• Russia’s president had ample reason to wish for Yevgeny Prigozhin’s demise.

• A tycoon and a Putin ally, he built a paramilitary force that fought by Russia’s side even as he castigated its military leaders. He is believed to have died at 62 in a plane crash.

• The apparent deaths of Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and other high-ranking officials of the Wagner Private Military Company in a plane crash this week leaves the Kremlin-funded group’s future in question.

• Why it matters: Without its founder and other top commanders, it is difficult to predict how Wagner will operate going forward, but it is likely that the group is the weakest it has ever been since first emerging nearly a decade ago, analysts told Axios.

• Lithuanian defence minister Arvydas Anušauskas says there are signs of “fragmentation” of Wagner mercenary group after the purported death of its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, and its troops are leaving Belarus.

• Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka said the “core” of the Wagner mercenary group — about 10,000 fighters — will remain in his country in his first comments since the presumed death of the organization’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in a suspicious plane crash in Russia.

• The Wagner mercenary group leader, who staged a short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership in June, was presumed dead after a jet went down northwest of Moscow on Wednesday.

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner paramilitary group, had visited the Central African Republic in the days before his jet crashed, a top adviser to the country’s president said.

• In a Ukraine village, there are no tears for Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner private militia, whose presumed death in a plane crash was reported this week.

• The day after the plane crash that apparently killed both Yevgeny Prigozhin and his right-hand man Dmitry Utkin (who gave his nom-de-guerre “Wagner” to the entire Wagner Group), local residents and leaderless mercenaries gathered by the former PMC Wagner Center in St. Petersburg. The flowers, candles, and other offerings they brought heaped up into a sprawling memorial to a man who had gained immense notoriety, both in Russia and abroad, for his private military company’s role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ekaterina Barkalova, a reporter writing for the independent Russian outlet Bumaga, visited the memorial and spoke to the people who came to honor Prigozhin. With the publication’s permission, Meduza is publishing an abridged translation of her reportage on why many Russians admired Prigozhin, despite his criminal biography and Wagner Group’s reputation for grotesque violence and colossal losses of mercenaries’ lives.

• The boys, aged 15 and 16, were put on trial at the Leoben Regional Court on July 16, 2023. They had made plans to massacre as many people as possible during an attack on the middle school attended by the 15-year-old, in Bruck an der Mur, where they both lived.

• When confronted in court, the boys — who both have a history of violence and criminality— admitted that “We wanted to shoot all the Christians in the class!” Asked how they would have responded if police had intervened, they said, “We would have surrendered” — adding that “Allah would have forgiven” them in prison, since “Killing Christians takes us to paradise.”

• Once again, a video from our partner website “Radio Genoa” reaches us from the multi-culti hell of Italy. There, a Muslim (apparently from North Africa) went berserk in broad daylight and attacked a church in the city of Turin. Again and again, the migrant tries to break open the entrance door with a stone. Passers-by videotape the scene, but no one is willing to intervene and stop the desecration of the church. Even the police are far and wide nowhere to be spotted: [...]

• The authorities were apparently alerted by a report from the neighbourhood. Not much could be seen from the balcony of a flat in the Saint-Eutrope housing complex, which is part of Erilia’s social housing stock, as planks were used as screens to hide the activities inside. These were Arabic language and religious lessons given on Sunday mornings by residents of the neighbourhood – according to initial investigations, mothers from the residence acted as teachers, allegedly receiving some small change in return. It is not known how many children attended the classes. One source estimates that there were between 10 and 15 children, but hardly more, as the flat was very small. How old were they? Between 5 and 14 years.

• The suspect, whom the two officials declined to name, was in communication with Katibat al Tawhid wal Jihad, an Al Qaeda-affiliated group the U.S. designated as a foreign terrorist organization last year, they said. He was arrested Friday, they said.

• From my chats with low-level IRGC functionaries, I understood there to be a ranking of sorts as to which foreign prisoners fetch the highest price. Complete foreigners are generally more valuable than dual-nationals. Western Europe is better than Eastern Europe is better than Japan. The Chinese whisk their citizens away in a matter of months; detainees from the developing world can expect to serve their sentences in full. Americans and Israelis are the most expensive hostages to extract, and are therefore the most coveted.

