● 09.06.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 06/09/2023: University of Michigan Admits It Got Cracked (Microsoft TCO)

Posted in Site News at 1:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• That’s what WordPress.com is asking for web hosting, domain ownership, and support for a hundred years. They are essentially saying they’ll be helping your anointed heir with the /wp-admin/ password after you die.

• Wolf’s politics were always more Sheryl Sandberg than bell hooks (or Emma Goldman). While Klein talked about capitalism and class and solidarity, Wolf wanted to “empower” individual women to thrive in a market system that would always produce millions of losers for every winner. Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal.

Science

• You’ve got to hand it to [Les Wright]; he really knows how to dig into optical arcana and present topics in an interesting way. Case in point: an electro-optical control cell that’s powered by ouzo.

Education

• As Retraction Watch reports, Natural History Museum of Denmark myriapodologist Henrik Enghoff suspected the authors of the paper from China and Africa used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to dig up academic references — and as it turns out, his hunch was right.

• The offending paper was initially taken down by Preprints.org, a preprint archive run by the academic publisher MDPI, in June after Enghoff’s colleague, the University of Copenhagen’s David Richard Nash, notified editors of the errors.

• Now, the paper has seemingly resurfaced online, hallucinated references and all, on a different preprint platform called Research Square.

• The Berlin R User Group fosters a diverse and vibrant R community in Berlin. Rafael Camargo shared some insights from his experience regarding the potential of R and some anecdotes for organizers of RUGs. The Berlin RUG is currently looking for sponsors to host their physical events, and companies interested in hosting the group can contact Rafael.

• The event welcomed 200 participants to discuss the theme: Enhancing National and Regional Economies through Sustainable and Equitable Technology. View the agenda for more information on the topics discussed.

• A decade later, Americans’ feelings about higher education have turned sharply negative. The percentage of young adults who said that a college degree is very important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Only about a third of Americans now say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. Among young Americans in Generation Z, 45 percent say that a high school diploma is all you need today to “ensure financial security.” And in contrast to the college-focused parents of a decade ago, now almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

• As a member of the school board in the remote Central Idaho town of Salmon, Josh Tolman worried that an earthquake would turn the elementary and middle schools to rubble. The foundations of the schools were crumbling. The floors buckled. The district canceled school whenever a few inches of snow fell for fear the roofs would cave in.

• But Tolman and the school district were in a bind: They couldn’t convince enough voters to support a tax increase that would allow the district to build a new facility. The school board ran six bond elections in seven years. But even though 53% of the community supported the bond in one of their first attempts in 2006, it wasn’t enough. Idaho is one of two states that require two-thirds of voters to support a bond for it to pass.

Hardware

• Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. has teamed up with China’s leading chipmaking firm, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., to build an advanced, seven-nanometer processor that sits at the heart of its latest flagship smartphone.

• U.S. denies China advanced supercomputer chip exports amid military concerns.

• In 2017 the Wisconsin GOP, with Donald Trump and Paul Ryan at the head of the parade, struck what they claimed was an incredible deal with Foxconn to bring thousands of high paying jobs to the state. The project, which Trump dubbed the “the eighth wonder of the world,” provided the former president with several years’ worth of endless free marketing for his “job creation” skills.

• There’s a lot to like about resin 3D printing. The detail, the smooth surface finish, the mechanical simplicity of the printer itself compared to an FDM printer. But there are downsides, too, not least of which is the toxic waste that resin printing generates. What’s one to do with all that resin-tainted alcohol left over from curing prints?

• Perhaps it’s a side-effect of getting older, but it seems like reading the color bands on blue metal-film resistors is harder than it was on the old brown carbon ones. So often the multimeter has to come out to check, but it’s annoying. Thus we rather like [Mike]’s Resistorganizer, which automates the process of keeping track of the components.

• There’s more than one way to scare people on Halloween. Sure, there’s always the low-brow jump scare, but that will generally just annoy the person and possibly cause a heart attack. No, what you need is a sustained soundscape of hellish audio. And where does one find hellish audio? Well, you make your own with a spooky-sounds noise box.

• SenseCAP T1000 is a credit-size GPS tracker using LoRaWAN low-power long-range connectivity. Smart Agriculture is one specific application that can leverage IoT and LoRaWAN to analyze and manage soil, crops, and water, but also to track the location of livestock. This is an important aspect of farming, and we’ll use the SenseCAP T1000 LoRaWAN GPS tracker to track cattle in this article/review. SenseCAP T1000 unboxing The package contains the  SenseCAP T1000 GPS Tracker device, which is about the size of a credit card, and a charging cable.

• I’ve been messing with some shadow memory settings on my working Am386 machine again, but in the process it exposed another memory issue. I think. Get it, because it’s about memory, and I’m feigning memory loss about a… shaddup.

• View all posts about my Am386 machine

• Uncovering another flaky SIMM was a relief in a way, because it exposed some instability and errant behavior I’d been experiencing of late. Drivers and TSRs would fail to load for no reason, and Windows 3.1 bluescreened with even more regularity than I remembered.

• I used MemTest86 to track down the failed module, and tried my best to save it with more isopropyl alcohol and contact cleaner, but I think it was a gone. I’ve put it in my small drawer of dubious computer parts for a future time when I might have more skills to fix things. It joins the other module I removed in July:

• Time for a listicle!

• AMD set to use TSMC’s Arizona fab despite delays as it needs geographic diversity.

• Recently I upgraded my AMD-based PC on a livestream, and I installed an Innodisk EGPL-T101 10 Gbps M.2 NIC (link to Innodisk product page).

• Under Linux, I could get through 9.4 Gbps using iperf3 between the PC and my Mac Studio. But under Windows, I could only get up to about 4.5 Gbps (tested around 1h 27m into the stream)!

• Intel Foundry Services (IFS) and Tower Semiconductor (Nasdaq: TSEM), a leading foundry for analog semiconductor solutions, today announced an agreement where Intel will provide foundry services and 300mm manufacturing capacity to help Tower serve its customers globally. Under the agreement, Tower will utilize Intel’s advanced manufacturing facility in New Mexico. Tower will invest up to $300 million to acquire and own equipment and other fixed assets to be installed in the New Mexico facility, providing a new capacity corridor of over 600,000 photo layers per month for Tower’s future growth, enabling capacity to support forecasted customer demand for 300mm advanced analog processing.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Tokyo also urged Beijing to immediately repeal the action.

