● 09.18.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Leftover Links 18/09/2023: A Week’s Catchup, Climate Focus

Posted in News Roundup at 12:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leftovers

• Hyprland is an open source Wayland compositor based on wlroots, a project I started back in 2017 to make it easier to build good Wayland compositors. It’s a project which is loved by its users for its emphasis on customization and “eye candy” – beautiful graphics and animations, each configuration tailored to the unique look and feel imagined by the user who creates it. It’s a very exciting project!

• Online dating platform Tinder on Sunday said it has partnered with the not-for-profit organisation Centre for Social Research to offer safety guidance to its users. The additional safety guide, along with the existing 15 safety features on the app, is part of Tinder’s efforts to ensure the safety of its users, utilising NGO CSR India’s insights amid the intersection of technology and violence against women, Tinder told PTI.

• We see the appointment of a receiver as a positive development, as it will help to ensure that AFRINIC’s members keep receiving registry services and benefit from related activities in the coming months. The establishment of an election timeline puts the organization on a path towards resolving its previous governance issues, which is to the benefit of both the staff and the AFRINIC community. These measures also allow AFRINIC to honour its commitments as set out in Internet Coordination Policy 2 (ICP-2), in the NRO MOU with the other RIRs, and the ASO MOU between the RIRs and ICANN to ensure the operation of the Joint Internet Numbers Registry.

Science

Education

• By next year, student-loan payments will drop out of growth calculations, because monthly bills will be part of the baseline. Yet for folk struggling to make payments, the holiday will be difficult to forget. According to Dan Collier of the University of Memphis, who studies the impact of student debt, many borrowers saved money to buy a first home or decided that they could afford to have more children.

• Most Americans believe universities should serve the public good. They’re meant to cultivate critical-thinking skills and equip young people with the knowledge, experience, and values to keep society moving along paths of progress. Today, though, other interests capture universities, steering them away from their promised broad social benefit. Allegations of improper influence due to the presence of corporations, donors, and politicians in higher education abound; we’ve seen claims of energy-sector donors biasing climate research and dogmatic politicians undermining anti-racism initiatives and academic freedoms. Meanwhile, the issues that students, faculty, and staff care about most — quality, affordable education, safe and equitable campuses, institutional sustainability — receive what we believe is lackluster attention from university governing boards.

• The good news is that companies can get all this information in a better way: the take-home coding exercise. Give people a setup repo with a starter dev environment and problem setup. Then ask them to spend one hour on it and commit their code. The actual interview can then be them talking through how they approached the problem and their code. This is a much closer proxy to day-to-day work, and you’ll learn more about them.

• Skydio has long piqued the interest of the drone industry as an American drone maker that could disrupt a market that’s otherwise largely dominated by DJI. And for folks looking to see behind the Skydio current, here’s a golden opportunity: a free-to-attend keynote hosted by Skydio itself.

Hardware

• Normally, 3D printing with filament takes temperatures of around 200 °C. However, there are some crafting plastics that melts in hot water at 60 °C. You can get spools of similar plastic that prints at very low temperatures, and some 3D printing pens use it. [Lost in Tech] picked up a spool of the stuff meant for medical printing and found that printing with it was a challenge. You can watch a video of the results below.

• For those living before the invention of the transistor, the modern world must appear almost magical. Computers are everywhere now and are much more reliable, but there are other less obvious changes as well. Someone from that time would have needed a huge clunky machine like a motor-generator set to convert DC voltages, but we can do it with ease using a few integrated circuits. This one can take a huge range of input voltages to output a constant 5V.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• That year, the US witnessed a grim milestone: for the first time ever, drug overdoses killed more than 100,000 people across the country in one single year.

• Of those deaths, more than 66% were tied to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin.

• Once the rats have matured and fattened up to around 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) or more, they can be taken to market and sold for 20,000 to 25,000 riel (about $5-6) per head.

• The coronavirus has long since lapsed as a primary concern for most Americans. Can we make progress on a problem when so few seem to care?

