Deep in Earth’s past, an icy landscape became a seascape as the ice melted and the oceans rose off what is now the northeastern United States. Nearly 50 years ago, a U.S. government ship searching for minerals and hydrocarbons in the area drilled into the seafloor to see what it could find.

It found, of all things, drops to drink under the briny deeps — fresh water.

This summer, a first-of-its-kind global research expedition followed up on that surprise. Drilling for fresh water under the salt water off Cape Cod, Expedition 501 extracted thousands of samples from what is now thought to be a massive, hidden aquifer stretching from New Jersey as far north as Maine.

It’s just one of many depositories of “secret fresh water” known to exist in shallow salt waters around the world that might some day be tapped to slake the planet’s intensifying thirst, said Brandon Dugan, the expedition’s co-chief scientist

[…]

They’re out to solve the mystery of its origins — whether the water is from glaciers, connected groundwater systems on land or some combination.

The potential is enormous. So are the hurdles of getting the water out and puzzling over who owns it, who uses it and how to extract it without undue harm to nature.

[…]

Why try? In just five years, the U.N. says, the global demand for fresh water will exceed supplies by 40%. Rising sea levels from the warming climate are souring coastal freshwater sources while data centers that power AI and cloud computing are consuming water at an insatiable rate.

[…]

Source: Scientists tap fresh water under the sea, raising hopes for a thirsty world | AP News

Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send only $280, an error that could hinder the bank’s attempt to persuade regulators that it has fixed long-standing operational issues.

The erroneous internal transfer, which occurred last April and has not been previously reported, was missed by both a payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was approved to be processed at the start of business the following day.

A third employee detected a problem with the bank’s account balances, catching the payment 90 minutes after it was posted. The payment was reversed several hours later, according to an internal account of the event seen by the Financial Times and two people familiar with the event.

No funds left Citi, which disclosed the “near miss” to the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, according to another person with knowledge of the matter.

[…]

A total of 10 near misses — incidents when a bank processes the wrong amount but is ultimately able to recover the funds — of $1bn or greater occurred at Citi last year, according to an internal report seen by the FT. The figure was down slightly from 13 the previous year. Citi declined to comment on this broader set of events.

Near misses do not need to be reported to regulators, meaning there is no comprehensive public data on how often these incidents occur across the sector. Several former regulators and bank risk managers said near misses of greater than $1bn were unusual across the US bank industry.

The series of near misses at Citi highlights how the Wall Street bank is struggling to repair its operational troubles nearly five years after it mistakenly sent $900mn to creditors engaged in a contentious battle over the debt of cosmetics group Revlon.

Citi’s mistaken Revlon payout led to the ousting of then-chief executive Michael Corbat, big fines and the imposition of regulatory consent orders requiring it to fix the issues.

[…]

Citi’s $81tn near miss in April was due to an input error and a back-up system with a cumbersome user interface, according to people familiar with the incident.

[…]

Citi’s technology team instructed the payments processing employee to manually input the transactions into a rarely used back-up screen. One quirk of the program was that the amount field came pre-populated with 15 zeros, which the person inputting a transaction needed to delete, something that did not happen.

Source: Citigroup erroneously credited client account with $81tn in ‘near miss’

Satirical news publication The Onion has bought Infowars, the media organisation headed by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, for an undisclosed price at a court-ordered auction.

The Onion said that the bid was secured with the backing of families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who won a $1.5bn (£1.18bn) defamation lawsuit against Jones for spreading false rumours about the massacre.

A judge in Texas ordered the auction in September, and various groups – both Jones’s allies and detractors – had suggested they would bid for the company.

[…]

The Onion plans to rebuild the website and feature well-known internet humour writers and content creators.

“We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website,” said Ben Collins, a former NBC News journalist who is chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, in a statement.

The website also posted a jokey article, saying that Infowars “has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society”.

The article went on to say that the satirical publication “has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars” and “forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars”.

A lawyer for families of eight of the Sandy Hook victims said the bid had their support.

“By divesting Jones of Infowars’ assets, the families and the team at The Onion have done a public service and will meaningfully hinder Jones’ ability to do more harm,” lawyer Chris Mattei said in a statement.

Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie died in the Sandy Hook attack, said: “The world needs to see that having a platform does not mean you are above accountability – the dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for.”

[…]

Source: The Onion buys Alex Jones’s Infowars at auction

Police officers in Portland, Oregon, stopped a car Tuesday night when they noticed a bag inside that said “Definitely not a bag full of drugs”. It, in fact, was – full of drugs: 79 blue fentanyl pills, three fake oxycodone tablets and 230g of methamphetamine, to be exact.

[…]

Source: Oregon police find bag full of drugs marked ‘definitely not a bag full of drugs’ | Portland | The Guardian

At the beginning of February, SIDN was in the news after announcing that it wanted to outsource part of its services to Amazon Web Services, the American web giant. According to SIDN, the reason for the outsourcing was that implementation on its own servers had become too expensive and too labor-intensive.

Van Eeten: ‘SIDN has not provided any explanation as to how on earth it ended up at Amazon. I can imagine that they don’t feel like dealing with all that iron (servers) and can’t find staff. But then there are numerous Dutch providers who say: ‘Just leave it to us. Then we will arrange everything.’

Van Eeten also does not understand why the registration system used by SIDN would be so demanding. ‘In principle it seems quite simple, I estimate a few hundred accounts on a database. I don’t see any reason why a Dutch cloud service couldn’t handle that.’

The criticism is partly a matter of timing: five years ago there would have been a lot less fuss about it. Van Eeten: ‘But in recent years the question has increasingly arisen whether it is wise to outsource more and more digital services to a handful of American companies. That discussion is about digital sovereignty. And that has become quite a thing in Europe.’

Source: ‘No one understands outsourcing the management of .nl domains to Amazon’ – Emerce

It’s completely nuts that a technical organisation says they can’t be technical – and is washing its hands of running the most popular TLD per capita population in the world!

The mysterious attacks began on July 11. “Strange beings,” locals said, visiting an isolated Indigenous community in rural Peru at night, harassing its inhabitants and attempting to kidnap a 15-year-old girl. […] News of the alleged extraterrestrial attackers quickly spread online as believers, skeptics, and internet sleuths around the world analyzed grainy videos posted by members of the Ikitu community. The reported sightings came on the heels of U.S. congressional hearings about unidentified aerial phenomenon that ignited a global conversation about the possibility of extraterrestrial life visiting Earth.

Members of the Peruvian Navy and Police traveled to the isolated community, which is located 10 hours by boat from the Maynas provincial capital of Iquitos, to investigate the strange disturbances in early August. Last week, authorities announced that they believed the perpetrators were members of illegal gold mining gangs from Colombia and Brazil using advanced flying technology to terrorize the community, according to RPP Noticias. Carlos Castro Quintanilla, the lead investigator in the case, said that 80 percent of illegal gold dredging in the region is located in the Nanay river basin, where the Ikitu community is located.

One of the key pieces to the investigation was related to the attempted kidnapping of a 15-year-old girl on July 29. Cristian Caleb Pacaya, a local teacher who witnessed the attack, said that they “were using state of the art technology, like thrusters that allow people to fly.” He said that after looking the devices up on Google, he believed that they were “jetpacks.” Authorities have not made any arrests related to the attacks, nor named the alleged assailants or their organization directly. However, the prosecutors office claimed that they had destroyed 110 dredging operations and 10 illegal mining camps in the area already in 2023.

Source: ‘Flying Aliens’ Harassing Village Are Actually Illegal Miners With Jetpacks – Slashdot

Senator Brian Schatz is one of the more thoughtful Senators we have, and he and his staff have actually spent time talking to lots of experts in trying to craft bills regarding the internet. Unfortunately, it still seems like he still falls under the seductive sway of this or that moral panic, so when the bills actually come out, they’re perhaps more thoughtfully done than the moral panic bills of his colleagues, but they’re still destructive.

His latest is… just bad. It appears to be modeled on a bunch of these age verification moral panic bills that we’ve seen in both red states and blue states, though Schatz’s bill is much closer to the red state version of these bills that is much more paternalistic and nonsensical.

His latest bill, with the obligatory “bipartisan” sponsor of Tom Cotton, the man who wanted to send our military into US cities to stop protests, is the “Protecting Kids On Social Media Act of 2023.”

