● 09.17.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 17/09/2023: Strikes Persist

Posted in News Roundup at 11:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• While we were debating about whether it even makes any sense to reboot RadioShack, or indeed any brick-and-mortar electronics store in the modern era, Dan Maloney and I stumbled on what probably is the real source of all of our greybeard nostalgia for the store chain: inspiration.

• Nixie tubes come in many shapes and sizes, but in only one color: the warm orange glow that makes them so desirable. They don’t usually come in large numbers, either: a typical clock has four or six; a frequency counter perhaps eight or nine. But some projects go bigger – a lot bigger in [Dalibor Farný]’s case. He built an art installation featuring more than a hundred jumbo-sized nixie tubes that make an entire wall glow orange.

• Tourists often get a bad rap, but, in a broad sense, they have the right idea when it comes to venturing into new places. Given the limited nature of vacations, tourists often are urgent in their exploration. Armed with lists and tagged locations on Google Maps, travelers usually have some semblance of a plan. When it comes to our own cities and towns, we have our preferences and go-tos; we’re always on the go without room for spontaneity. Moving through our hometowns with a renewed sense of wonder and curiosity can be just as restorative as traveling to another destination — that is, if we’re able to detach for a moment from our routines.

• The return of the painting also raises a quirk in the ownership since an insurance company had already paid out for the loss and now owns the work.

• The Groninger Museum insisted that it would have the right of first purchase for the work.

• Turns out: no, you don’t need to have an opinion. Nobody forces you to put things into Like and Don’t-Like columns. If someone asks what you think of something you can always say you don’t know.

• It wasn’t long ago that I started to understand this and ever since then I have been trying to remind myself and others of it. The conversation this week made me realize that I’ve actually made some progress.

• What had once been a way for visitors to find charming, off-the-beaten-path lodgings—and a way for local property owners to make extra money with little neighborhood disruption—has become a global business dominated by corporate investors that in many places threaten the safety and character of residential neighborhoods. How short-term rentals (or STRs) fit into the local landscape varies, but it’s becoming universally accepted that, left uncontrolled, their impact can be immense. In some places, they are making rental housing so lucrative as tourist lodging that it is becoming unavailable and unaffordable to local workers, students, and other residents. Selling for higher prices, they drive up property values and neighborhood tax bills and replace families with a steady stream of strangers—whom locals see as producing more crime and less accountability than traditional renters.

• A new study from research specialists Luminate shows that consumers in the UK affected by the cost of living crisis are twice as likely to cut back on food as entertainment. The study is based on a sample size of 2,000 participants and was presented at the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) annual conference.

Science

• Have you ever thrown a handful of raisins into a tub of sparkling water? Or peanuts into beer? It seems like an altogether strange thing to do, but if you’ve tried it, you’ll have seen the way the raisins dance and tumble in the fluid. As it turns out, there’s some really interesting science at play when you dive into the mechanics of it all. [Saverio Spagnolie] did just that, and even went as far as publishing a paper on the topic.

• When the conditions are just right.

• Our robo-worker future won’t put an end to this annoying labor-policy debate.

Education

• The sculptor Tyler Banks (’12) is getting ready for his first solo show, made possible by four years of unpaid labor at a gallery in SoHo.

Hardware

• A piece of manufacturing news from Tesla Motors caught our eye, that Elon Musk’s car company plans to die-cast major underbody structures — in effect the chassis — for its cars. All the ingredients beloved of the popular tech press are there, a crazy new manufacturing technology coupled with the Musk pixie dust. It’s undeniably a very cool process involving a set of huge presses and advanced 3D-printing for the sand components of the mould, but is it really the breakthrough it’s depicted as? Or has the California company simply scored another PR hit?

• A question for you: if the cathode ray tube had never been invented, what would an oscilloscope look like? We’re not sure ourselves, but it seems like something similar to this mechanical tachyscope display might worked, at least up to a point.

• Huawei’s rotating chairman defends Chinese chip production, says company has to use them no matter what.

• The chairs of four committees are among 10 lawmakers asking how Huawei and SMIC developed advanced chips.

• TOP500 Co-Founder Jack Dongarra recently commented on the sensitive geopolitical environment around the supercomputer listing and benchmarking organisation, drawing attention to potential missing data.

• We absolutely love the impetus of this project, as it definitely sounds like something a Hackaday reader would go through. After finally deciding between a CNC router and a laser cutter, [Eirik Brandal] was planning to “Hello, World” the CNC with something quick and simple, like maybe a few acrylic plates with curves and some electronics. Instead, feature creep took over, “things escalated out of control”, and [Eirik] came up with this intriguing and complicated kinetic sculpture.

