● 09.15.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 15/09/2023: More Harm by Windows and TikTok

Posted in News Roundup at 5:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• Along with the increase in the number of [Internet] users, people in Estonia have become more proficient computer users as well.

• This is illustrated by the fact that, compared with 2021, there has been a rise in the number of [Internet] users who have restricted cookies. Saagpakk said that as of this year, there are already 381,000 people in Estonia who have knowingly changed their browser settings to limit the ways websites can collect information about them.

• Humiliation is the central theme of Stephen A. Smith’s memoir, Straight Shooter. Underneath the fame, the chart-topping sports shows, the controversies and arguments, and the ability to talk and talk about all things for so long that his interlocutors can barely get a word in, there exists a man who still remembers—and carries with him wherever he goes—all the ways that he was humiliated as a child.

Science

• The latest Now Youth Future Report has unveiled how young individuals’ interests span across various sectors. Based on the report, the most intriguing industries for young people include healthcare, travel and hospitality, arts and culture, as well as the commerce sector. Intriguingly, parents’ educational background, gender, and personal values are strongly tied to their inclination toward different fields.

• When navigating the vast and unpredictable expanses of outer space, particularly on the alien terrains of distant planets, smart engineering often underlies every major achievement. A paramount example of this is the rocker bogie suspension system. It’s an integral component of NASA’s Mars rovers and has become an iconic feature in its own right. Its success has seen the design adopted by the Indian space program and thousands of hobbyists in turn.

Education

• For instance, they claimed higher levels of competence in calculating a discount on a television and in finding their way to a destination. Two thirds of those most likely to overestimate their mathematical ability were confident they could work out the petrol consumption of a car, compared to just 40% of those least likely to do so.

Hardware

• The chip designer will begin trading on Thursday, in the biggest listing of the year. Investors hope it will rejuvenate demand for new stock offerings.

• At “the size of three 60% keyboards (put together)” or approximately one Cannibal Corpse record on vinyl, this beautifully-executed death metal font-inspired macro pad by [zyumbik] may be better off hanging on the wall than hanging out on the desktop.

• They quickly got their answer: It was an early spring. Arm’s shares opened trading at $56.10, up 10 percent from its initial offering price of $51. Shares quickly soared further, rising 25 percent by the end of trading to close at $63.59 and giving the company a fully diluted valuation of $67.9 billion.s

• The Arm that listed on the Nasdaq Thursday is a very different operation to the one Softbank took private in 2016, because the British chip designer has evolved from licensing its architecture and core designs to developing pre-validated almost-complete processor blueprints that offer a swift and cheap route to developing custom silicon.

• The valuation of Arm at $54.5 billion is also lower than the $60-$70 billion that Softbank was said to be aiming for, a figure based on the estimated value of the proposed sale of Arm to GPU maker Nvidia at the time the deal fell through last year. It is still likely to make it the largest IPO in the US this year, however.

• Republican lawmakers are pressing the Biden administration to completely cut off Huawei Technologies Co. and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. from their American suppliers after Huawei launched a new phone using highly advanced technology the US has been trying to keep out of China’s hands.

• We asked SparkFun employees about their favorite piece of tech they’ve ever owned. Could be anything; a game console, a computer, or even the Motorola Razr they had in 2007. Everyone has something that got them started asking questions about how devices worked, or just something that holds a special place in their heart. Here are ours: [...]

• A rotating table is a super nifty tool for all kinds of photography and videography purposes. [Handy Bear] built a super simple example using some parts from IKEA.

• Vacuum forming is a handy thing to be able to do, and [3DSage] demonstrates how to do a bare-bones system that can form anything smaller than a dinner plate with little more than a 3D printed fitting to a vacuum cleaner, a heat gun, and a trip to the dollar store.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Researchers at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research (LIBR) in Tulsa, Oklahoma, have unveiled a ground-breaking study that holds significant potential for treating anorexia nervosa (AN), a debilitating eating disorder characterized by low body weight, body image concerns, and anxiety.

• Published under the title “The impact of floatation therapy on body image and anxiety in anorexia nervosa: a randomized clinical efficacy trial”

• The worse things get in this country, the more the media shouts about COVID shots and space aliens.

• You can gauge this for yourself.

• Things have actually gotten so bad that COVID is a good distraction again from all of the hyperinflation, Biden sundowning, his criminal son in trouble, China running roughshod over us and the Biden administration, and Ukraine making no progress in their “counter-offensive” despite trillions of dollars in aid.

• From light bloating to DVT (deep vein thrombosis), the list of possible air travel-related ailments runs from the trivial to the potentially fatal, via the downright embarrassing. But it’s stomach upsets and viruses that you’re most likely to pick-up en route. And the danger starts before you’ve even boarded.

• Yet lead is still everywhere — especially in poorer countries. Pure Earth, the largest nonprofit working on lead contamination internationally, recently conducted a massive survey of products in 25 low- and middle-income countries, from Peru to Nigeria to India to the Philippines, to test for lead levels in household goods. In their sample, they found high levels of lead in 52 percent of metal and 45 percent of ceramic foodware (a category including dishes, utensils, pots and pans), as well as 41 percent of house paints and 13 percent of toys.