• This past July, the term “cottage cheese” reached a 19-year high in Google search interest. While some people simply spread it on bread, others throw it into a blender with fruit and honey and call it ice cream. The versatility of cottage cheese was highlighted by TikTok’s recent obsession with this supermarket staple.

• A likely consequence: Sick students will avoid going to the university hospital.

• The rate of forced intercourse in early adulthood rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a potential increase in unintended pregnancies and other sexual, reproductive and mental health problems.

• A few days ago former White House chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci admitted the evidence supporting mask mandates was weak. Why would he do this as they appear to be gearing up Pandemic 2.0? Is it a sign Fauci is going to be made a scapegoat? Or is something else going on?

• Running is not just about training, or following the advice of those who have done long races, or not run at all. You can’t do a long distance without working your way up to it. You need to be comfortable and safe, and have the time to get out. It’s ok to somewhat plan your route and not go the entire distance. You may need to remember things to bring and have a backup plan. Know why you are doing this, and when you should see a licensed expert.

• Viridiana Pacheco, a young, speech therapist set up the foundation Voces de Guiraa’ with the support of two expats back in 2017 in Oaxaca.

• I know that we’ve already pointed to a whole bunch of studies, using a variety of different methods that all show no evidence of any link at all between social media and teen depression, but it’s time to highlight another one.

• Although the HHS-recommended change would benefit researchers and the cannabis industry, it would not resolve the conflict between state and federal marijuana laws.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• For young athletes, there are few moments as exciting as when they first see their name in the newspaper — preferably for a goal scored, or a save made, and extra points if a local reporter asks for a quote.

• That dynamic is now on the line at Gannett, the publisher of USA Today and many other regional newspapers, where it was forced to pause the publication of abysmally low quality AI-generated articles about high school sports.

• We were curious: how would a sports writer at a Gannett publication feel about the AI articles? So we asked one, though we’re keeping them anonymous and not sharing which newsroom they work at to protect their job.

• Queen’s Brian May becomes the latest musician to voice concerns over generative AI and the future of the music industry: “We might look back on 2023 as the last year when humans really dominated the music scene.”

• In a recent interview with Guitar Player, Queen’s Brian May admitted his apprehension about potential authorship issues as society strides forth into the era of generative AI. The seasoned musician is also a scientist with a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Imperial College London — so he acknowledges that AI will bring great benefit, especially its capacity for problem-solving. But May believes we will soon see more implications generative AI creates for the music industry.

• It’s generally accepted that security flaws in Microsoft’s products are a top magnet for crooks and fraudsters: its sprawling empire of hardware and software is a target-rich ecosystem in that there is a wide range of bugs to exploit, and a huge number of vulnerable organizations and users.

• And so we can believe it when Qualys yesterday said 15 of the 20 most-exploited software vulnerabilities it has observed are in Microsoft’s code.

• In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people throughout the tech industry has led some security experts to conclude that crooks likely have succeeded at cracking open some of the stolen LastPass vaults.

• In September last year, a breach at LastPass’ parent company GoTo (formerly LogMeIn) culminated in attackers siphoning out all data from their servers. The criticism from the security community has been massive. This was not so much because of the breach itself, such things happen, but because of the many obvious ways in which LastPass made matters worse: taking months to notify users, failing to provide useful mitigation instructions, downplaying the severity of the attack, ignoring technical issues which have been publicized years ago and made the attackers’ job much easier. The list goes on.

• Now this has been almost a year ago. LastPass promised to improve, both as far as their communication goes and on the technical side of things. So let’s take a look at whether they managed to deliver.

• TL;DR: They didn’t. So far I failed to find evidence of any improvements whatsoever.

• Norfolk Southern believes a software defect — not a hacker — was the cause of the widespread computer outage that forced the railroad to park all of its trains for most of a day earlier this week.

• A comic artist took a journalistic dive into the knotty debates around generative AI—and found artists worried about the people even more than the tech.

• In December, the ADL said it noticed an increase in antisemitic content on the social network, as well as the “return of extremists of all kinds to the platform [that] has the potential to supercharge the spread of extremist content.” The ADL further noted the return of what it said were “extremists and conspiracy theorists” emboldened by Twitter’s content amnesty policies, and further alleged that X wasn’t enforcing its own rules against antisemetic content.

• Plus: The doubling of the deficit, young Americans souring on college, and more…

• Not this shit again.

• Users are warning each other about misleading ads on Twitter as Musk lashes out over declining revenue.

• A weekend meltdown full of conspiracies and threats is now a routine occurrence for the billionaire Twitter owner.

• U.S. policymakers are increasingly considering “must-carry” laws for the internet, which would require digital intermediaries…

• Last week, Microsoft announced it would offer its Teams online conferencing and collaboration service as a stand-alone product in much of Europe starting on October 1. This was in response to the European Commission’s announcement that it was launching an investigation into whether or not Microsoft’s bundling of Teams with Microsoft 365 was an anti-competitive move.

• Now, the head of the company that offers a competing product to Teams believes that a similar investigation should happen in the US as well.

• Bloomberg reports that Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, during a presentation at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, was asked about Microsoft breaking off Teams from Microsoft 365 in Europe. Yuan stated, “You should ask this question to the FTC as well”.

Windows TCO

• The University of Michigan has mandated that passwords for all UMICH (Level-1) accounts be rest by the end of Sept. 12.

Security

• Linux is a popular operating system for servers and other devices. It is known for its stability, security, and flexibility. However, no operating system is immune to attack. One of the most common types of attacks against Linux servers is a brute-force attack. In this step-by-step guide, we’ll show you how to install and configure fail2ban on a Linux system and how to prevent SSH brute force attacks with Fail2ban.

• Interesting research:

• Malicious packages uploaded to PyPI, NPM, and Ruby repositories are targeting macOS users with information stealing malware.

• United Airlines flights were halted nationwide on Sept. 5, because of an “equipment outage,” according to the FAA.

• While Core Desktop has not yet made any public statement about the attacks, the ABC claimed to have seen a letter sent by the company to its clients saying it had become of the intrusion on 22 August.

• The three companies that were attacked are pathology services provider TissuPath, real estate agent Barry Plant and strata management firm Strata Plan.

