Links 03/01/2024: Games, Layoffs, and Lots of Censorship
Contents
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Leftovers
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Ruben Schade ☛ The Internet Archive can browse ISOs
This was yet another thing I learned from VOGONS this week! The Internet Archive’s view_archive.php function can be used to inspect ISOs, the same way you’d look at any archive.
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Eric Bailey ☛ Oh shit banners
I have worked for two newspapers over the course of my career (three if you count my high school newspaper). One thing I learned there is that the top half of each and every newspaper homepage is a daily battle of priorities.
The idea here is that the thing that is highest, largest, and leftmost on the page will get the most attention.
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Ali Reza Hayati ☛ Happy Birthday Matt
I’ve expressed my dislike of social networks for enough times but I don’t think I explained my still-growing enthusiasm towards blogging nearly enough and a big part of this is all thanks to what Matt created.
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Seth Michael Larson ☛ 2023 year in review
After 3 great years at Elastic I was hired by the Python Software Foundation to be the Security Developer-in-Residence. I still have days when I think I'm dreaming, I'm so grateful I have the opportunity to work full-time serving a community I love.
This blog saw a huge burst of activity thanks to my new position where I publish weekly reports on what I've been working on. There were 34 new publications to the blog in 2023 (up from 12 in 2022), of those 24 were related to the Security Developer-in-Residence role.
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Brandon ☛ Personal Site Spotlight: The Wrestling Insomniac 🔦
I tell you all this because I still stand by that The Wrestling Insomniac is one of the finest pro wrestling sites on the internet. I don't say that because Michael is my friend, I say that because the site is so good it made Michael my friend.
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Pete Brown ☛ “If you don’t like were you live, just move” is unrealistic and unhelpful advice.
I think it is really easy to say “Everyone should just avoid Substack because they’ve become the Nazi bar.” That is true; as a bunch of people have said, the correct number of Nazis to have on your platform is zero and if you find yourself in the business of explaining why the non-zero number of Nazis you have on your platform is okay, your place is not one where I want to hang out.
The hard question, though, is what folks like Krukowski are supposed to do.
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Hindustan Times ☛ NY Times Upshot analysed 515 million Wordle games played over the past year, with this stunning finding
Wordle, a web-based game released in 2021, took the world by storm soon after its release. People around the world, not only enjoyed playing this game, but many even discussed and shared it with others. Recently, the NY Times examined how players performed in half a billion of Wordle games over the past year. They also compared their outcomes to the strategies recommended by WordleBot.
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[Repeat] Boiling Steam ☛ Happy New Year 2024 and Some News
In 2023 we decided to move away from Wordpress to a static site (after building our own static site generator), and as you can expect there are many things that still remain to be implemented. But one of the most urgent things that had to be done was to import most of the older articles that were not yet available on the site. We have been using Git since 2020 to record and track changes on all of our articles, but everything prior to 2020 was basically in a Wordpress database. Over the past few months, I have worked on making an import script that would convert all the Wordpress syntax that was stored in the database into regular markdown documents. You end up with a fairly long piece of code with a lot of regexes and if conditions to remove stuff that was mostly wordpress related.
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Tedium ☛ We Beat The Machine
What makes Tetris “beatable,” in this context? Simple: He played so far into the game that its many parts were falling off the machine. In a modern competitive game of NES Tetris, the first thing to fall is the score, which tops out at 999,999 in the game. Second to fall was the original “kill screen,” a Level 29 that moved so quickly that, if you played using a traditional controller layout, you could not move your fingers quickly enough to keep up. (Players got past these limitations through a series of new techniques, the newest of which, “rolling,” was developed by an observant player, Christopher “CheeZ” Martinez.)
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404 Media ☛ 13-Year-Old Becomes First Person to Ever Beat Tetris
Blue Scuti is a Tetris prodigy who employs the “rolling” controller technique, a new way of holding and using the NES controller that was popularized in 2021. Rolling surpassed “hyper tapping,” which requires players to tap the controller’s D-pad 12 times per second, as the fastest and best way of playing Tetris. Rolling is a method where players roll their fingers on the bottom of an NES controller and use that pressure to push the controller into their other hand, which presses the D-pad to move the blocks. With rolling, players can push the D-pad at least 20 times per second, which is fast enough to theoretically play the game until it breaks. The technique has completely revolutionized competitive Tetris over the last few years.
