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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Networking giant Cisco has suggested the United Nations' first-ever convention against cyber crime is dangerously flawed and should be revised before being put to a formal vote.

The document that Cisco dislikes is the United Nations convention against cyber crime [PDF]. The convention took five years to create and was drafted by a body called the Ad Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes.^*

The purpose of the Convention is to "enhance international cooperation, law enforcement efforts, technical assistance, and capacity-building relating to cyber crime," in recognition that digital technology has become a big enabler of transnational mischief.

As The Register theregister.com reported after the Committee agreed on a draft text, Russia was a big driver of the document, and human rights groups don't like it.

Human Rights Watch, for example, criticized the Convention as overly broad, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation has labelled the Convention "too flawed to adopt."

Those two orgs, and others, worry that the Convention doesn't offer a narrow definition of cyber crime, and could give signatory nations legal cover to target citizens who share views they dislike. They also worry about secrecy provisions in the document that would allow nations to demand info from service providers, without the individuals targeted by such requests being informed or having recourse.

British human rights org Article 19 has also warned the Convention's broad language could stymie legitimate infosec research, by creating a legal environment in which cyber-boffins don't feel safe to ply their trade for fear of being labelled crims.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

On Sept. 26th, 2022, NASA's Double Asteroids Redirect Test (DART) collided with Dimorphos, the small moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos. In so doing, the mission successfully demonstrated a proposed strategy for deflecting potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs)—the kinetic impact method.

By October 2026, the ESA's Hera mission will rendezvous with the double-asteroid system and perform a detailed post-impact survey of Dimorphos to ensure that this method of planetary defense can be repeated in the future.

However, while the kinetic method could successfully deflect asteroids so they don't threaten Earth, it could also create debris that might reach Earth and other celestial bodies.

In a recent study, an international team of scientists explored how this impact test also presents an opportunity to observe how this debris could someday reach Earth and Mars as meteors. After conducting a series of dynamic simulations, they concluded that the asteroid ejecta could reach Mars and the Earth-Moon system within a decade.

[...] The paper that details their findings appears online on the arXiv preprint server and has been accepted for publication by The Planetary Science Journal.

For their study, Peña-Asensio and his colleagues relied on data obtained by the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube), which accompanied the DART mission and witnessed the kinetic impact test.

[...] "LICIACube provided crucial data on the shape and direction of the ejecta cone immediately following the collision. In our simulation, the particles ranged in size from 10 centimeters to 30 micrometers, with the lower range representing the smallest sizes capable of producing observable meteors on Earth with current technology. The upper range was limited by the fact that only ejected centimeter-sized fragments were observed."

Their results indicated that some of these particles would reach Earth and Mars within a decade or more, depending on how fast they traveled after the impact.

looorg writes:

https://github.blog/news-insights/research/survey-ai-wave-grows/

Githubs "AI in software development 2024 survey" is here. A compilation of wishful thinking and overly optimistic interpretations of survey data. It generates more questions then answers. Mostly the survey and the report wants to sing the praise of the AI as some kind of development savior, as it will literally improve everything and there doesn't appear to be any negative aspects associated with it at all. Or at least they don't ask about such things. The survey and the responses generates more questions then it answer. After all it doesn't really answer any questions.

Our survey data showed that nearly all of the survey participants reported using AI coding tools both outside of work or at work at some point. However, 17-27% of respondents indicated that they've only used AI tools at work, challenging the assumption that all developers are using AI outside of work.

Almost everyone is using AI for development, at work. But not for private projects. It's good enough for work things but not for your private projects? Why is it good enough for work but not for coding at home, or outside work whatever that is? Or do developers/programmers not code at home anymore? No explanation. No dwelling into that. Just more happy AI-shilling.

More than 97% of respondents reported having used AI coding tools at work at some point, a finding consistent across all four countries. However, a smaller percentage said their companies actively encourage AI tool adoption or allow the use of AI tools, varying by region. The U.S. leads with 88% of respondents indicating at least some company support for AI use, while Germany is lowest at 59%. This highlights an opportunity for organizations to better support their developers' interest in AI tools, considering local regulations.