• Freecycle.org is prompting millions of users to reset their passwords after their credentials were compromised in a data breach.

• Nine vulnerabilities patched in SEL electric power management products, adding to the 19 other flaws fixed earlier this year.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Facilities like hospitals, banks, data centers, airports, power and natural gas plants, and government institutions secure their properties with authorization hardware built to use the Open Supervised Device Protocol (OSDP). Unfortunately, there are both design weaknesses and poor practices which can be realistically exploited in the real world. OSDP advertises itself as an encrypted protocol, yet many installations use unencrypted modes. While it has defenses against trivial replay attacks, it has such a small counter inside that with enough samples one could replay communications on the wire. It also uses a truncated Message Authentication Code (MAC), which exposes OSDP systems to brute-force attacks. And lastly, OSDP is by design easy to misuse: installers can leave the controller perpetually in “install” mode which allows any device to ask for secret credentials for another device without any encryption on a shared communication line.

• Below the fold I update this sorry state of affairs, which I first started cataloging a decade ago.

• The technology used to secure Internet communication, for example via TLS, the basis for the HTTPS protocol, and for protecting the software supply chain, is based on public key encryption. For example, to start an HTTPS connection between Alice and Bob using Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange, they each use their private key and the other’s public key to compute aa shared secret key used to encrypt the communication.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The foundation, the Firefox browser maker’s netizen-rights org, assessed the privacy policies and practices of 25 automakers and found all failed its consumer privacy tests and thereby earned its Privacy Not Included (PNI) warning label.

• In research published Tuesday, the org warned that car manufacturers may collect and commercially exploit much more than location history, driving habits, in-car browser histories, and music preferences. Instead, some makers may handle deeply personal data, such as – depending on the privacy policy – sexual activity, immigration status, race, facial expressions, weight, health, and even genetic information, the Mozilla team found.

• “The Online Safety Bill could present websites like Wikipedia, Tik Tok and Twitter with the choice of blocking content to ensure their platforms are suitable for children or forcing users to verify their age. The first would lead to a huge restriction in the content we can all see, create and share. The second would pose a threat to our privacy and security.

• “Keeping children safe online is a worthy goal but we need to ensure that we do not restrict children’s right to information by banning them from large swathes of the [Internet], or expose them to intrusive age assurance.

• Trygg-Hansa’s security flaws have meant that information about 650,000 customers has been accessible to unauthorized persons via the internet. The Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (IMY) is now issuing an administrative fine of SEK 35 million against the company.

• 2013 is a good starting point for this story. That year, Montana passed a law requiring police to get a warrant before they could obtain location information generated by electronic devices. At the time, there were no state or federal laws that explicitly protected this data. And the police were already getting and using location data in thousands of criminal cases across the country every year.

• Montana’s straightforward law went into effect two and a half years before California’s landmark privacy law, CalECPA, codified similar protections for location data—and five years before the Supreme Court, in Carpenter v. United States, explicitly recognized the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant for access to cell site location information.

• Montana may have only a little more than a million residents, but since 2013, it has passed a significant number of other important privacy laws. These run the gamut from prohibiting government face surveillance and limiting face recognition, to providing Montana consumers with explicit privacy rights in their online data and preventing energy utilities from selling or sharing individual advanced meter energy data without consumer consent. In 2021, Montana expressly restricted familial searches of government-maintained DNA databases and became one of only two states to require a warrant to search consumer DNA databases like genetic genealogy sites. Also in 2021, Montana residents overwhelmingly supported (by 80%) a constitutional amendment that added electronic data and communications to the state constitution’s search and seizure protections.

• Learn more about all of the latest news by reading the full newsletter here, or you can listen to the audio version below!

• We’ve got a another cross-post episode for you this week, on a subject near and dear to our hearts: protocols over platforms, and restoring decentralization online. Mike recently joined Danny O’Brien on the DWeb Decoded podcast to talk all about these topics, as well as tell a little story about Danny’s role in the founding of Techdirt, and you can listen to the whole conversation here on this week’s episode.

• After years of irritating the DOJ with its refusal to compromise encryption, Apple suddenly went the other way after receiving criticism over its perceived inability to stop the distribution of CSAM (child sexual abuse material) via its devices and services.

• Never let it be said the NYPD doesn’t know how to have a good time. The question remains as to whether it’s possible for the NYPD to allow others to have a good time.

Defence/Aggression

• Vice President Kamala Harris has left Washington for Indonesia, where she’ll attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit. President Joe Biden decided to skip the event. The White House says Harris will demonstrate American commitment to Southeast Asia on her fourth trip to Asia since taking office. Harris’ plane left Washington on Monday morning. Southeast Asia has been a focal point of competition between the United States and China. The summit is not expected to resolve longstanding issues such as the military coup in Myanmar or territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

• Southeast Asian leaders met in Indonesia on Tuesday to seek a united voice on the years-long Myanmar crisis and tackle rifts over China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea.

• TikTok has been under scrutiny by European and American regulators over concerns that sensitive user data may end up in China. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020.

• Despite its flaws, the U.S. Constitution was a pioneering document. America became the first large nation to rule itself without a monarchy and instead fill its most important political offices via regular elections. Over the next century, the American Constitution served as a model for republican and democratic-minded reformers across the world.

• The United States no longer seems like a good model today. Since 2016, America has experienced what political scientists call “democratic backsliding.” The country has seen a surge in political violence; threats against election workers; efforts to make voting harder; and a campaign by the then-president to overturn the results of an election—hallmarks of a democracy in distress. Organizations that track the health of democracies around the world have captured this problem in numerical terms. Freedom House’s Global Freedom Index gives countries a score from 0 to 100 each year; 100 indicates the most democratic. In 2015, the United States received a score of 90, roughly in line with countries such as Canada, France, Germany, and Japan. But since then, America’s score has declined steadily, reaching 83 in 2021. Not only was that score lower than every established democracy in Western Europe; it was lower than new or historically troubled democracies such as Argentina, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Taiwan.

• Schneiter and Lundin are charged with “complicity in grave war crimes.” In November 2021, Swedish prosecutors indicted Lundin and Schneiter for Lundin Oil’s operations in Sudan from 1999 to 2003. Lundin Energy calls the charges “impossible and grossly inaccurate.” The defendants also vehemently deny any wrongdoing. Prosecutors allege that Lundin Oil was complicit in war crimes committed by the government of Sudan while the company operated oil fields in Sudan.