• The last three and a half years, during which the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, have been highly educational to me. As much as I thought I knew in early 2020, as news stories about an outbreak of a mysterious infectious pneumonia in China that was found to be due to a novel coronavirus, watching in real time what happened. Although by 2020 I had given up my rather naïve belief from many years ago that mass death from a pandemic of a deadly virus for which a vaccine was developed would fatally erode antivax beliefs among most people and thereby weaken the antivaccine movement, even I never anticipated how massively the pandemic and public health responses to it did exactly the opposite: Strengthen the antivaccine movement beyond anything it had ever achieved before and normalize antivaccine beliefs in our political discourse. By 2020, I had also come to understand how a combination of antivaccine messaging equating “resistance” to vaccine mandates (e.g., “do not comply,” which I will get to in a moment) had shifted the political center of gravity of the antivaccine movement sharply right over the preceding decade, but the pandemic taught me that the situation could get so much worse, with an increasing affinity between antivax beliefs and outright fascism. Perhaps most disturbing, I discovered that the pathway from having contrarian beliefs about public health to becoming a full-on pandemic conspiracy theorist antivaxxer was much shorter and easier than I had ever suspected, as I observed in my year-end post for 2020, later speculating why so many physicians are attracted to “contrarian” beliefs and then so easily slide from these beliefs deeper and deeper into conspiracy theory and science denial prodded by audience capture.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• OK, it’s official — everyone hates San Francisco’s self-driving taxi fleet. Or at least so it seems, if this video of someone vandalizing a Cruise robotaxi is an accurate reflection of the public’s sentiment. We’ve been covering the increasingly fraught relationship between Cruise and San Franciscans for a while now — between their cabs crashing into semis and being used for — ahem — non-transportation purposes, then crashing into fire trucks and eventually having their test fleet cut in half by regulators, Cruise really seems to be taking it on the chin.

• It’s an acknowledged problem with the mobile phone industry and particularly within the Android ecosystem, that the operating system support on a typical device can persist for far too short a time, leaving the user without critical security updates. With the rise of the Chromebook, this has moved into larger devices, with schools and other institutions left with piles of what’s essentially e-waste.

• The [MIT Technology Review] has just released its annual list of the top innovators under the age of 35, and there are some interesting people on this list of the annoyingly accomplished at a young age. Like [Lerrel Pinto], an associate professor of computer science at NY University. His work focuses on teaching robots how to do things in the home by failing.

• Airtable, a low-code platform for building collaborative apps, has announced to lay off about 27% of the workforce, or 237 employees, in the second round of job cuts.

• Earlier this week, MSN faced backlash for publishing an obituary for former NBA player Brandon Hunter, which was later taken down due to its offensive content. The obituary, believed to be possibly generated by AI, not only carried a derogatory headline but was also fraught with nonsensical and grammatical errors.

• The obituary for former NBA player Brandon Hunter, which appeared on MSN, created a stir as it referred to the basketball forward as “useless” in its headline. Although Microsoft, the owner of the news aggregation site, has not officially confirmed the use of AI in generating the content, reports strongly suggest this possibility.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation approved the incubation of two new projects, “SapientML” and “Intersectional Fairness” on August 24 to encourage developers worldwide to further experiment and innovate with AI and machine learning technologies, with plans to host future activities like hackathons to engage and build a community to promote open source AI.

• With these projects, Fujitsu and the Linux Foundation aim to further democratize AI to realize a world in which developers everywhere can easily and securely use the latest technologies on open platforms to create new applications and find innovative solutions to challenges facing business and society.

Security

• Malicious actors could exploit various memory corruption vulnerabilities impacting the ncurses programming library to facilitate code execution attacks against systems running on Linux and macOS, reports The Hacker News.

• Patches have already been issued for the identified flaws, collectively tracked as CVE-2023-29491, which include a denial-of-service with canceled strings bug, an off-by-one error, a stack information leak vulnerability, a heap out-of-bounds during terminfo database file parsing bug, and a stack information leak flaw, according to a Microsoft Threat Intelligence report.

• A hidden malware operation has infiltrated the Linux community for a solid three years without raising alarms, says Kaspersky, a Russian cybersecurity firm. Despite Linux being hailed as a secure alternative to mainstream operating systems like Windows and macOS, it appears even the cybersecurity experts missed this one.

• This quiet attack particularly exploited a so-called free download manager designed for Debian users. What’s unusual? This software was laced with malicious code way back since January 2020. It contained a hidden post-installation script that set off the malware, complete with comments in both Russian and Ukrainian.

• Security researchers at Kaspersky have discovered a seemingly benign website has been serving Linux users with malware for over three years.

• The official Free Download Manager website (freedownloadmanager[.]org) initially only offered a non-harmful version of the Linux Free Download Manager on a Debian repository for several years.