• As you’ll recall, Montana passed a law earlier this year to ban TikTok (and ban mobile app stores from offering TikTok for download). The bill has lots of problems, not the least of which was that Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen flat out told the NY Times that the purpose of the bill was to censor speech that parents were complaining about:

• The Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) of Australia just released a digitized version of a 1957 film documentary on Australia’s rocket research back in the day ( see video below the break ). The Woomera test range is an isolated place about 500 km northwest of Adelaide ( 2021 population 132 ) and hosts a small village, an airstrip, and launch facilities. In the Salisbury suburb of Adelaide, a former WW2 munitions factory complex was repurposed as a research center for rockets and long range weapons.

• For Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE in particular, joining BRICS is a statement that while they cooperate with the United States and the West, they also cooperate with Russia and China…

• Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t travel to India for the G20 summit on September 9-10, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on August 25.

• BRICS leaders announced on Thursday the “historic” admission of six new countries, as the bloc seeks to reshape the Western-led global order and expand its influence in an era of strategic competition. BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — agreed at their annual summit to make Argentina, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt…

• Four crew members from four countries rocketed toward the International Space Station on August 26.

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

• The plane believed to have been carrying Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin “crashed as the result of an assassination plot,” reported the Wall Street Journal, referencing U.S. officials. According to the U.S. authorities’ preliminary findings, either a bomb exploded aboard the plane or a different form of sabotage caused the crash.

• The head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov expressed his condolences to the family and friends of Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.

• In the wake of the plane crash that likely killed the paramilitary Wagner Group’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC), an armed formation fighting on the side of Ukraine in the war with Russia, has released a video addressed to Wagner mercenaries.

• Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has rejected accusations from Western countries claiming that the Kremlin ordered Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin’s to be assassinated. A recording of his answer was posted by the radio station Mayak.

• Autocratic leader of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko told journalists that Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin never asked him for security guarantees, reports Belarusian state-run news agency Belta.

• Latvia has sent another helicopter to Ukraine to help in that country’s brave defense against Russian aggression.

• Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas on August 25 faced pressure to resign amid reports that her husband has part ownership in a company that has kept operations in Russia since Moscow invaded Ukraine.

• Finnish media reports on August 25 said police have detained Yan Petrovsky, a Russian ultra-nationalist and former commander of the Rusich saboteur group that fights alongside of Russia’s armed forces against Ukraine.

• The training, which will include several pilots and dozens of maintainers, will start in September at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.

• August 26, 2023 12:15 PM

• Permanent residency will be available to people who travel to New Zealand on the temporary Special Ukraine Visa before March 15 next year.

• The latest package is the 18th sent by Finland to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, with their combined value coming in at about 1.3 billion euros.

• Russia’s Northern Fleet conducted navy exercises in the Barents Sea this month aimed at preventing the passage of unauthorized and foreign ships, the Interfax news agency reported on August 26.

• Russian-imposed police in Ukraine’s Moscow-annexed Crimea on August 24 detained six Crimean Tatars on charges of organizing a terrorist group and participating in its activities.

• Mr. Utkin, a prominent commander in the private Russian military company, was a longtime lieutenant to Yevgeny V. Prigozhin. He is believed dead at 53 in a plane crash.

• The Netherlands and Denmark have announced they will send F-16s to Ukraine as soon as training is complete, and the United States has unveiled new plans to train Ukrainian pilots and ground crew.

• Russian air defences shot down a drone near Moscow, the city’s mayor said on Saturday. Russia’s defence ministry said it also downed a drone over the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine.

• Since the start of the war in Ukraine, some have claimed that “children” are being recruited into the Ukrainian army. Three viral photos, purporting to show graves of very young soldiers, have been shared since mid-August as evidence of this phenomenon. However, two of these three photos have been manipulated, and actually show the burial sites of adult men.

• People in Vilnius celebrated the Ukrainian Independence Day on Thursday. To mark the 32nd anniversary, an event called “For Your Freedom and Ours!” was held in Vilnius Town Hall Square.

• Russia reported a new drone attack on Moscow early on August 26, prompting authorities to temporarily suspend operations at all three major airports in the Russian capital.

• Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said during a visit to Kyiv that there is “no alternative” to the original Ukraine-Russia grain deal that was brokered by his country and the United Nations but which collapsed after Moscow pulled out of the agreement last month.

• The Russian Ministry of Defense reported that a Ukrainian S-200 missile was downed in Russia’s Moscow-adjacent Kaluga region the night of August 25.