• Join Disco Slovenia for an electrifying event that brings together passionate activists, legal experts and engineers who understand the significance of owning the means of digital production. Only through empowered control and ownership over technology, data, and infrastructure can we truly attain independence and wield influence over the course of our digital future!

• Attal said the girls refused entry were given a letter addressed to their families saying that “secularism is not a constraint, it is a liberty”.

• If they showed up at school again wearing the dress there would be a “new dialogue”, the minister said.

• As federal law enforcement opens an investigation into the Jacksonville, Florida, shooting where a white gunman killed three Black people at a Dollar General as a possible hate crime and act of domestic violent extremism, we speak with civil rights leader Bishop William Barber about the increasing number of racist attacks in America fueled by racism. “There is this history of not just who kills, but what kills and what creates the atmosphere,” says Barber, who calls for a political movement of love to force out hateful politicians. Barber specifically condemns the Republican Party and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for attacking cultural issues as a distraction for policy failures. “The racist rhetoric and the culture wars and the hatred toward women, the hatred toward immigrants, the hatred toward the trans community is a form of deflection,” says Barber. “He’s decided that this is his way to office: distraction, division, deflection, focusing on culture wars so that he cannot be labeled as a failed governor.”

• A military judge at Guantánamo has thrown out the confessions of Saudi man Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri because he had been tortured and waterboarded at secret CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Romania and Morocco before being sent to Guantánamo. Psychologists James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, who were paid at least $81 million by the CIA to develop and then implement the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, had waterboarded al-Nashiri at a CIA black site. We get response from Roy Eidelson and discuss his new book, Doing Harm, which investigates the American Psychological Association’s complicity in post-9/11 torture programs and the struggle to reform the psychology field. “We felt there was a lot at stake,” says Eidelson. “It took over a decade for us to bring change in terms of APA’s policy toward interrogation and detention operations.” As the U.N. calls for al-Nashiri’s release, Eidelson warns that APA leadership and military personnel are once again pushing guidelines that expand psychologists’ role in torture. “They want to expand the opportunities that are available for psychologists to work in this arena where ‘do no harm’ is, at best, secondary, and sometimes off the table entirely,” says Eidelson. “It feels as though APA is slipping — slipping back into positions that led to awful things.”

• Executives of Lundin Oil (now Orrön Energy) Ian Lundin and Alex Schneiter’s criminal trial for alleged war crimes in Sudan began on Tuesday. Schneiter and Lundin are charged with “complicity in grave war crimes.” In November 2021, Swedish prosecutors indicted Lundin and Schneiter for Lundin Oil’s operations in Sudan from 1999 to 2003.

• President Tsai Ing-wen headed to Eswatini on Tuesday to cement ties with Taiwan’s only diplomatic ally in Africa, as China intensifies political pressure on the island. In a pre-departure speech, Tsai acknowledged support from Eswatini in the face of “many international challenges such as the expansion of authoritarianism” in recent years.

• Opposition politicians who are among dozens of members of the Kempir-Abad Defense Committee placed in pretrial detention last year following protests against Kyrgyzstan’s decision to cede water supplies to Uzbekistan have said they are facing pressure in custody that amounts to torture.

• The war crimes trial of three men accused of abusing non-Serb citizens in prison camps during the Bosnian War opened on September 5 in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

• Soldiers tortured them and used them as human shields.

• Sometimes called a hermit state, Eritrea is one of the most diplomatically isolated countries in the world. A history of repression, human rights abuses and conflict with neighboring countries has left it with few allies on the world stage.

• At the zenith of the mass protests in Egypt on January 25, 2011, Twitter, Facebook and other Western-based social media platforms appeared to be the most essential tools for the Egyptian Revolution.

• A Russian Court decided to detain mathematician Azat Miftakhov until November 3 on new charges of justifying terrorism

• Saudi Arabia and Russia on September 5 said they would extend voluntary oil cuts until the end of the year, continuing their campaign to bolster prices.

• A girl abducted and unlawfully taken to Russia’s Kaliningrad by her father has been returned to Lithuania, the National Crisis Management Centre (NKVC) has confirmed.

• François Ndzhelassili, a doctoral student from Gabon at the Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg, Russia, was killed on August 18 by a group of Russian men after they harassed him and called him racial slurs. The murder is just the latest case of discrimination and violence against Black people living in Russia despite ongoing initiatives meant to encourage Africans to study in the country.

• < The South African Presidency has published the long-awaited executive summary of the report looking into the arrival of the Lady R cargo vessel in Simon’s Town more than nine months ago, concluding no weapons were loaded for Russia. However, questions remain over what was delivered by the Russian vessel, and from which country.

• Defense is likely to receive funding equivalent to 3% of gross domestic product next year, Defense Minister Ināra Murniece (National Alliance) said in a press briefing on Tuesday, September 5. It is also planned to further increase the strength of the National Armed Forces (NBS) and to expand the presence of NATO troops in Latvia.

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

• Lost in a chaotic hall of mirrors of its own creation, the CIA has generally failed in its one and only legitimate task, to provide U.S. policymakers with accurate intelligence about the world beyond the Washington echo-chamber to inform U.S. decision-making.

• The removal of Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov in early September came following a series of minor but damaging corruption scandals and signaled a zero tolerance approach to graft in wartime Ukraine, writes Melinda Haring.

• War is a great destroyer of audacious plans, with dreams of quick victory often turning into nightmarish quagmires. Vladimir Putin learned this harsh lesson soon after launching his criminal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian autocrat and many of his political allies expected that the attack would be a romp. Their underlying premise was that Ukraine was not a real nation, just a Western-created house of cards waiting to be blown over by a strong show of force by the Russian army.

• Belarusian diplomatic missions will no longer issue passports to citizens permanently residing abroad, the independent online newspaper Zerkalo has reported, a blow to the Belarusian émigré communities.

• Belarusian authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka has ordered the country’s embassies to stop issuing passports to Belarusians living abroad.

• The Saeima Defense, Internal Affairs and Corruption Prevention Committee has decided to direct amendments to the Immigration Law, which will provide for the possibility for Russian citizens living in Latvia to apply for a temporary residence permit for a period of two years during which the official language exam has to be completed, for viewing in the parliament, Latvian Radio reported September 5.

