● 09.09.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 09/09/2023: Google Antitrust Case and Windows TCO Stories

Posted in News Roundup at 6:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• Sometimes, you need privacy for your developer platforms and cloud-native Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) thanks to stringent compliance and data sovereignty requirements. If that’s your situation, and you don’t want to burn your time building it yourself from various open-source programs, consider Upbound’s new Spaces, a self-hosting approach to the open-source project Crossplane,

• “VirtualBox as the Development Platform for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure”

• During this session we will show how to leverage Oracle Database containerized images to automate deployment and integration with your CI/CD application, how to monitor resources to maintain the high availability of application states, and scale or descale Oracle Real Application Cluster pods based on your workload requirements.

• Containers and VMs are needed to build and maintain software. Conatainers can deploy and scale apps, while VMs are more resource-intensive and can support separate environments.

Audiocasts/Shows

Instructionals/Technical

• The nice thing about Linux is all of the choices Linux users have. One is the choice of which desktop environment to use. For me, Xfce is my desktop environment of choice. One of those reasons I prefer Xfce is because of Thunar, the file manager for Xfce. It’s not flashy. It lets me get my file tasks done with a minimum of fuss. But what I like most of all is how easy it is to add custom actions to Thunar to create various custom tools to perform bulk file operations (which I do quite frequently). I have several custom actions that I use frequently with the production of The PCLinuxOS Magazine, and they are REAL timesavers.

• Those Thunar Custom Actions can be one-liners, or can invoke a custom bash script. I have custom actions that use both methods. Obviously, more complex actions require the use of a custom bash script, but there are quite a few one-liners that wield a LOT of power. Typically, my one-liners and my custom bash scripts run command line programs on either a single file, or on a group of files.

• Ask someone to name all the things they can find in a room. Only a few will mention air. Ask a Linux command line user about programs they use and they may well forget to mention ls. Like air, it is seemingly invisible since it is so everpresent. But is it the best it can be? Sure, you can use environment variables and aliases to make it work a little nicer, but, in fact, it is much the same ls we have used for decades. But there have always been moves to make better ls programs. One of them, exa, was recently deprecated in favor of one of its forks, eza.

• Several years ago (2010), I went to a meeting with some fellow secretaries. Towards the end of the meeting, we went to supper at a local restaurant, and decided to have someone take a group photo. Unfortunately, one of the girls had not eaten with us, so they asked if I could put her in the photo with the rest of us. I was able to do it, but with my limited GIMP experience, it didn’t turn out as well as I would have liked.

• With a tutorial from Davies Media Design, I’m learning how to do it. I’ll use a couple of photos I downloaded from Wikimedia Commons before I go back to my own photo. Use larger photos to give yourself room to work. Photos can always be sized down later, but not made bigger.

• As ⅆα√ℯℂ§ suggested, I created a short guide on how to configure a dark theme in Trinity Mini. As an example, I chose Arc Darkest, which was used in the guest’s account in the latest ISO TDE Mini.

• Of course, this theme can be implemented simply by copying the guest’s account configuration to the newly created user directory. However, this is not recommended, because the “guest” name will remain here and there, which is difficult to detect and can cause embarrassing errors. And besides, configuring everything from scratch, the user will learn something new.

• Charles Miller delivered his masters thesis at the Crypto and Privacy village at DEF CON. He introduced domain fronting, where a client contacts a Content Distribution Network (CDN) endpoint under one name, and the endpoint forwards traffic to another destination. This exploits a gap between TLS and HTTP as implemented by CDNs. His research found ways to identify endpoints at scale, even when Azure, Cloudflare, and Google clamp down on domain fronting on their infrastructure. Domain fronting is an important tool used by Tor to circumvent censorship in places that block encrypted SNI.

• 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.

• Get to grips with the file renaming powerhouse of the Linux world and give mv — and yourself — a rest. Rename is flexible, fast, and sometimes even easier. Here’s how to use to this powerhouse of a command.

• Feel like starting over? We’ll show you how to cleanly and safely reboot or shut down your Linux or macOS computer from the command line.

• The File Transfer Protocol is older than most of our readers, but it’s still going strong. FTP doesn’t have the security of a modern protocol, but you may need to use it anyway. Here’s how to do it.

• One of the changes systemd brought in was a new way to schedule jobs, with more finesse than cron. Some Linux distributions no longer ship cron. It’s time to check out systemd timers.

• It might sound crazy, but the Linux sed command is a text editor without an interface. You can use it from the command line to manipulate text in files and streams. We’ll show you how to harness its power.

Games

• Love your top-down stealth tactics? The Strike from the Shadows Humble Bundle has some pretty great looking picks for you. So here’s the compatibility you’re likely to see on Steam Deck and desktop Linux.

• Just recently I wrote about potential new hardware coming from Valve related to “Galileo” and “Sephiroth” that could be a Steam Deck refresh or new VR kit. Now we have basic initial details on a device being certified in South Korea.

• Well this is quite fun to see. Amnesia: The Dark Descent has gained a Redux mod that rebuilds the graphics engine behind the game to provide Vulkan on Linux and DirectX 12 on Windows. It’s not just adding it for the heck of it though, the developer said it will also correct some graphics issues in the original game while adding in new graphics options like HBAO+.

• Even more games get even more fixes in the latest release of Proton Experimental from Valve for Steam Deck and desktop Linux so here’s what’s changed.

• Coming from the developers of the excellent Scarlet Hollow, their next game Slay the Princess is set to launch on October 20 with full Native Linux support and it looks great. Save the princess? How about no. You’re supposed to slay her apparently. Well this is a bit different isn’t it.

• Projekt Z: Beyond Order is an upcoming atmospheric first-person zombie co-op shooter set in WW2, in development by 314 Arts and a new trailer is live. They also mentioned late last year they have gained Modus Games as a publishing partner. It was also originally just called Projekt Z with it being renamed to Projekt Z: Beyond Order recently.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This was a big week for backend work, especially on the subject of power management and energy efficiency!