You can read the full bill yourself, but the key parts are that it would push companies to use privacy intrusive age verification technologies, ban kids under 13 from using much of the internet, and give parents way more control and access to their kids’ internet usage.

Schatz tries to get around the obvious pitfalls with this… by basically handwaving them away. As even the French government has pointed out, there is no way to do age verification without violating privacy. There just isn’t. French data protection officials reviewed all the possibilities and said that literally none of them respect people’s privacy, and on top of that, it’s not clear that any of them are even that effective at age verification.

Schatz’s bill handwaves this away by basically saying “do age verification, but don’t do it in a way that violates privacy.” It’s like saying “jump out of a plane without a parachute, but just don’t die.” You’re asking the impossible.

I mean, clauses like this sound nice:

Nothing in this section shall be construed to require a social media platform to require users to provide government-issued identification for age verification.

But the fact that this was included kinda gives away the fact that basically every age verification system has to rely on government issued ID.

Similarly, it says that while sites should do age verification, they’re restricted from keeping any of the information as part of the process, but again, that raises all sorts of questions as to HOW you do that. This is “keep track of the location of this car, but don’t track where it is.” I mean… this is just wishful thinking.

The parental consent part is perhaps the most frustrating, and is a staple of the GOP state bills we’ve seen:

A social media platform shall take reasonable steps beyond merely requiring attestation, taking into account current parent or guardian relationship verification technologies and documentation, to require the affirmative consent of a parent or guardian to create an account for any individual who the social media platform knows or reasonably believes to be a minor according to the age verification process used by the platform.

Again, this is marginally better than the GOP bills in that it acknowledges sites need to “take into account” the current relationship, but that still leaves things open to mischief, especially as a “minor” in the bill is defined as anyone between the ages of 13 and 18, a period of time in which teens are discovering their own identities, and that often conflicts with their parents.

So, an LGBTQ child in a strict religious household with parents who refuse to accept their teens’ identity can block their kids entirely from joining certain online communities. That seems… really bad? And pretty clearly unconstitutional, because kids have rights too.

There’s also a prohibition on “algorithmic recommendation systems” for teens under 18. Of course, the bill ignores that reverse chronological order… is also an algorithm. So, effectively the law requires RANDOM content be shown to teens.

It also ignores that algorithms are useful in filtering out the kind of information that is inappropriate for kids. I get that there’s this weird, irrational hatred for the dreaded algorithms these days, but most algorithms are… actually helpful in better presenting appropriate content to both kids and adults. Removing that doesn’t seem helpful. It actually seems guaranteed to expose kids to even worse stuff, since they can’t algorithmically remove the inappropriate content any more.

Why would they want to do that?

Finally, the bill creates a “pilot program” for the Commerce Department to establish an official age verification program. While they frame this as being voluntary, come on. If you’re running a social media site and you’re required to do age verification under this bill (or other bills) are you going to use some random age verification offering out there, or the program set up by the federal government? Of course you’re going to go with the federal government’s, so if you were to ever get in trouble, you just say “well we were using the program the government came up with, so we shouldn’t face any liability for its failures.”

Just like the “verify but don’t violate people’s privacy” is handwaving, so is the “this pilot program is voluntary.”

This really is frustrating. Schatz has always seemed to be much more reasonable and open minded about this stuff, and its sad to see him fall prey to the moral panic about kids and the internet, even as the evidence suggests it’s mostly bullshit. I prefer Senators who legislate based on reality, not panic.

Source: Senator Brian Schatz Joins The Moral Panic With Unconstitutional Age Verification Bill | Techdirt

[…]

Motherboard has found, this synthesized call and another against Hempstead High School were just one small part of a months-long, nationwide campaign of dozens, and potentially hundreds, of threats made by one swatter in particular who has weaponized computer generated voices. Known as “Torswats” on the messaging app Telegram, the swatter has been calling in bomb and mass shooting threats against highschools and other locations across the country.

[…]

For $75, Torswats says they will close down a school. For $50, Torswats says customers can buy “extreme swattings,” in which authorities will handcuff the victim and search the house. Torswats says they offer discounts to returning customers, and can negotiate prices for “famous people and targets such as Twitch streamers.” Torswats says on their Telegram channel that they take payment in cryptocurrency.