That is one interpretation of the data. Another is that the Germans are seeing something the Americans are not. A risk of some kind perhaps? Also it's just filled with vague statements such as "at some point", which isn't the same as they use it all the time or even anymore. I tried something once, at some point. Not the same as it was good, or that I kept using it.

upstart writes:

Federal Appeals Court Finds Geofence Warrants Are "Categorically" Unconstitutional:

In a major decision on Friday, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are "categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment." Closely following arguments EFF has made in a numberofcases, the court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of "general, exploratory rummaging" that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment intended to outlaw. EFF applauds this decision because it is essential that every person feels like they can simply take their cell phone out into the world without the fear that they might end up a criminal suspect because their location data was swept up in open-ended digital dragnet.

The new Fifth Circuit case, United States v. Smith, involved an armed robbery and assault of a US Postal Service worker at a post office in Mississippi in 2018. After several months of investigation, police had no identifiable suspects, so they obtained a geofence warrant covering a large geographic area around the post office for the hour surrounding the crime. Google responded to the warrant with information on several devices, ultimately leading police to the two defendants.

On appeal, the Fifth Circuit reached several important holdings.

First, it determined that under the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Carpenter v. United States, individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location data implicated by geofence warrants. As a result, the court broke from the Fourth Circuit's deeply flawed decision last month in United States v. Chatrie, noting that although geofence warrants can be more "limited temporally" than the data sought in Carpenter, geofence location data is still highly invasive because it can expose sensitive information about a person's associations and allow police to "follow" them into private spaces.

Second, the court found that even though investigators seek warrants for geofence location data, these searches are inherently unconstitutional. As the court noted, geofence warrants require a provider, almost always Google, to search "the entirety" of its reserve of location data "while law enforcement officials have no idea who they are looking for, or whether the search will even turn up a result." Therefore, "the quintessential problem with these warrants is that they never include a specific user to be identified, only a temporal and geographic location where any given user may turn up post-search. That is constitutionally insufficient."

Unsurprisingly, however, the court found that in 2018, police could have relied on such a warrant in "good faith," because geofence technology was novel, and police reached out to other agencies with more experience for guidance. This means that the evidence they obtained will not be suppressed in this case.

Nevertheless, it is gratifying to see an appeals court recognize the fundamental invasions of privacy created by these warrants and uphold our constitutional tradition prohibiting general searches. Police around the country have increasingly relied on geofence warrants and other reverse warrants, and this opinion should act as a warning against narrow applications of Fourth Amendment precedent in these cases.

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

The New York Times is reporting (Archive link here) on a novel lawsuit filed against Meta, using Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

From the article:

Facebook, X, YouTube and other social media platforms rely on a 1996 law to insulate themselves from legal liability for user posts. The protection from this law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, is so significant that it has allowed tech companies to flourish.
But what if the same law could be used to rein in the power of those social media giants?

That idea is at the heart of a lawsuit filed in May against Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The plaintiff has asked a federal court to declare that a little-used part of Section 230 makes it permissible for him to release his own software that lets users automatically unfollow everyone on Facebook.

The lawsuit, filed by Ethan Zuckerman, a public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the first to use Section 230 against a tech giant in this way, his lawyers said. It is an unusual legal maneuver that could turn a law that typically protects companies like Meta on its head. And if Mr. Zuckerman succeeds, it could mean more power for consumers to control what they see online.
[...]
Mr. Zuckerman has focused on a part of Section 230 that spells out protection for blocking objectionable material online. In 2021, after a developer released software to purge users' Facebook feeds of everyone they follow, Facebook threatened to shut it down. But Section 230 says it is possible to restrict access to obscene, excessively violent and other problematic content. The language shields companies from liability if they censor disturbing content, but lawyers now say it could also be used to justify scrubbing any content users don't want to see.

Meta said it had asked U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where the lawsuit was filed, to dismiss the case because Mr. Zuckerman had not released a software tool to clean up people's Facebook pages. It also argued that Mr. Zuckerman had not shown that Section 230 should apply in his case.

"This suit is baseless, and was filed by the plaintiff over a hypothetical browser extension that he has not even built," a company spokesman said.