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Education
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NPR ☛ Hack, rizz, slay and other cringe-worthy words to avoid in 2024
Hack — "Its widespread adoption in multiple contexts, extending beyond its initial technological context, has the potential to lessen its inherent significance."
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Hardware
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Avalue’s Latest Leap in Server Board Technology with Emerald Rapids Intel processors
Avalue Technology introduced their new server boards, the HPM-ERSUA and HPM-ERSDE. Featuring Intel’s 5th Generation Xeon Scalable Processors, also known as “Emerald Rapids”, these boards are tailored for demanding applications such as cloud computing, data analytics, and AI processing within data center environments.
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Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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The Conversation ☛ AI can now attend a meeting and write code for you – here’s why you should be cautious
Despite their seemingly intelligent responses, we cannot blindly trust LLMs to be accurate or reliable. We must carefully evaluate and verify their outputs, ensuring that our initial prompts are reflected in the answers provided.
To effectively verify and validate LLM outputs, we need to have a strong understanding of the subject matter. Without expertise, we cannot provide the necessary quality assurance.
This becomes particularly critical in situations where we are using LLMs to bridge gaps in our own knowledge. Here our lack of knowledge may lead us to a situation where we are simply unable to determine whether the output is correct or not. This situation can arise in generation of text and coding.
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El País ☛ The hidden labor force behind ChatGPT: The drama of the ‘ghost workers’
Anthropologist Mary Gray calls them “ghost workers”. People we do not see, working in remote locations, training the great models that make the most famous chat in the world produce quality content. They are not just adults. There are children, too. Just like the ones who sew together soccer balls. Their labor conditions are very different to those enjoyed by Silicon Valley employees, where you can become a millionaire before the age of 30. In this other reality, that of the artificial intelligence supply chain, children like Hassan earn less than two dollars an hour. He’s 18 now, but he began at Toloka, a platform dedicated to data annotation, when he was 15. He is from a region of Pakistan. His friends also worked at these platforms after school until well into the night, according to reporting by Wired. They are able to get around age verification processes, and wind up doing jobs that are psychologically draining and age-inappropriate. This famous industry’s child labor problem is not something that is discussed.
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ The I in LLM stands for intelligence
When reports are made to look better and to appear to have a point, it takes a longer time for us to research and eventually discard it. Every security report has to have a human spend time to look at it and assess what it means.
The better the crap, the longer time and the more energy we have to spend on the report until we close it. A crap report does not help the project at all. It instead takes away developer time and energy from something productive. Partly because security work is consider one of the most important areas so it tends to trump almost everything else.
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Remy Van Elst ☛ Which Root Certificates should you trust? Find out with CertInfo
Which Root Certificates should you trust? Did you know that any certificate authority can issue a certificate for any website? There are protocols in place so that should not happen, but when (not if, when) they get hacked or coerced by their government, they can issue a certificate to intercept secure communication for any website. I've made an open source program, CertInfo that analyzes your browser history and queries all visited domains for their certificates. It presents a list of used root certificates (meaning, a website you visited was ultimately signed by that root CA) and a list of unused root certificates (meaning, no website in your analyzed history was signed by that root CA).
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Site36 ☛ Train trip with motion detector: French railway is testing methods for “intelligent” surveillance
According to Mediapart, the SNCF has 17,000 cameras in railway stations and 45,000 more on its trains. The tests were not carried out across the board, but at major railway stations in Paris, Lyon and Marseille, among others. For the various projects, the railway company used technology from domestic and foreign market leaders, including French companies Thales and Atos. According to the report, further tests were carried out in Caen in northern France in 2017 with an application from the Israeli company Briefcam. The administrative court subsequently judged the use of this software to be a serious and obviously unlawful invasion of privacy.
A controversial application from the Israeli company Anyvision – renamed Oosto in 2021 – was also tested. Its surveillance software can allegedly recognise people in video data based on their gait or clothing. High-ranking employees of Anyvision previously held important positions in the Israeli military and the foreign intelligence service. Following an investigation into the use of Anyvision technology in the West Bank, the Microsoft Group decided to sell its shares in the company.
