Links 30/10/2023: Misinformation/Disinformation and Digital Restrictions (DRM) in Cameras
Contents
- Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
- Leftovers
- Education
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Digital Restrictions (DRM)
- Monopolies
- Gemini* and Gopher
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Education
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The Verge ☛ What is chokepoint capitalism, with authors Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin
The best part of the book is that Rebecca and Cory have some good ideas about how to actually solve some of the problems they talk about. As you’ll hear Cory say, the book isn’t just expounding on all the problems — half the book is about solutions.
This episode is longer than normal, but it was a really great conversation, and I’m glad we are sharing it with you.
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Leftovers
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The Strategist ☛ What’s next for 5G in Southeast Asia?
In recent months, announcements of successful tests by various Southeast Asian telecommunication companies in RedCap (‘reduced capacity’) 5G have been a reminder of the region’s gradual rollout of fifth-generation networks. RedCap 5G is expected to facilitate a wider range of use cases for 5G, particularly for the internet of things, which is currently mostly served by 4G. Nevertheless, most of the region has yet to go beyond trials for 5G, and 4G will remain standard for some time.
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Education
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Medforth ☛ Austria: Afghan beats up sister – because she attends school
“He did not approve of his sister going to school,” said public prosecutor Wolfram Bauer at the beginning of the trial. The fact that the sister was attending class together with boys of the same age had “further frustrated” the accused.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Off Guardian ☛ Russia’s Sputnik V “Covid vaccine” is now officially useless
Sputnik V no longer protects against COVID-19 and will have to be replaced with an “updated” vaccine, according to Gamaleya Center director Alexander Gintsburg.
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The Straits Times ☛ G-7 calls for immediate repeal of bans on Japanese food amid China curbs
China suspended all Japanese fish imports two months ago when Japan started the release of treated radioactive water.
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Science Alert ☛ You Can Stop a Sneeze, But Here's Why You Never Should
It can be really dangerous.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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TCS, HCL Tech, Infosys, Wipro Together Let Go Of 21,859 Employees In Q2, But Not LTIM, TechM [Ed: And many are Microsoft layoffs (contractors)]
There are six tech giants in India in terms of market share and these are Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) at the top followed by Infosys, HCL Tech, Wipro, LTIMindtree and Tech Mahindra. These tech giants have also announced their Q2FY24 earnings which were broadly tepid, however, the majority of them also recorded a sharp decline in headcount along with attrition rate. But not all IT firms were letting go of employees, because LTIMindtree and Tech Mahindra made significant net additions in the quarter. Together, Infosys, TCS, Wipro and HCL Tech have let go of 21,859 employees in Q2FY24. On the other hand, Tech Mahindra and LTIMindtree have increased their headcount by a total of 3,028 employees with the Mahindra company hiring the most.
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Interesting Engineering ☛ Cruise hits the brakes on driverless cars after safety concerns
Cruise, the self-driving car company owned by General Motors, has put its driverless operations on hold nationwide after California regulators revoked its license over safety issues.
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Defence/Aggression
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The Straits Times ☛ Suspect under probe over blast that killed one, injured dozens at Christian convention in Kerala
October 29, 2023 2:57 PM
A woman died at the scene, while 52 others, including a 12-year-old girl, were hospitalised, said the state health minister.
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Reason ☛ Cornell Lockdown Due to Threats
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New York Times ☛ ‘A Communal Sigh of Relief’: Emerging From Lockdown, Lewiston Gathers to Mourn
Residents in and around the city, no longer under lockdowns, spent the weekend coming together to mourn, share meals and prepare to bury their dead.
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Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Funder Sequoia Faces Fresh Congressional Scrutiny Over Chinese Investments
Silicon Valley-based investment firm Sequoia Capital is facing government scrutiny over its Chinese investments, including ByteDance-owned TikTok. Congress has sent a request to the firm to detail how it will “prevent further US investment dollars from advancing Chinese interests,” as per a recent Executive Order.
Earlier this year, Sequoia announced its plans to split into three entities — Sequoia Capital in the US and Europe, Peak XV Partners in India and Southeast Asia, and HongShan in China, formerly Sequoia Capital China. The company claimed the restructuring was to address the “increasingly complex” nature of running a decentralized global investment business, but some government entities saw it as thinly veiled preparations for an expected legal requirement to divest from Chinese business.
