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canopic jug writes:

The ScheerPost has published a sermon which Chris Hedges gave on Sunday Aug. 20 in Oslo, Norway at Kulturkirken Jakob (St. James Church of Culture) where the actor and film director Liv Ullmann read the scripture passages. Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who has worked for many years at the New York Times, NPR, and several other publications. In his sermon he expounds on the long-standing problem of speaking truth to power.

Julian exposed the truth. He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption and mendacity that defines the global ruling class And for these truths they came after Julian, as they have come after all who dared rip back the veil on power. "Red Rosa now has vanished too," Bertolt Brecht wrote after the German socialist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered. "She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out."

We have undergone a corporate coup, where poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where we, as citizens, are nothing more than commodities to corporate systems of power, ones to be used, fleeced and discarded.

Given the massive quantities of disinformation spread over a longer period of time against Julian Assange, and the media blackout on coverage of his case and how it effects journalism as a whole, this is a difficult case to find a concise and accurate summary to link to. The bottom line is that, regardless of what one thinks (or has been told to think) about Julian Assange, the case hinges on factors which will determine whether or not there is a future for investigative reporting.

Previously:
(2023) Australian Lawmakers Press US Envoy for Julian Assange Release
(2023) No NGO Has Been Allowed to See Julian Assange Since Four Years Ago
(2022) Biden Faces Growing Pressure to Drop Charges Against Julian Assange
(2022) Assange Lawyers Sue CIA for Spying on Them
(2021) Key Witness in Assange Case Jailed in Iceland After Admitting to Lies and Ongoing Crime Spree
...
(2015) French Justice Minister Says Snowden and Assange Could Be Offered Asylum

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/hell-freezes-over-as-apple-supports-right-to-repair-bill/

Somewhere, ol' Beelzebub is putting on his thickest coat because Apple has endorsed a right-to-repair bill, suggesting hell has frozen over. In a letter dated August 22, Apple showed its support for California's right-to-repair bill, SB 244, after spending years combatting DIY repair efforts.

As reported by TechCrunch, the letter, written to California state Senator Susan Eggman, declared that Apple supports SB 244 and urged the legislature to pass it.

[...] The bill has been praised by right-to-repair activists like iFixit, who says the bill goes further than right-to-repair laws passed in Minnesota and New York. Minnesota's law was considered the most all-encompassing right-to-repair legislation yet. Some activists, though, lamented that companies aren't required to sell parts and tools for devices not actively sold. California's bill, however, keeps vendors on the hook for three years after the last date of manufacture if the product is $50 to $99.99 and seven years if it's over $99.99.

The bill also allows a city, county, or state to bring a related case to superior court rather than only a state attorney general, as noted by iFixit's blog post Wednesday.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Crypto botnet on X is powered by ChatGPT:

ChatGPT may well revolutionize web search, streamline office chores, and remake education, but the smooth-talking chatbot has also found work as a social media crypto huckster.

Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington discovered a botnet powered by ChatGPT operating on X—the social network formerly known as Twitter—in May of this year.

The botnet, which the researchers dub Fox8 because of its connection to cryptocurrency websites bearing some variation of the same name, consisted of 1,140 accounts. Many of them seemed to use ChatGPT to craft social media posts and to reply to each other's posts. The auto-generated content was apparently designed to lure unsuspecting humans into clicking links through to the crypto-hyping sites.

[...] The Fox8 botnet might have been sprawling, but its use of ChatGPT certainly wasn't sophisticated. The researchers discovered the botnet by searching the platform for the tell-tale phrase "As an AI language model ...", a response that ChatGPT sometimes uses for prompts on sensitive subjects. They then manually analyzed accounts to identify ones that appeared to be operated by bots.

[...] Despite the tic, the botnet posted many convincing messages promoting cryptocurrency sites. The apparent ease with which OpenAI's artificial intelligence was apparently harnessed for the scam means advanced chatbots may be running other botnets that have yet to be detected. "Any pretty-good bad guys would not make that mistake," Menczer says.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The United Nations' proposed Global Digital Compact will exclude technical experts as a distinct voice in internet governance, ignoring their enormous contributions to growing and sustaining the internet, according to ICANN and two of the world's regional internet registries.

The Global Digital Compact is an effort to "outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all." The UN hopes the compact will address issues such as digital inclusion, internet fragmentation, giving individuals control over how their data is used, and making the internet trustworthy "by introducing accountability criteria for discrimination and misleading content."

But ICANN, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), and the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) worry that recent articulations of the Compact suggest it should use a tripartite model for digital cooperation with three stakeholder groups: the private sector, governments, and civil society.