• Finnish police have arrested Russian ultra-nationalist Yan Petrovsky, the Finnish television channel MTV3 reported on Friday.

• Putin signed the decree bringing in the change with immediate effect on Friday.

• Two days after the presumed death of Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree obliging paramilitary troops to swear an oath to Russia’s national flag.

• The rule would also apply to mercenaries fighting in the framework of the special operation in Ukraine.

• The European Parliament’s Foreign Committee chair David McAllister has urged Kyrgyzstan to ensure compliance with international sanctions against Russia amid growing concerns countries in Central Asia are being used to bypass the measures.

• Moscow police arrested a pensioner with a yellow-and-blue flower bouquet on August 24, saying he violated an order on holding rallies, Telegram channel Ostorojno Moskva (Caution Moscow) said.

• Latvia’s State Security Service (VDD) said on August 25 that it had detained four Latvian nationals on suspicion of spying for Russia’s Federal Security Service.

• Responding to new border restrictions imposed by its neighbours, Belarus’ leader Alexander Lukashenko has said Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland are making things worse for their own people.

• Belarusian activist Olga Karach has appealed against the Lithuanian Migration Department’s decision not to grant her asylum, her lawyer confirmed on Friday. Lithuania’s intelligence claims Karach is a threat to national security due to links with Russian intelligence.

• From August 26 to 28, military exercises will be held in Latvia’s eastern Latgale region, which borders Russia and Belarus, to improve the anti-mobility capability of the National Armed Forces (NBS) and the readiness to deploy engineering obstacles, according to an army press release.

• The attacks came the day after Ukraine claimed that its special forces had staged a brief raid into the occupied Crimean Peninsula and fought with Russian forces.

• After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, hundreds of Western companies announced they would quit operating in Russia. But actually selling their assets and withdrawing has taken time.

• A newly declassified American intelligence analysis says Russian spy agencies are using influence laundering techniques to hide the Kremlin’s involvement in cultivating pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine messages.

• As war in Ukraine continues, so does the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, with a version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony tailored to the moment.

• He shored up Russian forces at their most vulnerable and drew Ukraine into a costly fight for Bakhmut, giving Moscow time to build defenses that are slowing Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

• War destroys lives and erodes nations. Yet it also paves the way for rebirth. As Ukrainians plan for the reconstruction of their country, they are also discussing the values needed to create a better society.

• Finnish police want to keep the suspect remanded in custody, according to Finnish news agency STT.

• U.S. officials say they expect Ukraine to continue its attacks because they send a strong message: Kyiv can still strike back.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The thief must have been someone inside the institution, Mr. Gradel said in an email to the British Museum that has been obtained by The New York Times. He was concerned, he added, that the three gems were “only the tip of a much larger iceberg.”

• Gradel’s email, which was reviewed by the Telegraph, included a detailed description of how he had identified the seller, allegedly Higgs. Gradel said if Higgs was not the thief, it was someone else with access to the museum’s archives who was stealing items and impersonating the senior curator online.

• While Williams told Gradel on March 2 that the matter would be investigated, Gradel had not received a respond by the end of June, prompting the art dealer to write a follow-up email to William and send a copy of his original email to Fischer, the museum’s director.

• Speaking exclusively to the Telegraph, Dr Gradel explained how he uncovered the theft of the decade with years of detective work and said that he had “suffered horribly” as the British Museum “refused to listen” to his warnings for two years.

• Had it not been for Dr Gradel’s refusal to take no for an answer, resulting in him directly contacting George Osborne, the museum’s chairman, after being “fobbed off” by its managers, the theft of more than 1,500 objects might still have remained unknown.

• But rather than thanking him for discovering the thefts, Dr Fischer has gone on the attack, effectively blaming Dr Gradel for the two-year delay in confirming the treasures were missing.

• All this comes at the worst possible moment, since the museum is preparing to launch its masterplan for the complete refurbishment of its building and a full redisplay of its collection. This much-needed project will cost many hundreds of millions of pounds and is unlikely to be completed until after 2050.

• Publication of the masterplan has been delayed on several occasions, and until Fischer’s replacement arrives—perhaps next summer—the museum will in practice have a leadership lacking full authority. Fischer’s exit also comes at a time when restitution issues are highly controversial, particularly over the Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes.