• Welcome Center’s first page can now be customized by distros–or for that matter, by users

• The KDE desktop portal implementation now supports the new cross-desktop accent color standard

• The separator line between the titlebar/toolbar area in KDE apps and the content below it is now drawn at the correct stroke weight with a high DPI screen

• KRunner-powered searches now only show you sleep modes that are actually supported by the system, and you can also now find them by searching for the word “power”

• They’ve finally set a date! The big release of the KDE Plasma 6 desktop is now set to launch in February 2024.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• As you can imagine, most of the changes are in the GNOME Shell component, which now allows users to dismiss notifications with the Backspace key, adds workspace indicators in the Activities button, and adds an extension hook to add Quick Settings items.

• Moreover, GNOME Shell now supports OWE (Opportunistic Wireless Encryption) networks in the status menu, shows immediate feedback when the Bluetooth quick setting is toggled, adds the ability to switch workspaces when scrolling over the Activities button, restores focus indication in system entries, and improves three-finger swipes for touchscreens.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• Introducing students to FreeBSD continues to be a high priority for the Foundation. This year, in addition to our participation in Google Summer of Code and the University of Waterloo Co-Op program, the Foundation hired Jake Freeland, a previous GSoC student, to intern with us for the summer. We sat down with Jake to learn more about him and the work he has been doing to support FreeBSD.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• PCLinuxOS forum member jzakiya just published his first article in the Journal of Current Trends in Computer Science Research (JCTCSR). His article (PDF), Twin Primes Segmented Sieve of Zakiys (SSoZ) Explained, was completed with his PCLinuxOS installation. According to jzakiya, “it’s actually an easy paper to read (written on purpose for that). It requires no knowledge of calculus, or higher order math, in order to understand it. All you need to have is an understanding of English, basic logical thinking, and a curiosity to learn something new!”

• Texstar wrote in his 2023.07 release announcement that the new “mylive-install” installer has replaced the previous “draklive-install” which seasoned PCLinuxOS users are familiar with.

• I love to read, and of course helping with the PCLinuxOS Magazine! I do a fair job at some computer graphics, and I’m trying to learn more about photography. Our family loves to go to the mountains together and ride ATV’s. I did a little fishing and camping when I was younger, but not any more.

• I really enjoyed my teaching years, but when the secretary job came along, I was ready for a change. Along the way, I have honed my organizational skills, hopefully taught some people, young and old, about agriculture and where your food originates, and gotten licensed to sell insurance (although I’m not an agent: I have to be licensed to help in the office). I’ve been there 27 years, and I still love it, but I’m actually considering retirement. At my age, it may be time. I won’t retire from the magazine staff, but I’m sure my place is Assistant Editor, since Paul does such a wonderful job as Editor.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Intel® Innovation, one of Intel®’s flagship developer events, continues to span the worlds of architecture innovation, software tools and technology & research. Canonical is proud to be the silver sponsor in 2023 and will demonstrate our joint solutions from cloud to the edge.

• As industry leaders in hardware and software, Intel and Canonical create solutions that customers often use together. For more than a decade, we have worked closely to advance our technologies, and simplify the product experience for our shared customers. By aligning our product roadmaps and conducting pre-integration work, we’re enabling customers to more easily implement new technologies, to accelerate their time to market, and to have a smoother product development experience.

Devices/Embedded

• Orange Pi says the Pi Zero 2W supports Android 12 TV, Debian 11, Debian 12, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Orange Pi OS (Arch). The new board does not show up in the Download section yet, but I’d expect software support to be similar to the Orange Pi Zero 3 SBC since it uses most of the same components but in a different form factor.

• The two boards can also be stacked and secured through the mounting holes with some standoffs.

• It’s not the first Raspberry Pi Zero 2W alternative we’ve covered as the Radxa Zero was introduced over two years ago with an Amlogic S905Y2 SoC and the MangoPi MQ Quad launched last year with a similar Allwinner H616 processor as the H618 found in the Orange Pi Zero 2W.

• Orange Pi has just released an affordable development board with a form factor similar to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. The Orange Pi Zero 2W is powered by the Allwinner H618 quad-core processor and offers configurations with up to 4GB of LPDDR4 memory. The Orange Pi Zero 2W is powered by the same Allwinner processor seen on Orange Pi Zero 3 covered in early July 2023.

Open Hardware/Modding

• “Ben the Intern” (his real name is just “Ben”) was double dared by the camera team to recreate the camera rig responsible for the ground-breaking “bullet time” special effects in The Matrix using Raspberry Pi hardware. Then I triple dared him to write a story about how it went. This is that story.

• As for my cover, I’m using a number of original instruments that I built out of Commodore hardware (C64, 1541, A600). On the two lead C=tars, the upper rod is a pitch bend, the lower rod is a volume control, and space triggers a glide effect. On the bass C=tar, the lower rod controls the cutoff frequency of the resonant low-pass filter in the SID chip, while space repeats the most recently played note.

• This discovery has shaken me up in ways I didn’t expect. While we all remember what colour the Apple II+ was, and the IBM 5150, and the Atari ST, I’m not not sure all C64 fans do… myself included.

• There are a couple of reasons for this. The legendary machine came in so many permutations over its long production run, and even machines within the same generation had cosmetic and technical differences. It was Commodore’s way!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• It’s Friday, and for a change I’m turning in Friday’s FOSS Week in Review on Friday instead of on Saturday. I’m not making any promises about punctuality for the future, but at least I’m working on it.

• It looks like my side lost in the poll we published here last week. If you’ll remember, there were a couple of headlines that were worded in a way that tripped my funny bone, and I couldn’t figure out which one I would use for a “headline of the week,” if we had such a thing — so I ran a poll to let my gentle readers decide.

• Usenet was the anti-BitTorrent. BitTorrent is efficiently letting people share small parts and pieces of binaries and piece them together. It’s the opposite of redundancy. Usenet was redundancy city. And flaky as all heck redundancy with a lot of posts missing and threads being read out of order and laggily and buggily and it just didn’t work very well. (And the comparison to Reddit unfortunately also extends to the toxicity on a social level.)