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Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Maritime expert: Good sailors do not drop anchor without wanting to
It is unlikely that a ship's anchor which likely damaged a gas pipeline and telecoms cable between Finland and Estonia fell to the seafloor by accident, a maritime expert believes. TSO Elering is hoping the damage will be covered by insurance.
An anchor likely belonging to the Hong Kong-flagged Newnew Polar Bear's was found by the Finnish authorities next to the Balticconnector gas pipeline on Tuesday. The Torgmoll Group-owned vessel is now the focus of investigations.
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New York Times ☛ The Proxy Forces Iran Has Assembled Across the Middle East
Hamas, which controls the strip and is a rare Sunni Muslim organization among mostly Shiite militants, catapulted Iran and its allies back onto the global radar on Oct. 7 with a brutal cross-border attack on Israel. In response, Israel launched a blockade and a sustained bombing campaign that has devastated Gaza, as well as preparations for a possible ground invasion, sparking rumblings about a regional conflagration.
The degree to which Iran holds direct influence over this loose regional network is murky. Here is a summary of the main proxy forces and their locations in the region.
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France24 ☛ 'We don't have the budget to feed all the inmates': A rise in deaths in DR Congo prisons
Overcrowding, lack of food, disease ... In September alone, 14 inmates died in the main prison in Goma, the capital of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Images of inmates crammed into tents and photos of bodies being removed leaked onto social networks in mid-October.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Meduza ☛ Former Wagner Group mercenaries are joining Chechnya’s Akhmat battalion, says Chechen commander — Meduza
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RFERL ☛ Four Ukrainian Police Officers Wounded In Russian Shelling, Kyiv Says
Four Ukrainian police officers were wounded on October 29 when a shell fired by Russian forces exploded by their vehicle in the frontline city of Siversk in the eastern Donetsk Province, Kyiv said.
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Meduza ☛ Redeploying troops Meduza updates its Ukraine combat map with the latest developments in Avdiivka, Orikhiv, and the Dnipro — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Russian Foreign Ministry says Ukrainian drone hit nuclear waste storage facility in October 26 attack — Meduza
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The Straits Times ☛ Russia's Medvedev: Energy cooperation with EU is pointless
Russia's former President, Dmitry Medevedev, was quoted as saying on Sunday that cooperation with Europe in energy matters was frozen or pointless as European countries had fallen on hard times and had poor growth prospects.
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YLE ☛ Orpo's NCP names presidential, European parliamentary candidates
Two former cabinet ministers are seeking re-election to the European Parliament next summer, along with four new candidates.
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YLE ☛ Russian Embassy won't accept applications to renounce citizenship; Finnish pols weigh dual nationality
Several politicians have called for an end to Finnish-Russian dual nationality while Alexander Stubb (NCP) has expressed concerns about the rights of dual citizens in Finland.
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Meduza ☛ ‘We’re not touching non-Jews today’: Flight from Israel sparks anti-Semitic riot at airport in Russia’s Dagestan — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Moscow college student given five-day sentence for Belarusian opposition flag on student ID cover, fined for pro-Ukraine statements — Meduza
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Meduza ☛ Ukraine to stop transporting Russian gas to Europe after contract expires — Meduza
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Quillette ☛ Dead Civilians and the Allocation of Blame
As the recent New York Times headlines in response to the explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab hospital demonstrate, when civilians die in wartime many papers rush to judgment without waiting for all the facts to come in. Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians say, the paper initially declared on 17 October. The second headline, later that same day, only compounded the disastrous misrepresentation: At least 500 dead in strike on Gaza Hospital, Palestinians say. As it turns out, the Times—along with nearly every other mainstream media outlet, many of which follow that newspaper’s lead—got every aspect of the story wrong: It wasn’t an Israeli strike; there weren’t anywhere close to 500 fatalities; and the hospital building wasn’t destroyed. The early coverage even featured the misleading picture of a wrecked building that wasn’t the hospital.
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Kansas Reflector ☛ Politicians love to cite crime data. It’s often wrong.
That’s because fewer than 1 in 10 law enforcement agencies in his state had reported their crime statistics to the FBI. In fact, more than 40% of the Sunshine State’s population was unaccounted for in the data used by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in its 2021 statewide crime report.