• Although the thefts have only recently entered the public eye, the museum has been aware of them for at least two years, according to emails reviewed by the New York Times. In 2021, Dutch-Danish scholar and gems dealer Ittai Gradel alerted the museum that three gems from the collection were listed on the online marketplace eBay. Gradel had purchased one of those objects plus another 69 works from the same seller. He told the institution at the time that he believed the thief was working from within the museum and leadership opened an investigation.

• Deputy Director Williams reported back to Gradel that no objects were missing and no staff members were at fault. Now Williams, who has served as deputy director since 2012, will step back as the museum conducts its review, according to a British Museum statement shared with Hyperallergic.

• These and other recent Validated Independent News stories (VINs) report information and perspective that the public has a right and need to know, but to which it has limited access. Posted VINs are candidates for inclusion among the top 25 stories in Project Censored’s annual book.

Environment

• Major players in the oil and gas industry are suing the US government for protecting 6 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico from an upcoming auction of drilling rights on federally owned land.

• M93 was unrelated to the existing population, and also had the advantage of being unusually large – a big benefit when defending turf from rivals or taking down 800 pound ungulates.

• He quickly became the breeding male in one of the island’s three wolf packs and went on to sire 34 pups, greatly improving the genetic health of the population and the kill rate of its prey.

Energy/Transportation

• Although grid-connected solar panels can reduce the fossil fuel consumption of thermal power plants, these savings are at least partly offset by the additional fossil fuels required to build and maintain what is essentially a dual energy infrastructure. Combining solar and wind power can further increase the share of renewable energy in the power grid, but this requires further infrastructure development. Apart from energy, this also demands a lot of money and time.

• Replacing fossil-fuel-fired power plants with energy storage, so that surplus electricity generated on sunny days can be stored for when there is no or insufficient sun, encounters the same problem. Energy storage, whether integrated into a power grid or located at individual households (off-grid systems), is very expensive and carbon-intensive to build and maintain.

• Security consulting giant Kroll disclosed today that a SIM-swapping attack against one of its employees led to the theft of user information for multiple cryptocurrency platforms that are relying on Kroll services in their ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. And there are indications that fraudsters may already be exploiting the stolen data in phishing attacks.

• Since the school year began this month, there have been no reports of what was once a common sight in Hammond, Indiana: children, climbing over or under idling trains, risking their lives to get to class. Local officials say this is thanks to reforms enacted in response to an investigation by ProPublica and InvestigateTV.

• Norfolk Southern, whose trains routinely stretched across multiple intersections, halting traffic and preventing pedestrians from crossing, committed to stopping its trains east of the Chicago suburb and splitting any that blocked crossings for more than 40 minutes. It also pledged to issue email alerts to help school, fire and police officials work around disruptions.

Wildlife/Nature

• Dr. Barry assembled a team of ecologists, biologists, geologists and engineers who, for the next three years, studied what they dubbed the “Octopus Garden” — the world’s largest known aggregation of these eight-legged creatures. It turned out that the sheen of the water was a clue: The nursery sat atop a hydrothermal spring; the shimmering was caused by heat emanating from the seabed. The team’s findings, detailed in a new paper published Wednesday in Science Advances, suggest that this hot spot makes the octopuses’ eggs hatch faster, which improves reproductive success.

Finance

• High mortgage rates and lifestyle changes are shrinking the American house. Think smaller living rooms and fewer bedrooms.

• Why it matters: People are holding onto their homes longer, and newly constructed abodes are getting smaller to compensate for rising costs, experts told Axios.

• The CEO known for firing 900 employees through a Zoom call in December 2021, revealed in a recent interview that he’s “worked really, really hard” to be a kinder boss.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Paul Dibb’s Strategist post, in response to Sam Roggeveen’s recent Australian Foreign Affairs article, was on target.

• The last of 12 Hongkongers caught by mainland Chinese coastguards over a failed bid to flee to Taiwan has been officially rearrested and remanded into custody in the city pending trial on charges linked to the 2019 extradition bill protests.

• “I even took off my farm boots and wore high heels to come here today,” Camila Telles told the audience of political activists, business executives, and students at April’s Liberty Forum, an annual conservative gathering in Brazil sponsored by the Atlas Network.