• Patients are paying the price for America’s failure to invest in primary care. Clinical evidence indicates that when patients have a steady primary care relationship, they tend to be healthier and live longer. But it is too hard for too many Americans to find and keep a primary care doc. By one recent estimate, 100 million Americans face some kind of barrier (physical or financial) to accessing primary care. One in four Americans doesn’t have a regular source of health care, a share that has been steadily growing since 2000.

• But the an advisory panel to the FDA found this week that phenylephrine, the active decongestant in basically every major cold medication, was no better than a placebo. That basically suggests that people have been taking these medications for years, and wasting their money on them, thinking they were getting positive results. On the scale between placebo and carcinogen, I know which one I would want.

• This is going to be a major shake-up for the drug industry either way—the key ingredient in a drug that drives $1.8 billion in sales annually is on the brink of no longer being Generally Recognized as Safe and Effective (GRASE)—a designation that could take it off the market entirely. As an FDA document released this week put it: [...]

• The number of school shootings with casualties in the U.S. hit a new record in the 2021-22 school year and more than doubled from the previous school year, according to recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

• Why it matters: This is now the second consecutive school year in which the U.S. broke this record.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• “AI should not be writing obituaries,” posted one reader. “Pay your damn writers MSN.”

• “The most dystopian part of this is that AI which replaces us will be as obtuse and stupid as this translation,” wrote a redditor, “but for the money men, it’s enough.”

• Identity controls could also be used to dictate what prompts can be passed to an AI model to prevent inputs that attempt to abuse a model’s vulnerabilities, and even to shut down a system altogether if unauthorized parties were to escalate their privileges over it.

• Slowly, over the days that followed, complaints about the new Slack started trickling into our chats. “folks I cannot handle this new version of slack and will be taking the rest of the month off,” one Atlantic staffer said. “I am reverting to sending physical memos on personal letterhead,” posted another. “all my slacks are: I hate the new slack,” slacked Adrienne LaFrance, the magazine’s executive editor. (Later on, she messaged me separately to see if I would write about Slack’s terrible new format.)

• All change is bad when you don’t think you need it. But this change felt distinctive because it laid bare a difficult fact: Office work is now more like social media than like office work.

• On Thursday, the company revealed that all new Chromebooks, along with any machine released from 2021 on, will have 10 years of automatic updates from the date of manufacture, up from eight years previously. Older machines dating back to 2019 will also be able to get the benefits of extended support time as well.

• The US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) nonetheless continued to press Google to support Chromebook hardware for longer periods of time. The group earlier this year issued its Chromebook Churn report, which argued for the benefits of more durable electronics. Long-lived, repairable Chromebooks mean less environmental waste and greater savings for taxpayers because schools, for one, don’t have to replace expired hardware as frequently.

• The Teamsters Union says it is creating a new unit to bring in workers from a growing Atlanta sector… gaming.

• A collage of Corsair employees and Teamsters union members gathered outside of the gaming manufacturing facility in Duluth on Wednesday holding signs that said “Union Strong” and “Vote Teamsters Yes.”

• Microsoft’s recent proposal to split its Teams from a broader business software package and sell it to customers separately with an annual discount wasn’t enough to satisfy regulators’ concerns, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

• The European Commission is preparing a statement of objections to send to the company, which could come in the next few months, the people said.

• At the end of August, Microsoft attempted to allay concerns raised by the EU’s antitrust arm as part of a new investigation into how it ties Teams to its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 packages. The EU’s investigation followed a complaint from Salesforce Inc.’s messaging platform Slack some three years ago.

Windows TCO

• However, this is not the first time that a Microsoft 365 application has suffered an outage. The current incident takes the count to nine occurrences in eight months.

• Cloud security company Wiz.io says there are many unanswered questions raised by Microsoft’s final report into a breach of its Azure cloud platform, pointing out that the threat actor, given the name Storm-0558, may have been forging authentication tokens for more than two years given the timeline in the report.

• Although MGM claims to have dealt with the issue, social media posts say that everything from slot machines to hotel communication systems have been inoperable at MGM venues in Las Vegas for four days. Check-in lines are growing, room access cards and ATMs won’t work, and people are unable to use food, beverage, and free play credits. Regressing to the past, to use manual cash payouts and physical room keys, is proving slow and clunky. (One tiny silver lining: free parking.)

• NoEscape is a ransomware-as-a-service operation that appeared in May and takes a double-extortion approach. That means instead of simply infecting victims’ machines with malware, encrypting their files and demanding a ransom to release the data, the crooks first steal the files before locking them up. They threaten to leak the information, as well as withhold the decryption keys, if the victims don’t pay the ransom.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• As generative AI has reached an inflection point, this open approach to innovation has become a crucial alternative to the more proprietary, often secretive progress being made by a handful of high-profile companies. Yet even as Delangue competes with the AI behemoths, he’s also deftly collaborating with them. In May 2022, Hugging Face announced a deal that allows anyone to run its models on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, giving AI engineers an easy way to deploy software and Microsoft a new revenue stream. Similar partnerships with Amazon Web Services and IBM have followed.