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Gizmodo ☛ Montana and North Carolina Lawmakers Just Came for Pornhub, So Now You Can’t
“As you may know, your elected officials in your state are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website,” says a message when visiting Pornhub, Redtube, Brazzers, and YouPorn in Montana and North Carolina. “While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”
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The Verge ☛ Pornhub blocks North Carolina and Montana as porn regulation spreads
The move is meant to protest laws that went into effect in both states on January 1st. Montana passed a standalone ID verification law in May, and North Carolina’s new law was tacked onto a bill regarding the high school computer curriculum. The laws require sites to either use third-party verification or, in the case of Montana, “digitized identification” to verify a visitor’s age. Both states also leave enforcement as a civil matter, allowing individuals to sue if they think a site violates the law.
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404 Media ☛ North Carolina and Montana Just Lost Access to Pornhub
A year ago, Louisiana paved the way for a wave of age verification laws that target porn sites; eight states have since passed copycat age verification laws of their own. Montana’s SB 544 and North Carolina’s HB 8 are nearly identical to Louisiana’s and other states’ laws. The laws’ text make unsubstantiated claims about the addictive potential of pornography and its apparent harms to viewers’ health. North Carolina’s law was passed as part of unrelated legislation that adds a computer science course to high school graduation requirements.
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Confidentiality
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DJ Bernstein ☛ 2024.01.02: Double encryption: Analyzing the NSA/GCHQ arguments against hybrids. #nsa #quantification #risks #complexity #costs
In 2019, Google and Cloudflare ran an experiment where they upgraded HTTPS for many "real users’ connections" to use post-quantum encryption. They then reported statistics on how affordable this was. Google had also run a similar experiment in 2016: "While it's still very early days for quantum computers, we're excited to begin preparing for them, and to help ensure our users' data will remain secure long into the future."
Sounds great! Except that, oops, the 2016 experiment ran into patent trouble. And, oops, half of the post-quantum connections in the 2019 experiment used SIKE, which in 2022 was shown by public attacks to be efficiently breakable.
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Defence/Aggression
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Daniel Pipes ☛ Discussion of the Voluntary Emigration of Gazans
Sen. Tom Cotton (Republican of Arkansas) wants them not going to the United States but to the countries that supported their jihad: "Iran should take responsibility for any Palestinian refugees caused by its proxy . . . war with Israel. Iran is responsible for the death and destruction — it should be responsible for refugees as well."
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NYPost ☛ Texas has bused 95K migrants to sanctuary cities since 2022 as Gov. Abbott warns ‘transportation mission’ will continue
New York City has seen more than 160,000 migrants arrive since the spring of 2022.
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US News And World Report ☛ US Believes Hamas Used Al Shifa Hospital but Evacuated Before Israeli Operation Source
U.S. intelligence agencies have not disclosed the evidence on which they based their assessment. The official said the U.S. had independently confirmed the information.
Israel has also said Al Shifa, which it had occupied earlier in the war in Gaza, had been used by Hamas. Israeli troops entered the hospital in November.
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NPR ☛ Maine's secretary of state tells NPR why she disqualified Trump from the ballot
Under Maine law, when I qualified Mr. Trump for the ballot, any registered voter had the right to challenge that qualification. Five voters did so, including two former Republican state senators. And then I was required under the statute, under the law, to hold a hearing and issue a decision, and do so within a very compressed timeline. So this wasn't something I initiated, but it's something that's required under Maine election law.
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Maine ☛ Ruling of the Secretary of State [PDF]
The Secretary of State's office received three challenges to the nomination of Donald J. Trump, each filed under 21-A M.R.S. §§ 336 and 337. The deadline for filing those challenges was 5:00 pm on Friday, December 8, 2023. See 21-A M.R.S. § 337(2)(A). Each challenge was timely.
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Vox ☛ How death threats get Republicans to fall in line behind Trump
It did not. What happened instead reveals a pattern that is quietly reshaping American politics: Across the board and around the country, data reveals that threats against public officials have risen to unprecedented numbers — to the point where 83 percent of Americans are now concerned about risks of political violence in their country. The threats are coming from across the political spectrum, but the most important ones in this regard emanate from the MAGA faithful.
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The Hill ☛ Man forces way into Colorado Supreme Court days after Trump ballot decision
A man was arrested early Tuesday after he broke into the Colorado Supreme Court overnight, opened fire and caused “significant and extensive” damage, local authorities said.
