Links 24/10/2023: More Shutdowns, Layoffs, and Online Scams
Contents
- Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
- Leftovers
- Science
- Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
- Monopolies
- Gemini* and Gopher
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Techdirt ☛ Peering Through The Fog Of War With Open Source Intelligence
“The fog of war” is a phrase that has been used for over a hundred years to describe the profound uncertainty that envelops armed conflicts while they are happening. Today, the uncertainty for non-combatants is exacerbated by the rapid-fire nature of social media, where people often like or re-post dubious war-related material without scrutinizing it first. The situation has become particularly bad on ExTwitter under Elon Musk’s stewardship, as a recent NewsGuard analysis published on Adweek revealed. The platform’s “verified” users pushed nearly three-quarters of the platform’s most viral false Israel-Hamas war-related claims, which were then spread widely by others:
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Leftovers
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New Yorker ☛ China’s Age of Malaise
Party officials are vanishing, young workers are “lying flat,” and entrepreneurs are fleeing the country. What does China’s inner turmoil mean for the world?
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The Straits Times ☛ Police in China rescue more than 1,000 cats from being slaughtered and sold as mutton, pork
The cat meat would have been sold as the more valuable mutton or pork in local markets.
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Science
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[Old] DJ Bernstein ☛ 2014.03.23: How to design an elliptic-curve signature system: There are many choices of elliptic-curve signature systems. The standard choice, ECDSA, is reasonable if you don't care about simplicity, speed, and security. #signatures #ecc #elgamal #schnorr #ecdsa #eddsa #ed25519
Earlier this month a new paper by Naomi Benger, Joop van de Pol, Nigel Smart, and Yuval Yarom hit the news. The paper explains how to recover secret keys from OpenSSL's implementation of ECDSA-secp256k1 using timing information from "as little as 200 signatures"; ECDSA-secp256k1 is the signature system used by Bitcoin. The timing information is collected by an attack process running on the same machine, but the process doesn't need any privileges; I don't see any obstacle to running the attack process in a separate virtual machine. Earlier papers by Yarom and Katrina Falkner and Yarom and Benger had explained how to carry out similarly efficient attacks against various implementations of RSA and binary-field ECDSA.
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DJ Bernstein ☛ 2023.10.23: Reducing "gate" counts for Kyber-512: Two algorithm analyses, from first principles, contradicting NIST's calculation. #xor #popcount #gates #memory #clumping
Tung Chou and I have a new software framework called CryptAttackTester for high-assurance quantification of the costs of cryptographic attack algorithms. So far the framework includes two case studies: brute-force AES-128 key search, and, as a deeper case study, "information-set decoding" attacks against the McEliece cryptosystem. The accompanying paper also looks at other attacks, covering various old and new examples of how attack analyses have gone wrong.
One of the appendices in the paper, Appendix D, chops almost 10 bits out of the "gate" count for "primal" attacks against Kyber-512. This reduction uses a technique that in this blog post I'll call "clumping". Clumping should also reduce the "gate" counts for "dual" attacks, but for this blog post it suffices to consider primal attacks.
The reason I'm putting "gate" in quotes here is that this is using the concept of "gates" in the Kyber documentation. As we'll see below, this concept doesn't match what hardware designers call gates, in particular in its handling of memory access.
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Science Alert ☛ Ultra-Fast Radio Bursts Detected Lasting Only Millionths of a Second
Where are they coming from?
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Science Alert ☛ Collision Between 2 Neutron Stars Could Be Deadly For Life on Earth
Fatal proximity.
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Education
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New York Times ☛ Grade Inflation Needs to Stop
Grade inflation acts just like real inflation.
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Hardware
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Hackaday ☛ The IMac GPU Becomes Upgradeable, With PCIe
Over its long lifetime, the Apple iMac all-in-one computer has morphed from the early CRT models through those odd table-lamp machines into today’s beautiful sleek affairs. They look pretty, but is there anything that can be done to upgrade them? Maybe not today’s ones, but the models from the mid-2000s can be given some surprising new life. [LowEndMac] have featured a 2006 24″ model that’s received a much more powerful GPU, something we’d have thought to be impossible.
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Hackaday ☛ DIY Shredder Creates Insulation
Plenty of us have experience with paper shredders, but there are all kinds of machines designed to completely destroy other materials as well, from metal and plastic, to entire cars. [Action BOX] built their own heavy-duty shredder capable of dismantling things like cell phones and other robust handheld objects, but after seeing what it would physically shred they decided to give it an actual job creating insulation for the attic space in their garage.