• The first time DataBreaches remembers hearing about the man who calls himself “USDoD” was when he posted a sales listing for member data from InfraGard. He had not only managed to acquire data on 80,000 members of an organization dedicated to protecting critical infrastructure, but his revelation of his method exposed some embarrassingly inept security on InfraGard’s part. But that incident and his newest leak involving 3,200 vendors of Airbus aren’t the only reasons to pay attention to him. In a somewhat rambling interview with DataBreaches, conducted over several days online, USDoD reveals some of his current operations and future plans with respect to US defense agencies and firms.

• Trygg-Hansa’s security flaws have meant that information on 650,000 customers has been accessible via the internet. The Privacy Protection Agency (IMY) is now issuing an administrative sanction fee of SEK 35 million against the company.

• A financial penalty of $3,000 was imposed on Autobahn Rent A Car for failing to put in place reasonable security arrangements to protect the personal data in its possession or under its control. Directions were also issued to strengthen access control measures to administrator accounts and to conduct reasonable security review of technical and administrative arrangements for the protection of personal data.

• Separately, a financial penalty of $9,000 was also imposed on Century Evergreen for failing to put in place reasonable security arrangements to protect the personal data of jobseekers in its possession or under its control.

• The BlackCat (ALPHV) ransomware gang now uses stolen Microsoft accounts and the recently spotted Sphynx encryptor to encrypt targets’ Azure cloud storage.

• While investigating a recent breach, Sophos X-Ops incident responders discovered that the attackers used a new Sphynx variant with added support for using custom credentials.

• In a recent turn of events, the claims portal for the globally renowned cryptocurrency exchange FTX has resumed its full-fledged operation. The operations were suspended following a security incident that took place with Kroll, the third-party agent responsible for handling the creditor claims amidst the ongoing FTX bankruptcy.

• The cybersecurity incident is just one of the myriad challenges FTX has had to navigate as it deals with its bankruptcy case.

• It used to be easier.

• Christopher Delzotto remembers the days not so long ago when many online financial scams could be spotted just by reading them. They were full of misspellings, poor grammar and awkward phrasing — all signs that they were created in other countries where a hacker’s first language isn’t English.

• The rise of artificial intelligence has changed that, offering tools that help cybercriminals clean up their language and opening new doors for hackers to break into computer networks through emails that trick recipients into sharing personal information or by fabricating images or videos used to extort victims.

• Microsoft analysts have revealed that Iranian state-backed hackers have been actively targeting satellite, defense, and pharmaceutical companies worldwide.

• The Australian government may be liable for tens of millions of dollars in compensation to asylum seekers after it posted their personal details online while they were in immigration detention.

• The mass data breach, discovered by Guardian Australia in 2014, resulted in information being used, in some cases, to allegedly threaten asylum seekers, or persecute and even jail their family members.

• Of the nearly 10,000 asylum seekers whose privacy was breached nearly a decade ago, those who suffered “extreme loss and damage” will each be eligible for more than $20,000 in compensation after a decision from the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

• Josh and Kurt talk about the weird world we live in how where we can’t control a lot of our hardware. We don’t really have control over most devices we interact with on a daily basis. The conversation shifts into a question of how can we decide what to trust and where. It’s a very strange problem we experience now.

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, libwebp, and thunderbird), Fedora (chromium, curl, flac, libtommath, libwebp, matrix-synapse, python-matrix-common, redis, and rust-pythonize), Gentoo (binwalk, ghostscript, python-requests, rar, samba, and wireshark), Oracle (.NET 6.0, kernel, and kernel-container), Slackware (python3), and SUSE (firefox).