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JURIST ☛ Man arrested after allegedly breaking into Colorado Supreme Court building and opening fire
The suspect also held an unarmed security guard at gunpoint to gain access to the building in addition to shooting out windows and firing a gun while inside, according to the Colorado Sun. The man called 911 and voluntarily surrendered to police several hours later. The incident appeared to begin in the early morning hours after a two car collision near the Colorado Supreme Court building. The suspect was involved in the crash and had pointed a gun at the other driver before shooting at the building housing the Colorado Supreme Court. After obtaining keys from a security guard held at gunpoint, the suspect entered the building, fired shots and moved between several floors before the suspect started a fire that caused the Denver Fire Department to respond. After surrendering, the man was taken to the local hospital for evaluation. Colorado State Troopers also responded to the scene and reported “significant and extensive damage to the building” as a result of the fracas.
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The Hill ☛ Hamas massacre footage shows the Gaza War is about religious fanaticism
As scene after gruesome scene unfolds, the repeated cry of “Allahu Akbar” — “God [sic] is great” — emanates from the terrorists and, yes, from many Palestinian civilians, as they massacre, mutilate, brutalize, torture, murder and rape Jews with satisfied and joyous faces, all the while photographing their victims.
You come to the realization that this war is not just about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but just one battle in a much greater war against radical [sic] Islamism being fought on many continents. American policy will continue to fail in the Middle East and beyond unless it acknowledges and strategizes against this complex and evolving threat, whose ideology allows the most grievous acts to be rationalized in the name of a radicalized religious perspective.
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Site36 ☛ Man in Mannheim shot by police: Officers allegedly prevented relatives from trying to calm him down
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Environment
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Kansas Reflector ☛ Environmental groups want stronger rules for use of coal ash fill after EPA reveals new risks
However, a lot of that ash, which can contain a host of toxic metals, isn’t just sitting around in a landfills or disposal pits, it’s also been a cheap source of fill material, with 2 million tons of it being used for that purpose in 2021 alone, according to the American Coal Ash Association, a trade group. EarthJustice, an environmental law group, citing the association’s numbers, says 180 million tons of coal ash has been used for fill since 1980. Ash has been used on everything from a golf course in Virginia to playgrounds in Tennessee and much of an entire Indiana town.
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New York Times ☛ Indiana’s Plan to Pipe In Groundwater for Microchip-Making Draws Fire
The fight in Indiana is an example of increased tension over water as urban growth, industrial demands and spotty regulation collide in communities that are putting increasing strain on their limited groundwater supplies. Overlying all of it is a changing climate and the potential for more erratic weather, including droughts like one that dried out the state in 2012.
Critics say the pipeline plan could cause some residential wells to run dry and overstress an aquifer that farmers rely on for irrigation, as well as possibly reduce flows in nearby rivers and streams. Supporters say initial tests show the aquifer has plenty of water, and that the new investments — including a drug factory to make a rival medication to Ozempic, the diabetes and weight-loss drug — would create jobs and boost the economy.
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Energy/Transportation
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David Rosenthal ☛ Good News For Tether
The good news for Tether is shown in this graph, with two huge surges in "market cap" this year. One of about $15B early in the year, and another of about $6B recently. It looks like the euphoria over the prospect of spot Bitcoin ETFs has solved the Greater Fool Supply-Chain Crisis with the cryptosphere experiencing a massive inflow of around $20B actual dollars. As one might expect from injecting $20B whose only uses are to HODL or to buy cryptocurrency into the market, the result has been a massive bubble in cryptocurrency "prices".
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Norway is on the verge of saying goodbye to petrol cars
Almost five out of six new cars sold in Norway last year were powered by battery only, with Tesla’s share of the overall market rising to 20% from 12.2% in 2022, registration data showed on Tuesday.
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The Register UK ☛ [Cryptocurrenc]-crook Sam Bankman-Fried spared a second trial
The prosecutors reasoned that much of the evidence that would be submitted had already been considered in his October trial – an event which yielded a guilty verdict after just four hours of jury deliberation.
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The Register UK ☛ A ship carrying 800 tonnes of Li-Ion batteries caught fire. What could possibly go wrong?
Two days later, the Coast Guard advised that a preliminary assessment of the vessel's condition led to the conclusion that "the vessel is stable with no indication of heat in the cargo holds."
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The Maritime Executive LLC ☛ Lithium-Ion Battery Fire Contained Aboard Bulker off Dutch Harbor
A second fire was soon reported in the Number 2 hold, but the crew had already used up their CO2 supply. With limited options left, they applied boundary cooling with firehoses and kept the holds closed in an attempt to contain the blaze.
