● 08.30.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 30/08/2023: RIP, Ueda San

Posted in News Roundup at 9:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• When serial production of the mechanism started, the US military became one of its first bulk buyers, integrating zippers into the troops’ clothing and gear during World War I.

• It wasn’t until the late 1930s that the invention finally revolutionized fashion.

• Netflix is getting ready to end its DVD home delivery service in the United States, 25 years after it started. This line of business generated $145.7 million in revenue last year, with just over a million DVD-by-mail subscribers. As a final gesture of appreciation, those customers can keep the latest DVDs they rented and enter for a chance to win another 10 free DVDs.

• I have a specific e-mail address set up so that readers of my blog can reach out to me no matter where they see my post. I knew about the risk of spam, but receiving genuine feedback and questions is something I appreciate a lot and I’m willing to mark everything else as spam if needed.

• What I did not expect was the amount of spam that originates from my self-hosted copy of Wikipedia, or that they’d use the e-mail that is present on the main ounapuu.ee domain.

• University of NSW said that three in four cases of contract cheating in 2021 were linked to the website, while the University of Sydney says it was facing increased reports of cheating through the website.

• You may not expect it, with video titles like “Come Pee With Me in Bloomingdale’s,” but Siegel is performing a vital public service. There are currently just over 1,000 public toilets in New York City—and per one report, only two of those are open 24/7. And while New York is the most notoriously bathroom-deficient city in America, it’s hardly unrepresentative. A 2021 report found the United States has only eight public toilets per 100,000 people. Iceland has 56.

• The lack of public restrooms in the United States isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a sign of America’s failure to invest in communal necessities for the collective good. But progressive leaders at the local level have the power to change that.

Science

• Newly-discovered “picoflares” could solve longstanding mysteries about solar winds.

Education

• New class policy set to take effect on Sept 1 was adopted in the wake of a teacher who committed suicide.

• Sunday afternoon, after careful evaluation of a significant security concern, we made the intentional decision to sever our ties to the internet. We took this action to provide our information technology teams the space required to address the issue in the safest possible manner.

• University of Michigan continues to restore online access after it shut down school [Internet] services Sunday afternoon

• U-M has said little about the nature of the “significant security concern” that prompted the [Internet] shut off

• The University of Michigan was grappling with a second day without internet on Tuesday, a situation that an expert called “highly unusual” as UM and federal officials continued to investigate a cybersecurity threat that led to the disruption.

• The disruption, in its third day, directly affects nearly 120,000 people at all three campuses, including about 65,000 students and 54,000 faculty and staff, and indirectly affects even more people as U-M seeks to solve the problem.

• U-M students and faculty on all three campuses began the fall 2023 semester without access to any of the University’s Wi-Fi networks or online resources linked to the University such as Canvas, Google Workspace and Wolverine Access. The outage was first reported Sunday afternoon by Information and Technology Services at 1:43 p.m. and is not expected to be completely restored for several days. Though the specific cause of the outage has not been announced, an ITS update sent to the campus community at 1:50 p.m. said the University made the decision to intentionally take U-M services offline in response to a “significant security concern.”

• “The team is working around the clock and already has restored access to some systems,” the update said. “That said, it may be several days before all online services return to their normal levels.”

• Our Information and Technology Services teams, working together with leading cybersecurity service providers, are working tirelessly to resolve this disruption and I want to personally thank them for their dedication to this critical effort. Already they have restored an impressive array of online tools that are accessible and functional through off-campus internet connections.

• The investigative work into the security issue continues. As noted in Monday’s message to the community, our U-M Division of Public Safety and Security and federal law enforcement partners are involved in this investigation.

• Earlier this month I wrote about academia’s versatility demand and the pressure on researchers to master diverse skills. In that post, I examined the changes taking place and the need to adapt and put innovation before anything else. A pivotal aspect of these transformations that has emerged — the rise of interdisciplinary research, has created something of a paradox. We are now in an age where interdisciplinary research is key, but also an age of hyperspecialization. Tasks that were previously handled by one person are now broken down into more distinct specialized components done by several people. How does the shift to interdisciplinary research reshape the very foundation of how knowledge is generated and applied across various fields and what do the different stakeholders in academia need to do to balance the depth of specialized knowledge with the breadth of interdisciplinary understanding?