What do Soylentils think? Will the plaintiffs succeed? Will this make any difference whatever?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://boingboing.net/2024/08/21/after-massive-public-outcry-disney-stops-attempt-to-kill-lawsuit-after-killing-restaurant-guest.html

See Previous Story: Disney Seeking Dismissal of Death Lawsuit Because Victim Was Disney+ Subscriber

AP reported yesterday that "Disney drops bid to have allergy-death lawsuit tossed because plaintiff signed up for Disney+."

I'm not a lawyer but the initial legal argument being made by Disney seems to me to be pure bad faith horseshit. This piece in New York Magazine looks at the lawsuit stemming from the allergic reaction death of a doctor named Amy Tangsuan at a Disney World Resort restaurant:

Tangsuan was allergic to dairy and nuts, and before she and her husband ordered, (they) asked a waiter whether any of the allergens were in her order... The waiter consulted with the chef, and then assured her that they could be made dairy- and nut-free.

About 45 minutes after Tangsuan ate, she went into an anaphylactic shock so severe her EpiPen was useless. She died soon after at a nearby hospital. In February, her husband filed a wrongful-death suit against the restaurant and Disney's theme-parks division, seeking money damages.

[...] Did they try this now abandoned tactic to save money? Of course. But it sounds like they're really doing it to save face — by moving cases to arbitration, it's permanently out of the public's view; however the case is settled, the general public will almost certainly be in the dark. PR problem of killing guests thus solved.

So they will not try that again until next time that they do ...

Original Submission

NASA Wants Clarity On Orion Heat Shield Issue Before Stacking Artemis II Rocket

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA would like to start stacking the Space Launch System rocket for the Artemis II mission—the first human flight around the Moon since 1972—sometime next month, but the agency's exploration chief says the milestone could be delayed as engineers continue studying the readiness of the Orion spacecraft's heat shield.

The heat shield, already installed at the base of the Orion spacecraft, will take the brunt of the heating when the capsule blazes through Earth's atmosphere at the end of the 10-day mission. On the Artemis I test flight in late 2022, NASA sent an Orion spacecraft to the Moon and back without a crew aboard. The only significant blemish on the test flight was a finding that charred chunks of the heat shield unexpectedly stripped away from the capsule during reentry as temperatures increased to nearly 5,000° Fahrenheit (2,760° Celsius).

The spacecraft safely splashed down, and if any astronauts had been aboard, they would have been fine. However, the inspections of the recovered spacecraft showed divots of heat shield material were missing. The heat shield material, called Avcoat, is designed to erode away in a controlled manner during reentry. Instead, fragments fell off the heat shield that left cavities resembling potholes.

NASA launched internal and independent investigations to look into the heat shield issue. Catherine Koerner, NASA's associate administrator for development of exploration systems, told Ars the inquiry remains open.

"We have not made any formal decisions on the forward path yet because we still are doing analysis," she said. "There are a lot of complications associated with the heat shield, not only with identifying a root cause, but also figuring out a path forward once we identify that root cause."

This is a complicated thermodynamic and aerodynamic problem, with engineers studying the combined effects of heating and air resistance as the Orion spacecraft dives deeper into the atmosphere. Victor Glover, the pilot of the Artemis II mission, told Ars earlier this year that ground testing and analyses can only go so far, and some of the dynamics may not be fully understood without more flight data.

Commander Reid Wiseman, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will join Glover on the Artemis II mission. They will fly around the far side of the Moon inside the Orion capsule after lifting off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. Artemis II will pave the way for future landing missions to deliver astronauts to the Moon's south pole.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday for August 2024 includes a fix for a security vulnerability in the Grub2 boot loader, which is used by many Linux operating systems. Tracked as CVE-2022-2601, this flaw, discovered in 2022, could lead to an out-of-bounds write with a potential bypass of Secure Boot protection.

The Grub2 boot loader provides compatibility with the Secure Boot technology on PCs running Linux systems. After installing the new patch, Windows applies a Secure Boot Advanced Targeting (SBAT) policy to block vulnerable Linux boot loaders that could compromise OS security.