That's dangerous, ICANN and co argue, because technical stakeholders would lose their distinct voice.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A prototype satellite built to test a deployable drag sail to de-orbit satellites appears to have fulfilled its purpose, burning up on re-entry earlier this month after spending just 445 days in orbit.

SBUDNIC, an acronym chosen to be a play on "Sputnik," was put together by students at Brown University, Rhode Island, using low-cost off-the-shelf commercial components. The CubeSat design featured a drag sail made from Kapton polyimide film, and with structural supports of thin aluminum tubing, which deployed once the satellite was in orbit.

[...] The project appears to have been successful in this respect, according to tracking data the team obtained from US Space Command. It indicated that SBUDNIC was about 470 kilometers (292 miles) above the Earth in early March, while other comparably sized satellites deployed to a similar orbit as part of the same mission were still at altitudes of 500 kilometers (310 miles) or more.

[...] Previous predictions had suggested that the drag device would reduce the orbital lifetime of SBUDNIC from over 20 years to as few as 6.5 years, but in reality it was brought down in about a year and a quarter.

[...] "Rather than taking junk out of space after it becomes a problem, we have this $30 drag device you can just throw onto satellites and radically reduce how long they're in space," Ganjikunta said.

Of course, this requires future satellites to be designed to have a similar mechanism built in, and so does not help to address existing space junk, but every little presumably helps.

SBUDNIC was a 3U CubeSat, meaning it was effectively the size of three 10cm cubes joined together. It was based around a $10 Arduino system plus 65 AA lithium batteries and included a variety of 3D-printed parts produced with consumer-grade printers.

Previously: Student Satellite Demos Drag Sail to De-orbit Old Hardware

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/youtube-may-face-billions-in-fines-if-ftc-confirms-child-privacy-violations/

Four nonprofit groups seeking to protect kids' privacy online asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate YouTube today, after back-to-back reports allegedly showed that YouTube is still targeting personalized ads on videos "made for kids."

Now it has become urgent that the FTC probe YouTube's data and advertising practices, the groups' letter said, and potentially intervene. Otherwise, it's possible that YouTube could continue to allegedly harvest data on millions of kids, seemingly in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the FTC Act.

The first report alleging YouTube's noncompliance with federal laws came last week from Adalytics and was quickly corroborated by research from Fairplay, one of the groups behind the FTC letter, The New York Times reported. Both groups ran ad campaigns to test if YouTube was really blocking all personalized ads from appearing in children's channels, as YouTube said it was. Both found that "Google and YouTube permit and report on behavioral ad targeting on 'made-for-kids' videos, even though neither should be possible under COPPA."

Google spokesperson Michael Aciman told The New York Times that these reports "point to a fundamental misunderstanding of how advertising works on made-for-kids content."

[...] But in their letter, child advocates told FTC Chair Lina Khan that they have "serious questions" about whether Google is being honest about ad targeting. After running targeted ad campaigns, Fairplay reported that YouTube placed its behavioral ads on children's channels 1,446 times. If YouTube was operating in compliance with COPPA as it claimed, Fairplay said that these campaigns would have resulted in zero ad placements.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Roughly a century before the Inca empire came to power in A.D. 1400, blasts of human-produced thunder may have rumbled off a ridge high in the Andes Mountains.

New evidence indicates that people who lived there around 700 years ago stomped rhythmically on a special dance floor that amplified their pounding into a thunderous boom as they worshipped a thunder god.

Excavations at a high-altitude site in Peru called Viejo Sangayaico have revealed how members of a regional farming and herding group, the Chocorvos, constructed this reverberating platform, says archaeologist Kevin Lane of the University of Buenos Aires. Different layers of soil, ash and guano created a floor that absorbed shocks while emitting resonant sounds when people stomped on it. This ceremonial surface worked like a large drum that groups of 20 to 25 people could have played with their feet, Lane reports in the September Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

These findings, from a ridgetop ritual area that faces a nearby mountain peak, provide a rare glimpse of the role played by sound and dance in ancient societies (SN: 11/18/10).

[...] His team acoustically tested the platform by stomping on it one at a time and in groups of two to four while measuring the noise produced. The same was done while a circle of four people stomp-danced across the platform.

The resulting sounds ranged in intensity from 60 to 80 decibels, roughly equivalent to between a loud conversation and a noisy restaurant, Lane says. Larger groups of Chocorvos dancers, possibly accompanied by singing and musical instruments, would have raised a much bigger racket.