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The protest came after Japan started discharging the first batch of radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant on Thursday.

• North Korea said on Thursday Japan should immediately halt the release of wastewater from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant, state media reported, hours after Japan began releasing treated water into the Pacific Ocean.

• The ocean is like a “mother’s embrace”, says Kim Jung-ja, a South Korean who free-dives without oxygen, wearing a black wet suit, mask and fins to pick by hand abalone, sea cucumber and other marine life that she takes to market.

• Japan’s plan has triggered some backlash in the region.

• South Korean police on Thursday arrested a large number of protesters demonstrating outside the Japanese embassy against the Japanese government’s dumping of treated radioactive water into the ocean. Japan has faced harsh criticism from many neighboring countries over this decision despite the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) support.

• More Korean seafood will be served at South Korean companies.

• The protest came the day Japan began releasing treated radioactive water from the wrecked power plant into the Pacific Ocean, a polarising move that prompted fresh, fierce criticism from around the region.

• The group reached the eighth floor of the embassy and hung banners condemning the release.

• The presidential office cafeteria also had raw fish on the lunch menu for its staff.

• Rising air pollution can cut life expectancy by more than five years per person in South Asia, one of the world’s most polluted regions, according to a report published on August 29 which flagged the growing burden of hazardous air on health. [...]

• More than 70,000 people died in 2021 alone as a result of fentanyl use in the USA. It is highly addictive.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• This is another example of the “modern” Web, the scourge of intelligence and good experience. Thus, there be a question. What am I going to do? The choice is not easy. Whatever Chromium-based browser I pick for my secondary option, there will be a compromise. Google will not annoy or prompt you, they will simply introduce features into Chrome without even asking. But at least you will have a quieter workflow. I am not keen on some of the other options, because I find them too busy for my taste, and it seems that Edge is heading that way.

• I could use Chromium, as is, and perhaps that will be my next option. But it seems I ought to stop using Edge altogether, and uninstall it from my Linux machines, the same way I do on my Windows boxen. But I’m sure I will find something new and fresh to annoy me soon, because that’s what the Web is all about since around 2013 or so. Well, I should be grateful to have been there at the beginning, when the net was still somewhat chaotic and pristine, and it wasn’t the lowest common denominator of corporate greed. Bye bye.

• Driverless taxis have arrived on the streets of San Francisco. The self-driving car companies Cruise and Waymo got the green light to expand their robotaxi fleets in the city earlier this month. The cars’ arrival was met with creative protests, curiosity, and long waitlists to take a ride. I spoke with Caroline Mimbs Nyce, an Atlantic writer covering technology, about her trip to San Francisco to give the robotaxis a try.

• What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. LLMs are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you. Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains.

• SSH was designed to provide secure remote access to machines, not for service-to-service communication. The protocol was designed to ensure that the connection is secured, that both parties are verified and the user is authenticated before any data is exchanged. This helps achieve two of the fundamental pillars of security: confidentiality and integrity. However, these security guarantees come at the expense of initial connection latency. Each SSH connection is required to complete the SSH handshake before the connection is available.

• So, what exactly has OpenAI done differently? Expanding on Altman’s comments and adding a few others.

• Approximately a quarter of a million passengers were ensnared in the chaos that unfolded during the bank holiday, when a technical malfunction at National Air Traffic Services (Nats), the organisation responsible for overseeing UK air traffic control systems, severely curtailed both take-offs and landings for a duration of around four hours.

• The disruption manifested as almost 1,600 flights across various UK airports were cancelled on Monday.

Linux Foundation

• The funeral of Ueda San of Sony took place yesterday. Many of us have known him for many years. Some of us have known him for a little while. Others, perhaps, have only recently heard of him.