Microsoft explained that the SBAT value would not be applied to dual-boot systems with both Windows and Linux on the boot drive, so the patch was expected not to impact these systems. However, many users with dual-boot configurations have reported that the CVE-2022-2601 update still rendered booting into a Linux OS impossible.

The issue appears to affect various Linux distributions, including popular ones such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Puppy Linux, and others. Affected systems typically display a "Security Policy Violation" error at boot, indicating a failed check on "shim SBAT data." Boot problems have been reported on both dual-boot systems and on Windows devices running Linux from an ISO image, USB drive, or optical media.

Microsoft's bulletin noted that only older Linux distros' ISOs were expected to experience boot issues following the CVE-2022-2601 patch. However, users with systems released in 2024 also seem to be affected. The only reliable way to restore a bootable state appears to be disabling Secure Boot entirely. Alternatively, users can follow the steps to remove the SBAT policy introduced by Microsoft this past week.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/microsoft-will-try-the-data-scraping-windows-recall-feature-again-in-october/

Microsoft will begin sending a revised version of its controversial Recall feature to Windows Insider PCs beginning in October, according to an update published today to the company's original blog post about the Recall controversy. The company didn't elaborate further on specific changes it's making to Recall beyond what it already announced in June.

For those unfamiliar, Recall is a Windows service that runs in the background on compatible PCs, continuously taking screenshots of user activity, scanning those screenshots with optical character recognition (OCR), and saving the OCR text and the screenshots to a giant searchable database on your PC. The goal, according to Microsoft, is to help users retrace their steps and dig up information about things they had used their PCs to find or do in the past.

The problem was that other users on the same PC, or attackers with physical or remote access to your PC, could easily access, view, and export those screenshots and the OCR database since none of the information was encrypted at rest or protected in any substantive way.

Microsoft had planned to launch Recall as one of the flagship features of its Copilot+ PC launch in July, along with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered Surface devices, but its rollout was bumped back and then paused entirely so that Recall could be reworked and then sent out to Windows Insiders for testing like most other Windows features are.

Among the changes Microsoft has said it will make: The database will be encrypted at rest and will require authentication (and periodic reauthentication) with Windows Hello before users will be allowed to access it. The feature will also be off by default, whereas the original plan was to turn it on by default and make users go into Settings to turn it off.

"Security continues to be our top priority and when Recall is available for Windows Insiders in October we will publish a blog with more details," reads today's update to Microsoft Windows and Devices Corporate Vice President Pavan Davuluri's blog post.

When the preview is released, Windows Insiders who want to test the Recall preview will need to do it on a PC that meets Microsoft's Copilot+ system requirements. Those include a processor with a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. The x86 builds of Windows for Intel and AMD processors don't currently support any Copilot+ features regardless of whether the PC meets those requirements, but that should change later this year.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), a federation of public interest advocacy groups, has asked the FCC to halt low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite launches until the environmental consequences of space pollution can be better managed.

Those concerns were underscored on Thursday when one of China's Long March 6A rockets broke apart in LEO after deploying 18 satellites for Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology group's Thousand Sails constellation. Reports suggest as many as 900 pieces of debris were scattered as a result of the disintegration.

US Space Command said at least 300 pieces are large enough to be tracked, each being 10cm (4 inches) or more across, though added it has observed no "immediate threats."

China hopes to put as many as 15,000 broadband-relaying sats into orbit in that Qianfan constellation.

Writing last week, US PIRG directed its concern at SpaceX, dubbing Elon Musk's rocket show "WasteX" for the "mega-constellations" of communications satellites shot into the sky by the Texas-based firm's Starlink subsidiary.

"Over just five years Starlink has launched more than 6,000 units and now make up more than 60 percent of all satellites," said Lucas Gutterman, director of the US PIRG Education Fund's Designed to Last project, in an online article. "The new space race took off faster than governments were able to act."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Wastewater, which is full of pollutants that contain nitrogen, can be directly fed into a new chemical reactor that converts it into ammonia, with purified water and oxygen as by-products

An environmentally friendly technique turns wastewater into ammonia and harmless by-products using a multi-chambered chemical reactor. The sustainable alternative requires much less energy than the conventional method for producing this crucial chemical.