Privacy/SurveillanceUS News And World Report ☛ 2023-09-13 [Older] Dutch Group Summons X to Appear in Court Over Alleged Data Misuse New Statesman ☛ Now mine has been stolen, I realise how personal a phone isHome, I google “what to do when your phone is stolen”. I wipe my phone remotely. I cancel my SIM and order a new one. I borrow my flatmate’s phone to call my banks (why do I have four?!): because I use Apple Pay, they cancel my cards as a precaution. I file a police report, though I know nothing will come of it, and an insurance claim; they tell me they will phone the next working day, and I hope they are cleverer than that. I change the passwords on my emails and social media – though I know my phone’s new “owners” likely aren’t interested in my data, just what little money they can get for the handset (and the joke’s on them, really, because the battery life is dire). At this point, I’d buy it from them myself, just to save the hassle.Hollywood Reporter ☛ TikTok Hit With $368M Fine Under Europe’s Strict Data Privacy RulesThe investigation found that the sign-up process for teen users resulted in settings that made their accounts public by default, allowing anyone to view and comment on their videos. Those default settings also posed a risk to children under 13 who gained access to the platform even though they’re not allowed.Computer World ☛ UK rolls back controversial encryption rules of Online Safety BillCompanies will not be required to scan encrypted messages until it is “technically feasible and where technology has been accredited as meeting minimum standards of accuracy in detecting only child sexual abuse and exploitation content,” said Stephen Parkinson, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Arts and Heritage, in a planned statement during the bill’s third reading in the House of Lords on Wednesday afternoon.Site36 ☛ Asylum seekers: EU fingerprint database to be expanded as it reaches capacity limitNL Times ☛ 2023-09-15 [Older] TikTok fined €345 million in data privacy case partially launched by Dutch regulator Engadget ☛ 2023-09-15 [Older] European regulators fine TikTok $368 million over failing to protect the data of young users JURIST ☛ Ireland regulator fines TikTok record €345 million for child data privacy violationsThe Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced on Friday a €345m million fine against social media giant TikTok for severe breaches of data protection regulations. The DPC’s investigation into TikTok’s practices was prompted by escalating concerns over the platform’s handling of personal data, particularly that of minors. ConfidentialityUnmitigated Risk ☛ Words matter in cryptography or at least they used toWith this background in mind, let’s explore three different “Hybrid” approaches to PQC and classical cryptography. By giving each a unique name and using simple examples, to see if we we can show how they differ: Nested Hybrid Signatures, Side-by-Side Hybrid Protocols, and the proposed Merged Hybrid Signatures.

Defence/Aggression

• Iran has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that it is withdrawing the designation of several senior UN inspectors who were working in the country, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said on Saturday.

• Why it matters: The decision is a significant escalation by Iran that could hamper the UN nuclear watchdog’s ability to monitor Tehran’s nuclear program.

• “The European Union is highly concerned by the … decision by Iran to withdraw the official designation of several experienced IAEA inspectors to monitor and verify its nuclear programme,” the spokesman for EU foreign affairs Peter Stano said in a statement.

• More than 8,000 migrants have arrived on the island over the past three days.

• PM Giorgia Meloni says Italy is being placed under “unsustainable pressure”.

• Ms von der Leyen acknowledged on Sunday that the issue was “a European challenge and needs a European answer”.

• EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pledged the swift return of irregular migrants and a crackdown on the “brutal business” of migrant smuggling Sunday during a visit with Italy’s premier to a tiny fishing island overwhelmed with nearly 7,000 arrivals in a single day this week.

• Around 8,500 migrants landed on the island in 199 boats between Monday and Wednesday this week, according to the UN migration agency.

• Meloni called for action at the EU level to prevent migrant departures from North Africa to Europe, including the possibility of a naval blockade of North Africa to keep smugglers’ boats from reaching Europe.

• In a welcome development last year, TikTok announced that it would start publishing insights about the covert influence operations it identifies and removes from its platform globally in its quarterly community guidelines enforcement reports.

• [...]

• Since then, the platform has published three quarterly reports that identified 22 separate covert influence operations originating in countries as various as Russia, Azerbaijan, Ireland, Georgia, Kenya, and Taiwan. But there has been one glaring exception: China.

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

• The war in Ukraine and its visiting president take center stage at the United Nations this week. But developing countries will be vying for the spotlight as well as they push for faster action on poverty and inequality at the first full-on meeting of world leaders since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted travel. The annual meeting at the U.N. General Assembly takes place at a polarizing and divisive juncture in history.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The document, which was made public this weekend by Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera, adds to the evidence that some scholars say shows Pius knew about the Holocaust as it happened. Some scholars say Pius didn’t want to confront or offend Hitler because he feared communism, believed that the Axis powers would win the war and wanted to avoid alienating millions of German and Nazi-sympathizing Catholics.

Environment

UAW Strike Exposes Tensions Between Biden’s Goals of Tackling Climate Change and Supporting Unions www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2023-09-16/auto-worker-strike-creates-test-of-bidens-goals-on-labor-and-climate”

• Protesters are calling on Biden to stop federal approvals of new fossil fuel projects, phase out oil and gas drilling on public lands, and declare climate change a national emergency. They want the U.S. to halt oil and gas exports, and transition to a reliance on renewable energy.

• Burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas remains the primary driver of global warming.

• The state of California has filed a sweeping climate lawsuit against Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, as well as the domestic oil industry’s biggest lobby, the American Petroleum Institute.

• The suit, filed on Friday in San Francisco Superior Court, claims that the companies misled the public for decades about climate change and the dangers of fossil fuels. It demands the companies help fund recovery efforts related to California’s extreme weather events, from rising sea levels to drought and wildfires, that have been supercharged by human-caused climate change.

• “And there’s no indications that any of the boundaries”—except the ozone layer, slowly on the mend since the chemicals destroying it were banned—”have started to bend in the right direction”, he told journalists in a briefing.

• “This means we are losing resilience, that we are putting the stability of the Earth system at risk.”

• The study quantifies boundaries for all nine interlocking facets of the Earth system.

• In Montana, young residents just won a lawsuit charging that construction of a new gas power plant was barred by the state constitution. But “pro-climate” President Joe Biden is arguing fiercely against letting the US Supreme Court hear a similar case.

Energy/Transportation

• Since July, I’ve been archiving data from the Citi Bike GBFS feed. Every five minutes, I have a datapoint for each of the roughly 2,090 stations with numbers for how many bikes are available or broken, and how many bikes are electric. It’s a long-term project that combines my interests in bikes, large datasets, and visualiation. It’s far from finished, though: these are just casual, early “lab notes”.

• Tata Steel and the UK Government have signed a joint agreement on a proposal to invest in electric arc furnace steelmaking at the Port Talbot site in South Wales.

• This is not the first time Cuban has experienced cryptocurrency losses. He lost an unspecified amount of assets when Iron Finance’s TITAN stablecoin collapsed in a rumoured rug pull in 2021, the report said.

Wildlife/Nature

• Following this event, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction (K-Pg), a new dawn emerged for Earth. Ecosystems bounced back, but the life inhabiting them was different.

Overpopulation

• Coltrane said the city’s crisis would likely help it compete for state and federal funding. That’s because the city would tackle dual problems: the ongoing drought and the replacement of lead in its pipes, a major priority of the federal government.

Finance

• The South Koreans are so ashamed over a situation of high unemployment, that it has become a euphemism to describe over half a million unemployed youth (just the youth) as “taking a break”.

• But the New York Times says they suffer from “low birth rates”.

• Apparently more than half a million unemployed young people are suffering…from not having half a million more young people competing with them for jobs,

• In America now, we have millions of layoffs, hiring freezes, reduced hours (involuntary), but they also tell Americans we “suffer” from less people to contend with for jobs and housing and everything else.

• Higher competition, fee structure changes mean they earn less than what they made during Covid-19.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• For two years, it was the coronavirus pandemic. Then, it became Russia’s war in Ukraine. Throughout both developments, the perils of climate change, poverty and inequality have steadily, increasingly thrummed through each convening of world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York.

Censorship/Free Speech

• From the outset, there was ample warning about FOSTA-SESTA, even if the law had noble intentions. The Justice Department raised objections before it even passed, concerned that its language extended beyond trafficking to cover “commercial sex transactions involving consenting adults,” which was of “minimal federal interest.” Freedom Network USA, the largest national organization of anti-trafficking social service providers and advocates, also opposed this aspect of the legislation, stating that “further criminalizing consensual commercial sex work, where there is no force, fraud or coercion, is no way to protect victims.” (Sex trafficking survivors typically favor prevention strategies that are structural in nature, like affordable housing, universal basic income, a living wage, and the expunging of criminal records.) Concerned with the threat of censorship, the ACLU warned that the law posed a “real and significant” risk to the “vibrancy of the Internet as a driver of political, artistic, and commercial communication.” But all of these considerations went unheeded, and FOSTA-SESTA sailed through Congress.

• This is FRESH AIR. I’m Tonya Mosley. There’s a practice in Hollywood of film studios relying on the Chinese market to break even. But in order for movies to be shown in China, filmmakers often have to self-censor. That’s according to a book by author Erich Schwartzel. For example, when China started allowing U.S. films to be shown there, Hollywood filmmakers had to ensure the movies wouldn’t offend the Chinese government. Schwartzel explores how this relationship has reshaped big-budget movies and the film industry as a whole in the book “Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, And The Global Battle For Cultural Supremacy.” Erich Schwartzel reports on the film industry for The Wall Street Journal. Terry spoke with him last year.