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Hackaday ☛ Using LEDs To Determine A Video Camera’s True Framerate
Interpolation and digital cropping are two techniques which are commonly used by marketing folk to embellish the true specifications of a device. Using digital cropping a fictitious zoom level can be listed among the bullet points, and with frame interpolation the number of frames per second (FPS) recorded by the sensor is artificially padded. This latter point is something which [Yuri D’Elia] came across with a recently purchased smartphone that lists a 960 FPS recording rate at 720p. A closer look reveals that this is not quite the case.
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Hackaday ☛ Retrotechtacular: The $175,000 Laser Printer
Laser printers today are cheap and readily available. But in 1976, they were the height of printing technology. The IBM 3800 was the $175,000 printer to have in that year. (Video, embedded below.) But you couldn’t have one on your desktop. Even if you could afford it, the thing is the size of a car, and we don’t even want to guess what it weighs. The printer took tractor-fed continuous form paper and could do 167 pages a minute at about 150 dots per inch (actually 180 x 144). For the record, that was as much as 1.7 miles of paper an hour!
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Hackaday ☛ KaboomBox Is A Firecracker Of A Music Player
Ka-chunk. Let’s face it, 8-tracks were not that great. But the players, that’s another story. The Panasonic RQ-830S, aka the dynamite or TNT player is just one of many lovely designs that used to grace the shelves of electronics stores. Hackaday alum [Cameron Coward] came across a non-working model and used it to create the KaboomBox.
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Hackaday ☛ When Is Damascus Steel Not From Damascus?
If you grow up around a working blacksmith’s forge, there are a few subjects related to metalwork on which you’ll occasionally have a heated discussion. Probably the best known is the topic of wrought iron, a subject I’ve covered here in the past, and which comes from the name of a particular material being confused with a catch-all term of all blacksmith-made items. I’ve come to realise over recent years that there may be another term in general use which is a little jarring to metalwork pedants, so-called Damascus steel. Why the Syrian capital should pop up in this way is a fascinating story of medieval metalworking, which can easily consume many days of research.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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France24 ☛ How palm oil companies are illegally burning forests to clear land in Indonesia
Indonesian palm oil companies have been playing a dangerous game: burning forests to clear land that has already been dried out by their activities – just to cut production costs. This practice is illegal because it is a major cause of wildfires that have destroyed ecosystems and generated massive atmospheric pollution in Indonesia and nearby countries over the past few years. A group of Indonesian environmental NGOs have been investigating how palm oil companies are continuing to harm the environment with impunity.
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uni Stanford ☛ Harvard professor advocates for a “neo-traditional” approach to Indigenous mental health
Indigenous professor Joseph P. Gone visited Stanford for a talk on modernizing traditions in order to address historical trauma.
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BIA Net ☛ 70-year-old ill prisoner ‘lost 50 kilos’ due to inadequate treatment
Cemal Tanhan is grappling with multiple health issues, including diabetes, hypertension, and anemia, says the Human Rights Association.
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Science Alert ☛ The Most Popular Banana in The World Could Vanish. Here's Why.
"Nobody is even close to solving the problem."
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Matt Rickard ☛ Horizontal Tuning: Instruction, Chat, and What Else?
But what’s beyond instruction-tuning and chat-tuning? Are there similar horizontal applications of tuning that would make sense for LLMs? That is, beyond fine-tuning for specific tasks, can we come up with better formats to query LLMs? I don’t know, but my intuition says yes. It might entail a small structure that lives over the input and compiles down to some intermediate representation (why ChatML is so interesting). Some ideas: [...]
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Gizmodo ☛ Artists Can Fight Back Against AI by Killing Art Generators From the Inside
How can artists hope to fight back against the whims of tech companies wanting to use their work to train AI? One group of researchers has a novel idea: slip a subtle poison into the art itself to kill the AI art generator from the inside out.
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The Verge ☛ Microsoft fixes the Excel feature that was wrecking scientific data
In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as...
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Windows Central ☛ Edge begs for answers: Microsoft polling users who download Chrome
Microsoft Edge now shows a survey when you try to download Google Chrome.
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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YLE ☛ NBI warns of email scam falsely accusing recipients of crimes
The email appears to come from the National Bureau of Investigation and alleges the recipient has been involved in child pornography-related cybercrimes.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Techdirt ☛ Clearview Gets $10 Million UK Fine Reversed, Now Owes Slightly Less To Governments Around The World
Here’s how things went for the world’s most infamous purveyor of facial recognition tech when it came to its dealings with the United Kingdom. In a word: not great.