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Environment
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CBC ☛ Cigarette butts remain Vancouver's most littered item — and a seemingly unsolvable waste problem
As well as being unsightly, cigarette butts are a toxic scourge due to their composition, and, in coastal cities like Vancouver, easily end up polluting the ocean, where they become a serious threat to biodiversity loss and ecosystem health.
Yet cigarette butts are still the No. 1 most littered item in Vancouver, where several education and mitigation programs over the years — including the threat of up to $10,000 in fines — have done little to make it socially unacceptable to discard them in the street.
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Science Alert ☛ An Extreme Weather Event in 2014-2016 Sped Up Sea-Level Rise, Study Finds
We need to understand this.
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Energy/Transportation
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H2 View ☛ Scotland awards £200,000 to study on exporting hydrogen to Germany
The Scottish Government has awarded £200,000 ($241,700) to the Net Zero Technology Centre (NTZC) to demonstrate the feasibility hydrogen exports from Scotland to Germany.
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Finance
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TechCrunch ☛ Layoffs at VW’s Cariad further delay software launch in Porsche, Audi models | TechCrunch
Cariad's plan to cut 2,000 jobs further delays launch of VW's software 1.2 in Porsche Macan EV and Audi E6 E-tron by 16 to 18 months.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Path to a Biden-Xi meeting ‘not smooth,’ says China’s foreign minister
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the path to a meeting between President Pooh-tin Jinping and Joe Biden was “not smooth”, state media reported as the top diplomat wrapped up a rare visit to Washington.
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Marcy Wheeler ☛ Mike Pence Simplifies the Gag Order Dispute
By dropping out of the Presidential race, Mike Pence resolved the biggest problem with the gag order Tanya Chutkan imposed in the January 6 case against Donald Trump.
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RFA ☛ Patriotic flag ceremonies at Hong Kong mosque ‘shock’ believers
The ceremonies come as community leaders admit to a ‘developing relationship’ with Chinese officials.
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Gatestone Institute ☛ Who Says Hamas Does Not Represent The Palestinians?
This means that a majority of Palestinians share Hamas's desire to eliminate Israel as expressed in the terror group's 1988 charter. The poll also showed that 71% of the Palestinians support the formation of armed groups to murder Israelis.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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The Straits Times ☛ Deepfake video of Taylor Swift speaking Mandarin sparks discussion over Hey Hi (AI) in China
The lip movements were synced to make it look like she was speaking Mandarin, and it sounded like Swift’s voice.
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The Straits Times ☛ TikTok’s response to Vietnam government’s demands may impact wider region
October 30, 2023 10:10 AM
Demands by Hanoi come streaked with an authoritarian bent, with Fentanylware (TikTok) fielding rising number of take-down requests.
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India Times ☛ Twitter takeover: 1 year later, X struggles with misinformation, advertising and usage decline
X looks and feels something like Twitter, but the more time you spend on it the clearer it becomes that it's merely an approximation. Musk has dismantled core features of what made Twitter, Twitter - its name and blue bird logo, its verification system, its Trust and Safety advisory group. Not to mention content moderation and hate speech enforcement.
He also fired, laid off or lost the majority of its workforce - engineers who keep the site running, moderators who keep it from being overrun with hate, executives in charge of making rules and enforcing them.
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New York Times ☛ Cruise Stops All Driverless Taxi Operations in the United States
The decision affects Cruise’s robot taxi services in Austin, Texas, and Phoenix, where a limited number of public riders could hail paid rides. Noncommercial operations in Dallas, Houston and Miami were also paused.
Cruise did not say how long the halt will last. Testing of driverless vehicles with a safety driver behind the wheel will continue, the company said.
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VOA News ☛ X Users Falsely Claim Video of 2017 Attack on Philippines Church Shows Hamas Attack in Gaza
Blue-checked users with an active subscription to X Premium continue to use the social media platform to spread disinformation about the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Their tactics include recycling old footage and misattributing it either to the Israeli armed forces or to Hamas and Palestinians, depending on loyalties. A viral video of a 2017 church attack in the Philippines is one such example.
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BW Businessworld Media Pvt Ltd ☛ Misinformation Posts On X "Ineligible For Revenue Share", Says Elon Musk
Musk's is seemingly looking to shift the incentive structure for content creators towards accuracy and away from sensationalism. In his statement, he emphasised that the primary goal is to maximise accuracy in content shared on the platform and this new policy aims to deter the creation and dissemination of misleading or false information.