• The Cuban government said it had begun criminal proceedings against a “trafficking network” that had been recruiting its citizens in both Russia and Cuba for Russia’s armed forces.

• The removal of Ukraine’s defense minister highlights the enduring challenge of corruption in Ukraine, which has emerged as a rare area of criticism of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s leadership.

• The vote in Slovakia this month will be a test of European unity on Ukraine, and of Russia’s efforts to undermine it. The front-runner wants to halt arms shipments to Kyiv.

• Kim Jong-un is likely to seek missile and warhead technology in an expected visit to Russia, and he is already getting a public embrace he has long sought.

• Ukrainian forces have made it past more Russian entrenchments in their campaign to reach the Sea of Azov, but minefields and more enemy troops lie ahead, analysts say.

• Ukrainian soldiers are trying to build on a new breach in enemy lines, but the battle will not be easy, military analysts said.

• Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency added the US multinational drinks company PepsiCo to a boycott list at the beginning of this month. Hartwall manufactures PepsiCo products in Finland.

• Previously, Russian diplomat Zakharova warned that Ukraine’s actions will not be left unpunished.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has returned to Kyiv after two days in eastern and southern Ukraine for meetings with commanders and Ukrainian troops to hear their requests, which he said would be passed on to top generals and other officials and addressed.

• Attacks using cluster munitions by both Russia and Ukraine since the start of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion last year have helped lead to a “dramatic” increase in the use of such weapons, highlighting the need for more countries to join a global ban.

• Ukraine’s parliament has approved the resignation of Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, paving the way for Rustem Umerov to take over the post amid Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country.

• Uzbekistan’s leading payment services Oson and Pay Way said they have suspended foreign money transfers as of September 5 amid warnings from the central bank over avoiding the violation of Western sanctions imposed against Russia for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

• A senior Ukrainian official on September 5 rebuffed a suggestion by Turkey that Kyiv should soften its stance to revive the Black Sea grain deal, saying Ukraine would not support sanctions relief for Moscow or a policy of “appeasement.”

• The SHOT Telegram channel reported on Sunday that a case was opened on Thursday by the Russian Investigative Committee into Masha Gessen, a journalist from New York, who has been providing insights into the atrocities taking place during Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.

• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to arrive in the Ukrainian capital for an unannounced visit.

• Romanian President Klaus Iohannis on September 5 said attacks are occurring close to Romania’s border with Ukraine but no drone or other device landed in Romania during a weekend attack by Russian forces on Ukrainian port infrastructure.

• Nothing could rattle the foundation of Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group more than the death of founder Yevgeny Prigozhin. Yet even that dramatic news is not expected to significantly impact the group’s operations in Africa.

• A new report sponsored by the European Commission has found that social media has played a key role in the spread of Russian-backed disinformation campaigns since their war with Ukraine began. /blockquote>

• Russia has increased its disinformation campaigns in Germany since its invasion of Ukraine, the German domestic intelligence agency said in Berlin on September 5.

• A rare video aired on Ukrainian television on Sunday allegedly showing a Russian pilot who had defected and encouraging other Russian soldiers to do the same. His dramatic escape allegedly took six months to plan, and was carried out in cooperation with Ukraine’s intelligence services. Whether the video is authentic remains unclear, but one thing is certain: Ukraine is doing everything it can to fuel Russian defections.

• Russian drone attacks early on Wednesday killed one person and damaged agricultural infrastructure in Izmail, a port district in the Odesa region, its governor Oleg Kiper said. Ukrainian air defence systems shot down Russian missiles that targeted Kyiv in another early morning attack.

• Western aid to Kyiv has played a key role in keeping Ukraine’s government up and running and in the fight against Russian forces.

• The issue of completely closing Lithuania’s border with Belarus is losing relevance as the Wagner mercenary group is leaving the neighbouring country, says President Gitanas Nausėda.

• September 06, 2023 12:50 PM

• Their absence has nothing to do with India, says Mr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.

• General Sergei Surovikin, who has not been seen publicly since the June mutiny by Wagner Group mercenaries, has reappeared in a new photograph online, adding further mystery to the fate of the Russian commander.

• The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has said the latest statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s Jewish roots are “another manifestation of deep-rooted anti-Semitism of the Russian elites.”

• President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the war-battered town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine and spoke to troops leading a counteroffensive against Russia, Ukraine said Tuesday. Earlier on Tuesday, the Kremlin declined to confirm a potential upcoming summit, which US officials expect to take place, between President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Russia.

• As Russian students headed back to school this year, many were given updated history textbooks – part of an attempt by Russian President Vladimir Putin to reaffirm his chosen narrative of Russia’s place in the world. The new books include a glorified account of Russia’s history, derision aimed at its enemies and justifications for the invasion of Ukraine.

• The apparent assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin in the crash of his private jet between Moscow and St. Petersburg represents an inflection point in Russian-African relations. Prigozhin, as leader of the notorious Wagner Group, had been the point man for Russia in Africa since Wagner first began operations on the continent in 2017.

Environment

• The typhoon lost strength and became a tropical storm after its landfall around 5am.

• Maricopa County’s enhanced heat surveillance system, which essentially counts each heat-related death by hand, is something of a state-level gold standard. Even so, the system only gives the county a concrete lower bound. That’s valuable, Parks said, because the county is able to know at least how many heat-related deaths occurred in a given year. But it’s almost guaranteed to be an underestimate. “The perception that that’s the true number is really rather pervasive,” he said. “It’s a very conservative estimate.” That even a rigorous system like Maricopa County’s cannot provide a full accounting illuminates the challenges of counting climate-related deaths nationwide.

• Experts have warned about maritime trade disruptions ahead of what is shaping up to be an even drier period next year. They argue that a potential early start to Panama’s dry season and hotter-than-average temperatures could increase evaporation and result in near-record low water levels by April.

• More than 14,000 ships crossed the canal in 2022. Container ships are the most common users of the Panama Canal and transport more than 40% of consumer goods traded between Northeast Asia and the U.S. East Coast.

• Torrential rain and winds caused by an extratropical cyclone have left at least 21 people dead in southern Brazil, officials said Tuesday, warning more flooding may be coming.

• Fierce rainstorms battered neighboring Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria on Tuesday, triggering flooding that caused at least seven deaths, including two holidaymakers swept away by a torrent that raged through a campsite in northwestern Turkey.