Security

• A key compromised from a crash dump (and the many, many lessons that followed), more examples of mishandling secrets, URL parsing mismatches show path traversal works well in Rust, an old Linux kernel bug shows how brittle code can be (even when it’s heavily audited), an example of keeping OSS projects alive, a quick note on BLASTPASS, and a look at privacy in cars, and more!

• Gigamon’s Precryption technology uses Linux’s eBPF to inspect pre-encryption and post-decryption network traffic for malicious activity.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, libwebp, ruby-loofah, and ruby-rails-html-sanitizer), Fedora (open-vm-tools and salt), Oracle (.NET 7.0, dmidecode, flac, gcc, httpd:2.4, keylime, libcap, librsvg2, and qemu-kvm), Red Hat (.NET 6.0 and .NET 7.0), Slackware (libarchive and mozilla), SUSE (chromium and kernel), and Ubuntu (curl, firefox, ghostscript, open-vm-tools, postgresql-9.5, and thunderbird).

• Akira is a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) group that started operations in March 2023. Since its discovery, the group has claimed over 60 victims, which have typically ranged in the small- to medium-size business scale. Akira has garnered attention for a couple of reasons, such as their retro 1980s-themed website (see figure below) and the considerable demands for ransom payments ranging from $200,000 to $4 million. Akira has been observed obtaining initial malware delivery through several methods, such as leveraging compromised credentials and exploiting weaknesses in virtual private networks (VPN), typically where multi-factor authentication (MFA) is not being used. Like many ransomware groups, they employed the double-extortion technique against their victims by exfiltrating data prior to encryption. It is also believed that the group may contain some affiliation with Conti due to observed overlap in their code and cryptocurrency wallets. The group has targeted multiple sectors, including finance, real estate, manufacturing, and healthcare.

• We’ve all seen these text messages. The texts addressed to someone else pops up on your phone about either a business meeting, veterinarian appointment, or a friendly get-together. You text back “Sorry, wrong number.” And then the unknown person continues the friendly conversation and tries to establish a friendship with you through innocent conversation.

• The scammers behind the fake wrong-number text messages are counting on you to continue the conversation. They want to exploit your friendliness. Once they’ve made a connection, they’ll work to become friends or even cultivate a remote romantic relationship. It’s all a ruse, designed to get you to relax your mistrust so you’ll be more susceptible to falling for their scam, such as a cryptocurrency investment or many others targeting victims.

• MGM Resorts International was hacked by the same group of attackers that breached Caesars Entertainment Inc. weeks earlier, according to four people familiar with the matter.

• The hackers demanded a ransom from MGM, according to two of the people. It wasn’t immediately clear how much ransom was requested or if the hackers deployed ransomware to lock up the company’s files.

• A suspected ransomware attack is affecting Auckland Transport’s Hop card system, impacting card top-ups and leaving customer service centres with limited functionality.

• “Early indications are that this is a ransomware attack however our investigations are ongoing,” an Auckland Transport (AT) spokesperson told 1News.

• No personal or financial data has been accessed.

• AT said in a statement that the incident was isolated and that commuters would still be able to tag on and off, even if their cards are unable to be topped up.

• “Our staff and operators will ensure you are still able to travel.”

• Following the Internet Organised Crime Assessment (IOCTA) 2023, today Europol published the spotlight report “Cyber Attacks: The Apex of Crime-as-a-Service”. It examines developments in cyber-attacks, discussing new methodologies and threats as observed by Europol’s operational analysts. The report also outlines the types of criminal structures that are behind cyber-attacks, and how these increasingly professionalised groups are exploiting changes in geopolitics as part of their modi operandi.

• Malware-based cyber-attacks, specifically ransomware, remain the most prominent threat. These attacks can attain a broad reach and have a significant financial impact on industry. Europol’s spotlight report takes an in-depth look at the nature of malware attacks as well as the ransomware groups’ business structures. The theft of sensitive data could establish itself as the central goal of cyber-attacks, thereby feeding the growing criminal market of personal information.

• As well as shedding light on the most common intrusion tactics used by criminals, the report also highlights the significant boost in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against EU targets. Lastly, among the report’s key findings are the effects the war of aggression against Ukraine and Russia’s internal politics have had on cybercriminals.

• Caesars Entertainment Inc. paid tens of millions of dollars to hackers who broke into the company’s systems in recent weeks and threatened to release the company’s data, according to two people familiar with the matter.

• Caesars is expected to disclose the cyberattack in a regulatory filing soon, the people said. The revelation of the alleged Caesars breach comes as another Las Vegas entertainment giant, MGM Resorts International, announced it had been hacked earlier this week.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Sites will claim to be able to identify AI-generated writing, images, or music. But none can accurately make this claim. Besides obvious errors in realistic-looking photos (extra limbs, garbled text, etc.), there isn’t a reliable way to detect AI-generated content. At the model layer, you can watermark content in a few different ways: introducing patterns in the token distributions or even the sequences of random numbers used to run the network (see this approach by researchers at Stanford). But that’s completely dependent on the model provider enacting the watermark. With the proliferation of open-source models, bad actors have more than their pick at unwatermarked vanilla generators.