• One important thing to know about Ueda San is that he built the open source community in Japan alongside others such as Hashimoto San, Eto San, Shibata San and the rest of the “old guard.”

• Building the open source community in Japan was not easy. Previously, companies operated in silos, and it was a radical idea to throw open the doors and allow engineers to mix and mingle. There was risk, there was fear, and there was the stubborn tide of habit.

• It takes an iron will to change an entire industry. Ueda San was extremely kind and gentle, but he would not yield on the importance of open collaboration. He knew the value it gave to people, to business and to society. Ueda San really believed in community and collaboration. He was tireless in promoting it, and he insisted that more and more people should be educated in its value.

• [Satoru Ueda] The OpenChain site carries the sad news of the passing of Satoru Ueda. Your editor first met Ueda San at the 2007 Linux Foundation Japan Symposium, where a small group of dedicated developers and managers was working hard to bring open-source development practices to the country. Ueda San was always a strong advocate for this cause and deserves much credit for the success of Linux and open source in Japan. He was also always a warm and welcoming person; he will be much missed.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (flask-security and opendmarc), Fedora (qemu), Oracle (rust and rust-toolset:ol8), Red Hat (cups and libxml2), Scientific Linux (cups), SUSE (ca-certificates-mozilla, chromium, clamav, freetype2, haproxy, nodejs12, procps, and vim), and Ubuntu (faad2, json-c, libqb, linux, linux-aws, linux-lts-xenial, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.15, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, and linux-gke, linux-ibm-5.4).

• Last week, the Specialised Commercial Crime Court of East London, Eastern Cape, handed down a prison sentence of three years to a hacker who stole just under R600 000 from the province’s education department.

• The crime took place in 2013, when Bruce Owen, in his thirties at the time, broke into the inner workings of the Eastern Cape Department of Education’s Basic Accounting System and used it to make payments into his own bank accounts.

• Yesterday, DataBreaches received a phone call from an employee at St. Vincent Hospital in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The employee was asking if we knew anything about a cyberattack on Hospital Sisters Health System (HSHS) and stated that everything had been down for two days but the employees were not really being given information other than some assurance by the hospital that no personal information had been compromised.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• This attack is not even a one-off “hit-and-run”, as the “bad” route is still stored in the peer router; when the session restarts the victim router will reset again the moment the route with the crafted payload is transmitted again. This has the potential to cause prolonged internet or peering outages.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The proposed EU ‘Regulation laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse‘ (2022) (CSA Regulation, or CSAR) has raised concerns that it is incompatible with EU fundamental rights and case law – perhaps more so than any other EU law in recent memory.

• Whilst all stakeholders agree on the importance of the aim to protect children, all formal legal and technical assessments have concluded that the proposed measures could amount to disproportionate violations of everyone’s privacy, personal data and free expression online, and rely on technically infeasible or dangerous measures.

• Read on to see how a wide range of stakeholders, including child protection experts, survivors of CSA, police, national governments, UN officials, companies, NGOs and others have warned that the proposed measures are misguided and could do more harm than good.

• In this document pool we list articles, documents, updates and news about the proposed EU ‘Regulation laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse‘ (2022/0155(COD)) (2022), which we refer to as the ‘CSA Regulation’ or ‘CSAR’. We approach this legislative proposal from a digital human rights perspective, including by analysing issues of mass surveillance, upload filters & online anonymity.

• Try as Johnson might (and he definitely tries) to draw a distinction between his original central London Ulez plan and Khan’s outer-city expansion, it is unclear how making a poor Londoner “pay £12.50 just to drive their car a few hundred yards in one direction rather than another” for the sake of cleaner air for all was fine when he suggested it in 2015, but morally reprehensible in 2023. The concept hasn’t changed, just the boundaries.

Confidentiality

• According to The Sun, which first reported on the breach, all 47,000 staff members and police officers – including senior officials, undercover and counter-terrorism cops, and officers assigned to guard the royal family – were exposed.