• If you build your own devices or hack on devices that someone else has built, you know the feeling of opening a serial terminal and seeing a stream of sensor data coming from your device. However, looking at scrolling numbers gets old fast, and you will soon want to visualize them and store them – which is why experienced makers tend to have a few graph-drawing and data-collecting tools handy, ready to be plugged in and launched at a moment’s notice. Well, if you don’t yet have such a tool in your arsenal, listen to this 16-minute talk by [Alex Whittemore] to learn about a whole bunch of options you might not even know you had!

• “The lathe is the only machine tool that can make copies of itself,” or so the saying goes. The reality is more like, “A skilled machinist can use a lathe to make many of the parts needed to assemble another lathe,” which is still saying quite a lot by is pretty far off the implication that lathes are self-replicating machines. But what about a 3D printer? Could a printer print a copy of itself?

• The Las Vegas Sphere is a large building. It stands 112 meters high and 157 meters wide, and is covered in a full 54,000 square meters of LED displays. That’s a little difficult to recreate at home for the typical maker. A scaled-down version is altogether more achievable though, as demonstrated by [DrZzs & GrZzs].

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• This post is a day late because late Thursday afternoon I had an eye exam. Unfortunately, I should have thought of how painful having my pupils dilated for several hours would make trying to stare at a screen and bang out some Insolence on Thursday evening for the edification of my readers, which is why I gave up. Still, waiting for my eyes to return to normal gave me an extra day to ponder a post on Substack—where else?— that I had come across earlier in the week as a result of another post on Substack—because of course that’s where I saw it—by Dr. Paul “We Want Them Infected” Alexander entitled using his usual rambling word salad, The PLAN revealed: They are Social Darwinists: they say we deserve their digi-tatorship because we, the unfittest, are stupid enough to let them, the fittest. Solutions? I like this substack & wanted“to share; support; the way I approach other people’s work is that I find the nuggets, the truths in them, same for mine when you read my work; we sift the wheat from the chaff.” (See what I mean.) Reading Alexander’s rant and the post that inspired it, entitled The Plan Revealed, led me to contemplate just how essential the attribution of malevolence to the enemy is to a conspiracy theory. Even though the post is nearly a year old, I just had to discuss it.

• “A recent Horizon 2020 research initiative, HBM4EU, measured chemicals in people’s bodies in Europe and detected BPA in the urine of 92 percent of adult participants from 11 European countries,” the agency wrote in a new report.

• The Copenhagen-based EEA said the share of adults exceeding the recommended maximum levels ranged from 71 to 100 percent in the 11 countries studied, referring to levels outlined by the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) in an April review.

• Drought, storms leave high-end crops parched and yellow as yields plunge.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• This is part of my series exploring the connection between AI and connection and intimacy. This is a post about the emotional impact of our work. Sometimes being told no—being judged by our AIs—is as harmful as any toxic content. I’ll get to that in a moment.

• My previous work had been dealing with the smaller Llama2 models (7b and 13b). I decided to explore two things. First, how much better the creative ability of the large Llama2 70b model is. Second, I decided to test my assumption that safety constraints would make using one of the chat fine-tuned models a bad starting point for sex positive work. Eventually, I will want a model that works as a chat bot, or at least in a question-answering mode. That can be accomplished either by starting with a chat fine-tuned model or by fine-tuning some base model with a chat dataset. Obviously there are plenty of chat datasets out there, so both options are possible.

• Developers are right. AI-generated code isn’t as good as something you or I could write. It has bugs, often hard to find because we are giving up some of our control. Even if it’s the correct implementation, it’s one of the slower implementations. But it’s important to remember: these were the same arguments made in the 1950s through 1970s about compilers vs. assemblers.

• The scoop comes from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the tech magnate, simply titled “Elon Musk.” Per its chapter on the launch of the driver assistance tech, Musk would learn firsthand that a curve on Interstate 405 caused Autopilot, thrown off by the road’s faded lane lines, to steer into and “almost hit” oncoming traffic.

• Self-driving cars are being heralded as the wave of the future, but there have been many hiccups along the way. The newest is activists showing how autonomous vehicles are easy to hack with a simple traffic cone.

Windows TCO

• One strip club in Las Vegas is offering free lap dances to customers who are impacted by a cyberattack at MGM Resorts.

• Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club in Las Vegas says it’s offering free luggage storage and airport pickup for people who experience delays in check-in, as well as a complimentary $1,200 platinum VIP membership and lap dances, according to TMZ.