• You can probably see where this is going. Disgraced former manufacturer PC Chips released a series of cheap motherboards at the tail end of the 486 era that were found to contain… Seinfeld bass guitar riff… fake cache chips. They didn’t have the capacity or silicon reported on their shells, and offered no cache whatsoever.

Privacy/Surveillance

• More than 200 journalists called on members of the European Parliament on Thursday to introduce an absolute ban on surveillance of the press through spyware in the upcoming European Media Freedom Act.

• No Consent. Under the ePrivacy Directive, the mere access or storage of data on the user’s terminal device is only allowed if users give their free, informed, specific and unambiguous consent. Two out of the three mobile apps did not display a consent banner when launching the app. The third app presented a banner that theoretically gave the complainant the choice of giving or withholding their consent. In reality, the transmission of their personal data began without any interaction on their part – and before they even had a chance to think about consent.

• We took a peep inside the code and found the apps to be little more than slightly modified versions of the official one. That said, there is a small difference that escaped the attention of the Google Play moderators: the infected versions house an additional module. It constantly monitors what’s happening in the messenger and sends masses of data to the spyware creators’ command-and-control server: all contacts, sent and received messages with attached files, names of chats/channels, name and phone number of the account owner — basically the user’s entire correspondence. Even if a user changes their name or phone number, this information also gets sent to the attackers.

• “Our experts discovered several infected apps on Google Play under the guise of Uyghur, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese versions of Telegram. The app descriptions are written in the respective languages and contain images very similar to those on the official Telegram page on Google Play,” the researchers said.

• In a statement to Forbes this week, Signal president Meredith Whittaker said the company was “deeply concerned for anyone who trusted and downloaded this app.” She praised Google for removing “this pernicious malware masquerading as Signal off their platform,” and urged Samsung to follow suit, which it has since.

• But to be a modern child is to be constantly watched by machines. The more time kids spend online, the more information about them is collected by companies seeking to influence their behavior, in the moment and for decades to come. By the time they’re toddlers, many of today’s children already know how to watch videos, play games, take pictures, and FaceTime their grandparents. By the time they are 10, 42 percent of them have a smartphone. By the time they are 12, nearly half use social media. The [Internet] was already ingrained in children’s lives, but the coronavirus pandemic made it essential for remote learning, connecting with friends, and entertainment. Watching online videos has surged past television as the media activity that kids enjoy the most; children cite YouTube as the one site they wouldn’t want to live without.

• But New York Times investigations have revealed that the spyware has also been used by some governments, including Mexico, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, to spy on journalists and human rights activists. The United States blacklisted NSO Group in November 2021.

• This guide is addressed to activists, lawyers and any other interested individuals who wish to access personal data on them or their clients that is processed, or has been processed, by Europol. It provides a brief overview of the political context, advice and information on the process of requesting one’s personal data, relevant resources and a template request.

• One of the things we’ve tried to get across over the years (perhaps unsuccessfully), is that not only are laws to get rid of hate speech almost always abused, they’re also counterproductive in the actual fight against hate. For those who support those laws, they seem to think that without them, that means that there is nothing at all that can be done about “hate speech.” But that’s false. There are all sorts of ways to actually combat hate speech, and part of that is in making it socially and economically unacceptable.

Defence/Aggression

• Junta uses arrests and raids on medical clinics to punish or intimidate doctors and nurses.

• Tatiana Stanovaya, a prominent Russian political analyst who holds a senior position at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, posits that with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin has initiated an era of chaos. According to her perspective, this period of turmoil will culminate in a state of all-out conflict, in which Vladimir Putin will lose his ability to function as a mediator among his vassals and influential figures. The recent extermination of Prigozhin (predicted in one of our previous articles) marked the next stage in the destruction of the regime, which can no longer rely on the usual force mechanisms: arrests, prosecutions and media attacks. Overall, the power system in Russia is becoming more and more unstable and fragile.

• It reported more than 7,000 people at the hotspot on Wednesday evening. Some 5,000 people were due to be transferred by the end of Thursday to Sicily, where there are larger processing facilities.

• In any war there will be a huge need for ammunition and for replacement weapons. The Ukraine war has drained NATO arsenals and stockpiles meant for other contingencies.

• A year into the Ukraine war the US and its allies started to give contracts to stodgy defense contractors to make more ammunition and smart weapons. But problems immediately arose. Many of the production facilities had long since shut down and new ones would have to be created. Supply chains would need to be renewed, but for older weapons the supply chains might not exist any longer. Finding experienced workers and engineers also became a challenge, since there were not so many volunteers for short term contract jobs.

• The corporate news media — with MSNBC being a notable exception — as is their policy, mostly ignored Trump’s most recent threats to kill and imprison President Joe Biden and the other “enemies” of the MAGA movement. Ignoring the danger will not make it disappear or otherwise go away; moreover, to ignore Trumpism and neofascism is to normalize them.