• I attended a presentation at the Crypto and Privacy Village, where Matthew McPherrin presents on the various mechanisms Certificate Authorities expose to clients to clarify whether a certificate is revoked or not, and the privacy implications of those mechanisms. Matthew elaborated on Certificate Revocation Lists, Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP), OCSP stapling, and a superior alternative: short lived certificates. The privacy implications center around feeding the Certificate Authority unnecessary data on client behaviors as they verify whether a certificate is revoked or not.

• 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.

• While being able to monitor maliciously-issued certificates is a good thing, publicly logging all certificates unfortunately exposes more data than one might like. Since each certificate is pushed again to the log upon every renewal, an adversary can gauge whether a website is being actively maintained, and hence whether it has been kept up-to-date with the latest security patches.

• This inspires the question — can CT logs be used for target reconnaissance?

Defence/Aggression

• A team of hackers enables Kim Jong Un’s strategic ambitions, despite international sanctions.

• North Korea appears to have made progress in its space program, despite a second rocket failure on Thursday, but its unusually quick launch pace may be causing problems, analysts said.

• South Korea Foreign Minister Park Jin and his U.S. and Japan counterparts on Thursday “strongly condemned” a North Korean rocket launch which they said was a ballistic missile disguised as a space rocket, South Korea’s foreign ministry said on Thursday.

• The ​rocket failure was an embarrassment for the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, who badly needed a morale booster for his people.

• Police seem unable to stem increase, and residents say underlying causes are not addressed.

• The Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise was scheduled to continue until August 31.

• North Korea said its second attempt to put a spy satellite into orbit failed on Thursday, three months after the first one crashed into the ocean.

• This comes amid the increasing violent crimes targeting random people in the country.

• The administration has been stymied by how to deal with TikTok even as intelligence officials have warned that it poses a national security threat. The app has been barred on government devices federally and in more than two dozen states, its CEO was grilled before Congress in March and lawmakers have proposed legislation that would make it easier for the White House to ban tech companies owned by “foreign adversaries” such as China.

• Mr. Attal said attacks on the principle of laïcité — France’s version of secularism, which guarantees freedom of conscience but also the neutrality of the state and of some public spaces — had “increased considerably” in French schools.

• “When you enter a classroom, you should not be able to distinguish or identify the students’ religion by looking at them,” Mr. Attal told the TF1 television channel on Sunday.

• It was only later that the FBI learned of a smuggling network helping Uzbeks into the US — which involved at least one individual with ties to ISIS.

• The incident kicked off a flurry of urgent meetings among top national security and administration officials at a time when Republicans have hammered Biden on the security of the southern border heading into the 2024 campaign. Staff on key congressional committees have been informed of the incident, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

• Many legal analysts are skeptical this approach will work in a courtroom. There is no First Amendment right to engage in a conspiracy to break the law, and Mr. Trump has been charged with urging others to take illegal actions.

• Consider the scenario in which Section 3 is invoked against Trump in 2024. Although he has won the Republican nomination, Democratic secretaries of state in key states refuse to place his name on their ballots, as a person who engaged in insurrection against the United States. With Trump’s name deleted from some swing-state ballots, President Joe Biden is easily reelected.

• But only kind of reelected. How in the world are Republicans likely to react to such an outcome? Will any of them regard such a victory as legitimate? The rage and chaos that would follow are beyond imagining.

• “Schools of the Republic are built on very strong values and principles, especially laïcité… I have decided that the abaya could no longer be worn in schools,” he declared.

• The Education Minister ignored those who contested the ban, as he continued to express his beliefs, saying: “Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school.”

• He further describes the abaya as “a religious gesture, aimed at testing the resistance of the republic toward the secular sanctuary that school must be”.

• The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations, many new to Washington, and represents a changed approach from conservatives, who traditionally have sought to limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending.

• Instead, Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• While those five co-conspirators were not charged in the Justice Department’s indictment, they were among the 19 charged in Georgia. The Georgia indictment also mentions 30 unindicted, unnamed co-conspirators. Outlets such as CNN and the Washington Post have closely reviewed clues in the indictment to determine some of their identities.