[…]

Torswats’ use of synthetic voices allows them to carry out swatting threats at scale with relatively little effort, while also protecting what their own voice sounds like.

[…]

Motherboard’s reporting on Torswats comes as something of a nationwide swatting trend spreads across the United States. In October, NPR reported that 182 schools in 28 states received fake threat calls. Torswats’ use of a computer generated voice also comes as the rise of artificial intelligence poses even greater risks to those who may face harassment online. In February, Motherboard reported that someone had doxed and harassed a series of voice actors by having an artificial intelligence program read out their home addresses

[…]

On their Telegram channel, Torswats has uploaded at least 35 distinct recordings of calls they appear to have made. Torswats may have made many more swatting calls on others’ behalf, though: each filename includes a number, with the most recent going up to 170. Torswats also recently shuttered their channel before reappearing on Telegram in February.

In all of those 35 recordings except two, Torswats appears to have used a synthesized voice. The majority of the calls are made with a fake male sounding voice; several include a woman which also appears to be computer generated.

Torswats is seemingly able to change what the voice is saying in something close to real-time in order to respond to the operator’s questions. These sometimes include “where are you located,” “what happened,” and “what is your name?”

[…]

After publication of this article, Torswats deleted the audio recordings from their Telegram channel and claimed they were stopping the service for at least one month. “Time to dip a bit,” they wrote on the channel.

Source: A Computer Generated Swatting Service Is Causing Havoc Across America

[…]

Jan Erik, sound muddled, he tells the caller he has already lost one million Swedish Krona (about £80,000) in trading scams.

But the caller already knows this. And he knows it makes the pensioner a good target for a follow-up “recovery scam”. He tells Jan Erik that if he hands over his card details and pays a €250 deposit, Solo Capitals will use special software to track his lost investments and get his money back.

“We will be able to recover the whole amount,” William Grant says.

It takes him a while to wear Jan Erik down. But after about 30 minutes on the phone, the pensioner begins reading out his credit card details.

The audio recording was saved by the company under the file name “William Sweden scammed”. The BBC obtained the file from a former employee, but the company had not tried hard to hide it. In fact, it had handed it out to new recruits as part of the company training package.

This was a lesson in how to scam.

[…]

The scam

For more than a year, BBC Eye has been investigating a global fraudulent trading network of hundreds of different investment brands that has scammed unwitting customers like Jan Erik out of more than a billion dollars.

Our investigation reveals for the first time the sheer scale of the fraud, as well as the identities of a shadowy network of individuals who appear to be behind it.

The network is known to police as the Milton group, a name originally used by the scammers themselves but abandoned in 2020. We identified 152 brands, including Solo Capitals, that appear to be part of the network. It operates by targeting investors and scamming them out of thousands – or in some cases hundreds of thousands – of pounds.

One Milton group investment brand even sponsored a top-flight Spanish football club, and advertised in major newspapers, lending it credibility with potential investors.

In November, BBC Eye accompanied German and Georgian police on call-centre raids in the Georgian capital Tbilisi. On the computer screens, we saw row after row of British phone numbers. We phoned several and spoke to British citizens who told us they had just invested money. On one desk, there was a handwritten note with a list of names and useful details for the scammers: “Homeowner, no responsibilities”; “50k in savings”; “From Poland, British citizen”; “50k in stocks.”

Next to the name of one British man, a note said: “Savings less than 10K, very pussy, should scam soon”.

The majority of victims sign up after seeing an ad on social media. Within 48 hours typically they receive a phone call from someone who tells them they could make returns of up to 90% per day. On the other end of the phone there is usually a call centre with many of the trappings of a legitimate business – a smart, modern office with an HR department, monthly targets and bonuses, awaydays and competitions for best salesperson. Some call centres play pumping music in the background. But there are also elements you won’t find in a legitimate business – written guidance on how to identify a potential investor’s weaknesses and turn those weaknesses against them.

From their first phone call, victims can be directed into regulated companies or sometimes unregulated, offshore entities. Some victims who signed up to regulated brands within the Milton group are directed by their broker to place trades designed to lose the customer money and make money for the broker – a practice which is illegal under UK regulations. Some victims are instructed to download software that allows the scammer to remotely control their PC and place trades for them – also illegal. And according to former employees of Milton group brands, some customers think they are making real trades, but their money is simply being siphoned away.