• In fact, the land now known as Iraq is often referred to as the birthplace of the Bible. This land –also called the “cradle of civilization” – is where Christianity was brought to light during the first century. This was through the work of Thomas the Apostle and Mar Addai (Addai of Edessa) and his pupils Aggai and Mari.

• Iraq is where Assyrians, amongst the oldest of Christian communities, have lived for millennia. Since the 7th century Islamic invasion of the region, Christian communities have been persecuted at the hands of Muslims. This persecution peaked in 2014 when the Islamic State (ISIS) invaded Iraq’s Christian towns and villages in an attempt to establish an Islamic caliphate.

• Taiwan is a democratic island that China has long claimed as part of its territory. Hawaii, on the other hand, has been an official U.S. state since 1959.

• TikTok’s launch of its shopping platform, which began testing in the US late last year, prompts a lot of questions: Will the app be able to meaningfully compete against Amazon in the US? How will TikTok’s entrance into e-commerce feed into efforts by some lawmakers to ban the app over concerns about its Chinese parent company, ByteDance? But the one I kept asking myself was more experiential: What is TikTok now?

• To make it a hit, TikTok said, it is actively driving videos with shopping buttons into users’ feed. The company is also, for the time being, giving generous discounts and coupons to users who shop and forgoing commissions from many sellers. TikTok said that it had already signed up 200,000 sellers to TikTok Shop and that more than 100,000 creators could make videos and livestream with shopping buttons.

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

• “I belong here,” I reminded myself, as I drove toward the checkpoint to gain entry to the groundbreaking event for the $2.9 billion Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion (MBSD) project, which was about to begin.

• After holding up my press pass, I was allowed in, though I was not among the select media invited to the event by the state agency responsible for the project, Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA).

• Demand for fossil fuels is set to peak by the end of the decade, according to a new projection from the International Energy Agency — but it might not be enough to curb the worst impacts of climate change or outpace new fossil fuel projects.

• In 2021, Rouet and her neighbors started circulating a petition calling on authorities to speed up their planned electrification of the docks within Marseille’s city limits. As it stands, this part of the port is slated to supply power to two cruise ships by 2025—and allowing ships to run on electricity instead of dirty marine fuel when docked will almost certainly save lives.

• For the last 22 years, the United States has been fighting a global war on terror that, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pakistan to Niger, has been a disaster of the first order. So many of our taxpayer dollars have gone into that “war” and ever rising Pentagon and national security state budgets. Meanwhile, the true war of all wars on planet Earth — think of it as a global war of terror — has simply worsened without a significant enough mobilization to truly deal with it. It should be no surprise then that, in 2023, the most greenhouse gases ever are entering the atmosphere.

• Both dams prevented the coursing Wadi Derna River from flooding the city. However, due to alleged dismal local governance throughout the years, the dams’ restructuring was put on halt in 2002, according to Derna’s current deputy mayor Ahmed Madroud. The pair of infrastructure did not hold against the river and the heavy rains caused by the Mediterranean storm Daniel.

Energy/TransportationDeSmog ☛ Satartia Poisoning ‘Was an Anomaly,’ Says Carbon Capture CEO“I’m not saying don’t tell the truth, I’m saying it’s the level of truth that you give.”This was advice provided by James Millar, president and CEO of the International CCS Knowledge Centre, to an audience attending a panel discussion at a carbon capture conference held in Edmonton, Alberta on Wednesday. Millar spoke freely about countering scientific studies, damage control, and a Mississippi CO2 leak that hospitalized dozens of people.Hackaday ☛ Students Set EV Acceleration World RecordHumans have a need for speed, and students from the Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ) have set a new acceleration record for an electric vehicle with a 0 to 100 km/h (0 to 62 mph) time of 0.956 seconds.OverpopulationNBC ☛ Dry states’ taking Mississippi River water isn’t a new idea, but some mayors want to kill itThe Southwest has long struggled to find enough water for its growing population in a region prone to drought that climate change is making worse. Transporting water from the Mississippi River basin, which drains roughly 40% of the continental United States, has always been a long shot that many say isn’t practical or remotely cost-effective. But Wellenkamp worries that conversation around the idea hasn’t stopped.A formal compact is still far off. The mayors’ support would be just the first step in a lengthy, politically fraught process that would require buy-in from all 10 states along the river and federal approval, experts said. Those states range from left-leaning states like Minnesota, where the river begins, to thoroughly conservative states like Louisiana, where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico.Associated Press ☛ Earth is outside its ‘safe operating space for humanity’ on most key measurements, study saysEarth is exceeding its “safe operating space for humanity” in six of nine key measurements of its health, and two of the remaining three are headed in the wrong direction, a new study said.Earth’s climate, biodiversity, land, freshwater, nutrient pollution and “novel” chemicals (human-made compounds like microplastics and nuclear waste) are all out of whack, a group of international scientists said in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances. Only the acidity of the oceans, the health of the air and the ozone layer are within the boundaries considered safe, and both ocean and air pollution are heading in the wrong direction, the study said.CNN ☛ Conditions on Earth may be moving outside the ‘safe operating space’ for humanity, according to dozens of scientistsThe nine boundaries, first set out in a 2009 paper, aim to establish a set of defined “limits” on changes humans are making to the planet – from pumping out planet-heating pollution to clearing forests for farming. Beyond these limits, the theory goes, the risk of destabilizing conditions on Earth increases dramatically.The limits are designed to be conservative, to enable society to solve the problems before reaching a “very high risk zone,” said Katherine Richardson, a professor in biological oceanography at the University of Copenhagen and a co-author on the report.[Old] University of Texas ☛ UT Austin Leads Review of World Water ResourcesThe study draws on data from satellites, climate models, monitoring networks and almost 200 scientific papers to analyze the Earth’s water supply, how it’s changing in different regions and what’s driving these changes. The study’s co-authors include almost two dozen water experts from around the world.