• According to the Justice Department, Pankov made at least $350,000 from cybercrime activities between 2016 and 2019. He is believed to have developed and sold NLBrute, a tool that has been widely used by cybercriminals to obtain credentials.

• Pankov was charged with using NLBrute to obtain the login credentials of tens of thousands of computers located all over the world.

• In addition to smishing and social engineering, the group was also observed using a credential harvesting tool, thoroughly searching through a victim’s internal systems to identify valid login information, using publicly available tools to harvest credentials from internal GitHub repositories, and the open source tool MicroBurst to identify Azure credentials and secrets.

Security

• A subtle flaw in how GitHub handled repository creation and user renaming could have had serious consequences for the open source community, but has now been fixed. Learn more about how it worked

• While attack details remain unknown, Chrome, Edge and Firefox users are being urged to update their browsers as an exploit for CVE-2023-4863 lurks in the wild.

• Google, Microsoft and Mozilla have all moved to patch a critical zero-day flaw affecting their browsers and potentially linked to the dissemination of malicious commercial spyware.

• Mozilla on Tuesday patched an actively exploited zero-day bug affecting the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client.

• Ubuntu Server is one of the more popular operating systems used for container deployments.

Privacy/Surveillance

• When I was banned from most of Reddit, I had a “karma” of over 20,000 which means most users found me incredibly insightful.

• The people doing the banning are toxic, and in the case of /r/Linux, they are puppets of Microsoft.

• I wonder how long the Social Credit Score has actually been around before they admitted to it.

• Ireland’s privacy regulator today issued a fine of €345 million, or $367 million, to TikTok after finding that the company had breached the European Union’s GDPR regulation.

• TikTok has more than 130 million users in the EU. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, or DPC, leads oversight of the company’s privacy practices within the bloc. The reason is TikTok’s EU subsidiary, TikTok Technology Ltd., is incorporated in Ireland.

• News broke on Friday that Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) — the lead privacy regulator for Big Tech companies whose European headquarters are largely in Dublin — was handing TikTok a fine of 345 million euros (roughly $500 million Cdn), following a two-year investigation into its compliance with privacy rules in the latter half of 2020.

• On International Identity Day, we are highlighting that the technology-driven ID systems being implemented around the world are leading to new forms of surveillance and exclusion.

• Last September, PI and its global network of partners launched Identity Crisis – a campaign to change the narrative on identity systems. Around the world PI and our partners have seen ID systems creating and facilitating exclusion, insecurity, and surveillance.

• British authorities have arrested a man who reportedly spied for China at the heart of the government in London, sparking fresh fears over how Beijing gathers intelligence.

Confidentiality

• Casmer spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin at the “Cybersecurity” AWS Startup Showcase event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They dove deep into how data becomes dangerous and discussed how to ensure data is safe to use. (* Disclosure below.)

Defence/Aggression

• The statement demanded that Tehran disclose the current location of nuclear materials from former secret facilities and sought clarification on other ambiguities about Iran’s uranium stockpile.

• The U.N. nuclear watchdog has harshly criticized Iran for effectively barring several of its most experienced inspectors from monitoring the country’s disputed program. The International Atomic Energy Agency is tasked with monitoring a nuclear program that Western nations have long suspected is aimed at eventually developing a nuclear weapon. Iran insists the program is peaceful. Rafael Mariano Grossi, the head of the IAEA, said Iran had “effectively removed about one third of the core group of the Agency’s most experienced inspectors.” Iran linked the move to what it said was an attempt by the United States and three European countries to misuse the body “for their own political purposes.”

• According to him, each printer is the size of a truck. He noted that Ukrainians were trained how to use the printers last week.

• The absurdity is clear. If the presidency is not covered by Section 3, that means a president who engaged in insurrection or aided the “enemies of the United States” is not disqualified from future office-holding even though almost any other federal official who did the same thing would be. Surely an insurrectionist who held the highest office in the land is much more of a menace to the republic than one who was merely a low-level federal bureaucrat. It makes no sense to disqualify the latter, but not the former. Indeed, it might be more logical to penalize insurrectionists who held high office more severely than those who held lower ones.

• The JKPCC president said the ground situation in the valley was different from what the BJP was projecting in the rest of the country.

• “They use it in other states, to make speeches, when the ground situation is different. When Article 370 was abrogated, they made it sound like Jammu and Kashmir was previously an area under Pakistan, which is totally wrong.