• Telles is an agribusiness influencer – her clients include the major Brazilian meat producers Seara and Friboi – with more than 300,000 followers on Instagram and a talent for taking her pro-big farmer messages viral. From the dimly-lit stage, she opened the event’s first-ever panel on agribusiness with familiar talking points, mocking leftists for blaming climate change on cows.

• TH International (Tims China), the exclusive operator of Tim Hortons coffee shops in China, plans to get the country hooked on Popeyes’ iconic chicken sandwich in a big way. Over the next decade, at least 1,700 new Popeyes outlets will open across China, if things go to plan. /blockquote>

• As an Australian citizen, my only request would be to cede Australian sovereignty to Wellington, instead of the reverse. I for one would welcome our new Kiwi overlords, even if I were compelled to pronounce it fush and chups.

• In the final sitting block of the New Zealand parliamentary term this month, legislators have been offering free and frank advice to their colleagues during their valedictory speeches.

• Eugene V. Debs was a US politician and a member of the Socialist Party and ran for President five times since 1900. He fought the presidential election in 1920 while being imprisoned in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.

• “I thank the capitalist masters for putting me here. They know where I belong under their criminal and corrupting system. It is the only compliment they could pay me,” Debs wrote in a statement.

• Debs opposed America’s participation in World War I as he believed that it was only for the advantage of arms manufactures and similar business people.

• The Bill C-18 legislative process was marked by repeated warnings from the government that this was an urgent issue that justified its repeated efforts to cut off debate in order to fast track the bill into law before the summer break. In fact, in a late change, the bill was amended to provide that it would take effect with 180 days of royal assent, rather than the previously envisioned staged approach that would have resulted in a gradual development of regulations and implementation. That change has had enormous implications as the law can now take effect at any time but no later than December 19, 2023, which in turn led Meta to move to comply with the law immediately by blocking news links in Canada.

• Western dialogue invariably serves the cause of Islamic expansion, while causing the West to lose more of its freedoms, all because of its naiveté.

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• Note how Nahdlatul Ulama leaders claim that the Sharia is being manipulated as they completely ignore the texts of the Qur’an and Hadith which call for violence, the texts followed by the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.

• The group said Muslims should instead accept the reality of the nation state. It previously called on Muslims to reject the concept of a kafir, or infidel, and accept non-Muslims as fellow citizens. Modest as this reality-check might sound, coming from the world’s largest Muslim civil-society organisation it was significant, suggests James Dorsey, a scholar at RSIS, a think-tank in Singapore.

• SB 244 is fairly expansive; it includes consumer electronics (phones, laptops, etc.) and appliances (microwaves, washing machines, etc.), though a few exceptions have been carved out, including game consoles and alarm systems. The rational for those appear to be piracy and security, respectively. It shares a good deal (including the proposed name) with the Right to Repair Act, which went into effect in Minnesota this May.

• “Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital – the capitalists – organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets. “

• Below the fold some discussion of this idea.

• Kent State fashion students are using platforms like Instagram and TikTok to cultivate creativity and make their mark on the digital stratosphere.

• While being booked for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump made history as the first former president to have his mugshot taken and released to the public. Shortly after the image of Trump scowling at a police camera started to circulate, the embattled real estate mogul and politician began using it to raise money for his 2024 presidential campaign. “Mugshots have these various ways of being deployed … to craft a narrative, or to reinforce a narrative,” says Emory University professor Carol Anderson, who contrasts the novelty of Trump’s mugshot with the usage of mugshots by the media and the state to convey an image of Black criminality. As L.A. Times reporter Keri Blakinger explains, “the widespread distribution of mugshots undermines the presumption of innocence” and exacerbates racial bias. Blakinger is also the author of the memoir Corrections in Ink, which details her experience serving time in prison in upstate New York. “If he were treated like any other defendant, [Trump] would have been given a bail amount he couldn’t afford and left to die in a filthy cell,” she notes, cautioning that “the more that we celebrate some of these broken features of the system, the more ingrained they become.”

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• We can’t possibly go through all the lies and half-truths but here are a few we saw. You will notice that the goal for many of the authors was to discourage people from voting. Some of it came from overzealous ZEC and government critics who saw election tampering even where it did not exist.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Both Denmark and neighboring Sweden have struggled to balance respect for free expression with the diplomatic fallout of the desecrations. Governments in many Muslim-majority countries have issued withering condemnations, and authorities in both countries have said that the risk of terrorist attacks has risen in recent months, posing a threat to national security.