Finance

• Earlier in her career, Inhorn spent more than three decades researching assisted reproductive technologies and gender relations in the Middle East. She was struck by how many young Arab men valued and looked forward to fatherhood—a sharp contrast with what she heard from young American women, who shared story after story of men “who were simply unready or unwilling to commit.” Inhorn’s research reflected my own experience of freezing my eggs after struggling to find a partner, and after reaching out to her in 2018 to learn more about her work, I have gotten to know her, and learned of her plans to write this book early on.

• Technology and academia are sectors that significant percentages of students seek careers in. Academia has been facing an increasing mismatch between applicants and positions. In the last ten years, the number of Ph.D.s granted by the University has slightly increased amid a nation-wide oversupply of Ph.D.s and a shrinking number of professorial job openings. Meanwhile, recent technology job cuts have led to concern among students in a traditionally robust fields.

• Airtable, the code-free software company that was recently valued at $11.7 billion, today announced that it will lay off 237 people, or 27% of the company. Howie Liu, Airtable’s founder and CEO, says the cuts are part of a plan to focus the company on winning large enterprise clients and get spending under control. The cuts follow a December 2022 layoff that shed 254 people.

• Moody’s on Thursday (Sep 14) cut China’s crisis-hit property sector’s outlook to negative from stable, citing economic growth challenges the ratings agency said would dampen sales despite government support.

• Citigroup will eliminate multiple management positions and cut jobs as the bank seeks to streamline its operations.

• In a press release posted Wednesday, Citi said that the reorganization will give CEO Jane Fraser more direct control as she attempts to improve the company’s stock. As part of the changes, the heads of the bank’s five divisions will report directly to Fraser. Citi will also slash regional leadership roles throughout the bank.

• “We have taken hard, consequential, tough decisions here,” Fraser told investor on Wednesday. “They are not going to be universally popular within our bank. It’s going to make some of our people very uncomfortable. I am absolutely fine with that… it is absolutely the right thing to do for our shareholders.”

• As Citigroup embarks on a sweeping reorganization, support staff in compliance and risk management are among the most likely to lose their jobs, according to sources familiar with the situation.

• Technology staff working on overlapping functions are also at risk of being laid off, one of the people said.

• Citi managers are already convening discussions with employees about potential layoffs, according to the sources, who declined to be identified discussing personnel matters. One-on-one meetings about departures were also starting, one of the sources said.

• Google-parent Alphabet late on Wednesday let go of hundreds of employees from its recruiting team in continuation of its efforts to operate more efficiently as macroeconomic uncertainty looms.

• The company, which faces stiff competition from Microsoft, AWS, IBM, and Oracle in the field of generative AI and artificial intelligence, is looking to trade non-technical roles for engineering and technical talent.

• “As we’ve said, we continue to invest in top engineering and technical talent while also meaningfully slowing the pace of our overall hiring,” a Google spokesperson said in an email statement.

• Google’s parent company Alphabet has once again made layoffs. This time the company has excluded hundreds of employees from its global recruitment team. Alphabet has become the first company to lay off employees in the second quarter of the current financial year. Tech companies started layoffs in the beginning of 2023 and the phase of laying off employees is not over yet.

• Along with Alphabet, many big tech companies including Meta and Amazon have already laid off many employees. According to media reports, Alphabet has decided to eliminate hundreds of posts. This is not part of wide-scale layoffs. The team strength will be retained for important roles. Alphabet cut about 12,000 jobs in recruiting and engineering teams in January. These layoffs of employees were done across the world, which is about 6 percent of the total workforce. Amazon had announced cuts in 18,000 jobs. Microsoft had also shown the way out to 10,000 employees.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Remember how great it was to go back to school in September, starting a fresh new year? Unless you were a victim of bullies, that is.

• Gibson and her husband, John, reportedly had an account on the website Chaturbate where they livestreamed themselves having sex and asked viewers for tips. Those videos were apparently archived on other sites without the Gibsons’ knowledge—which is what the anonymous Republican operative told the Washington Post. That person also shared screenshots with the Associated Press, something Gibson’s lawyer, Daniel Watkins, called “a criminal act.” He told the Post he believed this was a violation of Virginia’s revenge porn law, which makes it a Class 1 misdemeanor to “maliciously” distribute sexual or nude images of someone else with “intent to coerce, harass, or intimidate.”