• In February 1940, Russell was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the College of the City of New York by unanimous vote of the Board of Higher Education of New York City. (He was assigned to teach three courses with unwieldy names: logic and its relation to science, mathematics, and philosophy; problems in the foundations of mathematics; and relations of the pure to applied sciences and the reciprocal influence of metaphysics and scientific theories.) But within scarcely a month, Justice John E. McGeehan of the New York Supreme Court (in New York State, this is the designation of the trial court) ordered the Board to revoke Russell’s appointment, ruling that the appointment “adversely affects public health, safety, and morals” and would “aid, abet, or encourage … conduct tending to a violation of penal law.” A year later, in 1941, philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey noted that, although the Russell case was closed, “the issue underlying it is no more settled than the Dred Scott case [which ruled that no African American could ever become a US citizen] settled the slavery issue.” Eight decades later, the issues raised by the Russell case—the rights to free speech and academic freedom—have still not been settled.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

Civil Rights/Policing

• Detroit automakers survived a pandemic and semiconductor shortage. They were embracing a historic transition to the electric-vehicle era, underwritten by billions in subsidies from the Biden administration. Profits were rolling in.

• The walkout led by United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain at three General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Stellantis NV factories is no ordinary labor-versus-industry clash. The 54-year-old former Chrysler electrician is pushing for a dramatic reset of the wage scales and working conditions that would meaningfully change the economics of car manufacturing. He’s taken aback executives with eye-watering demands for 40% pay increases over the next four years and a 32-hour work week — unheard of in American manufacturing.

• Just as jarring has been Fain’s unconventional negotiating style. Instead of following decades of precedent and targeting one company at a time, Fain has taken on all three companies employing 146,000 union members at once. He’s inflicting significant damage by disrupting truck and sport utility vehicle output, while taking pains not to burn through too much of the UAW’s strike fund. He’s left himself the option to bring down even more lucrative pickup plants, if need be.

• Iranian authorities detained the father of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old woman who died in police custody last year, as he left his home to visit his daughter’s grave on the first anniversary of her death, human rights observers said.

• A few hours later, Amjad Amini was taken home by security guards and has been under house arrest, the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights said Saturday.

• Though the underlying human rights issues and economic troubles that drove much of the protests persist, the government’s intense crackdown has largely quashed public unrest — and the authorities want to keep it that way.

• On Saturday, security agents swarmed the neighborhood of Ms. Amini’s family home and prevented her parents from attending a commemoration they had planned at her gravesite. Her father was briefly detained for interrogation and released on Friday, according to Saleh Nikbakht, the family’s lawyer. To further prevent visitors from visiting Ms. Amini’s grave in Saghez, the authorities imposed checkpoints along the road leading to the cemetery and intentionally opened a nearby dam to flood it, residents said on social media.

• Instead, Trump framed workers’ economic fight against corporate giants Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis as a partisan skirmish, lumping the UAW in with Joe Biden. In a statement delivered late last month, Trump railed against UAW leadership, claiming, “Autoworkers are getting totally ripped off by crooked Joe Biden and also their horrendous leadership. Because these people are allowing our country to do these electric vehicles that very few people want.”

Twitter

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

Monopolies

Patents

• Asus sues Samsung over 4G and 5G patents infringement after the two companies failed to come to a licensing agreement.

Software Patents

Trademarks

Copyrights

• Markets use prices to distribute resources, and prices are set by supply and demand, and that started breaking down in the cassette and floppy disk age where making the initial recording was very expensive but making copiesnof that was cheap. Big capital has tried to patch the hole to their advantage at the expense of the public by introducing artificial scarcity in the form of an exclusive right to make copies, “copyright”.

• And now it’s getting twisted one more turn, since now the initial work itself is easy to make, but the models, the makers themselves, are wholly owned by big corporations like Microsoft and Google. Capitalism was bad before. It’s going to get cataclysmic now that the workers are wholly owned machines.

• IBM has managed to violate the freaking BSD license by doing basically the only thing it does not allow. Falsely attributing the work to someone else and then the others have followed along and not done anything to bring themselves out of violation.

• Reports indicate that thousands of Canadian BitTorrent users are receiving new waves of letters demanding cash settlements for movie piracy. Why this controversial business model has been allowed to continue for more than two decades is no longer the big question. Eclipsing that by far is the inexplicable lack of awareness among otherwise savvy internet users who just keep feeding the trolls.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.