• Several of Trump’s allies who were active in his schemes to overturn the election — including those named as well as those speculated to have been mentioned — didn’t cease their efforts to undermine democracy after the fake-electors plot failed or even after President Joe Biden took office. American Oversight has been investigating the ongoing election denial movement and its threats to democracy, and has uncovered thousands of pages of public records that shed light on the movement’s activities after the 2020 election. Below, we take a look at a number of those allies and the records we have obtained that provide details about their work, from the immediate post-election hunt for evidence of widespread fraud to partisan election investigations, alleged voting machine breaches, and ongoing efforts to erode trust in democracy.

Environment

• Even if the world caps global heating at the Paris climate treaty target of 1.5 degrees Celsius — a very big if — a third of the continent’s 2,234 resorts would still be highly vulnerable to snow scarcity, they reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.

• With the rise in global temperatures already flirting with the target limit of 1.5 degrees under the 2015 Paris climate accord, and a higher climb seemingly inevitable, the researchers analyzed the impact on more than 2,200 ski resorts across 28 European countries.

• The research evaluated changes in snow cover across a range of increases in temperature: 53% of ski resorts in Europe would face “very high risk of insufficient snow” at a rise of 2 degree Celsius. Nearly all — 98% — would face that level of risk if the 4-degree bar is surpassed.

• The study looked at how resorts across Europe — from the British Isles to Turkey, and from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean basin — would be affected by different levels of global heating: 1.5C, 2C, 3C and 4C.

• Earth’s surface has, on average, already warmed 1.2C, amplifying extreme weather across the globe.

• From the Rocky Mountains to the Alps, ski resorts — especially those at or below 1,500 metres (5,000 feet) — already experience foreshortening skiing seasons and declining ski conditions, with snow sometimes replaced by rain.

• Global temperatures sit at 1.2C above pre-industrial levels and an analysis from Carbon Brief shows the world will reach 2C of warming between 2038 and 2072 if emissions remain close to current levels.

• The study’s lead author, Samuel Morin from France’s National Centre for Meteorological Research, said the modelling accounted for geography, elevation and regional differences.

• On this page we’ll delve into the exciting subject of atmospheric absorption, spectra and the units used. We’ll also look at the code and databases behind the many graphs on the other page.

• The fires are typical of the increasingly extreme weather events being driven by climate change. But climate is only part of the story — the long history of business-driven destruction of Maui’s historic wetlands and public utilities’ refusal to invest in safe energy infrastructure is also to blame. The Lever’s news editor, Lucy Dean Stockton, spoke with Kaniela Ing, a former Hawaii state representative and now national director of the Green New Deal Network, about how capitalists have destroyed Hawaii’s natural environment from the early twentieth century on, helping fuel the disastrous wildfires we’re seeing now.

• By a vote of six-to-four, Ecuador voted “Yes” and became the first oil producing country to keep a large field untapped by popular vote. The state oil company now has one year to decommission and remove all infrastructure in the famous bioreserve. The 50,000-odd daily barrels currently pumped out of Yasuní may be a drop in the global oil bucket — Saudi Arabia produces 12 million barrels a day — but staunching the flow is not purely symbolic. Production at Yasuní represents more than 10% of tiny Ecuador’s total oil production; ending it will impact the country’s foreign reserves and degrade the country’s once-stellar reputation within the rapacious global oil industry. In choosing this, Ecuadoreans have declared other things supreme. Deconstructing the derricks protects a 50,000-acre ecosystem in the western Amazon watershed that is known as “the most biodiverse place on Earth.” At the equatorial borderland of the Andean foothills and the Amazon basin, Yasuní contains 10% of the rapidly declining number of species on Earth. It is also home to two of the largest remaining “uncontacted” tribes living in voluntary isolation. Locking its oil beneath the soil will stop an estimated 345 million tons of CO2 from releasing into an already carbon-clogged atmosphere.