• Hora Sadat, a prominent female Afghan YouTuber, mysteriously died in Kabul on August 21. Reports suggested the 25-year-old was poisoned after attending a public event.

• There is no space for nuanced discussion about reality any more, as it seems that nonsense floods the zone. So, please try to follow along here as there needs to be some nuance to finally get down to the details of this issue. It’s nonsense, piled on top of nonsense, piled on top of nonsense, which ends with Elon Musk suggesting he’s going to sue George Soros for… advocating for laws that Elon doesn’t like (for what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure the laws being talked about are problematic, but the details aren’t clear, and there’s no law against advocating for bad laws).

• The post led to the author being arrested for “terrorizing”; so clearly unconstitutional that the police officer lacks qualified immunity, says the Fifth Circuit.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The event will be staged in a virtual auditorium looking like the Royal Courts of Justice in London where Assange is set to face his final appeal in the UK court system. The rally aims to build for a real life protest at the same venue when the court date is announced.

• Our coverage revolves around a commitment to illuminating diverse voices and a key principle of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, one that has been ingrained in us by each of our dedicated and talented journalism professors:

• Seek truth and report it.

• Turkish authorities should immediately and thoroughly investigate a recent drone attack in Syria that killed a driver and injured a journalist, determine if they were targeted for their work, and bring the perpetrators to justice, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

Civil Rights/Policing

• By taking such a strong stance against Russian athletes, the international community has demonstrated that they care to punish Russia for the crimes against humanity that they have committed in the Ukraine. These crimes include rape and other forms of violence against women. Ukraine’s ombudswoman for human rights, Lyudmyla Denisova, told the BBC that in one case, “about 25 girls and women aged 14 to 24 were systematically raped during the occupation in the basement of one house in Bucha. Nine of them are pregnant.” However, one must ponder, why should the International Olympic Committee only take punitive measures against Russian athletes, when there are so many other countries out there who have committed crimes just as grave against women?

• In recent days, it was reported that Iran has decided to force women who refuse to don a veil into psychiatric treatment and to bar them other kinds of medical treatment. This comes after Amnesty International reported, “Official announcements reveal that since 15 April 2023, more than a million women have received text messages warning that their vehicles could be confiscated after they were captured on camera without their headscarves. Additionally, countless women have been suspended or expelled from universities, barred from sitting final exams, and denied access to banking services and public transport. Hundreds of businesses have been forcibly closed for not enforcing compulsory veiling.”

• On the two-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul, Zarifa Ghafari told the Telegraph: “I receive dozens of threats every day. Even yesterday the Taliban said to me: ‘Just wait, we are coming after you’.

• “It means nowhere is safe. My husband has to accompany me everywhere. People have guns in Europe, the US or Asia. I don’t feel safe anywhere.”

• Iran arrested scores of Christians, mostly converts from Islam but also some Assyrian-Chaldeans baptised as children, over a seven-week period in June and July in 11 different cities of the country, this according to Article18, a human rights organisation that advocates on behalf of Iranian Christians and religious freedom.

• In an early report, the NGO had reported 50 arrests by mid-July in five cities, but its latest update indicates that at least 69 people were taken into custody, 10 of which – four men and six women – are still held by the authorities.

• Eric Duprey, 30, who had three young children and worked as a delivery driver, was pronounced dead within minutes of being struck on a Bronx sidewalk. The sergeant, Erik Duran, was suspended without pay just hours later, an unusually quick disciplinary move by the NYPD.

• New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has jurisdiction to probe deaths involving police, is investigating.

• Currently, journalists at the İstanbul office of the Russian state media outlet Sputnik are in the midst of a strike. These journalists have been staging their protest outside Süzer Plaza in İstanbul’s Dolmabahçe area for nine days. What sets this strike apart is Sputnik’s decision to terminate the employment of 24 unionized journalists on the very day the strike commenced.

• “In the Kobanî trial, Demirtaş and his colleagues are being tried for inciting the murder of Yasin Börü and other crimes. The perpetrators of these murders must be identified, and their guilt must be confirmed by a court ruling in order to hold those who incited them accountable. Interference occurred in this trial as part of the preparation to sentence politicians in the Kobanî trial, and these decisions were upheld,” said Mazlum İçli’s lawyer.