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The Strategist ☛ Curbing the threats to encryption
Government efforts to access private communications are nothing new. In decades past, such attempts at prying were often justified on national-security grounds.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Defending federal networks requires more than money, CSIS study finds
A six-month study dove into the services offered by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to protect federal networks.
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Defence/Aggression
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Krebs On Security ☛ NJ Man Hired Online to Firebomb, Shoot at Homes Gets 13 Years in Prison
A 22-year-old New Jersey man has been sentenced to more than 13 years in prison for participating in a firebombing and a shooting at homes in Pennsylvania last year. Patrick McGovern-Allen was the subject of a Sept. 4, 2022 story here about the emergence of “violence-as-a-service” offerings, where random people from the Internet hire themselves out to perform a variety of local, physical attacks, including firebombing a home, “bricking” windows, slashing tires, or performing a drive-by shooting at someone’s residence.
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Craig Murray ☛ Genocide Unfolding
Tonight has been the most violent bombardment of Gaza so far, notably concentrated on precisely the areas into which Israel ordered the population to evacuate. I find it almost impossible to believe that this genocide is under way with the active support of almost all western governments.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Germany: Trial of Islamist in Duisburg knife attacks begins
As he was led into the courtroom, the defendant repeatedly flashed hand signals identified with the radical Islamist terror group "Islamic State" (IS) — with which he identifies — while the parents of the murder victim looked on. He also refused to stand as the judge entered the courtroom.
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The Strategist ☛ Lessons from Finland for the Indo-Pacific
I recently visited Finland, for the first time, to attend the Helsinki Security Forum, organised by the Finnish Institute for International Affairs, on the theme ‘Deter, defend and secure—Europe in the era of radical uncertainty’.
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Defence Web ☛ Indian Navy patrol ship INS Sumedha visits Nigeria
The Indian Navy offshore patrol ship, INS Sumedha is the latest Indian naval ship to pay an official visit to Nigeria. The visit starting on 13 October was said to improve bilateral relations and security in the Gulf of Guinea.
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Marcy Wheeler ☛ Donald Trump Raises Conflict Concerns about His Mike Flynn Pardon
Just days after DOJ submitted a filing arguing that a pardon used as a quid pro quo would be unlawful, Trump claims that Sidney Powell couldn't have been his lawyer on November 25, 2020 when she filed a lawsuit he demanded, because she was conflicted.
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RFA ☛ Taiwanese iPhone maker targeted by Beijing
Some cite Beijing’s concern that Foxconn’s founder is dividing the Taiwan vote.
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RFA ☛ Philippines summons Chinese ambassador over S China Sea collisions
Analysts say Manila is adopting an assertive transparency policy in dealing with Beijing in the region.
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CS Monitor ☛ U.S. stands with Philippines after China rams boats in disputed waters
Two Chinese vessels dammaged a Philippine coast guard ship supplying a contested shoal in the South China Sea. The U.S. has warned that it is bound by treaty to defend the Philippines.
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CS Monitor ☛ Escaping North Korea: ‘Beyond Utopia’ documents one path to freedom
Most Westerners know little about North Korea or what it’s like to live in – or leave – the rigid country. “Beyond Utopia” shows the lengths defectors are willing to go to experience freedom.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ Oryx says nine Russian helicopters destroyed, 15 damaged, in Ukraine’s October 17 attack — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Acting through mercenary proxy, Russia’s Defense Ministry starts recruiting women to serve as snipers and drone pilots in Ukraine — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ ‘This isn’t our problem, Gena’: Video shows Yekaterinburg police sat in car and laughed while watching fight that ended in Gabonese student’s death — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Youth footballer from Ukrainian club Shakhtar flees to Russia — Meduza
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Techdirt ☛ Supreme Court Asked (Again!) To Rule That Recording Cops Is Protected By The 1st Amendment
You’d think this legal question would be settled by now. Smartphones have been in everyday use for more than a decade. Citizen journalists have been part of our daily life ever since the advent of affordable portable cameras. The internet has democratized publication, lowering the barrier between observation and accountability.
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[Repeat] DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ TIL: The FDA Tried to Prevent Having to Turn Over Safety Data it Already Had for COVID Shots for 76 Years. Pfizer Layoffs.