• A lot of Fedi’s struggles both early on and today come from this idea that every server should carry every post, which just doesn’t work. That’s also why hashtags on Fedi aren’t a good idea.

• It doesn’t work technically and it’s inhuman socially. Ebba Grön has a song about it, “Mental Istid” which means “Mental Ice Age”. It’s all about one long algorithmic timeline where you can’t cry, you can’t sob, nothing matters, everything is homogenous, our lives are rapidly flittering past on status updates. That is what Twitter is. That is where the “Usenet-glob” model of Mastodon was heading.

• This code has been called “comically evil,” which warms my bitter heart. Yes, I could use a database. But why? The data changes 3-4 times a year, if I’m productive. And yes, the data is in columns, not rows. SNMP doesn’t do rows. It doesn’t really do tables. It only has columns, which you could choose to arrange side-by-side, but that’s a feeble human thing and irrelevant to this primordial protocol.

• In writing this I had to choose between complex code and simple data, or simple data and complex code. Given that updates consist of adding an entry to the end of each column, I chose simple code. Yes, there’s an occasional painful update where I realize that I missed one of my old books, but those are increasingly rare.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• More than ever, we need a movement to ensure the internet remains a force for good. The Mozilla Internet Ecosystem (MIECO) program fuels this movement by supporting people who are looking to advance a more human-centered internet. This week we’re highlighting Yoshiki Ohshima, a computer scientist and researcher with big ideas for how to shift the way that we think about building virtual worlds.

Education

• After competing as a national figure skater in her native Canada and attracting over 1 million views as a Minecraft YouTuber – all by the age of 12! – the good-vibes powerhouse that is Tigris Li now invites us all to explore our most human inner workings. Her goals? To help everyone develop heightened emotional intelligence, and to educate and empower a new generation of innovators. She does so through her eclectic practice as an artist and creative technologist – leveraging 3D design and every tool making has to offer, to create experiences that spark conversations about our relationships with technology, each other, and ourselves.

FSFE

Licensing / Legal

• This week is all about Remote ID, as the September 16, 2023 is the final deadline for drone pilots to make their drones Remote ID compliant. That’s under the Federal Aviation Administration’s final rule for remote ID, which mandates a way that drones must provide identification and location information. But drone remote ID modules are proving to be out of stock — and that’s causing a problem for many drone pilots.

• This realization bothered me. If Spotify shuts down its services or removes songs from its platform, there is nothing I can do. I can’t access or save those playlists anywhere else. That digital footprint left on the beach will be washed away, and I won’t be able to enjoy that music as easily.

• The [Internet] culture surrounding streaming doesn’t just affect the music industry; everything from movies and TV shows to video games are slowly falling into the clutches of media giants. Music streaming overtook digital music sales—which itself overtook physical sales—for the first time in 2016. And 78% of American households subscribe to streaming services. The content we consume on a daily basis is rapidly only becoming accessible through monthly subscriptions. Thus, we don’t actually own that content, but rather we own the privilege to access it on each service—and that privilege can be taken away at any moment.

Programming/Development

• PHP is big. The trolls can proclaim its all-but-certain “death” until the cows come home, but no amount of heckling changes that the Internet runs on PHP. The evidence is overwhelming. What follows is a loosely organised collection of precisely that evidence.

• Should we really forget efficiency? No. But we should postpone focusing on efficiency until we are effective.

• Basically, the previous sentence is the summary of this blog post and maybe it sounds obvious at first reading. But based on my experiences it is not. The biggest problem we have (not only) in IT these days is a lack of effectiveness. And what do we do to solve this problem? We attempt to improve our efficiency – amplifying our problems instead of solving any of them.

• I mentioned this issue several times in previous posts, usually in the context of other topics. Taking a few steps back, I realize this is probably the root cause for many, if not most problems we face in IT today (and in many other places). Therefore, I decided to dedicate a whole post to this issue.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• There are quite a few ways to increment and decrement numeric variables in bash. This post examines the many ways you can do this.

Leftovers

• In the home computer market of the 1980s, there were several winners that are still household names four decades later: the Commodore 64, the Apple II and the Sinclair Spectrum, to name a few. But where there are winners, there are bound to be losers as well – the Mattel Aquarius being a good example. A price war between the bigger players, combined with a rather poor hardware design, meant that the Aquarius was discontinued just a few months after its introduction in 1983. However, this makes it exactly the type of obscure machine that [Leaded Solder] likes to tinker with, so he was happy to finally get his hands on a neat specimen listed on eBay. He wrote an interesting blog post detailing his efforts to connect this old beast to a modern TV.

• Common Sense Media provides some really useful tools if you’re a parent looking to see if certain content is age appropriate. I’ve used it for years. But… also, for years, the organization has been way out over its skis in supporting all sorts of absolutely horrible laws that would do real damage to the internet, to privacy, and to free speech. Over and over again if there’s a bad internet law, Common Sense Media has probably supported it.

• We suspect that if you want to write a blockbuster movie or novel, the wrong approach is to go to a studio or publisher and say, “I have this totally new idea that is like nothing you’ve ever seen before…” Even Star Trek was pitched to the network as “Wagon Train to the stars.” People with big money tend to want to bet on things that have succeeded before, which is why so many movies are either remakes or Star Trek XXII: The Search for 4 PM Dinner Specials. Maybe that’s what the El Salvador-based Unicomer Group had in mind when they bought one of our favorite brands, RadioShack. They are reportedly planning a major comeback for the beleaguered brand both online and in the physical world.

• We look at the dire conditions inside the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, where Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants were recently booked. Ten prisoners have now died in the jail’s custody just this year — the latest on Sunday. Shawndre Delmore had been incarcerated pretrial for five months before he was found unresponsive in a cell on August 31. Delmore’s family is demanding answers as to why a previously healthy 24-year-old would so suddenly suffer from cardiac arrest, and is calling for an immediate independent investigation into conditions at the jail, which is already under federal investigation. “This is systemic. This is not a one-off,” says the family’s attorney Mawuli Mel Davis, whose firm represents three other families with relatives that have died at the jail in the past two years. In 2022, Fulton County Jail recorded 15 in-custody deaths, including that of Lashawn Thompson, a 35-year-old Black man who was “eaten alive” by insects and bedbugs in his cell. We also speak to Davis about another client, the family of Johnny Hollman Sr., a 62-year-old Black grandfather and church deacon who died after a traffic stop in August, and about the Republican Georgia attorney general’s sweeping indictment of 61 Cop City protesters on RICO charges. “This is fascism,” warns Davis. “This is an attempt to have a chilling effect on people who are organizing against police violence.”