Energy/Transportation

• Australia, South Korea and China are top coal electricity polluters per capita.

• China, an electric-vehicle juggernaut, will have at least seven brands on display, while Germany’s automakers are now a drag on their home economy.

• Jason from NotJustBikes, and Alan Fisher from the Armchair Urbanist did a great podcast episode last March about micro-mobility devices like e-bikes and scooters.

• The Big Problem with Small Vechiles

• “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice”. This Martin Luther King quote was used by Conservative peer Baroness Stroud to introduce the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), which launched in March.

• Set up by the owners of GB News and involving “senior leaders from politics, media, culture, business, and academia”, ARC claims that it will address the six “fundamental issues of our time”, including “energy and resources” and “environmental stewardship”.

• Fringe climate crisis deniers who claim that the earth is “cooling” and greenhouse emissions are good for “biological productivity” are getting exposed to millions more people than they normally would on YouTube thanks to conservative influencer Jordan Peterson.

• That’s according to viewership data newly reviewed by DeSmog, which reveals a massive visibility boost for public figures who’ve been active in the climate denial movement for years but whose ideas — such as the claim that plants are growing much better due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — are now rarely taken seriously by most legacy media outlets.

• China’s energy policies have a huge impact on the pace of global climate change.

• Lawyers, accountants, consultants, cryptocurrency analysts and other professionals have racked up more than $700 million in fees since last year from the bankruptcies of five major [cryptocurrency] firms, including the digital currency exchange FTX, according to a New York Times analysis of court records. That sum is likely to grow significantly as the cases unfold over the coming months.

• Groups including the NAACP, Sierra Club, and Sunrise Movement have signed on to support the march and its demands for Pres. Biden to take bold action on fossil fuels in the wake of a deadly, record-breaking summer of extreme heat and climate disasters. They join the key groups organizing the march, including the Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Popular Democracy, Climate Organizing Hub, Food & Water Watch, Fridays For Future USA & NYC, Earthworks, Greenfaith, Indigenous Environmental Network, New York Communities for Change, Oil Change International and Oil & Gas Action Network.

Overpopulation

• Last year, the park implemented similar conservation measures on the South Rim in parts of July, August and September until the water tank levels returned to normal.

• The analysis by researchers with the World Resources Institute found that all seven states that rely on the Colorado River face high or extremely high water stress. Arizona ranked first for the most severe water stress in the country, followed by New Mexico and Colorado, while California ranked fifth.

Finance

• In 2019, Italy became the first major Western nation to join China’s Belt and Road.

• As of the end of the quarter, GitLab had 7,815 base customers, including 810 customers with a turnover in excess of $100,000, up 37% year-over-year. Total users of GitLab’s platform passed 30 million users, with more than 50% of Fortune 100 now GitLab customers. The company’s revenue run rate sat at $558 million as of the end of July and its dollar-based net retention rate was 124%, meaning it’s getting significantly more business from existing customers.

• Roku Inc. is cutting 10% of its workforce and curbing hiring plans in an effort to lower expenses, the company said Wednesday in a regulatory filing.

• The video streaming company laid out a series of cost-cutting measures that it says will bring down its annual headcount expense growth rate.

• Digital media giant Roku is laying off roughly 10% of its workforce, it announced Wednesday, marking the latest in a series of large corporate layoffs over the past year as employers continue to restructure their workforces amid lingering recession fears (see Forbes’ layoff tracker from the first quarter here).

• Roku Inc. plans to reduce its personnel by around 10%, equivalent to 360 workers, as part of a strategic move to stop a string of quarterly losses. The prominent streaming platform also intends to restrict new hires to meet its cost-cutting goals.

• Roku’s workforce reduction was in response to its updated financial forecast. This move follows Roku’s altered financial forecast. Roku now expects third-quarter 2023 sales of $835 million to $875 million, up from a projection of $815 million in July. Investor confidence boosted Roku’s shares by 8% to $90.48 in early trading.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The prime minister of Vanuatu lost his job after he was criticized for veering too close to the West. He accuses his successor of being too cozy with China.

• SpaceX approved the $1 billion loan, which was backed by some of Musk’s SpaceX stock in October and Musk drew all of it down the same month, according to the report, citing documents. Musk took ownership of Twitter in October.

• The U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency CISA on Monday confirmed the addition of Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko to its roster of prominent voices preaching the gospel of security-by-design and secure-by-default development principles.

• Zatko, most recently the CISO at Twitter who blew the whistle on the social media giant’s security shortcomings, is joining the agency in a part-time capacity to work on the “security and resilience by design” pillar of the Biden administration’s National Cybersecurity Strategy.

• MITRE and CISA introduce Caldera for OT, a new extension to help security teams emulate attacks targeting operational technology systems.

• At this point advertising on Twitter is directly extending financial support to neo-Nazis. It’s long past time that companies like Apple,1 which resumed advertising on the platform in December 2022, just stopped.

• But it won’t, which is finally putting the lie to the idea that the company’s leadership team care one iota about about the impact its actions make on the culture of the country which nurtured it. “You support rampant anti-semitism on your service? No problem! Here’s some money. You explicitly allow transphobic hate speech on the service? That’s fine with us! Here, have some more money.”

• The government released its draft Bill C-18 regulations on Friday ahead of the Labour Day weekend, but ironically those regulations do very little to ensure that new funding will be allocated toward employing journalists. While the regulations establish what amounts to a minimum 4% link tax on Google and Meta if they link to news content, they set no minimum requirements to spend the resulting revenues on journalists or news content. In fact, the government specifically dictates to the CRTC that the legislative requirement that an “appropriate portion of the compensation will be used for the production of local, regional and national news content” will involve no minimum amount and the agreements need only reference that “some” of the compensation will be used for that purpose. As a result, in the best case scenario for the government in which the Internet platforms pay for links by reaching commercial agreements with news outlets, the big beneficiaries such as Bell, Rogers, the CBC, and Postmedia would be free to spend the vast majority of the money generated by those deals on executive salaries, debt repayment, or any other purpose.

• However, despite Meta’s assurances that news outlets will still be able to post content for viewers to see, recent reports have surfaced revealing Meta has quietly reduced referral traffic to media outlets, according to a report by the prominent UK news outlet, Reach PLC. Digital revenue in the UK dropped by 14.5% in the first quarter of 2023, and Reach claimed the root cause stems from “recent changes to the way Facebook presents news content, causing a reduction in referred traffic across the sector.”