• Chitral, now divided into Upper and Lower Chitral districts, consists of high-altitude valleys in the Hindu Kush Mountains. It borders the eastern Afghan provinces of Kunar, Nuristan, and Badakhshan. A narrow strip of Afghan territory separates it from China and Tajikistan, which gives the region great strategic significance.

• The G77+China, a group of developing and emerging countries representing 80 percent of the world’s population, kicked off a summit in Cuba Friday with a call to “change the rules of the game” of the global order.

• The Pentagon’s Central Command has ordered interviews of roughly two dozen more service members who were at the Kabul airport when suicide bombers attacked during U.S. forces’ chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, as criticism persists that the deadly assault could have been stopped.

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

• The top American military officer says North Korea may be able to boost Russia’s supply of artillery munitions for the war in Ukraine. But Army Gen. Mark Milley says that’s not likely to make a big difference. He made the comments as he arrived in Norway for NATO meetings that began Saturday and will focus in part on the conflict. Milley said the recent meeting in Russia between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin will probably lead North Korea to provide Soviet-era 152 mm artillery rounds to Moscow. Milley said that while he doesn’t want to play down the weapons assistance too much, “I doubt that it would be decisive.”

• North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspected Russian nuclear-capable strategic bombers and hypersonic Kinzhal missiles on September 16, accompanied by President Vladimir Putin’s defense minister.

• The first cargo ships have sailed to Ukraine to load grain following the collapse of a deal with Russia, Ukrainian deputy PM said on Saturday. Earlier, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspected Russian nuclear-capable bombers and other warplanes in Russia’s Far East. Follow our live blog for all the latest developments on the war in Ukraine. Read our live blog to see how all the day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• For centuries, Armenians have had a tight relationship with Russia. But those ties have come under strain over the past year and a half as Russia, bogged down in Ukraine, has largely stood aside as its Armenian ally faces ever increasing pressure from Azerbaijan. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), partners of LRT English, report.

• A farmers’ association in Romania has asked the government to continue a ban on Ukrainian grain and related products following a decision by the European Commission to lift restrictions, a move that would mirror actions announced by Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary.

• North Macedonia’s Foreign Ministry has ordered the expulsion of three Russian diplomats, the third such move since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

• Two cargo vessels were headed to Ukrainian ports on September 16, the first to use a temporary corridor to sail into Black Sea ports and load grain for African and Asian markets, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov told Reuters.

• Kyiv said it was continuing offensive operations against Russian forces in the east and south as alarms sounded throughout Ukraine on September 16, while Russia said it shot down two drones outside Moscow overnight as its full-scale invasion of Ukraine approached its 20th month.

• Russian troops have transformed the fighting front into what is likely the largest minefield in the world. Ukrainian sappers are making but slow progress through this sea of death. But they haven’t lost their optimism.

• In an interview, American military analyst Michael Kofman says he believes Ukrainian troops have a realistic chance of a breakthrough in their counteroffensive, assuming they don’t run out of ammunition.

• The bars against sales in Poland, Hungary and Slovakia were in place early Saturday, reviving an issue that has threatened European Union solidarity on Ukraine.

• The Slovakian foreign ministry announced on Thursday that it had expelled a Russian diplomat suspected of violating the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which delineates the rights and responsibilities of diplomats.

• Some 120 nongovernmental groups have publicly appealed to lawmakers in the Kyrgyz parliament, the Supreme Council, to reject adoption of a law that would allow authorities to register organizations as “foreign representatives” in a style that critics say mirrors repressive Russian legislation.

• One American and two Russian space crew members have blasted off aboard a Russian spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a mission to the International Space Station.

• September 17, 2023 5:44 AM

• He inspected Russian nuclear-capable strategic bombers, hypersonic missiles and warships on his visit.

• According to Finnish customs only about 11 cars with Russian licence plates tried to cross the border on Saturday compared to a daily average of 250.

• Muscovites go about their daily lives with little major disruption. But the war’s effects are evident — in the stores, at the movies and in the increasingly repressive environment.

• September 17, 2023 8:57 AM

• North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un will visit several food enterprises as part of his ongoing visit to Russia, Russia’s RIA news agency reported on Sunday.

• Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya has said she will be in New York this week for high-level meetings with officials from the United States and other countries as delegations converge for the UN General Assembly.

• The North Korean leader was shown key elements of the Russian nuclear force as fears grew that the two nations were expanding their military ties.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law Thursday restricting release of her travel and security records after the Legislature wrapped up a special session marked by a fight to more broadly scale back the state Freedom of Information Act.