“The victims think they have a real account with the company, but there isn’t really any trading, it’s just a simulation,” said Alex, a former employee who worked in a Milton group office in Kyiv, Ukraine.

In order to better understand how the scam works, the BBC posed as an aspiring trader and contacted Coinevo, one of the Milton group’s trading platforms. We were connected to an adviser who gave the name Patrick, and told us we could make “70% or 80% or 90% as a return in one single day”. He told us to send $500 worth of Bitcoin as a deposit to begin trading with.

Patrick pressed our undercover trader to provide a copy of their passport, and after providing a fake copy we were able to continue to operate the account for about two months before Coinevo appeared to detect the fake. At that point, Patrick wrote to us by email, swearing at us and cutting off contact.

But the BBC’s deposit money was already in the system. We were able to track it as it was divided up into small fractions and moved through many different Bitcoin wallets, all seemingly associated with the Milton group. Experts told the BBC that genuine financial institutions do not funnel money in this way. Louise Abbott, a lawyer who specialises in cryptocurrency and fraud, examined the flow of the money and said it suggested “large-scale organised crime”. The reason the money was spread over various different bitcoin wallets, Abbott said, was to “make it as complicated as possible and as difficult as possible for either you, or the victim, or us as lawyers to find”.

[…]

Soon they were speaking nearly every morning, and Jane was revealing specific things she needed money for – expensive repairs to her roof, a buffer for her pension. Hunt used them against her, she said, telling her certain trades would “get her that roof” and “help her future”.

Over the next few months, Jane invested about £15,000. But her trades weren’t doing well. Hunt advised her to withdraw her money and invest with a different trading platform, BproFX, where she could get better returns.

By that point, Jane fully trusted David Hunt. “I felt like I knew him well and I thought he had my interests at heart,” she said, welling up. “So I agreed to move with him.”

What she didn’t know was that BproFX was an unregulated, offshore entity based in Dominica. In reality, EverFX’s UK regulatory status did not stop it from scamming British citizens, but the move over to BproFX would strip Jane of even the scant protections she might be afforded under UK law. The BBC found several victims who were moved to unregulated companies in this way.

[…]

Other victims told the BBC they were scammed this way. Londoner Barry Burnett said he started investing after seeing an ad for EverFX, but after a few early wins, he suddenly lost more than £10,000 in 24 hours. The adviser pressured him to put in another £25,000 to trade himself out of his black hole.

“I must have got at least half a dozen calls in the space of about two hours,” Barry said. “People begging me to put more money in.”

Jane faced similar pressures from David Hunt. “He kept telling me that the more I put in the more I can recover,” she said.

Instead, both finally decided to call it quits. Barry had lost £12,000, Jane £27,000.

[…]

The operations of the Milton group have been investigated before, by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and others, but the BBC set out to identify the senior figures behind the global scam.

We began by combing through publicly available corporate documents to map the connections between companies in the Milton group. Five names appeared again and again, listed as directors of the Milton trading platforms or supporting tech companies – David Todua, Rati Tchelidze, Guram Gogeshvili, Joseph Mgeladze, and Michael Benimini.

We plugged the five names into the Panama Papers, a massive 2016 leak detailing offshore companies, and discovered that four of them – Tchelidze, Gogeshvili, Mgeladze and Benimini – were listed as directors or senior figures within a group of linked offshore companies or subsidiary companies that pre-dated the Milton group.

Many of these non-Milton companies led back in some way to one figure: David Kezerashvili, a former Georgian government official who served for two years as the country’s defence minister.

Kezerashvili was dismissed as defence minister and later convicted in absentia for embezzling more than €5m of government funds. By the time of his conviction, he was living in London and the UK turned down a request from Georgia for his extradition.

There were no publicly available documents linking Kezerashvili to this pre-Milton network, but when we looked at the Panama Papers, his name came up again and again, identifying him as either the founder of the parent companies in the network or as one of their initial shareholders. Behind the scenes, Kezerashvili appeared to be at the centre of that network.