Last year, the FDA was ordered to turn over safety data it had on COVID shots after being sued under the Freedom of Information Act.
The hair in the soup?
It argued in court that it needed 76 years to turn over data that it possessed last year.
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BoingBoing ☛ Cop: not laughing at my joke question creates reasonable suspicion. Laughing at it creates reasonable suspicion too.
P.S. it's wild that you can't just look up this case online without paying $30 to PACER, and PACER is so rudimentary and broken you can't even link to it. What a rip-off!
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Environment
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New York Times ☛ Gavin Newsom Wants to Export California’s Climate Laws to the World
He has signed a raft of laws and regulations to speed the nation’s most populous state away from fossil fuels, including a ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035 and a mandate to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2045. He wants to end oil drilling in his state, a major oil producer, also by 2045.
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Federal News Network ☛ California Gov. assures his state is always a partner on climate change as he begins trip to China
The Governor of California Gavin Newsom has assured during his week-long trip to China that his state will always be a partner on climate issues no matter how the U.S. presidential election turns out next year. Newsom’s visit Monday comes as U.S.-Chinese relations have witnessed a sharp deterioration in recent years due to trade disputes, U.S. support for self-governing Taiwan, and human rights concerns, among other contentious issues. He began his visit with a climate-themed discussion at The University of Hong Kong. Climate remains one area where collaboration is seen as possible. Both countries appear to have fully re-engaged in the run-up to the next U.N. climate change conference, which opens Nov. 30 in Dubai.
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Energy/Transportation
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New York Times ☛ Federal Investigators Widen Tesla Inquiry, Company Says
Reuters and Consumer Reports have reported that Tesla vehicles fell short, in road testing, of the range indicated by the Environmental Protection Agency, which tests cars on rollers in a laboratory. Carmakers have some discretion in how they configure cars for the tests and can influence the results.
The range of all battery powered cars suffers in cold weather, but a Tesla Model Y sport utility vehicle that Consumer Reports tested fell at least 50 miles short of the claimed range even in warm weather.
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Interesting Engineering ☛ Infinite Machine unleashes P1 Cybertruck-like EV scooter, all sold-out
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New York Times ☛ Off-Duty Pilot Tries to Disrupt Engines on Alaska Airlines Flight
The flight was diverted to Portland, Ore., because of a “credible security threat” inside the cockpit, the airline said. An off-duty pilot was charged with attempted murder.
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Finance
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GM workers in Brazil go on strike in protest against layoffs
Metalworkers at Brazilian plants of General Motors have voted to go on strike starting Monday in protest against layoffs carried out by the U.S.-based automaker in the country, according to a union that represents them.
The strike for an "indefinite period of time" happens as GM announced it was reducing workforce at its three factories in Sao Paulo state after a drop in sales and exports, a move it dubbed "necessary" for its sustainability.
The Sindmetal union representing metalworkers at the Sao Jose dos Campos plant said workers had voted to enter a strike on Monday, adding that employees of the Sao Caetano do Sul and Mogi das Cruzes plants had also agreed to similar measures.
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YLE ☛ Finland plans separate social security system for newly-arrived immigrants
Critics of the government's proposal say cuts to social security will increase poverty among immigrant communities and lead to further marginalization.
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Federal News Network ☛ IRS crackdown on wealthy tax cheats brings in millions of dollars in early stages
On today's Federal Newscast: Several workers at the Government Publishing Office have filed a lawsuit, alleging a pervasive workplace culture of racism and sexism. The Biden administration is kicking off the first update to the national cyber incident response plan in seven years. And the IRS crackdown on wealthy tax cheats is bringing in millions of dollars.
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Pro Publica ☛ Minnesota AG Opens Investigation Into Contract-for-Deed Real Estate Practices
The Minnesota attorney general’s office is investigating potentially exploitative real estate transactions that have targeted Somali and Hispanic immigrant homebuyers in the state.
The attorney general’s action follows a report by ProPublica and Sahan Journal last year that revealed how contracts for deed — an alternative home sale agreement made directly between a seller and a buyer — can lock purchasers into inflated prices and unfavorable terms, and sometimes lead to eviction and the loss of their life savings.
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AIM ☛ Video SaaS Companies Face A Loom-ing Threat
Loom was acquired by Atlassian at a 36% reduced valuation, whereas Hopin was acquired by RingCentral after a 99% drop in its valuation.