• While recent evolutions in “AI” have netted some profoundly interesting advancements in creativity and productivity, its early implementation in journalism has been a sloppy mess thanks to some decidedly human-based problems: namely greed, incompetence, and laziness.

• Most of us will at one point have run out of storage and either had to buy a larger driver or delete some of those precious files. This problem can happen to data centers, too, with the ever-increasing amount of data stored on servers across the world. [Cerabyte] aims to fix this, with their ceramic-based media promising 1 TB/cm² of areal density.

• The Daily Telegraph has published weekly articles since 11 August by David Blackmon, a veteran of the oil and gas industry.

• The articles have all been critical of current policies to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions and ensure the transition to renewable energy.

• If asked to name the absolute worst Democratic and Republican Senators when it comes to technology and innovation policy, it would be difficult to come up with any worse than Richard Blumenthal from the Democratic side and Josh Hawley from the GOP side. Both have extremely long histories of having absolutely terrible, free speech destroying, privacy destroying ideas about the internet, going back to before each were in the Senate. When both of them were state Attorneys General (Blumenthal in Connecticut, Hawley in Missouri), both used baseless attacks on tech companies as a key way to get headlines and propel them into the Senate.

• Spain’s national prosecutor has announced a criminal investigation into Luis Rubiales, the head of Spain’s soccer federation, after he forcibly kissed Spanish soccer star Jenni Hermoso during the recent World Cup trophy ceremony. Hermoso filed a sexual assault complaint against Rubiales, who has been temporarily suspended by soccer’s international governing body FIFA but has refused to step down voluntarily. No permanent sanctions have been announced. Meanwhile, the rest of the Spanish women’s soccer league is on strike over pay and working conditions after talks between federation leadership and the players’ union broke down. We look at what has become a #MeToo moment in Spanish sports with Brenda Elsey, co-host of the feminist sports podcast Burn It All Down, who says institutional change is desperately needed in the male-dominated world of soccer. “If they had listened to women for the last eight years, to the players, this wouldn’t have had to happen, but they absolutely refused to make any changes,” Elsey says of FIFA, noting that widespread support for Hermoso is bringing to light a “spectrum” of abuse and exploitation in the sport.

Education

• Looking back on this documentary 18 years later, it’s striking how many interviews it captured with people who would go on to greater fame and success: [...]

• While the surveyed group is small, teachers have expressed concern that a majority of their students use ChatGPT in some capacity and have implemented software into the classroom to detect if an assignment was completed using AI. Other schools have even gone so far as to add guidelines to the application process, with the University of Michigan Law School saying that “applicants ought not use ChatGPT or other artificial intelligence tools as part of their drafting process.”

• I have no strong points here. I just think the opposites in my brain are weird, and that I usually have the wrong instinct.

• A virus taught our species how to slow down and reminded us we are not the Masters of the Universe. Harsh periods often bring re-evaluations of what’s essential in our lives. Now, by looking outside ourselves, perhaps even abandoning the comfort of our perspective of the world, we can discover things that have and will change our way of living and, hopefully, will create a stronger bond to all forms of life.

Hardware

• Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic “floppy disks” and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there’s a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I’ve learned so far.

• Name one other podcast where you can hear about heavy 3D-printed drones, DIY semiconductors, and using licorice to block laser beams. Throw in homebrew relays, a better mouse trap, and logic analyzers, and you’ll certainly be talking about Elliot Williams and Al Williams on Hackaday Podcast 235.

• [Harrison Low] published some 3D-printed linear actuators, which generated a lot of interest. He got a lot of advice from people on the Internet, and he took it to heart. The result: an improved version that you can see in the video below.

• Many movies and songs use a lot of of bass to make it feel more real to the viewer or listener. Because of this, subwoofers are common in high-quality audio setups, often costing a substantial part of the budget. [Daniel Fajkis] takes the subwoofer to it’s logical extreme by building a rotary subwoofer on a $200 budget.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Authorities in Massachusetts also have responded by warning parents about the challenge, which is popular on social media [sic] sites such as TikTok.

• After looking crunching the numbers, they estimated that 31 percent of the male population worldwide has any type of HPV, while 21 percent carry the HPV variations that are at high risk of turning into cancer. They also noted that “HPV prevalence was high in young adults, reaching a maximum between the ages of 25 years and 29 years, and stabilised or slightly decreased thereafter.”

• One contributing factor to the growing concerns about safety is a shortage of air traffic controllers. A recent internal study by the inspector general of the US Department of Transportation found that twenty of twenty-six critical facilities (77 percent of them) are staffed below the FAA’s 85-percent threshold. That includes the vital New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility, which manages one of the most complex airspaces in the world and is currently at 54 percent of its staffing target (which is jointly determined by the FAA and the controllers’ union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association). Less than 1 percent of FAA facilities are currently meeting 100 percent of their staffing targets.

• In November 2020, facing a record-breaking overdose crisis, voters in Oregon decided to take a chance on a novel approach to drug use in this country. That fall, voters overwhelmingly approved a measure to decriminalize possessing small amounts of some controlled substances, including heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. This ballot initiative, known as “Measure 110,” went into effect in early 2021. It reclassified personal drug possession from a misdemeanor to a lower-level violation and set up a “Drug Treatment and Recovery Services Fund” to create new addiction recovery centers. By replacing low-level drug arrests with more humane and health-oriented approaches, such as citations and referrals to services, Oregonians began to undo the harms caused by over 50 years of a failed War on Drugs.