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Ruben Schade ☛ Apple should release a bike or scooter, not a car
Screw Apple’s rumoured smart, self-driving, and/or electric car. They should release a smart bike, scooter, or another personal mobility device. Something premium, beautiful, and most importantly, desirable.
This would have four effects: [...]
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International Business Times ☛ Energy Bills In The UK Is Set To Increase By Five Per Cent After Rise In Energy Price Cap
Implemented from January 1st, this adjustment translates to an initial five per cent surge in energy bills for average households as they enter 2024, coinciding with what may be the coldest three months of the year.
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DeSmog ☛ Dark Money, CCS Bonanza, Corporate Comms Offensives: What to Watch in 2024
If you care about maintaining a livable climate, stay tuned for a big 2024. Major elections are coming in both the UK and U.S., and expect corporate money, and talking points, to be flowing. Global climate leadership is on the line, and we’ll be reporting whether it’s also for sale.
On the heels of COP28, we’ll be tracking the ways corporate and right-wing interests, from the Alberta oil sands to U.S. agribusiness, try dressing up the same old climate denial and delay in the language of “solutions” that in reality perpetuate climate pollution — and do so with the polish and pizzazz of PR and ad companies. DeSmog has been pulling back the veil on climate misinformation and disinformation like this since 2006. Expect more big stories from our growing team of investigative reporters and researchers in 2024.
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Wildlife/Nature
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The Revelator ☛ A Year to Remember…for Wildlife
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Finance
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Wizards of the Coast slashed 1,100 jobs in 2023 as Hasbro CEO took home $9m
Cocks took home a reported $9.4m in compensation, three times his Executive Compensation from the $3.7m in 2021. Despite this windfall for the CEO, he still announced 1,100 job cuts at WotC in the weeks leading up to Christmas.
This announcement came as a shock to the employees who helped contribute to record sales and were the pillars propping up the toy giant in 2023. Sales of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) and Magic the Gathering (MTG) were a boon for the company. Both are under the banner of Wizards of the Coast, owned by Hasbro.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Common Dreams ☛ From the Hands of the Wicked to the Hands of the Righteous
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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VOA News ☛ Ukraine Did Not Release Video Confirming Delivery of F-16s
“#Ukraine has confirmed by releasing a video that it has received the first batch of F-16 fighter jets!!!”
That is false.
The video was posted to Instagram on November 30 by Ukrainian clothing brand Aviatsiya Halychyny, which specializes in aviation-related themes.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Meduza ☛ Russian authorities arrest woman who burned passport on New Year’s Eve
The Telegram channel Baza reported a blogger named Yevgenia Hoffman was arrested in connection with the case and that she claims to have burned her expired passport after getting a new one.
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RFERL ☛ The Monster Returns: Stalin Looms Large Over Putin's Russia
“We are definitely living inside Stalin’s legacy,” he wrote, “where the main things are fear, atomization, submission, and other social evils.”
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JURIST ☛ Hong Kong activist Jimmy Lai pleads not guilty to conspiracy and sedition charges
Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon Jimmy Lai pleaded not guilty Tuesday to two counts of conspiring to collude with foreign forces and one count of publishing “seditious” materials, according to Hong Kong Free Press. Conspiring to collude with foreign forces violates the National Security Law, and publishing “seditious” materials violates the sedition law.
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New York Times ☛ Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong Media Executive, Pleads Not Guilty to Security Charges
On Tuesday, the lead prosecutor, Anthony Chau, began making his case by outlining evidence of what he described as Mr. Lai’s collusion with foreign forces, a vaguely defined political crime under the national security law. Mr. Chau’s argument centered on meetings Mr. Lai had with American politicians, messages he had exchanged with officials, interviews he gave to the media, and views that he aired on social media.
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RFERL ☛ Iran Reportedly Executes Kurdish Prisoner Of Conscience
They were convicted of taking "action" against national security interests, propaganda against the regime, and "corruption on Earth."
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Project Censored ☛ State of the Free Press 2024: A Discussion of Ongoing Censorship
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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Press Gazette ☛ John Pilger praised and pilloried following death aged 84
His most famous achievement was his 1979 front-page report for the Daily Mirror headlined “Death of a Nation”, which revealed that possibly two million people out of a population of seven million in Cambodia had been victims of genocide and starvation under dictator Pol Pot.