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Pico Shutdown Rumors are False, Says Parent Company ByteDance
A recent rumor, which alleged that TikTok parent company ByteDance is slated to spin down its XR hardware subsidiary Pico Interactive, is false, the company says.
China-based publication EqualOcean reported late last week that ByteDance is set to “gradually abandon the PICO business.”
The report alleged the person in charge of Pico recently went to Singapore to report to ByteDance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming, maintaining Pico’s performance in the past few years has “not met expectations, and there is no hope for the future.”
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Bloomberg ☛ 3M Raises Its Full-Year Profit Target After Deep Spending Cuts
3M Co. boosted its full-year adjusted profit and cash flow targets as it reported third-quarter results that easily topped Wall Street estimates, lifted by sweeping cost cuts and efforts to combat an ongoing sales slump.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Meduza ☛ ‘We passed the democracy exam’: Poland’s long-ruling conservative party lost its majority, but the liberal opposition isn’t out of the woods just yet — Meduza
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Federal News Network ☛ A Swiss populist party rebounds and the Greens sink in the election. That’s a big change from 2019
Official results in Switzerland election show that the anti-immigration Swiss People’s Party has rebounded from searing losses four years ago to cement and expand its hold as the largest faction after the parliamentary election. Two environmentally-minded parties lost ground in the election despite record glacier melt in the Alpine country. The final tally showed the people’s party gained nine seats compared to the last vote in 2019. It climbed to 62 overall in parliament’s 200-seat lower house. The Socialists were in second and they added two seats to reach 41 in the lower chamber. Pollsters said climate change, rising migration and higher health care costs were the main concerns on voters' minds.
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Meduza ☛ Volunteer who helped hundreds of Ukrainians return home from Russia arrested in Belgorod region — Meduza
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New York Times ☛ Republicans Grapple With Being Speakerless, but Effectively Leaderless, Too
With a speaker fight in the House, concerns about an aging Senate leader and a 2024 front-runner who has the party in a vise grip, some G.O.P. members worry the turmoil could have long-term effects.
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Futurism ☛ It Looks Like Twitter Is in Even Deeper Trouble Than We Thought
According to the marketing firm's data, only two of Ebiquity's clients bought ads on X last month, a massive drop from 31 brands in September 2022. The consultancy works with 70 out of 100 top-spending advertisers, per Insider, including the likes of Google, Walmart, and General Motors.
"This is a drop we have not seen before for any major advertising platform," Ruben Schreurs, Ebiquity's chief strategy officer, told the publication.
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Business Insider ☛ Most of the world's biggest advertisers have stopped buying ads on Elon Musk's X, exclusive new data shows
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Vice Media Group ☛ Elon Musk Still Doesn’t Understand How Wikipedia Works
These are, of course, questions that it’s remarkably easy to answer that betray an incomprehensible ignorance of the Wikimedia Foundation or the idea of operating a service as a public good rather than a for-profit institution. But harping on Wikipedia is a hobby horse that Musk keeps returning to, putting the widely-used resource on blast and fomenting conspiracy theories about it to his audience of millions.
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Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Is Now Bullying Wikipedia
But as X users were quick to point out in the platform's "Community Notes" feature, Wikimedia is actually very transparent about how its finances are directed.
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Gizmodo ☛ Biden Names 31 'Tech Hubs' Across the U.S. That Can Nab Up to $75 Million Each
The president announced the news in a White House fact sheet, with the funding secured through the CHIPS and Science Act signed in 2022. Each tech hub can receive up to $75 million from federal and local government, public and private universities, nonprofits, and unions. Biden’s hope is that these tech hubs will spur economic growth in their respective states, adding to his commitment to Bidenomics, which aims to grow the middle class through trickle-up economics.
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New York Times ☛ The People Who Broke the House
To help make sense of this dark farce, it is useful to dig into the warring factions that have already destroyed the speaker dreams of multiple colleagues. Boiling down the action so far: A tiny gaggle of eight Republicans, mostly hard-right extremists, took down Kevin McCarthy. Then a larger group of hard-liners quashed the candidacy of Steve Scalise, the majority leader, before it even came up for a floor vote, with an eye toward elevating one of their own, the chronically belligerent Jim Jordan. But a coalition of moderates, institutionalists and members who just can’t stomach Mr. Jordan struck back, voting him down again and again and again — and again, if you count Friday’s closed-conference ballot effectively stripping him of the nomination.
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Press Gazette ☛ Half of top newsbrands see fall in search visibility after latest Google core update
The October core update appeared to have a bigger impact than other algorithm changes this year.