• Since the start of 2021, most major UK publishers have received payments from Facebook to use their content in its News tab. The tab was previously curated by a team of around 15 journalists at Upday, but this contract ended last year as Meta turned it into a fully automated product.

• The announcement comes after Meta blocked access to news feeds in Canada after that country passed a media law known as the Online News Act earlier this year.

• Meta started blocking Canadian news feeds at the beginning of August, even though the Canadian law will take effect only by the end of the year.

• /blockquote>

• When Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton held a news conference in May decrying state lawmakers’ anticipated vote to impeach him, he framed the decision as not only a threat to his political career but as one that endangered the slew of lawsuits he’d filed against the Biden administration.

• Paxton, who has since been suspended from office, faces an impeachment trial that starts today. He has long positioned himself as one of the country’s strongest conservative attorneys general, relentlessly pursuing nearly 50 lawsuits against the federal government on issues that include immigration, health care and the environment. Such messaging raised Paxton’s national profile, appealed to his base of conservative supporters and helped him tamp down political pushback stemming from allegations of wrongdoing that have dogged his eight-year tenure.

Censorship/Free Speech

• On Monday, September 4, the Press Supervisory Board of Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance revoked Entekhab’s operating license indefinitely and blocked the outlet’s website and social media accounts in the country.

• “The opportunity to think for ourselves and to express those thoughts freely is among our most cherished liberties,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion.

• Join the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT)’s seventh annual Future of Speech Online event, on October 4-5, to explore how to build a rights-respecting future where people benefit from generative AI.

• From today’s decision by Judge Jia Cobb in Seltzer v. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority: Plaintiff Susan Seltzer participated in an arbitration proceeding before the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). The arbitration concluded with a written award that was published online.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Guesmi was initially arrested on March 18, 2022, and held for a week after authorities alleged that his reporting about the dismantling of a terrorist cell illegally disclosed information about government surveillance. On November 29, a court sentenced Guesmi to one year in prison. On May 16, 2023, an appeals court increased his sentence to five years.

• Shocking the conscience. That’s the legal term for government actions that are so far from acceptable no one, not even cop-friendly courts, can deem them acceptable.

• The MPs are former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, Liberal Senator Alex Antic, Labor MP Tony Zappia, Independent MP Monique Ryan and Greens Senators David Shoebridge and Peter Whish-Wilson.

• The planned visit comes ahead of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s scheduled state visit to the US in October.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Last year, Delaware police prevented 54-year-old Jonathan Guessford from holding a sign warning drivers about a speed trap and wrongfully cited him for “improper hand signal” after he flipped off the officers who seized and tore up his sign. Police have now agreed to pay Guessford $50,000 as part of a settlement reached in a lawsuit alleging that police violated his civil rights.

• Amnesty International’s Turkey branch, which fights for human rights worldwide and works to end violations, has laid off one-third of its employees. In the branch, which has 24 employees,eight people have been let go, two of them being institution managers. The institution cited “restructuring” as the reason.

• The employees criticized the layoffs, attributing them to “union-related” reasons, as Amnesty International had withdrawn from collective bargaining negotiations with the DİSK Sosyal-İş Union on June 7.

• The discovery of poverty as a national problem in the late 1950s and early ’60s redefined economic inequality from a description of relative material circumstances to a cultural issue deriving from the inadequacies of individuals or groups. Debate within and around the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations on how to understand and thus respond to “poverty” overlapped with the debate about structural unemployment. Figures like Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz, labor and civil rights leaders like Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin, and labor economists like Charles Killingsworth continued to argue that poverty stemmed primarily from the economy’s inability to generate sufficient gainful employment. In their view, the most effective anti-poverty strategy would involve the kind of substantial federal intervention that would tighten labor markets—including public investment, serious job training, and direct job creation.

• As a high school sprinter in Virginia’s Tidewater region, I often participated in meets at Christopher Newport University’s Freeman Center, which had one of the few indoor tracks in the area. I won 500-meter races against top runners, and my high school was team champion.

• Track and field was a huge part of my identity. I looked forward to crossing the Monitor-Merrimac bridge over the James River to Newport News, and I saw the opportunity to display my skill at Christopher Newport as a way to impress colleges and earn an athletic scholarship. It wouldn’t be until 20 years later that I understood the underlying irony. The construction of Christopher Newport, where Black athletes like me competed alongside our white counterparts, had displaced Black homeowners whose hopes and aspirations were dashed by racism.

• Katie Luck was sitting in her yard under a magnolia tree one afternoon in April when a school bus passed by. A white elementary school student shouted at her from a window, “You don’t belong here.”

• The 81-year-old grandmother and retired teacher, who is Black, was so distressed that she called James and Barbara Johnson, who live down the road from her on Shoe Lane in Newport News, Virginia. The Johnsons, perhaps better than anyone, knew just how wrong the elementary schooler was. The stacks of files and photo albums on their dining room table are a shrine to what the Shoe Lane area used to be — and what it might have become.

• Under new age verification rules in the UK’s massive Online Safety Bill, all internet platforms with UK users will have to stop minors from accessing ‘harmful’ content, as defined by the UK Parliament. This will affect adult websites, but also user-to-user services – basically any site, platform, or app that allows user-generated content that could be accessed by young people. To prevent minors from accessing ‘harmful’ content, sites will have to verify the age of visitors, either by asking for government-issued documents or using biometric data, such as face scans, to estimate their age.

• This will result in an enormous shift in the availability of information online, and pose a serious threat to the privacy of UK internet users. It will make it much more difficult for all users to access content privately and anonymously, and it will make many of the most popular websites and platforms liable if they do not block, or heavily filter, content for anyone who does not verify their age. This is in addition to the dangers the Bill poses to encryption.

• Two key organizers of the 2022 trucker protest argued that their efforts were a form of free speech, as prosecutors asserted that “this case is not about their political views.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Moving to Tokyo was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. Discovering another culture brings a lot of surprises, one of them was the ‘Disaster Preparedness Tokyo’ book that came with my new apartment. The level of preparedness for natural disasters in Japan is way beyond anything I have seen in other parts of the world. And I believe this also applies to the Internet in Japan, something I’d like to convey in this article.