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VOA News ☛ Tunisian Journalist Detained After Criticizing Minister, Lawyer Says
Tunisian judicial authorities on Monday ordered that prominent journalist Zeid El-Heni should be detained and tried on charges of defamation, days after he criticized the trade minister, his lawyer said.
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The Nation ☛ A Visit to Belmarsh Prison, Where Julian Assange Awaits His Final Appeal Against Extradition to the US
Back at the registration counter, the stout woman told me that Assange could not receive any books. Why not? He had to remove books from his cell before adding new ones. Again, I ask: Why? With a straight face, she answered, “Fire hazard.” Recalling Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, I think, but dare not say, “Manuscripts don’t burn.”
[...]
Belmarsh does not offer him education programs or communal activity, like orchestra practice, sports, or publishing a prison journal, that are standard at many other prisons. The regime is punitive; although Belmarsh’s 700-odd inhabitants are on remand, awaiting trial or appeal. They are Category A prisoners, those who “pose the most threat to the public, the police or national security” and stand accused of terrorism, murder, or sexual violence.
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The Dissenter ☛ From Prison, Assange Expresses Regret That WikiLeaks Can No Longer Expose War Crimes
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ANF News ☛ Female journalists who reported on Jina Amini banned from phone calls and family visits in prison
Iran's Supreme Court announced its verdict on 23 October 2023 against female journalists Ilahe Mohammadi and Niloufer Hamidi for reporting on the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini by 'morality police' on 16 September 2022.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Federal News Network ☛ DHS sees ‘usability testing’ as central to big burden reduction goals
Dana Chisnell said she did her first usability tests on software manuals in the 1980’s. Later on in her career, she said usability tests helped states improve voter experiences at the Center for Civic Design. They also featured in some of the U.S. Digital Service’s work when Chisnell served there during the Obama administration.
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Federal News Network ☛ First win in Europe: DoD employees get union representation at German military installation
The 389 non-appropriated fund (NAF) employees all work for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES), at 11 separate facilities as retail, food and gas station workers. While AFGE covers AAFES employees working in the United States under a single contract, it didn’t represent AAFES employees stationed abroad. Moving forward, the employees will automatically be covered under an existing contract between AAFES and AFGE.
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The Verge ☛ A New Year’s resolution for tech companies: knock it off with the CAPTCHAs
I am certain this experience is familiar to every reader of The Verge. Probably you have even read, over the years, frustrated screeds just like this one. Things were bad enough when you had to fill out one. But lately, when I’ve been trying to buy something — or even just sign up for an email list to let someone market to me — I’ve had to fill out three. Three! Why! Why! Why!
It is fully 2024. Isn’t the tech industry supposed to be about innovation?
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Terence Eden ☛ Reductive Thinking and the Unfairness of Spotify Payments
In "Theory Of Games And Economic Behavior" by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, the authors discuss the card game of poker. There are dozens of variations of poker, each with their own intricacies. But they all boil down to the same pattern - is my hand stronger than your hand?
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Gizmodo ☛ How a Group of Train Hackers Exposed a Right-to-Repair Nightmare
Dragon Sector was hired by a repair workshop that was stumped by several Newag trains that wouldn’t start. The hackers quickly found anticompetitive behavior ingrained in the code of Newag trains and went to Polish authorities with the case in 2022. Dragon Sector says in two instances, Newag had written code that would cause a train to fail if it was at a competitor’s workshop. After a year of not seeing much progress with the authorities, the train hackers decided to go public.
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Patents
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Software Patents
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[Old] DJ Bernstein ☛ 2022.01.29: Plagiarism as a patent amplifier: Understanding the delayed rollout of post-quantum cryptography. #pqcrypto #patents #ntru #lpr #ding #peikert #newhope
Reportedly, after announcing its experiment, Google was contacted by Jintai Ding, who informed Google that he had a patent covering New Hope and asked them for money.
If that's in fact what happened, then suddenly it makes sense that Google's enthusiasm for running the experiment would have rapidly disappeared. Imagine the effect of email saying "A patent holder is asking us for money because of your CECPQ1 experiment" from one of Google's patent lawyers to the managers at Google in charge of TLS.
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Trademarks
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Techdirt ☛ ‘Lord Of The Wings’ Food Truck Trademark In New Zealand Defeated By Tolkien Estate
Readers here shouldn’t need to be reminded that the Tolkien Estate, through its company Middle-Earth Enterprises, is known to be extremely aggressive with its enforcement of intellectual property over anything remotely to do with The Lord of the Rings. The estate appears to operate under the notion that it has control over words via trademark law that it absolutely does not. And, where it does have those rights, it enforces them in draconian ways.