• I’ve already written about how the draft regulations will do little to ensure more spending on journalism and how they are stacked against small, independent and digital first news outlets. But as I read analysis that suggests that Google got what it wanted – a cap on liability – I fear that the regulations are badly misunderstood. In fact, if you assess the competing policy objectives in the regulations and consider how they might actually play out, it becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that they don’t work and may well lead Google to walk away from news in Canada.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The video is announced with viral English and Arabic language hashtags cherry-picked to maximize outreach. Most of the Arabic language hashtags used by titan5151 have tens of millions of views while three have 7-10 billion views.

• Alex Jones’ personal spending is frustrating families who are trying to collect on the $1.5 billion in judgments against him for calling the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting a hoax.

Censorship/Free Speech

• In January, heavily militarized Georgia State Patrol officers shot and killed Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, a nonviolent activist protesting in the local forest that Cop City would destroy, in a hail of 57 bullets. In the immediate aftermath of their killing, law enforcement claimed that Tortuguita possessed a firearm and fired first. This was a lie. Body camera footage suggests one officer shot another, and autopsies showed Tortuguita had their arms raised and no gunpowder residue on their hands when they were killed.

• Still, she says, she was most concerned about the parents who expressed their fury — not behind a screen, but directly to our faces. They were, Albertalli said, “real people with their full chest and whole face, shouting at their kids’ classmates’ parents.”

• In an interview after this incident, the wounded protestors thanked Druze leader Sheikh Hikmat al-Hajari for his condemnation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s ruling Ba’ath party. The protestors expressed the unity of their community against al-Assad’s party and said the movement to remove him from power would continue to be peaceful. Anti-government protests have been growing for weeks in Sweida, which is home to many members of Syria’s Druze minority. The protestors have called for al-Assad to step down from office after a bloody civil war and an economic crisis.

• Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices. Geofencing dragnets. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.

• Tsurkov, a dual Russian and Israeli citizen, is a doctoral student at Princeton University. New Lines Magazine reported that she was conducting field research on Shia movements in Iraq when she was kidnapped in Baghdad.

• Enforced disappearances have been used to silence activists and protesters and have had a chilling effect on freedom of expression in Iraq, the organizations said.

• As “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk continues his campaign of censorship at Twitter, we’re getting an exhibition in the outsize power of billionaires to shape our politics.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• A leading Russian journalist has had her phone compromised using Israeli spyware, researchers said Wednesday, the latest sign that phone hacking tools are being used to spy on media workers and opposition figures worldwide.

• A joint investigation by Canadian Internet watchdog Citizen Lab and digital rights group Access Now found that the phone of Galina Timchenko had been infected using spyware built by the Israeli company NSO Group. The infection began on or around Feb. 10, 2023, the researchers said. They did not identify who would have deployed it.

• Timchenko — the co-founder and publisher of independent Russian news outlet Meduza — was in Berlin at the time of the hack, the researchers said.

• We spend the hour with acclaimed journalist and author Naomi Klein, whose new book Doppelganger out this week explores what she calls “the mirror world,” a growing right-wing alternate universe of misinformation and conspiracies that, while identifying real problems, opportunistically exploits them to advance a hateful and divisive agenda. Klein explains her initial motivation for the book was her own alter-ego, the author Naomi Wolf, for whom she has often been mistaken. Both Naomis entered public consciousness in the 1990s with books critiquing corporate influence, but in recent years Wolf has become one of the most prominent vaccine deniers and purveyors of COVID-19 misinformation — making the ongoing confusion about their identities a source of frustration. “It’s very destabilizing,” says Klein, who still urges people to seriously engage with the dangerous ideas propagated in mirror worlds, rather than simply look away. “It’s so hard to look at the reality that we are in right now, with the overlay of endless wars and climate disasters and massive inequality. And so whether we’re making up fantastical conspiracy theories or getting lost in our own reflections, it’s all about not looking at that reality that is only bearable if we get outside our own heads and collectively organize.”

• Russian journalist Yevgeny Erlikh, who previously served as the editor-in-chief of a Baltic-based news program for the outlet Current Time, revealed in a Facebook post Thursday that he received a notification from Apple that said his iPhone may have been targeted by “state-sponsored attackers.”

• Meduza’s publisher and general director Galina Timchenko received a similar message in June, shortly before cybersecurity experts determined that her device had been infected with Pegasus spyware.

• Inside Iran, journalists are “seen as a threat,” said Holly Dagres, an Iran analyst with the non-partisan U.S. think tank Atlantic Council, in an email to CPJ. “They help inform the populace about what is happening and uncover the truth. As a result, journalism is kryptonite to authoritarian governments because it can expose systemic issues and lead to them being held to some form of account.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Like it or not, there are a lot of unconstitutional harassment laws on the books. While it’s always nice to see the First Amendment protect speech we like, it’s just as likely to protect speech we don’t like. And harassment laws are often written far more broadly than they should be, given the First Amendment implications.

• The United Auto Workers, headed by a new reform leadership, are set to strike the Big Three automakers at midnight tonight. The entire working class will be watching to see if autoworkers can claw back decades of concessions and win a transformative contract.