When it came to the Milton group, there was similarly no publicly available documentation linking Kezerashvili to the scam companies, and there was no evidence that he had any direct financial interest in the Milton brands.

But several former employees of Milton-linked companies told us confidentially that they had had direct dealings with Kezerashvili and knew him to be involved in the Milton group.

Kezerashvili has frequently promoted the scam trading platforms on his personal social media accounts. On the business networking site LinkedIn, he has used his account almost exclusively to promote jobs and share posts about Milton-linked companies.

The BBC was able to find a number of other pieces of evidence linking the former defence minister to Milton brands. Several companies owned by Kezerashvili used a private email server on which the only other users were Milton group companies. His venture capital firm, Infinity VC, owned the branding and web domains for companies that provided trading platform technology to the scammers.

Kezerashvili also owns a Kyiv office building that was home to both the scam call centre selling EverFX and the tech firms that provided the software – offices which were raided by police in November. He also owns a Tbilisi office block that contained some of the same tech firms.

When the BBC examined social media profiles belonging to the four senior Milton group men, it became clear from pictures posted of wedding parties and other social events that they all had close social ties to Kezerashvili. Kezerashvili is Facebook friends with at least 45 people linked to the Milton group scams, and one of the four senior figures identified by the BBC is his cousin.

The BBC tracked Kezerashvili to his £18m London mansion and asked to speak to him, but we were told he wasn’t available. He told the BBC via his lawyers that he strongly denied any involvement with the Milton group, or that he gained financially from scams. He said that EverFX was to his knowledge a legitimate business and his lawyers argued other connections we have found to the people and IT behind it “proved nothing”.

Mr Chelidze and Mr Gogeshvili also strongly denied our accusations, saying that EverFX was a legitimate, regulated platform. They denied knowledge of Milton or any connection between EverFX and the brands we identified, which they suggested had misused EverFX’s source code and brand to confuse users. They said EverFX had never had a crypto wallet and had no control over how its third-party payment processors directed funds.

Mr Mgeladze also denied our accusations, telling us that he has never owned any call centres fraudulently mis-selling investments and has no knowledge of the Milton group.

Mr Benimini did not respond to our questions.

EverFX denied our allegations, saying that they were a legitimate and regulated platform where risks were fully explained. They said that they had investigated Barry Burnett’s case and found that he was responsible for his losses.

In Jane’s case, they told us her losses were as a result of her moving to an unconnected company. They said that they had fully cooperated with the FCA and there were no outstanding UK regulatory complaints.

Sevilla FC told the BBC only that once their contract with EverFX ended, they had no more contact with the company.

[…]

 

Source: On the hunt for the businessmen behind a billion-dollar scam – BBC News

The Florence museum that houses Michelangelo’s statue of David has invited teachers and students from a Florida school to visit, after an uproar over an art lesson.

The school’s principal quit after a complaint about a sixth-grade art class that included an image of the statue.

A parent had complained the image was pornographic.

Cecilie Hollberg, director of Galleria dell’Accademia, has now issued the invitation to the class.

She said the principal should be “rewarded, not punished”.

“Talking about the Renaissance without showing the David, an undisputed icon of art and culture and of that historical period, would make no sense,” Ms Hollberg said.

The controversy began when the board of Tallahassee Classical School – a charter school in Florida’s state capital – pressured principal Hope Carrasquilla to resign after three parents complained about a lesson that included a photo of the 17ft nude marble statue.

The statue, one of the most famous in Western history, depicts the biblical David going to fight Goliath armed only with a sling and his faith in God.

[…]

The incident has left Florentines and experts on Renaissance art bewildered.

The David is considered a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance and a symbol of humanist values. It has been displayed in the Galleria dell’Accademia since 1873.

Ms Hollberg said she was “astonished”, stating that to think that the David statue could be considered pornographic means not only failing to understand the Bible, but Western culture itself.

“I cannot believe that actually happened, at first I thought it was fake news, so improbable and absurd was it,” she said.

“A distinction must be made between nudity and pornography. There is nothing pornographic or aggressive about the David, he is a young boy, a shepherd, who even according to the Bible did not have ostentatious clothes but wanted to defend his people with what he had.”

[…]

According to Florentine art historian and dean of the University for Foreigners in Siena, Tomaso Montanari, such an attitude is “disconcerting”.