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Copyrights
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New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement
Last week, The New York Times announced a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft alleging large-scale copyright infringement. They are accused of using millions of articles, without permission, to train ChatGPT to provide information to readers. The complaint accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of taking a “free-ride on the Times’s massive investment in its journalism” to create content that readers unwittingly use as a substitute for the Times’ original articles.
Why we care. Marketers face the prospect of needing to invest in generative AI to improve workflows, especially the content-creation workflows heavily reliant on large language models like ChatGPT. At the same time, it needs to be borne in mind that there is a realistic prospect that litigation (this is only one of a number of copyright infringement lawsuits) or regulation might at some point curb what the large language models can do.
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[Old] LOC ☛ National Jukebox
The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center and other contributing libraries and archives. Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings.
At launch, the Jukebox includes more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Jukebox content will be increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles made by other Sony-owned U.S. labels, including Columbia, OKeh, and others.
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Digital Music News ☛ Earliest Mickey Mouse Film Officially Enters Public Domain
The entry of the first version of Mickey Mouse into public domain has sparked some questions about current copyright law. Disney pushed for the extension of copyright law from 75 years to 95 years in 1984 when these original cartoons were expected to hit the public domain. In 2004, Congress added another 20 year extension at the behest of copyright holders.
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El País ☛ Mickey Mouse is free at last (from ‘copyright’)
The earliest form of Mickey Mouse loses copyright protection in the United States in 2024, when the cartoon, which debuted in that 1928 short where the mouse pilots a steamboat and whistles a tune from 1910, entered the public domain. This annual selection of works, known as Public Domain Day, is compiled by Jennifer Jenkins, a professor of law and director of Duke’s Center for the Study of Public Domain. The list of works losing copyright protection this January, after 95 years, is especially powerful.
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Gizmodo ☛ Everything You Need to Know About Mickey Mouse's Public Domain Debut Today
Mickey Mouse is finally in the hands of the public, to do whatever they want with him. Well, in part. After Disney infamously helped delay the moment, today is the day Steamboat Willie, the first Disney animated short to star Mickey and Minnie Mouse, become public domain. But what does that mean? Simultaneously a lot and not much.
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The Verge ☛ Welcome to the public domain, Mickey Mouse
It’s finally happened: after nearly a century, Mickey Mouse has slipped off Disney’s copyright leash. The first versions of the iconic cartoon character, seen in Steamboat Willie and a silent version of Plane Crazy, enter the public domain in the US on January 1st, 2024. (An early version of Minnie Mouse is also fortunately included.) There’s still a complicated mess of protections around Mickey, but today is a moment public domain advocates have awaited for decades — and there are plenty of other exciting new entries as well.
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Quartz ☛ The first-ever Mickey Mouse is no longer owned by Disney
Because US law allows copyright to be held for just 95 years, Disney’s sole claim to the character has officially ended. And it’s not just Mickey Mouse that people can share, adapt, or remix, but all characters in “Steamboat Willie,” including the first iteration of Minnie Mouse.
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Harvard University ☛ Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns, Shortest Tenure In University History
Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.
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New York Times ☛ Harvard President Resigns After Mounting Plagiarism Accusations
Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, announced her resignation on Tuesday, after her presidency had become engulfed in crisis over accusations of plagiarism and what some called her insufficient response to antisemitism on campus after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.
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France24 ☛ Harvard president Claudine Gay resigns after rows over plagiarism, anti-Semitism
Gay was also engulfed by scandal after she declined to say unequivocally whether calling for genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct, during testimony to Congress alongside the heads of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania last month.
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New York Times ☛ Claudine Gay and the Limits of Social Engineering at Harvard
The point may now be moot, but the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
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The Atlantic ☛ Claudine Gay’s Resignation Was Overdue
But these new revelations about Gay’s work seem to show a pattern that is too damning to ignore and transcends excuses about sloppiness or accidents. Any scholar—to say nothing of any student—with this many problems in their work would be in a world of professional trouble. And in the end, Gay’s name is on her dissertation and her published papers. She, like every author, is ultimately responsible for the integrity of her work. (Gay has defended her scholarship, but her letter announcing her resignation makes no mention of any of the various academic accusations regarding her work.)