• Remember how I said that I’d get back to normal posting this week? I lied. Well, not exactly. My intentions were good, but family and life interfered. (I won’t provide any further details.) That is why next week is more likely to be when I get back to normal blogging. Still, I couldn’t leave you hanging until next week without commenting on at least one thing I’ve been noticing in the COVID-19 “contrarian” (translation: antimask, antivax, science-denying) crankosphere, namely a little post in which a prominent COVID-19 contrarian and antivaxxer decided that vitamin D is the answer to nearly everything. It came in the form of a post by someone who’s been a dominant subject even during my current posting drought, namely Dr. Paul Marik, cofounder of the quack group Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC).

• In a unanimous decision, Mexico’s Supreme Court issued a historic ruling Wednesday decriminalizing abortion on the federal level. While laws banning the procedure are still in place in a majority of Mexican states, people in those states can now receive abortions at federal medical facilities run the country’s public health system, and states will be barred from penalizing those patients and providers. The ruling is part of a wave of reproductive rights wins in the region, as Mexico now joins Argentina and Colombia in decriminalizing or legalizing abortion since 2020. “Latin America is actually leading the conversation on the protection of reproductive rights,” says our guest Cristina Rosero, who worked on the lawsuit that decriminalized abortion in Colombia last year. Meanwhile, Mexico is on track to elect its first woman president, as its two major political parties have both named women candidates for next year’s presidential election. In the face of continued political violence against women in the country, the representation of women in its highest office is “definitely a step forward for our political rights here in Mexico,” says Rebeca Ramos, executive director of the Mexico City-based reproductive rights nonprofit GIRE.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Tracked as CVE-2023-20269 (CVSS score of 5.0, medium severity), the issue exists in the remote access VPN feature of Cisco ASA and FTD and can be exploited remotely, without authentication, in brute force attacks.

• “This vulnerability is due to improper separation of authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) between the remote access VPN feature and the HTTPS management and site-to-site VPN features,” Cisco explains in an advisory.

• By deliberately implementing a naive client and not leveraging a feature-packed solution like FreeRDP, our initial releases lacked initial support for a lot of features that people have come to expect from remote desktop solutions – bidirectional copy/paste, file sharing, etc. Our decision to use the web browser as the user-facing client meant that we don’t have access to system resources in the way that a native client would.

• Apple has just released a security update warning iPhone users to update their phones to iOS 16.6.1 to avoid becoming the target of a vicious malware attack.

• The exploit is called Blastpass and uses Pegasus spyware from NSO Group to read a target’s text messages, view their photos, and listen to calls. The malware was discovered by the Citizen Lab in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto, with researchers notifying Apple of the “zero-click, zero-day” exploit. Citizen Lab first spotted Blastpass on the phone of an unnamed Washington D.C. employee at a civil society organization with international offices. Blastpass can attack any phone running iOS 16.6 “without any interaction from the victim” says CitizenLab.

Windows TCO

• Special Counsel Jack Smith’s ongoing investigation into 2020 election subversion is now focusing on voting machine breaches in four swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — according to reporting from CNN this week.

• American Oversight has been investigating efforts by activists in each of these states to overturn the election results, and the evidence we’ve uncovered has been helping to drive accountability. The new CNN report cited records we obtained that show these efforts involved election deniers from around the country — including Sidney Powell, whose nonprofit Defending the Republic has close ties to election-undermining efforts in Pennsylvania and Arizona. Powell has been identified as a co-conspirator in the DOJ’s indictment of Donald Trump, and she was charged in Fulton County, Georgia.

• According to invoices obtained by CNN, Powell’s non-profit, Defending the Republic, hired forensics firms that ultimately accessed voting equipment in four swing states won by Biden: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona.

• Powell faces criminal charges in Georgia after she was indicted last month by Atlanta-area district attorney Fani Willis, who alleges that Powell helped coordinate and fund a multi-state plot to illegally access voting systems after the 2020 election.

• The charges, filed yesterday, reveal the actual identities of the criminals, who will probably never see a courtroom, let alone a prison, anywhere in the world. Nevertheless, they represent a continued law enforcement effort to bring international cyber criminals to justice and disrupt their operations.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• The OpenTF Foundation didn’t want to fork Terraform, but HashiCorp gave it no choice. HashiCorp’s recent decision to shift Terraform licensing to the non-open-source Business Source License (BSL) is fixed in stone. Thus, as the OpenTF Foundation said it would in the OpenTF manifesto if HashICorp refused to return Terraform to the Mozilla Public License (MPL) v2.0, the newly formed foundation is forking the code.

• Or, did they? Scalr CEO Sebastian Stadil told The Register, “Our view is that we’re actually not the fork because we’re just changing the name, but it’s the same project under the same license. Our position is that the fork is actually HashiCorp that has forked its own projects under a different license.”

• Recently, the popular open-source command line copy tool, cURL for transferring data via URLs, was given a jaw-dropping 9.8 Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) critical security violation mark. There was only one little problem with this National Vulnerability Database (NVD) CVE-2020-19909 report: It was bogus. There’s nothing wrong with cURL. Now, the same kind of crap security report has shown up for the open-source SQL database, PostgreSQL.

• This time, according to the PostgreSQL Security Team reports, just like with cURL, whoever the unknown reporter was didn’t bother to tell them that was a security problem. Had they done so, the security team would have told them the same thing they told the NVD crew: There was no problem.

• Businesses face billions of malware and ransomware threats each year. Antimalware tools can help enterprises protect their networks and limit any damages that may occur.

• Angry IP Scanner provides a network scanner alternative to Nmap that is simple, user-friendly and versatile across OSes. Scan types include ping scans, UDP scans and TCP scans.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The bill would empower the U.K. government, in certain situations, to demand that online platforms use government-approved software to search through all users’ photos, files, and messages, scanning for illegal content. Online services that don’t comply can be subject to extreme penalties, including criminal penalties.

• Such a backdoor scanning system can and will be exploited by bad actors. It will also produce false positives, leading to false accusations of child abuse that will have to be resolved. That’s why the OSB is incompatible with end-to-end encryption—and human rights. EFF has strongly opposed this bill from the start.