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Federal News Network ☛ Argentine minister’s surprise showing sets up presidential election run-off with right-wing populist
Argentina's economy minister has produced a big surprise by finishing first in the opening round of the presidential election over a front-running right-wing populist who wants to drastically diminish the government. Sergio Massa’s victory over Javier Milei in Sunday's vote came even though during Massa's watch inflation has surged into triple digits, putting more Argentines into poverty. With nearly all balots counted early Monday, Massa has 36.7% of the vote and Milei has 30%. As the top two finishers, they now advance to a November runoff. That vote will determine whether South America’s second-largest economy continues with a center-left administration or elects a right-leaning leader who proposes profound changes.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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NYPost ☛ Coca-Cola has quietly scrubbed references to Hamas-supporting BLM from its website [Ed: How many FOSS projects added "BLM" references to their sites, in spite of some project participants cautioning it would become a liability? BLM is not a FOSS thing. AWS did the same. Even 'Linux' Foundation decided to post the BLM stuff, before the Hamas endorsements. The 'Linux' Foundation made a detailed catalogue of BLM endorsements in Linux Foundation's Site/Blog ☛ this page before BLM accounts expressed support for Hamas terror]
BLM's Chicago chapter sparked outrage with a now-deleted post on X showing a photo of a paraglider with the text "I stand with Palestine."
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Project Censored ☛ October 2023 Newsletter
Kate Horgan, who designed the new web pages, noted: “The addition of this expansive digital archive will act as a vital resource for students, educators, and researchers looking to utilize critical pieces from Project Censored’s publications. We are eager to continue building this resource and offering content that is free and accessible for our supporters.”
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The Dissenter ☛ Consortium News Sues NewsGuard, US Government For Alleged Defamation
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Kansas Reflector ☛ U.S. House Republicans target ‘explicit’ books in school libraries
Democrats criticized the hearing as leaning into culture war topics to attack public education, and said that those tactics resulted in book bans. Republicans argued that books were not being banned because those that are removed at public schools can be bought elsewhere.
“These censorship laws are being enacted by extreme MAGA politicians under the pretext of parental rights when in reality it’s a coordinated, and apparently well-funded, vocal minority of parents and conservative organizations pushing their own personal agenda on others,” the top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, said.
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Meduza ☛ Russian opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov charged with spreading ‘disinformation’ for video about civilian deaths in Ukraine — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Navalny refuses to leave cell, fails to attend hearing, after writing materials confiscated — Meduza
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Journalists rethink jobs as India targets media
Bora said deficient funding is a problem for Indian media. She recalled that a senior student at IIMC once said that "our duty as journalists is to occupy areas not covered by advertisements."
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Meduza ☛ Detained Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva remanded in custody until December 5 — Meduza
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Site36 ☛ EU agency criticises repression against sea rescuers: States initiated over 63 proceedings in seven years
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Site36 ☛ Possible violation of arms embargo: German technology for Myanmar military
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Vice Media Group ☛ How Landlord Tech Is Squeezing Renters Who Can't Afford Security Deposits
A Rhino policy agreement viewed by Motherboard states the company uses information from consumer credit reports to generate insurance scores, including bankruptcies, number of revolving accounts and having bills in collection, which it receives from Equifax, another credit reporting company.
“I feel it’s wrong and they take advantage of people that can't afford a different choice,” Cundiff said. “Apparently, it doesn't matter that I bust my ass to try to get my credit score above 600.”
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New Statesman ☛ Landlordism is killing culture
The profiteering of private landlords is clearly a major contributor to the housing crisis. Less discussed is the way in which rentier capitalism is killing the UK cultural scene. In music, more than 35 per cent of grass-roots music venues (small to-medium-sized venues that focus on showcasing new music) have closed in the last 20 years, according to data from the Music Venue Trust (MVT). Ninety-three per cent of those are tenants, with the typical operator having just 18 months left on its tenancy. The pandemic, during which time many venues were shut for a year or more, only made the crisis worse: during the pandemic the grass-roots music sector acquired over £90m of new debt, yet 67 per cent of the government’s Culture Recovery Fund was paid directly to landlords.
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Pro Publica ☛ Documents Reveal Leonard Leo’s Early Strategy to Remake State Courts
In July 2015, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court shielded Gov. Scott Walker, then a rising Republican star with aspirations to the presidency, from a criminal investigation.