K. Lane. Pounding the ground for the thunder god: Sounding platforms in the Prehispanic Andes (CE 1000 1532). Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Vol. 71, September 2023, 101515. doi: 10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101515.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microchips in the Parmigiano and Other Ways Europeans Are Fighting Fake Food:

Parmigiano-Reggiano producers are seeking new ways to protect the market for the world-famous pasta topping. Their latest trick to beat counterfeiters is edible microchips.

Italian producers of parmesan cheese have been fighting against imitations for years. Now, makers of Parmigiano-Reggiano, as the original parmesan cheese is officially called, are slapping the microchips on their 90-pound cheese wheels as part of an endless cat-and-mouse game between makers of authentic and fake products.

"We keep fighting with new methods," said Alberto Pecorari, who is in charge of protecting Parmigiano's authenticity for the consortium representing producers. "We won't give up."

Other European food producers are also going to ever greater lengths to protect their hallowed brand names against knockoffs. Guaranteeing food authenticity is big business in the European Union and more than 3,500 EU products have received protected status in addition to Italy's Parmigiano, including Greek feta cheese, French Champagne and Italian Parma raw ham.

[...] New methods to guarantee the origin of products are being used across the EU. Some wineries are putting serial numbers, invisible ink and holograms on their bottles. So-called DNA fingerprinting of milk bacteria pioneered in Switzerland, which isn't in the EU, is now being tested inside the bloc as a method for identifying cheese.

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/science/otzi-iceman-genome-appearance-genetics/

Ötzi the Iceman is one of the most well-studied individuals in human history, but there always seems to be more to learn about him. A new genomic study has now found that he didn't look the way previous studies had imagined him – instead he was bald, his skin was darker, and he had an ancestry that was far more exotic and isolated than previously thought.

In September 1991, two hikers discovered a human body in the Alps near the Austria and Italy border. At first they assumed they'd stumbled on an unlucky modern mountaineer, but on closer, scientific investigation, it was determined that the chap had died about 5,300 years ago. In the three decades since his discovery, Ötzi has been studied extensively, with scientists able to figure out what he ate, how he dressed, how he lived and how he died.

His full genome was published in 2012, allowing scientists to reconstruct an image of what he might have looked like. From that data, Ötzi was imagined as a fairly light-skinned man with a bushy beard, a thick head of unkempt hair, deep-set eyes and wrinkled skin beyond his 45 years of life. But a new study, using more comprehensive genomic analysis techniques, upends much of that picture.

Previously:
    Ötzi the Iceman's Last Meal
    Study: Ötzi the Iceman Probably Thawed and Refroze Several Times
    Ötzi the Iceman May Have Scaled Ice-Free Alps

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

Sometimes you just can't beat the original summary:

Some aspects of our Universe, like the strength of gravity's pull, the speed of light, and the mass of an electron, don't have any underlying explanation for why they have the values they do. For each aspect like this, a fundamental constant is required to "lock in" the specific value that we observe these properties take on in our Universe. All told, we need 26 fundamental constants to explain the known Universe: the Standard Model plus gravity. But even with that, some mysteries still remain unsolved.

Ask Ethan explains what these constants are, and 4 puzzles that might mandate more.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"US copyright law protects only works of human creation," judge writes:

Art generated entirely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted because "human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim," a federal judge ruled on Friday.

The US Copyright Office previously rejected plaintiff Stephen Thaler's application for a copyright because the work lacked human authorship, and he challenged the decision in US District Court for the District of Columbia. Thaler and the Copyright Office both moved for summary judgment in motions that "present the sole issue of whether a work generated entirely by an artificial system absent human involvement should be eligible for copyright," Judge Beryl Howell's memorandum opinion issued Friday noted.

Howell denied Thaler's motion for summary judgment, granted the Copyright Office's motion, and ordered that the case be closed.

Thaler sought a copyright for an image titled, "A Recent Entrance to Paradise," which was produced by a computer program that he developed, the ruling said. In his application for a copyright, he identified the author as the Creativity Machine, the name of his software.

Thaler's application "explained the work had been 'autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine,' but that plaintiff sought to claim the copyright of the 'computer-generated work' himself 'as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,'" Howell wrote. "The Copyright Office denied the application on the basis that the work 'lack[ed] the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim,' noting that copyright law only extends to works created by human beings."

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee will be Friday, August 25th, 2023 at 20:30 UTC (1:30pm PDT, 4:30pm EDT) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when available.

The agenda for the upcoming meeting will be published when available. In the meeting we plan to discuss mechanicjay's report on different entity types and the first draft of the bylaws, which was posted to janrinok's journal previously.

Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

Our community is encouraged to observe and participate, and is therefore invited to the meeting. SoylentNews is, after all, People!

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

One of the most prominent pirated book repositories used for training AI, Books3, has been kicked out from the online nest it had been roosting in for nearly three years. Rights-holders have been at war with online pirates for decades, but artificial intelligence is like oil seeping into copyright law’s water. The two simply do not mix, and the fumes rising from the surface just need a spark to set the entire concept of intellectual property rights alight.

As first reported by TorrentFreak, the large pirate repository The Eye took down the Books3 dataset after the Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance sent the site a DMCA takedown. Now trying to access that dataset gives a 404 error. The Eye still hosts other training data for AI, but the portion allotted for books has vanished.

[...] . The nonprofit research group EleutherAI originally released Books3 as a part of the AI training set The Pile, an 800 GB open source chunk of training data comprising 22 other datasets specifically designed for training language models. Rights Group said the organization “denied responsibility” for Books3. Gizmodo reached out to EleutherAI for comment, but we did not receive a response.

The Eye claims it regularly complies with all valid DMCA requests, though that data set was originally uploaded by AI developer and prominent open source AI proponent Shawn Presser back in 2020. His stated goal at the time was to open up AI development beyond companies like OpenAI, which trained its earlier large language models on the still-unknown “Books1” and “Books2” repositories. The Books3 repository contained 196,640 books all in plain.txt format and was supposed to give fledgling AI projects a leg up against the likes of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

Over Twitter DM, Presser called the attack on Books3 a travesty for open source AI. While other major companies and VC-funded startups get away with including copyrighted data in their training data, grassroots projects need something to compete—and that’s what Books3 was for.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/record-labels-sue-internet-archive-for-digitizing-obsolete-vintage-records/

Major record labels are suing the Internet Archive, accusing the nonprofit of "massive" and "blatant" copyright infringement "of works by some of the greatest artists of the Twentieth Century."

The lawsuit was filed Friday in a US district court in New York by UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Concord Bicycle Assets, CMGI, Sony Music Entertainment, and Arista Music. It targets the Internet Archive's "Great 78 Project," which was launched in 2006.

For the Great 78 Project, the Internet Archive partners with recording engineer George Blood— who is also a defendant in the lawsuit—to digitize sound recordings on 78 revolutions-per-minute (RPM) records. These early sound recordings are typically of poor quality and were made between 1898 and the late 1950s by using very brittle materials. The goal of the Great 78 Project was to preserve these early recordings so they would not be lost as records break and could continue to be studied as originally recorded.

In a blog post responding to the record labels' lawsuit, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said that the Internet Archive is currently reviewing the challenge and taking it seriously. However, Kahle characterizes the Great 78 Project as providing "free public access to a largely forgotten but culturally important medium," claiming that "there shouldn't be conflict here."
[...]
Days after record labels filed their complaint, a court document was unsealed showing that the Internet Archive had reached a joint agreement with book publishers due to the publishers' legal victory earlier this year. If the judge signs off, the agreement would permanently bar the Internet Archive from lending any unauthorized scans of books when authorized e-book versions exist, Publishers Weekly reported.

The Internet Archive would also be barred from profiting from any infringing works.

It's unclear how high the damages are in this case, but the agreement includes an all-inclusive "confidential monetary settlement" that "substantially" covers publishers' legal fees and costs, as well as damages and other claims. Previously it was estimated that the case could cost Internet Archive more than $19 million, which The Register reported amounts to approximately half of the nonprofit's 2019 budget.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Warnock and Chuck Geschke co-created the Postcript page-description language, and in Warnock's garage in 1982, they started Adobe Systems to turn it into a product. Dr Geschke died in 2021, and in our obituary for him we discussed Postscript's significance.

Steve Jobs attempted to buy Adobe – named after the creek at the back of Warnock's garage – for five million dollars the year it was founded. Warnock and Geschke refused, but sold him 19 percent of the company and licensed their software to Apple, which used it in the Apple LaserWriter – arguably the product which saved the Macintosh. Postscript was very much not Warnock's only gift to posterity, though.

John Warnock was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1940, and obtained all three of his degrees (bachelor's, master's, and doctorate) from the University of Utah. He also met his future wife, graphic designer Marva (née Mullins), while studying at the university.

[...] His 1969 doctoral thesis, "A Hidden Surface Algorithm for Computer Generated Halftone Pictures," described what is now known as the Warnock Algorithm, and in his words [PDF], he has "the dubious distinction of having written the shortest doctoral thesis in University of Utah history." It is a mere 32 pages long [PDF], and notably contains no computer code whatsoever.