• Now, with the bill on the verge of becoming U.K. law, the U.K. government has sheepishly acknowledged that it may not be able to make use of some aspects of this law. During a final debate over the bill, a representative of the government said that orders to scan user files “can be issued only where technically feasible,” as determined by Ofcom, the U.K.’s telecom regulatory agency. He also said any such order must be compatible with U.K. and European human rights law.

Defence/Aggression

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

2023-09-07 [Older] Latvia helps with reconstruction of Chernihiv, Ukraine

• Musk is now so powerful he has his own foreign policy. On Thursday, CNN, citing Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming biography of Musk, reported, “Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet.” This incident has been known about since it happened last October. The new information is that it happened under Musk’s personal command and that he claims he spoke to Russian officials before making the decision. (Musk might also have been influenced by some of the right-wing voices he likes to engage with on Twitter, who called for the Starlink cancellation of service).

• SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has officially admitted to thwarting a Ukrainian attack on Russia’s naval fleet near the Crimean coast by cutting off Starlink [Internet] access at a crucial moment.

• “All processes are becoming more complicated and slower — from sanctions to the provision of weapons,” Zelenskiy said in his evening address on September 8. “The longer it takes, the more people suffer,” he warned.

Environment

• Despite those efforts, many environmental groups have long pointed out the event’s considerable carbon footprint. According to estimates, Burning Man releases some 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of the emissions created to power 19,000 homes for a year.

• “After exodus, the Burning Man team has three weeks where they grid out the entire event area and pick up all items and trash,” spokesperson Rita Henderson said in a statement. “In addition, they clean along the side of the county highways leading to and from the event.”

• During the first week of October, the bureau and organizers will inspect points around the area to determine whether the cleanup efforts were acceptable, she said, adding that if the bureau finds the cleanup isn’t acceptable, it will schedule time with the organizers to address the issues.

• According to the latest projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global climate will be 1.5 to 4.4 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels by 2100. This figure is based on various scenarios describing how anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions may develop in the future. So in the best case, if we manage to curb emissions quickly and radically, we can still meet the 1.5 degree target of the Paris Agreement.

• “The world is not on track to meet the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement,” including capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above mid-19th century levels, the report said.

• As those road-blockaders saw, Burning Man is not only a victim of environmental change but also a perpetrator of it. A friend—the one engaged to the ultramarathoner—recently described the festival as “the ultimate expression of a capitalist economy that throws off so much surplus wealth” that “tens of thousands of people can gather to create self-destructing artifacts.” In 2019, when the Burning Man Project last sought to renew its permit with the Bureau of Land Management, it faced environmental-impact requirements that it argued “would forever negatively change the fabric of the Burning Man event, if not outright kill it.” (At least some of the requirements were dropped, and the permit was renewed.)

• According to a number of academic researchers and environmental organizations across Canada, this status is a gaping loophole by which mining companies maximize profits and avoid reclamation costs, foisting billions of dollars of liabilities onto the public.

• The Breach spoke to academics, campaigners and regulators to expose for the first time how companies are abusing this loophole—and how it can be fixed.

• “Global leaders must do more than talk. They must act. To make a livable future possible, President Biden and fellow G20 leaders must commit to a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and an ambitious commitment to a just renewable energy transition. They must stop promoting dangerous distractions like Carbon Capture and Storage that benefit no one but the fossil fuel industry. They must end public finance for fossil fuels and shift this to renewable energy. Agreeing to this now will provide momentum for commitments to be made at the UN Climate Negotiations in Dubai later this year. The global pressure is building, exemplified by marches around the world culminating in a March to End Fossil Fuels in NYC September 17th, where thousands will gather to demand Biden phase out fossil fuels and declare a climate emergency. It’s time for world leaders to step up and lead the way towards a just and thriving future.”

Overpopulation

• “We argue that the four-fold population explosion peaking in the 19th century, the growing competition for a stagnant number of elite positions, and increasing state fiscal stress combined to produce an increasingly disgruntled populace and elite, leading to significant internal rebellions,” write the researchers in their published paper.

• Population growth led to overcrowding, poverty, and an overflow of qualified bureaucrats unable to rise up the ranks, the researchers say. The cost of keeping order, adding to burdens associated with depleting silver reserves and opium imports, exacerbated the problems even further.

Finance

• It may seem on first blush that Canada has taken a number of steps to protect its businesses in the past few years, given it has restricted Chinese companies from investing in this country’s critical minerals sector and introduced cybersecurity bills to protect critical infrastructure.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Though this is Gomez’s first sting as commissioner, she knows her way around the building. Gomez spent 12 years in a variety of corporate communications roles before joining the commission, including a stint as Deputy Chief of the International Bureau as well as Senior Legal Advisor to former FCC Chairman William Kennard. Most recently, Gomez served as a senior advisor in Biden’s State Department’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy.

• Julian deserves unwavering support, at the very least because he alerted the world to crimes being committed by the U.S. government. His bravery has been well-documented, even if the government says that he is a danger to American national security.

• The U.S. Justice Department has made something of a sport of attacking people on “national security” grounds. Just look at what has happened in recent years to Tom Drake, Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Daniel Hale and this writer.

• Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter has sued the state of California over a law requiring social media companies to publish their policies for removing offending material such as hate speech, misinformation and harassment.

• The first-of-its-kind legislation was signed into law a year ago by California Gov. Gavin Newsom. In a lawsuit filed Friday against state Attorney General Robert Bonta, X Corp. challenges the “constitutionality and legal validity” of the law, saying it violates the First Amendment.

• Assembly bill 587 requires social media platforms to post their content moderation policies — which they already do — and twice a year submit a report to the state on how they address hate speech, racism, misinformation, foreign political interference and other issues.

• The law, “compels companies to engage in speech against their will, impermissibly interferes with the constitutionally-protected editorial judgments of companies such as X Corp.” and has pressures companies to remove or demonetize “constitutionally-protected speech,” says the lawsuit, filed in the Eastern District Court of California.

• Markus Lanieux thought his prayers had been answered when, in the summer of 2021, his attorney informed him that she had struck a tentative deal with the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office that would secure his freedom after 12 years in prison.