Under this policy, any posts flagged as containing misinformation will no longer be eligible for the revenue-sharing system. This is a significant departure from the past, where content creators had financial incentives to engage in the "reaction economy" by generating sensationalist content.
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India Times ☛ X posts with misinformation ineligible for revenue share: Elon Musk
Posts on X that are corrected by users via Community Notes will become ineligible for ad revenue share, Elon Musk has announced.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Hackaday ☛ The UK Online Safety Bill Becomes Law, What Does It Mean?
We’ve previously reported from the UK about the Online Safety Bill, a piece of internet safety legislation that contains several concerning provisions relating to online privacy and encryption. UK laws enter the statutes by royal assent after being approved by Parliament, so with the signature of the King, it has now become the law of the land as the Online Safety Act 2023. Now that it’s beyond amendment, it’s time to take stock for a minute: what does it mean for internet users, both in the UK and beyond its shores?
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ABC ☛ Salman Rushdie could confront man charged with stabbing him when trial begins
Rushdie was the target of a decades-old fatwa by the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for his death over alleged blasphemy in “The Satanic Verses.”
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Jerusalem Post ☛ Sweden to expel man behind recent Koran burning demos - TV4
"The Migration Agency has decided to expel the person from Sweden," TV quoted the agency as saying. "As a result of complications carrying out the decision, a limited residence permit has been granted for the period Oct. 25, 2023 to April 16, 2024."
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IranWire ☛ Iranian Man Faces Ordeal for Exposing Officials’ Corruption
However, a source told IranWire that the case is related to Mehrabi’s exposure of corruption among officials in Mobarakeh.
He was freed on bail 43 days after his arrest on february 1, but security agents took him back into custody a few hours after his release. He has since remained behind bars.
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Medforth ☛ France: Muslims planned the murder of people who spoke ” negatively ” about Islam
Romain T. was arrested this summer and charged with “criminal terrorist organisation” and remanded in custody in July. A source familiar with the case reports that this is a “very radicalised and very dangerous” criminal profile who has already been reported for making threats against teachers at his school for glorifying terrorism. The second suspect allegedly provided Romain T. with information in a social networking group that enabled him to identify a person who “spoke foully about Islam”. He was brought before an anti-terrorism judge on Friday October 20 to face charges. The youth is said to have already been remanded in custody.
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The Sun ☛ Fury at prankster’s Manchester Arena bomber Halloween costume as he faces police probe
But after his friends on Facebook urged him to take it down he added: “Only went and won the best costume.”
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Axios ☛ Prisons are banning thousands of books
Why it matters: Prison book bans far exceed school and library book bans, per the report from PEN America, which found "single state prison systems censor more books than all schools and libraries combined."
The report, based on open record requests, interviews with prison mailroom staff and narratives from incarcerated people, reveals some of the tactics prisons employ to censor titles.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Stanford University ☛ ‘The Killing of a Journalist’: Slovakia’s struggle against corruption
Directed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Final Cut for Real, the 2022 film follows the investigation of the 2018 murders of Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kušnírová. Prior to his death, Kuciak was tracing tax fraud of several businessmen with connections to top-level Slovak politicians.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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JURIST ☛ EU survey shows escalating racism towards Black immigrants
The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) on Wednesday published a survey showing a significant increase in racial discrimination racism towards first- and second-generation Black immigrants across 13 European Union countries, with Austria, Germany and Finland topping the list for the highest rates of discrimination and harassment.
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New York Times ☛ Germany’s Far-Left Wagenknecht Forms New Populist Party
Sahra Wagenknecht has announced a new party, which could become another populist force scrambling German politics.
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JURIST ☛ Synagogues in Berlin, Tunisia targeted with fire attacks as hate crimes soar in wake of Israel-Hamas war
On Wednesday, two people targeted a Berlin, Germany synagogue with molotov cocktails, a type of homemade firebomb, and rioters in Tunisia burned down the historic El Hamma synagogue. The attacks came as tensions continue to boil over in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent siege of Gaza.
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Scheerpost ☛ Biden’s $8 Billion Quest to Solve America’s Groundwater Crisis
These rural areas have long relied on underground aquifers as their only source of water, lacking access to the major rivers and reservoirs that sustain cities such as Denver, Colorado, and Los Angeles, California. As climate change leads to worsening droughts, the water level in these aquifers has fallen as there’s less rainfall to recharge them. As a result, many of these communities have suffered dire water access issues: Some have found their aquifers contaminated with unhealthy chemicals, while others have lost water access altogether as irrigated farms drain water away from household wells.