Energy/Transportation

• Here’s what I would’ve wanted:

• Energy is rationed. Everyone gets the same amount. You can’t sell it (it’s cap without trade) but you can work together in collectives and coops to pool your allotment. The rations are separate for fossil-derived energy and renewable energy, with an awareness that renewable doesn’t mean infinite since there’s a bandwidth issue. The fossil rations rapidly decrease.

Overpopulation

• This will be for 300 women between 20 and 49 years old, and have resided in Seoul for over six months.

• The National Infrastructure Advisory Council, a group of 30 executives and leaders from the public and private sector that advises the president on infrastructure risks, approved the draft document that aimed at helping the largely publicly owned water sector.

• A rather unsettling premise of the piece is that the human eco-predicament is, in many respects, wholly ‘natural’, the product of human evolutionary success gone awry. Innate expansionist behaviours that were advantageous in Paleolithic (pre-agricultural) environments have become maladaptive in today’s globalized industrialized environment. Why is this significant? Because society seems unwilling to recognize that H. sapiens is a still-evolving species subject to the same natural laws and forces affecting the evolution of all living organisms. It is entirely conceivable for modern civilization to be ‘selected out’ by an increasingly hostile environment of our own making. Policies and programs that attempt to ‘fix’ overshoot without attempting to override humanity’s now destructive expansionist tendencies are doomed to fail.

Finance

• Moves to boost sagging economy unlikely to fuel genuine recovery, analysts say.

• Some businesses’ requests for tips have led to complaints from people unfamiliar with the practice.

• The number of young people not attending school or college with employment experience is 3.94 million.

• Stolen gold and other metals are sold to donju, entrepreneurs engaged in smuggling.

• Iranian assets that had been frozen in South Korea were transferred to Switzerland’s central bank last week for exchange and transfer to Iran, South Korean media reported on August 21.

• Several thousand Laotians already do seasonal agricultural work in the country.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• During his time in South Africa, Xi will also co-chair the China-Africa Leaders’ Dialogue with the South African President.

• “China has been Germany’s largest trading partner for seven years,” said the manager of the German-Chinese Business Association.

• The Chinese man was wearing a helmet and life vest, and was travelling on a 1800-cc jet ski.

• A case involving a Hong Kong protester jailed in mainland China has been scheduled to be mentioned in the city’s District Court on Wednesday, three years after he was caught while allegedly attempting to flee to Taiwan.

• A summit between the U.S., Japan, and South Korea sought to institutionalize the trilateral relationship. But it’s battling several sources of distrust: in Asia of U.S. staying power, in China of the three allies, and in South Korea of Japan.

• China said firm had carried out “foreign-related statistical investigations” without approvals.

• More than 40 country representatives to attend BRICS in the shadow of Japan-Korea show of unity with U.S.

• The New York Times reports that a mysterious company called Flannery Associates has spent over $800 million hoovering up massive amounts of farm land in the Solano County region. The company has been procuring Bay Area land parcels for close to five years and has now amassed some 52,000 acres (or 22,000 hectares). The land grabs, which stretch from Fairfield to Rio Vista, have understandably worried locals and government officials, who—for years—were kept in the dark about who exactly was buying up this land or what the buyers planned to do with it.

• Solano County’s rural roots are still front and center in an area where a company backed by tech industry billionaires has been buying up land to create what they imagine to be a city of the future. That company, Flannery Associates, has committed roughly $900 million to secure thousands of acres of farmland, court documents show.

• Meta has rejected its own Oversight Board’s recommendation to immediately suspend the Facebook and Instagram accounts of Cambodia’s former Prime Minister Hun Sen, an authoritarian dictator who refers to political dissidents as dogs and has been accused of using Meta’s platforms to incite violence. The decision marks a stark divergence from the Oversight Board, which was created in 2018 as a Meta-funded, independent check on the company’s most sensitive politically fraught content moderation decision. Recommendations aside, the Cambodia case proves that the buck for political content on Facebook and Instagram ultimately still stops with Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The posts were part of a Chinese influence campaign that stands out as the largest such operation to date, researchers at Meta said in a report on Tuesday. The effort, which the company said had started with Chinese law enforcement and was discovered in 2019, was aimed at advancing China’s interests and discrediting its adversaries, such as the United States, Meta said.