• The law, which took effect immediately, allows the state to wall off details about the security provided the GOP governor and other constitutional officers, including who travels on the State Police airplane and the cost of individual trips. Proposed changes to the 1967 law protecting the public’s access to government records were among several items Sanders had placed on the agenda for a session that met this week.

Environment

• Post-tropical Cyclone Lee is toppling trees and cutting power to tens of thousands as it lashes New England and eastern Canada. The storm is expected to make landfall Saturday at near hurricane strength in Atlantic Canada and then move farther into the region. It is expected to bring high winds, dangerous storm surge and torrential rains across an enormous swath of territory. Forecasters say it is still dangerous even after being downgraded from a hurricane. In touristy Bar Harbor, Maine, officials closed a parking lot at a pier as high tide moved in and waves crashed against seawalls.

• Today’s links Greenwashing set Canada on fire: A generation of idealistic Canadian kids broke their backs every summer “planting thousands of blowtorches a day.” Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Greenwashing set Canada on fire (permalink) As a teenager growing up in Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their summers tree planting; they’d come back from the bush in September, insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they’d made a new forest with their own blistered hands.

• The state of California has jumped into the ring in the fight to hold some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers accountable for their role in driving the worsening climate crisis. On Friday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against five oil and gas majors including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, and ConocoPhillips as well as their chief lobby group the American Petroleum Institute. The lawsuit alleges these entities deliberately deceived the public about the dangers of fossil fuels and their impact on the climate system, and effectively engineered a delayed societal response to addressing the climate problem.

• California’s filing adds to a growing wave of climate lawsuits brought by cities, counties and states across the country against Exxon and its industry peers. A handful of the state’s coastal communities led the way in this wave of litigation by filing some of the first cases against fossil fuel companies in 2017 and 2018. Now more than three dozen states and municipalities are taking corporate climate polluters to court.

• Yet extreme weather that swings between drought and floods is creating hardships for the region’s tea-growers, who have a similar appreciation for the different kinds of leaf and the environments in which they’re grown to connoisseurs of fine wines.

• There are thousands of dams across New England and many were built decades if not centuries ago, often to help power textile mills, store water or supply irrigation to farms. The concern is they have outlived their usefulness and climate change could bring storms they were never built to withstand.

• “When they were built, the climate was different. The design storms were different,” said Robert Kearns, a climate resilience specialist with the Charles River Watershed Association.

• The logging industry committed a triple crime. First, they stole our old-growth forests. Next, they (literally) planted a time-bomb across Ontario’s north. Finally, they stole the idealism of people who genuinely cared about the environment. They taught a generation that resistance is futile, that anything you do to make a better future is a scam, and you’re a sucker for falling for it. They planted nihilism with every tree.

• Basically, the finding is that there’s no easy way out of the climate change hell hole we dug ourselves into as a species, and that rapid decarbonization is still the best path to preventing the worst impacts of global warming.

Energy/Transportation

• Erin Plante is a private detective who specializes in chasing down stolen cryptocurrency. In March of 2022, she got the biggest assignment of her career: Hackers had broken into an online game called Axie Infinity and made off with over $600 million worth of digital money.

• It was the largest [cryptocurrency] heist in history. And now it was Erin’s job to find that money and get it back.

• Erin’s investigation would lead her to face off against some of the world’s most formidable digital money launderers, whose actions would soon raise alarms at the highest levels of government — even threaten the nuclear security of the entire planet.

• With increasing awareness of past environmental damage from [cryptocurrency] mining, questions arise as to how persistent the problem will be in the future and how taxation can help in addressing this negative externality. We estimate that the global demand for electricity by [cryptocurrency] miners reached that of Australia or Spain, resulting in 0.33% of global CO2 emissions in 2022. Projections suggest sustained future electricity demand and indicate further increases in CO2 emissions if [cryptocurrency] prices significantly increase and the energy efficiency of mining hardware is low. To address global warming, we estimate the corrective excise on the electricity used by [cryptocurrency] miners to be USD 0.045 per kWh, on average. Considering also air pollution costs raises the tax to USD 0.087 per kWh. Country-specific estimates vary depending on their electricity sources.

• Laos state-owned electricity distribution company Électricité du Laos (EDL) has announced that it will suspend electricity supply to [cryptocurrrency] mining operations in the country, citing various reasons such as the struggle to generate enough power amid drought conditions.

• According to the announcement, Laos experienced drought in the first half of 2023. The extreme heat resulted in higher demand for electricity and caused hydropower plants to struggle to generate enough power.