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The Times Of Israel ☛ Iranian teen allegedly attacked by morality police for not wearing a hijab dies
Geravand’s October 1 injury and now her death threaten to reignite that popular anger, particularly as women in Tehran and elsewhere still defy Iran’s mandatory headscarf, or hijab, law as a sign of their discontent with Iran’s theocracy.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Tim Bray ☛ On C2PA
Leica, the German maker of elegant but absurdly-expensive cameras, just released the M11-P. The most interesting thing about it is a capability whose marketing name is “Content Credentials”, based on a tech standard called C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity), a project of the Content Authenticity Initiative. The camera puts a digital watermark on its pictures, which might turn out to be extremely valuable in this era of disinformation and sketchy AI. Herewith a few words about the camera (Leicas are interesting) but mostly I want to describe what C2PA does and why I think it will work and how it will feel in practice.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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[Repeat] Unified Patents ☛ Acacia entity, Monarch, 2nd networking patent monopoly challenged
On October 23, 2023, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 8,693,369, owned and asserted by Monarch Networking Solutions, LLC, an Acacia Research Corp. entity. The ‘369 patent monopoly relates to routing data packets with the same destination address using port masks.
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Copyrights
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Torrent Freak ☛ Brazil Regulator Claims "80% of Pirate TV Boxes" Were Blocked Last Week
Brazil's telecoms regulator Anatel claims that during an operation last week, it successfully blocked around 80% of pirate 'TV boxes' in the country. Estimates from early 2023 suggest that seven million were active in Brazil. The operation, claimed to be the most significant ever carried out, arrives just weeks after Google & Cisco were criticized for "turning a blind eye" to the IPTV piracy problem.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Technology and Free Software
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I was right
on two accounts. One is that Ubuntu would run nicely on this MacBook Air. I've been using it for a few days now and in the process I found that I didn't need MacOS as much as I thought I might. So this afternoon I formatted the SSD and installed 22.04. Gnome is light and peppy, and everything except the built-in camera works, and I never used it anyway. So baring some sort of major hardware failure, this laptop should be around for a few more years.
The second is this theory I've had. This morning I found this article in the Mainichi English news titled 'When passing face-to-face, risk of COVID infection peaks within 5 seconds: Japan study' [1]
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On into Autumn
Recently on Gopher, I belive it was, I read someone's entry wherein they said they'd setup rsync to backup photos from their Android phone. I should have bookmarked the entry because I can no longer find it or even remember where I read it. I tried using Veronica and going through Gohper entries manually but no luck, otherwise I would have pointed to this person.
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Internet/Gemini
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KISS static web photo albums with `photoalbum.sh`
Once in a while, I share photos on the inter-web with either family and friends or on my The Irregular Ninja photo site. One hobby of mine is photography (even though I don't have enough time for it - so I am primarily a point-and-shoot photographer).
I'm not particularly eager to use any photo social sharing platforms such as Flickr, 500px (I used them regularly in the past), etc., anymore. I value self-hosting, DIY and privacy (nobody should data mine my photos), and no third party should have any rights to my pictures.
I value KISS (keep it simple and stupid) and simplicity. All that's required for a web photo album is some simple HTML and spice it up with CSS. No need for JavaScript, no need for a complex dynamic website.
[...]
A decent looking (in my opinion, at least) in less than 500 (273 as of this writing, to be precise) lines of Bash code and with minimal dependencies; what more do you want? How many LOCs would this be in Raku with the same functionality (can it be sub-100?).
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Programming
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Sample guppy:// Server
I wrote a sample Guppy server in Python, which sends up to 8 chunks in parallel: [...]
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Stack Programming and Combinators
There's an interesting relationship between the basic operators of stack-based programming languages and combinatory calculus. I'm not sure if it's in any way useful, although perhaps it allows one to think about the operational semantics of stack-based programming from a new angle. But in any case, it's just a nice connection that I only made thanks to Jon Purdy's talk "Concatenative Programming: From Ivory to Metal"[1].
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go
go not golang
hey so go is neat
go is easy to write
go has nice tooling and many modules
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.