Agriculture, refrigeration systems, paper, cleaning supplies and other industries use hundreds of millions of tonnes of ammonia every year. Making that much of the chemical uses about 2 per cent of energy total energy consumption and contributes 1.4 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Some of this environmental price is due to the conventional way of producing ammonia, which requires high temperatures and pressures. To make ammonia production more sustainable, Feng-Yang Chen at Rice University in Texas and his colleagues wanted to replace that technique with a room-temperature reactor.

Their reactor takes in water mixed with nitrates – nitrogen compounds often found in wastewater, such as industrial sewage or agricultural runoff contaminated with nitrogen-based fertilisers. After the nitrate water enters the first of three chambers, electrodes, similar to those found in batteries, create an electrochemical reaction that transforms the liquid into three components: only ammonia remains in the first chamber of the reactor, while purified water flows out through the second one and oxygen goes to the third.

Because ammonia contains only nitrogen and hydrogen, this electrochemical reaction does not require any ingredients other than the wastewater. And the purified water it produces is clean enough to meet the World Health Organization (WHO) regulations for drinking water.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The FDA’s current regulations allow food companies to independently determine the safety of thousands of ingredients considered “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS), often without notifying the FDA or disclosing safety data. This practice has led to the addition of many unreviewed substances to the U.S. food supply, raising concerns about the adequacy of post-market oversight and the potential risks of such ingredients.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for ensuring the safety of the U.S. food supply, including setting nutrition labeling standards, collaborating with companies on food recalls, and addressing foodborne illness outbreaks. However, a recent article in the American Journal of Public Health suggests that the FDA has adopted a more hands-off stance regarding the safety of food additives and certain ingredients already in use.

The current FDA process allows the food industry to regulate itself when it comes to thousands of added ingredients—by determining for itself which ingredients should be considered “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS—and deciding on their own whether or not to disclose the ingredients’ use and the underlying safety data to the FDA. As a result, many new substances have been added to our food supply without any government oversight.

“Both the FDA and the public are unaware of how many of these ingredients—which are most commonly found in ultra-processed foods —are in our food supply,” said Jennifer Pomeranz, associate professor of public health policy and management at NYU School of Global Public Health and study’s first author.

Since 1958, the FDA has been responsible for evaluating the safety of new chemicals and substances added to foods before they go to market. However, food safety laws distinguish between “food additives” and “GRAS” ingredients. While compounds considered “food additives” must be reviewed and approved by the FDA before they are used in foods, ingredients considered GRAS are exempt from these regulations.

The GRAS designation was initially established for ingredients already found in foods—for instance, vinegar and spices. But under a rule used since 1997, the FDA has allowed the food industry to independently determine which substances fall into this category, including many new substances added to foods. Rather than disclose the new use of these ingredients and the accompanying safety data for FDA review, companies can do their own research to evaluate an ingredient’s safety before going to market, without any notification or sharing of the findings. The FDA suggests—but does not require—that companies voluntarily notify the agency about the use of such substances and their findings, but in practice, many such substances have been added without notification.

In their analysis, the researchers review the history of the FDA’s and industry’s approach around adding these new compounds to foods and identify the lack of any real oversight. This includes a federal court case in 2021 upholding the FDA’s hands-off approach.

fliptop writes:

A major American auto manufacturer reportedly laid off about 1,000 of its employees on Monday, including about 600 workers based in the U.S. in a bid to streamline current operations:

General Motors (GM) is making cuts in its software and services business, which was recently put under the command of two former Apple executives in a partial retreat from a hiring spree over the last several years, according to The Wall Street Journal. Monday's layoffs stand as the most recent job cuts at GM, which reached buyout agreements with approximately 5,000 salaried employees in 2023 as part of a cost-cutting effort and got rid of several hundred executive positions in February of that year, according to Reuters.

[...] The layoffs are not related to a specific cost-reduction initiative but are instead a result of the company leadership's review of the business and an effort to find more opportunities for efficiency, a GM spokesperson told the DCNF [Daily Caller News Foundataion]. Monday's job cuts followed a decision by the two new GM executives from Apple, Baris Cetinok and Dave Richardson, to streamline the service and software business, sources familiar with the matter told the WSJ.