• It’s the latest instance of bitcoin mines, which consume large amounts of electricity to power arrays of computers that spit out sequences of numbers that can unlock bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, profiting off of strain on power grids. Amid the ongoing heat wave, the amount Riot received from ERCOT and TXU when it powered down its mining operation in Rockdale, midway between College Station and Austin, in August was more than it took in so-called power and demand response credits in all of 2022, according to a company statement.

• The YouLess is a device that can help you monitor energy usage. It works on so called smart meters using a P1 port, it can monitor solar panels but it also works with regular old analog meters. I have an old style analog meter but I like gadgets and monitoring / reducing my energy usage just as much as the next guy so I bought one. It has an optical sensor that you paste (with tape) on your meter and that detects a little black bar on the rotor disc and using a rpm factor on your meter it calculates the electricity used. I has some trouble with the device when I set it up, it turned out to be aligned wrongly. It sometimes missed the black bar, so the numbers were incorrect. I wrote a little application using Qt and QML to show the raw light sensor values in a line graph to help me align the YouLess correctly. This post tells you more about the application, which of course is open source.

Finance

• If the United Auto Workers strike isn’t settled soon, consumers will see higher prices for new cars — and not just the ones from Detroit. On Friday, union members picketed outside a Ford plant, a General Motors plant, and a Stellantis factory. Right now, the automakers have big inventories, so most analysts say there shouldn’t be an immediate shortage of cars.

• Airtable, a low-code platform for building collaborative apps, has announced to lay off about 27 per cent of the workforce, or 237 employees, in the second round of job cuts. According to Forbes, the cuts are part of a strategy to focus the company on winning large enterprise clients while also controlling spending.

• “The market has tipped towards favouring efficient growth over growth at all costs. We must operate the business in a more mature way that puts us on a path to become a public company and to have durability and efficiency in how we grow,” Howie Liu, Airtable’s founder and CEO, was quoted as saying.

• As recently as the early Nineties, when the great cities of the Midwest and East Coast were careening toward what seemed like an inevitable downturn, the urban agglomerations along the Pacific coast offered a demonstrably brighter urban future. From San Diego to the Puget Sound, urban centres along America’s western edge continued to thrive and expand as migrants from other parts of the country, and the world, crowded in.

• In the process, the Pacific cities seized the economic initiative. The West Coast became home to the country’s premier trade entrepôt and its dominant entertainment and technology centres, and home to five of the world’s six most valuable companies.

• Yet now these same cities — despite differing histories and industrial mixes — face a precipitous decline. Never before have all the burgeoning cities of the future, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, started to shrink. This is, at least in part, a reaction to high prices, relentless property crime, homelessness — San Francisco’s rate of homelessness, for example, is twelve times the national average — and diminished economic opportunity, particularly for the middle and working classes.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The US government believes China’s Defense Minister Li Shangfu is the subject of an investigation by Beijing and has been relieved of his duties, the Financial Times reported late Thursday citing American officials.

• Reports say the probe is linked to military procurement and will likely see him removed.

• The Colorado congresswoman previously denied vaping during the performance, but could be seen doing so on surveillance video.

• This week in Congress: a Biden impeachment inquiry, a frozen House of Representatives, and a looming government shutdown.

• The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is also a clear challenge, experts say, to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a massive infrastructure corridor that has granted China considerable influence throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America since 2013. But now, amid growing accusations of predatory lending, some BRI partners are demanding to renegotiate the terms of their loans. Italy is poised to pull out of the BRI altogether.

• Chinese Defence Minister Li Shangfu has not been seen in public for more than two weeks. The disappearance of this top official close to President Xi Jinping comes two months after that of now-former foreign affairs minister Qin Gang, and follows the dismissal of a pair of influential military generals. For some observers, Li’s vanishing is likely linked to corruption, while others see it as a sign of intense political battles hidden from outside eyes.

• The US government may try to prosecute you for violating sites’ terms of service. But it won’t be handling its own actions the same way.

• A string of dropped corruption cases in Malaysia has raised questions over Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s commitment to fighting graft, with lawmakers and analysts warning it could risk alienating voters, deepen divisions within the ruling coalition, and jeopardise his reform agenda.

• Hong Kong’s sky will light up with more than 30,000 fireworks on October 1, as the city puts on a HK$18 million fireworks display to celebrate China’s National Day for the first time since 2018. The Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau will coordinate a 23-minute pyrotechnics show, sponsored by Hong Kong Telecom and FWD Insurance [...]

• The US government believes China’s Defense Minister Li Shangfu is the subject of an investigation by Beijing and has been relieved of his duties, The Financial Times reported late Thursday citing American officials.

• They stoke uncertainty about his rule as an internal security clampdown trumps international engagement.

• Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on Saturday detained a dual national suspected of “trying to organise unrest and sabotage”, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported, amid heightened security to thwart planned protests a year after a young woman’s death in police custody.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The Covid-19 vaccine misinformation policies of Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, were not effective in combating misinformation and its overall design is more to blame for this rather than just algorithms, a new study has revealed.

• The study, led by researchers at the George Washington University in the US and published in the journal Science Advances, found that Facebook’s efforts were undermined by the core design features of the platform itself.

• The work of trying to minimize the influence of harmful misinformation is both exhausting and essential. Big pushes, like the one Meta undertook in late 2020 to begin removing more misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines while promoting content from authoritative public health and scientific sources, always seem too late and undertaken in response to public or institutional pressure. And they require a sustained effort that platforms don’t always seem willing to maintain. A question has always lingered in the background of these big public moments where major platforms get tough on online harms: Did these efforts actually work?

• A new study, published this week in Science Advances, argues that Meta’s Covid-19 policies may not have been effective. Though Meta’s decision to remove more content did result in the overall volume of anti-vaccine content on Facebook decreasing, the study found that engagement may have “shifted, rather than decreased” outright.

Censorship/Free Speech

• So, last Friday, the 5th Circuit released its opinion in the appeal of an absolutely ridiculous Louisiana federal court ruling that insisted large parts of the federal government were engaged in some widespread censorial conspiracy with social media, and barred large parts of the government from talking to social media companies and even academic researchers.

• Users of the social platform, now officially known as X, are made to wait on average about two and a half seconds after clicking on links to Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Substack, the analysis found. That’s more than 60 times longer than the average wait for links to other sites.

• While not included in our full tests, the delay appears to also include links to the new Threads platform, which like Facebook and Instagram is owned by Meta.

• Users who clicked a link on Musk’s website, now called X, for one of the targeted websites were made to wait about five seconds before seeing the page, according to tests conducted Tuesday by The Washington Post.

• The delayed websites included X’s online rivals Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and Substack, as well as the Reuters wire service and the Times. All of them have previously been singled out by Musk for ridicule or attack.

• In 1934, Hollywood photographer A.L. “Whitey” Schafer took this staged photo which mocked the Motion Picture Production Code (aka Hays Code), a set of moral guidelines that were applied to American films that were released from 1934 to 1968. The photo attempted to violate as many rules as possible in one image.

• On the other hand, requiring that an employee engage in specifically religious practices (e.g., attend religious services) is indeed generally treated as religious discrimination. I take it that López Prater’s “non-conformance” argument (as opposed to her “Hamline would not have labeled the act of showing the images ‘Islamophobic’ if she were Muslim” argument) is that requiring that an employee avoid what some religious people see as blasphemy should be treated similarly to a requirement that an employee affirmatively engage in religious worship or similar behavior. The court didn’t specifically deal with this question, and I take it that it remains open, perhaps on a motion for summary judgment or on an eventual appeal.

• In the SpaceX and Tesla CEO’s world, “unfettered free speech,” as Isaacson wrote, “does not extend to the workplace.”

• On Friday, UN experts issued a formal appeal to Saudi Arabia, urging the revocation of the death sentence imposed on Mohammad Al Ghamdi, who stands accused of engaging in social media dissent. Saudi security services took Ghamdi into custody on June 11, facing a series of criminal allegations related to his social media commentary.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Thanks entirely to the brilliance of Chris Hedges in leading me through the material, I think this is the most clear outline of the Assange case which I have ever given.

• Kiran Nazish, founding director of the Coalition For Women In Journalism, a nonprofit that assists women and nonbinary journalists, said such online campaigns are a serious threat for those in Iran and in exile.

• The threat of arrest and online harassment has increased since the mass protests in 2022 over the death of a young Kurdish woman in police custody.

• The Hong Kong Free Press newsroom is powered by monthly contributors who help keep our content paywall-free for all readers. Now, there are over 15 ways to support our team, including Patreon.

• Nordstar says it is putting its Metroland Media Group division into creditor protection under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act as part of a restructuring plan.

• The Metroland business owns dozens of community newspapers delivered alongside advertising flyers. Nordstar says it is getting out of the flyer business entirely and converting the newspapers to a digital-only format.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The IAM says on its website that the nonprofit group has been working in Afghanistan only to improve lives and build local health, community development and education capacity. “We are a partnership between the people of Afghanistan and international Christian volunteers, and we have been working together since 1966.”