The court’s conservative majority halted the probe into what prosecutors suspected were campaign finance violations. One of the deciding votes was cast by Justice David Prosser, a conservative who had won reelection a few years earlier in a heavily contested race. During the race, a state GOP operative said if their party lost Prosser, “The Walker agenda is toast,” according to an email included in a trove of documents the Guardian surfaced. Another vote for Walker came from Michael Gableman, a justice who had also waged a contentious campaign for his Wisconsin Supreme Court seat.
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Techdirt ☛ LAPD Releases Recording Two Cops’ Decision To Pursue Pokémon Rather Than Robbery Suspects
In the annals of law enforcement’s neglect — if not actual disdain — for its alleged desire to “serve and protect,” this is surely on of the weirdest and most specific episodes in its ongoing infamy.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Techdirt ☛ Google Decides To Pull Up The Ladder On The Open Internet, Pushes For Unconstitutional Regulatory Proposals
It’s pretty much the way of the world: beyond the basic enshittification story that has been so well told over the past year or so about how companies get worse and worse as they get more and more powerful, there’s also the well known concept of successful innovative companies “pulling up the ladder” behind them, using the regulatory process to make it impossible for other companies to follow their own path to success. We’ve talked about this in the sense of political entrepreneurship, which is when the main entrepreneurial effort is not to innovate in newer and better products for customers, but rather using the political system for personal gain and to prevent competitors from havng the same opportunities.
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Digital Music News ☛ FCC Revives Interest in Net Neutrality Rules Following 2017 Death
The FCC has voted to revive rules mean to govern how internet service providers (ISPs) like Charter and Comcast treat internet traffic. The FCC says it will also seek comments on proposals to ensure broadband services have effective oversight in the United States.
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Monopolies
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Techdirt ☛ Tired Of Being Ripped Off By Monopolies, Cleveland Launches Ambitious Plan To Provide Citywide Dirt Cheap Broadband
Cleveland has spent years being dubbed the “worst connected city in the U.S.” thanks to expensive, patchy, and slow broadband. Why Cleveland broadband sucks so badly isn’t really a mystery: consolidated monopoly/duopoly power has resulted in a broken market where local giants like AT&T and Charter don’t have to compete on price, speeds, availability, customer service, or much of anything else.
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Patents
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[Old] UN ☛ Convention on the Grant of European Patents (European Patent Convention)
(2) The following in particular shall not be regarded as inventions within the meaning of paragraph 1 :
(a) discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
(b) aesthetic creations;
(c) schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers;
(d) presentations of information.
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Trademarks
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Techdirt ☛ The Utah Cookie Wars Are Over: Crumbl Settles Trademark Suit With Dirty Dough
In the middle of last year, we talked about an odd lawsuit between two bakeries, Crumbl and Dirty Dough. Crumbl’s suit against Dirty Dough claimed both theft of trade secrets and trademark infringement, the latter of which revolved around two major claims. First, the owner of Dirty Dough used to work for Crumbl. That obviously isn’t the basis of any lawsuit that would be successful on the trademark claims, but is important because there was also the accusation of theft of trade secrets. The second main claim was that Dirty Dough took some distinctive packaging that Crumbl felt constituted trademark infringement. Sounds bad, until you get into the details.
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Copyrights
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Gizmodo ☛ Michigan State University Employee Suspended After Hitler Image Loomed Over Football Stadium
Larson said that MSU won’t be using the third-party source moving forward and claimed there will be a more stringent review and approval process for all future video board content.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Gaming Companies Flag 'Highly Skilled Hackers' as Emerging Piracy Threat
The Entertainment Software Association, which represents several major gaming companies, has compiled an overview of Notorious 'Pirate' Markets. The group lists a variety of problematic sites and services, including 1fichier.com, unknowncheats.me, and 1337x.to. In addition, highly skilled hackers, repackers, and abuse of cryptocurrency are flagged as emerging piracy problems.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Sky Asked Govt. to Target Pirate IPTV Resellers via New Dedicated Police Unit
The chief executive of Sky TV in Ireland met with a government minister in May 2023 requesting the formation of a "dedicated anti-piracy unit" to crack down on the sale of pirate IPTV subscriptions. Correspondence seen by local media indicates that Sky advised that "at least two detectives" would be needed to tackle dozens of subscription resellers across Ireland.