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Reason ☛ Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns After Plagiarism Scandal
But Gay's resignation barely mentioned the plagiarism scandal. Instead, she mostly nodded to the criticisms she faced in the wake of the House antisemitism hearings, in which she appeared callously dismissive of calls for genocide against Jewish people.
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Techdirt ☛ FTC Continues To Wade Into Copyright Issues In AI Without Understanding Anything
Last year we were dismayed (and somewhat annoyed) to see the FTC step way beyond its bounds and expertise by issuing a ridiculous comment to the US Copyright Office regarding questions around AI and copyright. In it, the FTC (which has no authority — or expertise — regarding copyright law) argued that fair use was somehow anticompetitive, and resulted in “unfair competition.”
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Torrent Freak ☛ RCN Faces Another Multi-Million Dollar Piracy Lawsuit
Internet provider RCN has yet another piracy liability lawsuit to deal with in the new year. Screen Media Ventures, one of the largest independent movie and TV-series distributors, claims the ISP can be held liable after subscribers downloaded and shared hundreds of the company's films. Screen Media Ventures previously tried to join a related suit but filed its own when a federal court denied the request.
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Torrent Freak ☛ DHS/HSI Assist Korea to Arrest Operator of "World's Largest Manga & Webtoon" Site
A report last month claimed that after five years of tracking, the operator of 'M', a mysterious platform described as the "world's largest illegal comics and webtoon distribution site," had been identified. With assistance from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the suspect's home was raided just days before Christmas. Now the dust has settled, here's what we believe is a clearer picture of the nature of the platform and the operation to take it down.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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oopsie hiyaa time flies
i have a weekly rolling reminder to write a gemlog post. and i dismiss it sometimes because i don't *actually* intend to do a weekly post. i aim to get one post every month or so, but if i made the reminder a monthly affair i'd inevitably dismiss it and not be prompted for another month.
ANYWAY i bring that up because i kept dismissing the notification EVERY WEEK because i thought "nah, i definitely only JUST wrote a post this month"... turns out i had NOT written once since october lollllll oops
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This Island Cardboard
I try to make myself and my immediate surroundings as self-sufficient as possible. There’s something innate in me that makes me want to do everything myself, to not depend on anyone, and even more so to be **free**. Of course, “free” can hide a lot. Despite how ingrained this part of my nature is, though, I can see where it’s been reinforced. As always, it begins with a “there but for the grace of God go I” situation.
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Kung Fu
"Kung fu" actually means something like hard (or bitter) work, so would include anything that requires dedication to master—the piano, vi, tea ceremonies, etc. Or is it just a bag slopped in swimming pool water, as far as ritual goes?
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Happy 2024!
I was out of the country for my first big vacation in half a decade (when we went to Toronto and then spent a week driving around Newfoundland), and my first international trip since we did both Europe and Chicago in 2016. It is, emphatically, good to be back. My partner had a great time; I was sick but had fun otherwise, so mixed feelings for me.
We got off the plane from the Caribbean late Sunday night and couldn't even make it to midnight. I've long stopped trying for this; if it happens, it happens, if it doesn't, great. We picked up the dogs, came home, put them to bed, and crashed ourselves. My partner slept poorly. I slept nine hours straight.
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Politics and World Events
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Banned from Antenna (publ. 2024-01-02)
I wrote a post yesterday regarding the war in the middle east and expressing support for the nation of Israel. I was surprised to discover this morning that my entire domain had been banned from Antenna. If I try to submit any feed, I get an error similar to this: [...]
[...]
I'm throwing out a call to other Antenna users to stand up for me. A few months ago, I remember a gemini user lamenting that they would like to hear more conservative voices in the gemiverse, to balance things out. Well, let's find out if that was a bunch of baloney or not.
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Technology and Free Software
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Some replies for Christmas morning
I've been an user on the Fediverse since 2018, and I've tried running my own instance several times, though it has always been kind of a messy endeavor due to my lack of technical knowledge and money. I found out about Tootik this week just as I migrated my neocities log to sourcehut's Gemini service.
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OpenBSD workstation hardening
I wanted to share a list of hardening you can do on your OpenBSD workstation, and explaining the threat model of each change.
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Posting is feeling silly again
Nice walk to the local taxing authority and back.
Grandson over to paint a bedroom.
Ambulance in the distance.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.