The spokesperson could not comment as to how many jobs were affected by Monday's actions but said that around 600 jobs would be affected at the company's global technical center in Warren, Michigan.

Previously: GM to Slash 1500 Jobs at Lordstown, Ohio Plant

Related: Tesla Lays Off 'More Than 10%' of its Global Workforce

Original Submission

looorg writes:

The scraping defence. They are not scraping content for their AI models. They are just looking for statistical correlations to their models.

https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-copyrighted-books-are-just-statistical-correlations-to-our-ai-models-240617/

Earlier this year, several authors sued NVIDIA over alleged copyright infringement. The class action lawsuit alleged that the company's AI models were trained on copyrighted works and specifically mentioned Books3 data. Since this happened without permission, the rightsholders demand compensation.

The lawsuit was followed up by a near-identical case a few weeks later, and NVIDIA plans to challenge both in court by denying the copyright infringement allegations.

In its initial response, filed a few weeks ago, NVIDIA did not deny that it used the Books3 dataset. Like many other AI companies, it believes that the use of copyrighted data for AI training is a prime example of fair use; especially when the output of the model doesn't reproduce copyrighted works.

The authors clearly have a different take. They allege that NVIDIA willingly copied an archive of pirated books to train its commercial AI model, and are demanding damages for direct copyright infringement.

[...] NVIDIA also shared its early outlook on the case. The company believes that AI companies should be allowed to use copyrighted books to train their AI models, as these books are made up of "uncopyrightable facts and ideas" that are already in the public domain.

The argument may seem surprising at first; the authors own copyrights and as far they're concerned, use of pirated copies leads to liability as a direct infringer. However, NVIDIA goes on to explain that their AI models don't see these works that way.

AI training doesn't involve any book reading skills, or even a basic understanding of a storyline. Instead, it simply measures statistical correlations and adds these to the model.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/08/that-book-is-poison-even-more-victorian-covers-found-to-contain-toxic-dyes/

In April, the National Library of France removed four 19th century books, all published in Great Britain, from its shelves because the covers were likely laced with arsenic. The books have been placed in quarantine for further analysis to determine exactly how much arsenic is present.

[...] Chemists from Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, have also been studying Victorian books from that university's library collection in order to identify and quantify levels of poisonous substances in the covers. They reported their initial findings this week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Denver.

[...] The Lipscomb effort was inspired by the University of Delaware's Poison Book Project, established in 2019 as an interdisciplinary crowdsourced collaboration between university scientists and the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. The initial objective was to analyze all the Victorian-era books in the Winterthur circulating and rare books collection for the presence of an arsenic compound called cooper acetoarsenite, an emerald green pigment that was very popular at the time to dye wallpaper, clothing, and cloth book covers. Book covers dyed with chrome yellow—favored by Vincent van Gogh—aka lead chromate, were also examined, and the project's scope has since expanded worldwide.

The Poison Book Project is ongoing, but 50 percent of the 19th century cloth-case bindings tested so far contain lead in the cloth across a range of colors, as well as other highly toxic heavy metals: arsenic, chromium, and mercury.

[...] The project lists several recommendations for the safe handling and storage of such books, such as wearing nitrile gloves—prolonged direct contact with arsenical green pigment, for instance, can lead to skin lesions and skin cancer—and not eating, drinking, biting one's fingernails or touching one's face during handling, as well as washing hands thoroughly and wiping down surfaces. Arsenical green books should be isolated for storage and removed from circulating collections, if possible. And professional conservators should work under a chemical fume hood to limit their exposure to arsenical pigment dust.

[...] "These old books with toxic dyes may be in universities, public libraries, and private collections," said Abigail Hoermann, an undergraduate studying chemistry at Lipscomb University who is among those involved in the effort, led by chemistry professor Joseph Weinstein-Webb. "So, we want to find a way to make it easy for everyone to be able to find what their exposure is to these books, and how to safely store them."

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How a Library Handles a Rare and Deadly Book of Wallpaper Samples - 20190630

Original Submission