• The company said that not only Facebook and Instagram had been infiltrated, but so was Twitter –now X – Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, Medium, Substack and Tumblr. In total, the campaign covered at least 50 different apps.

• The articles and information appeared mostly in English but were also translated into Greek, German, Russian, Italian, Turkish and many more languages. The campaign could be linked to an older campaign Meta named Spamouflage, as well as to Chinese law enforcement.

• Despite these efforts, X continues to face criticism similar to other social media platforms for its handling of misleading or false content during significant elections. This has sparked discussions about the company’s readiness for the US presidential election.

• One notable concern arises from X’s prior workforce reduction, which included employees who had worked on trust and safety. The company’s ability to ensure a secure and accurate platform for the upcoming election has raised questions among critics.

• Musk slashed staffing after buying Twitter, raising concerns about its ability to moderate content and reliably function.

• After cutting the majority of employees whose responsibility it was to remove and moderate false or misleading information, Gita Johar, a Columbia University business professor who studied misinformation on Twitter, told NBC News that Twitter’s decision risks turning the site into a “free-for-all with rumors, conspiracy theories and falsehoods taking hold on the platform and in people’s imagination.”

• My concern is not that there aren’t actually lots of people who do sympathize with Putin and — in perfect agreement with the Times’ with-us-or-against-us attitude — believe they must take his side against that of the United States. My concern is that basic facts about the war should not be banned by yelling “Putin!” and that a preference for peace, compromise, and avoidance of nuclear apocalypse should not be twisted into supposed support for whichever side of a war a newspaper opposes.

• Toyota apologized for the problem and said it was investigating the cause, though it ruled out a cyberattack.

• Toyota will resume operations at 25 production lines of a dozen plants in its home market from Wednesday morning and add the final two plants from the afternoon, it said.

• The company continues to investigate the cause of the glitch [sic], which it said was not due to a cyberattack and prevented it from ordering components.

Censorship/Free Speech

• In the past year, Mary Wood has gone through an ordeal that’s increasingly familiar to teachers, librarians, and school administrators across the country: She is being targeted by activists who want to censor what books are in libraries and what discussions happen in classrooms.

• Mary is an English teacher at Chapin High School in Chapin, South Carolina. As originally reported in The State, she assigned Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” a nonfiction book about the Black experience in the United States, as part of a lesson plan on research and argumentation in her advanced placement class. District officials ordered her to stop teaching the book. They alleged that it violated a state budget proviso that forbids a broad range of subject matter involving race and history.

• The human rights experts revealed: “The law has no other objective than silencing critical expression in relation to the war in Ukraine. The legislation is a drastic step in a long string of measures over the years restricting freedom of expression and media freedom, and further shrinking civic space in the Russian Federation.”

• Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, the law that criminalised those speaking against the Russian Army was put in place in an attempt to unite the country.

• This turn of events raises a fundamental question: Can Thailand’s progressive movement genuinely place its trust in the idea of working through the existing political system? While developments in Thai politics will continue to unfold, it is now natural to suspect that conservative groups may have strategically shaped the election process in order to portray the results as a reflection of public desires. In reality, however, the outcome, which is now slipping from the grasp of the MFP, has ended up serving as an endorsement of the party’s preconceived agenda.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Kansas authorities must destroy all electronic copies they made of a small newspaper’s files when police raided its office this month, a judge ordered Tuesday, nearly two weeks after computers and cellphones seized in the search were returned.

• The Aug. 11 searches of the Marion County Record’s office and the homes of its publisher and a City Council member have been sharply criticized, putting Marion, a central Kansas town of about 1,900 people, at the center of a debate over the press protections offered by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Democrats say there is now scant difference between Hong Kong’s judicial system and that of mainland China

• Relatives feared he had died, but a rubber plantation co-worker and the Lao embassy put them back in touch.