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Michael Geist ☛ The Broadcasters’ Online News Act Submission: Demanding An Even Bigger Piece of the Bill C-18 Pie for Bell, Rogers and the CBC
The government has yet to release its final regulations for the Online News Act, but recent comments from News Media Canada seemed to suggest that it is hoping to find common ground with Google, stating that it supports the company’s proposed amendments to Bill C-18 draft regulations.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Softenni
The comparisons to teekyuu are obvious, both shows focus on cute girls doing tennis things. In fact, the only reason I know about this show is that I love teekyuu and Softenni is recomended as similar.
What I don't see this show campared to is hidamari sketch, which is surprising because the similarities in direction, sound design, pacing, tone and bgm instantly jumped out at me. (maybe these wouldn't be so obvious to someone who isn't as obsessed with hidasketch as I am). Anyway I looked into it and unsurprisingly found that the director was Ryouki Kamitsubo,who directed some episodes of hidamari sketch season 1.
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Biking
So far I have just over 3000 km in 2023 (I rode 4000 km in total during 2022). It might sound like huge number but I'm commuting daily on my bike (~6 km per day, and usually 18 km once a week).
There were only a very few longer trips (>75 km). Just 4 if I'm not mistaken.
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On to the weekend
I think my newspaper subscription is going to run out soon. I don't think I'll resubscribe once it does, because I'm no longer interested in the news. At this point I usually just skim the headlines but skip the stories themselves because it's nearly always doom and gloom.
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A pleasant weekend
I went to an arcade Saturday: Mikado. There are two locations, very close to each other. The first[1] is only 1 minute from Takadanobaba station (JR Yamanote, Seibu and subway.) The basement has a number of pinball games, like High Speed, and a few from the 1970s (the names of which I forgot.)
Upstairs from there is a room full of classics like Space Invaders, After Burner, Puck Man (as PacMan is known here) and Arkanoid. Quite a few of those games are in their original cabinets (like Space Invaders) which is really nice to see.
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One of the rarest gas stations in the United States
One of the YouTube channels I watch is Phil Edwards [1], and on October 10^th, I managed to catch his request for help—he wanted people local to a dozen cities to provide some phone video. I noticed that one of the cities mentioned was Lake Worth Beach, Florida. I once lived in Lake Worth, Florida [2]—could it be near there?
Turns out, Lake Worth *is* Lake Worth Beach [3], having changed its name in 2019 in order to rebrand itself. And while Lake Worth Beach (and I don't think I'll ever get used to that name) is a bit north of Chez Boca, it isn't *that* far to drive. I felt it would be interesting to see what project Phil Edwards has in mind, so I signed up.
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I'm getting some serious “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” vibes from this card magic book
“The book I ordered for you came in,” said Bunny, walking into the Computer Room and handing me a slim volume—Scott Kahn's Kahnjuring: Deceptive Practices With Playing Cards [1]. She had ordered it about a week prior after we saw him on Penn & Teller's “Fool Us” [2] (spoiler: he failed to fool them, but it's still a very cool card swap with transparent cards). “How soon until I see some tricks?”
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bouncer/activity table
i want to get the baby a bouncer/activity table because she loves standing while we hold her and is just starting to play with toys. i think one of these things would make her so happy and really help her development. maybe a christmas present? but maybe that will be too late. hm. we’ll see.
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🔤SpellBinding — DEIMOSZ Wordo: HASTE
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Technology and Free Software
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State of my computing: October 2023
It seems I didn't write anything here for a long time. Perhaps a shift of interests but certainly a lack of time. In practice it means that I use computers for www browsing, office work and such stuff instead of fun/hobby things.
In any case I decided to summarise what I am using and for what purpose (except the work computers).
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Small Operating Systems Part 2 (publ. 2023-10-23)
I was surprised there was nobody with any thoughts to share about small operating systems. Well, I learned a little more on my own. Wikipedia has a decent list of "floppy-disk based operating systems", though most of the entries are for old brands of CP/M or DOS that are only history now.
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I Want to Like Open Location Codes (Plus Codes) But I Can't
So sometime in the last day, a friend of mine sent me a Google Maps link to a location in a city decently near me. I saw a strange code that was made of some letters and numbers and a plus in the middle, along with the city name. After clicking on the info icon to the right of that number, I learned about something called "Plus Codes". It turns out some folks at Google created an encoding method for Latitude and Longitude coordinates.
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Git clone all the things
After a night of sleep, I thought that I could also expose the source of this log under https://log.pfad.fr. During my previous adventures, I stumbled upon the git documentation about the "Dumb HTTP protocol".
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.