• Amini’s death on Sept. 16, 2022, triggered a wave of protests across the country that mushroomed into the largest challenge to the theocratic regime since its founding in 1979. The protesters chanted “Woman, life, freedom,” as well as anti-regime slogans, including “Death to the dictator,” and targeted symbols of the Islamic Republic. Women burned their head scarves in defiance of laws that require women to cover their hair and their bodies.

• After mass arrests and a violent crackdown that killed hundreds of people, the protests eventually faded over several months. Human rights groups say that security forces killed more than 500 people, including dozens of teenagers and children, and that tens of thousands of people were arrested.

• From books in libraries to what is taught in the classroom, measures that authorities are taking in Inner Mongolia — a semi-autonomous region in China — are raising concerns, advocates and experts say, about the preservation of Mongolian culture and language. It is also part of an effort by authorities under China’s leader Xi Jinping to forge a common national identity.

• A report by the SPD’s traffic collision investigation squad later found that Dave had been driving at a peak speed of 74 miles per hour in a 25 mph zone. Investigators concluded that Dave struck Kandula with his Ford SUV at approximately 63 miles per hour, and Kandula was thrown approximately 138 feet.

• In the video, Auderer is heard laughing, apparently at something his interlocutor says.

• In short, the digitisation of schools is something that all education unions now have to keep a close eye on. Indeed, many unions are beginning to do just this – following a growing readiness across all sectors of trade unionism to actively speak-up and push-back on digital issues. However, digital education can be a complex and convoluted topic. This article briefly considers a few ways in which digital technologies are becoming particularly problematic for teachers’ work … highlighting some priorities for education unions over the next few years: [...]

• Thousands of terminated tweeps began suing their former employer en masse as the layoffs began, with lawsuits ranging from violations of California’s WARN act that requires proper notice be given of a planned mass layoff, to layoff discrimination, to claims that it was on the hook for $500 million in contractually obligated severance payments that had gone unpaid.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• For decades AT&T has sought to shovel its broadband network upgrade costs on to the shoulders of other companies. It was the primary catalyst for the net neutrality wars, after AT&T made it clear it wanted to (ab)use its monopoly over broadband access to force companies like Google to pay an extra troll toll if they wanted their traffic to reach AT&T customers.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• California is poised to be the third state in the U.S. (behind New York and Minnesota) to pass “right to repair” legislation after the state’s Right to Repair Act SB 244 passed 50–0 vote in the Assembly followed by a 38–0 vote in the Senate. Those three states alone comprise roughly 20 percent of all American consumers.

• Spotify emailed Digital Music News about its latest music-marketing offering today. According to the relevant resources – among them a formal release, an in-depth Spotify for Artists guide, and a minutes-long video for good measure – the program is currently open to stateside artists with 1,000 or more monthly streams during the last 28 days in at least one of the “target markets.”

• On the latter front, eligible acts and their teams can customize Showcase campaigns to try and reach fans in 36 countries, among them the United States, a number of European nations, and many states in Central and South America.

Monopolies

• During opening arguments, Kenneth Dintzer, deputy director in the DOJ’s civil division, said, “This case is about the future of the internet, whether the Google search engine will ever face meaningful competition to protect that future.” At the heart of the government’s case is Google’s use of contracts to maintain what Dintzer contends is a “default status” market share that tops 89% in the search engine market and 74% in the search ads business.xs

• US Government lawyers have claimed Google pays out more than US$10 billion (A$15.6 billion) each year to ensure it is the default search engine on mobile phones and PCs, as the biggest anti-trust trial against the company kicked off in Washington on Tuesday.

• Google removed fake Signal and Telegram apps from its Play store.

Trademarks

• It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the NCAA has appeared all over Techdirt, representing itself as a jealous and prolific defender of all the intellectual property rights the college athletics organization has, or imagines it has. Like any good cabal, the NCAA is both extremely insular and also aggressive when it comes to anyone else using anything that remotely is or looks like its property.

Copyrights

• This is completely untrue, of course, even if the copyright industry parrots the idea endlessly. Theft involves taking something from someone; downloading material involves making an additional copy – that is, not taking away, but adding. Of course, there is then the argument that this is still stealing because the unauthorised version represents a lost sale. But numerous pieces of research have debunked this simplistic claim. Indeed, there is evidence that after downloading such unauthorised copies, people go on to buy official versions, thus boosting sales, rather than harming them. Needless to say, none of these more subtle points are mentioned in the one-sided Danish presentation. Instead, we get this weirdly moralistic take: [...]

• Last year, the U.S. indicted two Russians who stand accused of operating the book piracy site Z-Library. Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova were arrested in Argentina, where they are currently ‘home confined’ pending their extradition battle. Meanwhile, their lawyers are trying to convince a New York federal court to dismiss the case for a myriad of reasons.

• As we’ve discussed widely, the entire premise of various link tax bills has never made sense. They’re pushed by the media and politicians insisting that Google and Facebook are unfairly “profiting” off of their news. Except that’s never made any sense at all to anyone who looked at the situation carefully.

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