• The 46-year-old son of a sugarcane farmer had been dreaming of this day since he stood in court in stunned silence as the judge sentenced him to life without parole for a crime that ordinarily carried a maximum sentence of two years.

• On Monday, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó confirmed Balázs Orbán’s (no relation to the PM) statement that the Hungarian government would not support Ursula von der Leyen to lead the European Commission for another five years. In 2019, Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orban welcomed that a German mother of seven had been appointed to replace Manfred Weber.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• “Of course, I was haunted by the futility of the process. If we fail to show who they really are, you can throw what we shot in the trash. But if it works, it can help open the eyes of the world to the daily suffering of Afghans and the trauma caused by past and present warlords,” the Egyptian filmmaker says via email. In reality, the idea was almost doomed to be a failed attempt. Accustomed to filming world leaders as a journalist, Nash’at believes that you only get access through a mediator. And he thought he had succeeded in this case too, until his call stopped being answered, just as he was about to travel to Kabul. He went anyway and searched for other contacts. By the time he had run out of money, however, he still hadn’t filmed anything.

• Now, 18 months into the conflict, the Russian president seems to believe he has finally arrived at a convincing explanation that will resolve this logical fallacy: Zelensky’s Jewish heritage is part of a Western plot to disguise the true character of his regime. As Putin explained in an interview with Russian state media on 5 September, “Western managers put an ethnic Jew in charge of Ukraine” in order to “cover up the anti-human nature” of the Ukrainian government.

Censorship/Free Speech

• On Thursday, September 7, Kloop received a letter from Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Culture, Information, Sport and Youth Policy warning that if the outlet didn’t remove a September 1 article within 48 hours its website would be blocked under the country’s false information law. The letter did not specify which information was false and followed a complaint against the outlet by the State Committee for National Security.

• The article cited a jailed opposition politician’s allegations of ill-treatment—which he had posted on his personal Facebook page and was widely reported by Kyrgyz media—and included a rebuttal of the politician’s claims by the country’s penitentiary service.

• Ruhi was arrested by Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps officers in Nowshahr, in the northern Mazandaran Province, on September 22, 2022 after being spotted in a video showing him dancing during protests in the city the day before.

• The protests were among the first of the wave of street demonstrations that took place nationwide following the death in police custody just days earlier of Mahsa Amini, who had been detained in Tehran by the morality police for allegedly violating Iran’s controversial hijab law.

• The Iranian Teachers’ Union’s Coordination Council revealed on September 7 that Khoran, who was being tried in a joint case with several other activists, received a sentence of six years and eight months in prison, 72 lashes, a two-year ban from using social media platforms, and two years of exile to the remote city of Delfan.

• Hey, Techdirt haters: hold onto your hats, because I’m going to praise Elon Musk for doing the right thing, even though many of you insist that my complaints about him are motivated by personal dislike. But, as I’ve noted repeatedly, I’m happy to highlight when he does the right thing, such as here where he is (perhaps surprisingly) challenging a terrible internet law that the bigger internet companies refuse to challenge (because it helps them), and bringing in a big time 1st Amendment lawyer to do so. And, importantly, the challenge seems really well done.

• The amicus brief filed Friday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit supports X’s request for an en banc rehearing by all of the circuit’s judges; a three-judge panel ruled against X in July and its decision was unsealed in August.

• Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed and got a search warrant for the data from the former president’s X account, and both a trial judge and the appeals court ordered Twitter to comply. But the Justice Department also got a nondisclosure order to prevent X from discussing the existence or contents of the search warrant with anyone, including Trump.

• That’s a prior restraint of speech, and the July ruling that upheld it made two critical mistakes. First, the three-judge panel wrote that the judicial review standard of “strict scrutiny” applied, requiring a finding that the government acted to further a compelling governmental interest, and that the action was narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. But instead of taking the Supreme Court’s admonition that prior restraint scrutiny is “the most exacting” First Amendment test, the panel claimed X’s speech on information “obtained only by virtue of its involvement in the government’s investigation” was not entitled to that highest level of protection.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• On September 1, the Russian Ministry of Justice added three journalists—including Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov—to its list of so-called “foreign agents,” accusing them of helping create and distribute “messages and materials” from foreign agents “to an unlimited number of people.”

• In addition to Muratov, the Russia-based editor-in-chief of independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta who was awarded the 2021 Nobel peace prize, the list included Denis Kataev, a journalist with exiled broadcaster Dozhd TV (TV Rain) and French broadcaster Radio France; and Ksenia Larina, a journalist with investigative outlet The Insider. Kataev and Larina live outside Russia.

• Gershkovich has spent almost six months in detention on allegations of espionage — the first U.S. journalist to face such charges since the Soviet era — sending an alarming message to all journalists covering Russia.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Authorities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have executed at least 100 people in 2023, according to human rights watchdog Amnesty International.

• In a statement on Friday, the activists said they documented several cases in which people had been sentenced to death for social media posts or drug-related offenses in “grossly unfair trials that fell far short of international human rights standards.”

• “The authorities’ relentless killing spree raises serious fears for the lives of young men on death row who were under 18 at the time of the crimes,” Amnesty said.

• The charge alleges that this policy was retaliatory against unionizing workers, and that the company also unlawfully silenced workers who asked questions about it.

• “The Employer eliminated a normal channel of communication used by employees to talk about workplace matters for the purpose of preventing them from engaging in Section 7 activity,” the charge states, referring to the section in the National Labor Relations Act that protects union organizing. “The Employer also unlawfully proffered a severance agreement with provisions that restrict employees exercise of their rights under the Act. This severance agreement is unlawful as drafted and is also unlawful because it was presented to workers in retaliation for having engaged in section 7 and/or Union activity.”

• A bunch of those employees weren’t having it, and as representatives from the Grindr union told Wired, 82 out of the company’s 178 employees — or a staggering 46 percent of its total staff — decided to quit in response to the policy that would have required relocation for many. Many more who did not sign the pledge will face termination next year during the second phase of the policy’s rollout, employees said.