• The Taliban have imposed their harsh interpretation of Islamic law, or Shariah, since seizing power from a U.S.-backed Afghan government in Kabul two years ago. They have barred teenage girls from schools beyond the sixth grade nationwide and ordered most female government employees to stay home.

• The fundamentalist Taliban, who retook control of Afghanistan as U.S.-led international forces withdrew in 2021, have imposed a particularly harsh form of Shari’a law on the country when they have been in power at various points in the past four decades.

• The internationally unrecognized Taliban-led government in Afghanistan has been accused by UN and other international officials of grave human rights offenses against non-Muslims, women, and minorities.

• Well, this is a bit of a doozy. This case — via the Institute for Justice — involves a possible First Amendment violation but v

• Hundreds of people have gathered in central London to mark the anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini. The 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman died in police custody last year on Sept. 16, 2022. Her death sparked worldwide protests against Iran’s conservative Islamic theocracy. The crowds Saturday held her portrait and rallied around the memory of a young woman who died after she was arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s mandatory headscarf law. Similar protests took place in Rome and Berlin. Authorities in Iran sought to prevent the anniversary from reigniting the protests that gripped the country last year. A Kurdish rights group reported a widespread general strike in Kurdish areas on Saturday, circulating video and photos of largely empty streets and shuttered shops.

• CNN — The United Auto Workers strike isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s part of a growing movement of US workers walking off the job. From Hollywood writers to nurses, factory workers, and Starbucks baristas, thousands of workers have gone on strike in recent months to demand higher pay and improved benefits and working conditions….

• In an Instagram post, the “A League of Their Own” star shared “advice” for the “Charlie’s Angel” actress regarding the return of her talk show.

• The United Auto Workers said it had “reasonably productive conversations with Ford” but did not mention G.M. or Stellantis.

• What’s being called the “summer of strikes” comes at a time when workers increasingly fear new technologies will threaten their jobs.

• Carmakers are anxious to keep costs down as they ramp up electric vehicle manufacturing, while striking workers want to preserve jobs as the industry shifts to batteries.

• [...]

• The established carmakers — General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler, Jeep and Ram — are trying to defend their profits and their place in the market in the face of stiff competition from Tesla and foreign automakers. Some executives and analysts have characterized what is happening in the industry as the biggest technological transformation since Henry Ford’s moving assembly line started up at the beginning of the 20th century.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Leading comms tech provider launches 7730 Service Interconnect router platforms boasting ‘revolutionary’ approach to delivering the power and benefits of service routing into IP access and aggregation networks

• To be clear: SpaceX’s Starlink service is a game changer for those out of range of broadband access. Getting several hundred megabits per second in the middle of nowhere is a decidedly good thing, assuming you can afford the $600 hardware and $110 a month subscription cost.

Strikes

• Employers with at least four workers will be required to disclose salary ranges for any job advertised externally to the public or internally to workers interested in a promotion or transfer.

• Pay transparency, supporters say, will prevent employers from offering some job candidates less or more money based on age, gender, race or other factors not related to their skills.

• This morning, the United Auto Workers launched a landmark strike against the Big Three automakers for their refusal to provide adequate pay and job security. Meanwhile, over the last year, the automakers have authorized $5 billion in stock buybacks.

Monopolies

Patents

• The Federal Circuit recently vacated a jury verdict of non-infringement in the long-running design patent dispute between outdoor apparel companies Columbia Sportswear and Seirus Innovative Accessories. Columbia Sportswear North America, Inc. v. Seirus Innovative Accessories, Inc., No. 2021-2299, — F.4th — (Fed. Cir. Sept. 15, 2023). The Federal Circuit held that “comparison prior art” used for infringement analysis must be tied to the same article of manufacture as that claimed.  The lower court thus erred by permitting the jury to consider additional references. The decision benefits design patent holders – making it easier to prove infringement and also places more weight on skillful decisions made during prosecution to define the article of manufacture.

• Columbia owns U.S. Design Patent No. D657,093, which claims an ornamental design for a heat reflective material featuring contrasting wavy lines. Seirus sells gloves and other products incorporating its HeatWave material, which features similar wavy lines. Columbia sued Seirus for infringing the ‘D’093 patent in Oregon federal court.

Copyrights

• Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN is well aware of the latest piracy trends and the group knows its classics too. This week, BREIN reports that several Usenet uploaders have settled for thousands of euros after being tracked down. In recent weeks, four people associated with a NZB community were caught and all agreed to a private deal instead of going to court.

• IMPALA responds to Deezer and UMG’s proposal on streaming — and points to its own plan to boost diversity and improve revenues for all artists.

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