• A bronze plaque affixed to the stone in 1929 at Robinson Park paid tribute to immigrants of the 1850s who professed a dedication to freedom while venturing “into a wilderness, suffered hardships and faced dangers and death to found this state in righteousness.” The monument celebrating the city’s founders, including abolitionists, but neglected to acknowledge eradication and removal of the Kaw Nation from land upon which the Sacred Red Rock was located nor did the text recognize spiritual harm done when the stone was uprooted from confluence of the Shunganunga Creek and Kansas River near Tecumseh.

• On Tuesday, Pepper Henry marked unconditional return of the 24-ton boulder to the Kaw Nation and preparations to transport Iⁿ‘zhúje‘waxóbe to a memorial park in Council Grove. The prayer stone, which could be equated to a church structure, was recently removed from its base in a Lawrence park ahead of the journey. The stone was scheduled to be moved Wednesday to land owned by the tribe since 2002.

• “Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams has recently and unexpectedly learned that we are unable to continue business operations,” read a sign taped on the factory gate in Taylorsville, North Carolina, as Taylorsville Times reported on Saturday (Aug. 26). Workers were asked not to report to work from Monday (Aug. 28) onwards.

• Earlier this year, Democrats in Michigan’s state legislature broke with Democratic Party norms by actually using their elected offices to push through a suite of significant pro-worker legislation. This included rolling back the right-to-work law that Michigan passed in 2012, making Michigan the first state in more than fifty years to do so.

• Joey Andrews, elected to the state house in 2022 to represent District 38 in southwestern Michigan, championed the repeal of right to work and other pro-union policies, like restoring teachers’ bargaining rights. Jacobin’s Nick French spoke with Andrews about Michigan Democrats’ recent legislative record, the relationship between labor and the Democratic Party, and the current moment in working-class politics more broadly.

Monopolies

• It will harass you even for searching for one. It will harass you while you are on another browser maker’s Web site trying to download one.

• Then after you install it and go to 27 different places making it the default, it will sometimes ignore it, and try to steal the defaults back, forcing you to start over.

• But then if you manage to set the default browser, you will start getting notifications, on your desktop, from Microsoft, that you’ve made “a bad choice” and “you need to reconsider” (essentially).

• This is the kind of thing the US v. Microsoft trial was about, they’ve even gotten in trouble in Europe, but they won’t stop.

Copyrights

• In Russia, where various factions are in disagreement over the best way to permit piracy of Hollywood movies, new wildcards have entered the equation. The government-backed Cinema Fund says piracy carries “reputational risks” and that would be “inappropriate” right now. A furious cinema chief has accused the fund and government of protecting Western copyright holders. He says that Russia needs pirated copies of Barbie in cinemas, sooner rather than later.

• Several authors including comedian Sarah Silverman are suing OpenAI for using pirated copies of their books to train language models. This unauthorized use gives rise to several copyright infringement claims and also violates the DMCA, they argue. OpenAI disagrees and this week asked the California federal court to dismiss all claims but one.

• Expense and restricted access to live matches drive some Premier League fans towards piracy. Optimists believe this can be fixed; get rid of the 3pm blackout and be realistic on what regular fans can afford. By announcing its plan to crack down even harder on piracy, via a paywalled article published in the Financial Times, the Premier League’s messaging could hardly be more symbolic.

• Music licenser BMI sent a letter to a Ramaswamy campaign lawyer that says Eminem’s works are no longer part of a music licensing agreement following a request from Eminem, according to the Daily Mail.

• Today’s TidyTuesday concerns US copyright law. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted materials in some instances. Fair use law isn’t always clear, and there is often litigation to decide whether something is fair use. This week’s TidyTuesday uses a data set created by web scraping to get information about federal court cases on fair use. This week’s data comes with the following warning: [...]

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