• In the case, Van Loon v Department of the Treasury, EFF argued in an amicus brief that the government needed to do more to ensure that coders’ First Amendment rights were protected when it took the unprecedented step of placing an open-source project on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) sanctions list.  That led Github to temporarily take down the project and essentially halt all additional work on it.  While the government later clarified in an FAQ— issued after EFF and others had publicly complained— that it did not intend to prohibit “discussing, teaching about or including open source code in publications,” we argued that this didn’t go far enough to protect coders. We urged the Court to require the Treasury Department to follow the strict limits of the First Amendment and to be more clear and careful in its actions.

• The District Court did not agree with us that the government overstepped the First Amendment here, and dismissed the case overall.  But, in interpreting the government’s actions, it did make even more clear that the scope of the sanction did not include coders developing the code. The Court said:

• While we are disappointed that the Court did not conduct a full First Amendment analysis and directly require the Treasury Department to take more care, both here and in any future situations where open source projects interact with federal sanctions laws, the Court’s analysis should give anxious coders some relief.  The Court clearly draws a sharp line between actually using the code to conduct transactions and the role of coders in developing and using the code outside of actual transactions. EFF will continue to monitor this case and others where coders are put at risk.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Back in 2015 domain registrar Tucows announced it would hope to modestly kickstart stagnant broadband competition by buying a small Virginia ISP by the name of Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI). Operating under the Ting brand name, the company said the goal was to bring a “shockingly human experience and fair, honest pricing” to a broken broadband market dominated by a handful of monopolies.

Monopolies

Patents

• As part of an ongoing series examining the patent holders and pools erroneously designating patents as essential, we highlight U.S. Patent 10,460,344 titled “Region merging and coding parameter reuse via merging.” This patent is owned by GE Video Compression (GEVC). GEVC has designated the ’344 patent as essential to the AV1 standard as a part of SISVEL’s AV1 Patent Pool. See AV1 Patent List, AV1 Family AV1-040, available at https://www.sisvel.com/images/documents/Video-Coding-Platform/PatentList_AV1.pdf.

Software Patents

• A recently unsealed lawsuit filed in the US by HPC software provider Sylabs accuses rival outfit Ctrl IQ (CIQ) and its founder Greg Kurtzer of violating Sylab’s trade secrets in order to start its business, and of filing its own patents based on that technology.

• The federal civil case was filed in the District Court for the Northern District of California under case number 5:23-cv-00849 in February, with the judge unsealing the complaint in July. The accusations are being rejected by CIQ and Kurtzer.

• This agreement, finalized earlier this month, covers the respective sales of network infrastructure and endpoint devices by the two companies, and includes patents covering a broad range of standards including the 3GPP, ITU, IEEE, and IETF standards for 3G, 4G, and 5G networks.

• According to Huawei, the deal provides greater certainty, not just for itself and Ericsson, but for their customers and other companies around the world, that there will not be disruptive patent disputes between the two over products implementing widely used network standards.

• In a statement, Alan Fan, head of Huawei’s Intellectual [sic] Property [sic] Department, said: “As major contributors of standard essential patents (SEPs) for mobile communication, the companies recognize the value of each other’s intellectual property, and this agreement creates a stronger patent environment.

Copyrights

• I’ve had regular monthly donations set up for the Internet Archive for years, and have been an advocate for the invaluable service they’ve offered the web over the past decades. There isn’t anywhere else online like it, whether it be their forward-thinking Wayback Machine, or their online library of materials.

• Back in November of 2022, a jury awarded the major labels over $46.76 million in damages as part of their copyright infringement lawsuit against Grande Communications Networks.

• As local pay TV companies complain that pirate IPTV providers are using VPNs and public DNS services to evade blocking measures, Brazil’s telecoms regulator wants cooperation from Big Tech. Referencing a one-week deadline and potential legal action to force compliance, an Anatel advisor spoke of “giants” being notified, one with a name that begins with a ‘G’.

• Responding to an inquiry on future anti-piracy strategies, Creative Future CEO Ruth Vitale calls on U.S. lawmakers to consider site blocking as a much-needed solution. Blocking foreign pirate sites could be a “game changer”, she argues. The Association of American Publishers also sees site blocking as an ideal tool to fight piracy more effectively and efficiently.

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