• Making RIPE more visible, taking part in industry events, keeping up with policy discussions, and preparing for a RIPE Meeting in Rome – as we go into September, the RIPE Chair Team reports on the work ahead in the months to come.

• This article focuses on four user-friendly DNS servers: Gcore Public DNS, OpenDNS, Quad9, and 1.1.1.1 Public DNS.

Monopolies

• The Federal Trade Commission is reportedly going ahead with an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon.com Inc. after the company’s lawyers offered no concessions in recent talks with the regulator, according to a report today in the Wall Street Journal.

Patents

• Public comments responding to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office proposals have been posted on regulations.gov on a rolling basis. This analysis has been updated from the original version – July 23, 2023 – to reflect comments posted on regulations.gov as of August 22, 2023.

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently declined to issue a writ of mandamus directing the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas (Judge Gilstrap) to dismiss a patent infringement lawsuit against Charter Communications based upon improper venue. In re Charter Commc’ns, Inc., No. 2023-136 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 5, 2023). Although non-precedential, the decision highlights a key difference between motions to dismiss for improper venue under 28 U.S.C. § 1406 and motions to transfer venue for convenience under 28 U.S.C. § 1404. It also shows the high bar for obtaining the “extraordinary remedy” of mandamus relief from denial of an improper venue motion.

• >

• Substantial evidence supported a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision finding the challenged claims were obvious. A PTAB decision finding that Sony Interactive Entertainment had shown that a Bot M8’s patent directed to a video game authentication system was obvious over prior art has been affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals…

• On August 31, 2023, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 10,259,470, owned and asserted by the Phelan Group, LLC, an NPE. The ’470 patent generally relates to a vehicle control system for authenticating and monitoring a driver and their operation of a vehicle to improve safety.

• On August 25, 2023, less than two months after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding a substantial new question of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,437,935, owned and asserted by Vision Works IP Corp., an NPE.

Trademarks

• A TTAB judge once told me that one can predict the outcome of a Section 2(d) case 95% of the time just by looking at the marks and the goods/services. Here are three recent appeals from Section 2(d) refusals. How do you think these came out? Answers will be found in the first comment. [No hints this time].

*

• In re Puma SE, Serial No. 90600590 (August 29, 2023) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Christopher C. Larkin). [Section 2(d) refusal of the mark PWRSHAPE for “Clothing, namely, pants, skirts” and “Clothing, namely, pullovers, jackets, shirts, T-shirts, sweaters, and coats,” in view of the registered mark POWERSHAPE for “bras.”

Copyrights

• Why hasn’t Miley Cyrus gone on tour since her ‘Bangerz’ tour in 2014? The singer bares all on TikTok, revealing the 70+ date “didn’t earn her a dime.” Miley Cyrus has posted a series of videos to TikTok sharing some inside information about the industry.

• Jeffrey “predatory journals” Beall famously catapulted himself out of any serious debate with an article in the journal TripleC, entitled “The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access“. In it, Beall claimed that OA proponents don’t care about access, but that they form an “anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with”. The article is so replete with similarly unhinged fairy tales that Beall quickly lost all standing with the scholarly community.

• The export of the West’s obsession with enforcing copyright monopolies has brought with it the inevitable rise of copyright madness. Here’s a good example of that, reported on the Sixth Tone site. It involves a professional Chinese astrophotographer, Dai Jianfeng, and Visual China Group (VCG), China’s largest stock photo provider. The latter demanded that Dai should pay compensation to VCG for publishing his own photos: [...]

• The answer isn’t on any page of google, or any page of the physical book itself — not the copyright page where the rest of the credit information is, not the front or back cover, NOWHERE. Sarah posed the question in the Unresolved Mysteries subreddit. “This would be the kind of thing that the folks over at Endless Thread would have a field day over,” someone commented.

• And, indeed… we did! In this episode, Amory uncovers the artist behind this iconic illustration.

• SNEP also revealed some interesting stats about the French music industry as a whole. The 200 most listened-to tracks in paid audio streaming accounted for 10.5% of the total number of paid streams. Those top 200 tracks streamed in H1 2023 accounted for around 3.8 billion streams from paid subscribers. The entire top ten best-selling artists for H1 2023 in France were all local acts. 17 of the Top 20 best-selling album sin the country were also made by local acts, while 75% of the Top 200 were French productions.

• Title 17, Section 407 of the U.S. Code requires that the copyright holder in a printed work or sound recording published in the United States “deposit, within three months after the date of such publication, two complete copies of the best edition… in the Copyright Office for the use or disposition of the Library of Congress.”

• Failure to do so subjects the copyright holder to “a fine of not more than $250 for each work” as well as “the total retail price of the copies… demanded” and an additional “fine of $2,500… if such person willfully or repeatedly fails or refuses to comply” with the deposit requirement.

• A few years ago, a small publisher called Valancourt Books sued the government, challenging the constitutionality of this requirement, and initially lost its suit. But last week the District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed the district court’s decision.

• With AI initiatives developing at a rapid pace, copyright holders are on high alert. Of particular concern is technology companies using their content as training data, without any form of compensation. Last month, Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance was the first to successfully send a DMCA takedown notice for the Books3 training dataset, and is now calling for more transparency.

• Each month throughout 2023, we will be spotlighting a different CC-licensed illustration from the collection on our social media headers and the CC blog. For September, we’re excited to showcase “Open Is Beautiful” by Ukrainian illustrator, Tanya Korniichuk. The piece, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, was inspired by a quote from Cecília Oliveira, Executive Director of Fogo Cruzado:

• Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Hardi is the Deputy General Secretary for Internal Affairs and Partnership Manager of Wikimedia Indonesia and has been working in open culture since he started with Wikipedia.

• Anti-piracy coalition ACE reports that Egyptian law enforcement authorities have shut down three anti-piracy rings, which operated sports, TV, and movie piracy sites. These successes are the result of close cooperation between rightsholders and the local authorities. While these successes should not be understated, most brands live on, as copycat sites thrive.

• Days after inking an expanded distribution deal with Sony Music’s The Orchard, One Media iP has announced the acquisition of the “licensor’s income share” of an over 15,000-track catalog. One Media iP reached out to Digital Music News today with word of the investment, which was executed specifically via its “Harmony IP” royalty-advance program.

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