• In other words, the fracas is a perfect illustration of post-pandemic workplace dynamics in tech and beyond, as bosses are lobbing increasingly draconian return to office demands at workers who’ve been accustomed to a more flexible arrangement.

• Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Friday that Taliban authorities are perpetrating gender persecution against women and girls in Afghanistan. Following the conclusion of the report, international justice director at HRW Elizabeth Evenson called for coordinated support by from the international community to ensure that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has the resources and needed cooperation to investigate this crime and provide accountability for gender persecution.

• HRW said in a report issued on September 8 that while men in Afghanistan have also been subject to “serious violations” of their human rights, the underlying discrimination against women is evident from the “all-encompassing restrictions targeting women.”

• According to the rights group, the Taliban’s “widespread and systematic attack against women” constitutes “a crime against humanity of persecution targeting women and girls.” An International Criminal Court investigation is needed as it “could provide a path toward accountability for the crime against humanity of gender persecution,” it added.

• “The Taliban’s cruel and methodical denial of the basic rights of women and girls to remove them from public life has received global attention,” said Elizabeth Evenson, international justice director at Human Rights Watch. “Coordinated support by concerned governments is needed to bring the Taliban leaders responsible to justice.”

• The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) defines crimes against humanity as a range of prohibited acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population, with knowledge of the attack. The crime of persecution is the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group based on grounds international law recognizes as impermissible. Persecution committed against people because of sex characteristics, or the social constructs and criteria used to define gender, amounts to gender persecution.

• Proslavery newspaper columnists and southern planters had responded to the huge success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by accusing Stowe of hyperbole and outright falsehood. Benevolent masters, they said, took great care of the enslaved people who worked for them; in some cases, they treated them like family. The violent, inhumane conditions Stowe described, they contended, were fictitious. By naming her sources, and outlining how they had influenced her story, Stowe hoped to prove that her novel was rooted in fact.

• A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an immediate success; its publisher reported selling 90,000 copies by the end of 1854. Abraham Lincoln himself may have read the book, at a crucial turning point in the Civil War: Records indicate that the 16th president checked it out from the Library of Congress on June 16, 1862, and returned it on July 29. Those 43 days correspond with the period during which Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation.

• In 2019, I wrote a story for ProPublica, co-published with The New Yorker, about the dispossession of Black landowners in the South. The story looked at the legal obstacles that families face when they pass their land down without a will, a form of ownership known as heirs’ property. Laws and loopholes allow speculators and developers, among others, to acquire the property out from under families, often at below-market rates. Black Americans lost 90% of their farmland between 1910 and 1997, and the heirs’ property system is one of the primary causes.

• I focused on the Reels family of North Carolina, chronicling how they had lost their land to developers but refused to leave it. This land was their home, their freedom, their livelihood, their history and their legacy. They believed so deeply in their moral claim to the land that they would not accept a ruling that it no longer belonged to them. Their story of losing heirs’ property is common in the South, but their determination to protest was unlike anything I had seen. Two of the brothers, Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, ended up spending eight years in a county jail for refusing to obey a court order to stay off the land. Their sister, Mamie Reels, and their niece, Kim Duhon, dedicated their lives to protecting the property and freeing Melvin and Licurtis.

• It’s great to see hateful people being shut down by little things like, you know, the Constitution. Would that it happened more frequently. Or, more hopefully, would that the mere existence of the Constitution prevent hateful legislators from passing hateful laws that have zero chance of surviving a constitutional challenge.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• While government leaders spent the last three years hyperventilating about TikTok, less talked about has been the dodgy “internet of things” (IOT) space; a broad assortment of mostly overseas-made techno doodads with paper-grade security and privacy standards that Americans connect to home and business networks with reckless abandon.

• Last month, without public input or notice, the California Department of Technology changed its map outlining which communities get “middle mile” infrastructure, which we’ll explain in more detail below. The department reduced its plan from building 10,000 miles of fiber to 8,300 miles. In many cases, this entirely cuts off many communities with the greatest need for access.  These uninformed cuts to critical infrastructure will drastically raise the cost of building high-speed, high-capacity internet networks in unserved and underserved neighborhoods. It also jeopardizes the funds these communities need to build these networks. These changes run counter to the purpose of S.B. 156 and all efforts to close the digital divide.

• What is the middle mile? To understand, it helps to think of broadband infrastructure like a public road system. Local streets connect residential areas to the main streets and highways. These main streets and highways, built for higher speeds and capacity, connect people, goods, and services to one another over long distances.

• In broadband, those main streets and highways are what is considered the “middle mile.” The local roads connecting to each individual home and business are the “last mile.”

Monopolies

• In 1998, Microsoft’s antitrust defense claimed that the tech industry’s dynamism prevented monopoly control. Google could try something similar when its case begins next week.

Copyrights

• The Authors Guild praised the new regulations, which were posted Wednesday, as a “welcome first step” toward deterring the proliferation of computer-generated books on the online retailer’s site. Many writers feared computer-generated books could crowd out traditional works and would be unfair to consumers who didn’t know they were buying AI content.

• In a statement posted on its website, the Guild expressed gratitude toward “the Amazon team for taking our concerns into account and enacting this important step toward ensuring transparency and accountability for AI-generated content.”

• Long time Techdirt readers may recall the iterative changes that Japanese copyright laws have undergone over the course of the last several years. While they aren’t the only changes to have occurred, the topline summary was to turn copyright infringement from a predominantly civil law issue into a criminal one, particularly in cases that prosecutors can identify as not falling under the following provision in the Japanese constitution:

• As part of a voluntary agreement with copyright holders, German Internet providers block a list of structurally infringing websites. Recently, Filmfans.org and Serienfans.org were added to the blocklist, bringing the total number to fourteen. The goal of this scheme is to tackle online piracy but, in this case, the blockade didn’t come as a surprise.

• The Executive Vice-President of the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance recently stated that a basic level, it would like to see the production, marketing, and distribution of any device which can be used to infringe intellectual property rights, made illegal. While that comment should be viewed in context, when taken literally that could mean the end of all piracy. Of course, nothing in this game is so straightforward.

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