“First comes the dismay at the absence of educational freedom, as it should not be restricted or manipulated by families,” Mr Montanari said.

“On the other hand, from a cultural perspective, the Western world has a tendency to associate fundamentalism and censorship with other societies, believing it possesses the capability to spread democratic ideals worldwide.

“But this cultural backsliding clearly highlights the presence of fundamentalist views within the West as well.”

[…]

Back in Florence, Ms Hollberg remarked: “From majestic statues to charming fountains and paintings, Italy is overflowing with works of art, not just in its museums, but in all its cities, squares and streets, with some featuring naked figures.

“Does that make it pornography? Should entire cities be shut down because of the artistic depictions of the human form?”

Source: Italian art experts astonished by David statue uproar in Florida – BBC News

At a rundown market on the Indonesian island of Batam, a small location tracker was beeping from the back of a crumbling second-hand shoe store. A Reuters reporter followed the high-pitched ping to a mound of old sneakers and began digging through the pile.

There they were: a pair of blue Nike running shoes with a tracking device hidden in one of the soles.

These familiar shoes had traveled by land, then sea and crossed an international border to end up in this heap. They weren’t supposed to be here.

Five months earlier, in July 2022, Reuters had given the shoes to a recycling program spearheaded by the Singapore government and U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc. In media releases and a promotional video posted online, that effort promised to harvest the rubberized soles and midsoles of donated shoes, then grind down the material for use in building new playgrounds and running tracks in Singapore.

[…]

None of the 11 pairs of footwear donated by Reuters were turned into exercise paths or kids’ parks in Singapore.

Instead, nearly all the tagged shoes ended up in the hands of Yok Impex Pte Ltd, a Singaporean second-hand goods exporter, according to the trackers and that exporter’s logistics manager. The manager said his firm had been hired by a waste management company involved in the recycling program to retrieve shoes from the donation bins for delivery to that company’s local warehouse.

But that’s not what happened to the shoes donated by Reuters. Ten pairs moved first from the donation bins to the exporter’s facility, then on to neighboring Indonesia, in some cases traveling hundreds of miles to different corners of the vast archipelago, the location trackers showed.

[…]

Source: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them in Indonesia

But I guess they are being recycled after all then? So that’s good, right?

The African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) has no board, no CEO, has sometimes been close to not being able to pay its staff, could fail, and other regional internet registries have therefore expressed interest in funding its ongoing activities, according to John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).

Curran offered that view of AFRINIC’s affairs during a talk at the NANOG 87 event on February 14 that was posted to YouTube. In it, he explains that legal action means AFRINIC has not been able to constitute a board and has no CEO – the previous officeholder resigned in November 2022. Without a functioning board, AFRINIC can’t appoint a new leader or even conduct meetings to implement workarounds that allow it to appoint additional directors.

“That’s a bad situation,” Curran said, because “goal one of running an organization is not to lose the ability to govern the organization.”

Curran said AFRINIC is fulfilling its functions, but is “presently ungoverned” so “that kind of makes it hard to respond to court issues … because you literally don’t have anyone who can represent the organization.”

Attempts to have courts recognize temporary officers have failed.

Curran said this situation was unforeseen by those who established global internet governance services, so it is hard for entities like the Number Resource Organization – the coordinating body for the world’s Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) – to intervene.

Other RIRs have therefore offered operational financial support, Curran explained, to ensure that AFRINIC can pay its staff.

• APNIC calls in lawyers to handle election code of conduct breach allegations
• Afrinic’s new CEO promises change of culture at org laid low by allegations of corruption and dysfunction
• APNIC election sparks move for rapid rule changes to prevent council stacking
• APNIC warns members to watch out for fake election phone calls

“At the present moment (i.e. this week), AFRINIC is able and paying its staff,” he said.

“But we’re kind of on a week-to-week basis with AFRINIC right now,” he added. “I’m literally telling you AFRINIC could have a significant operational failure led by governance failure or a court-led governance event that could cause it to be non-operational.”

“We hope that AFRINIC will find its way back into proper governance and be fine but we’re planning for a number of contingencies,” Curran suggested, among them how to create a new body to replace AFRINIC.

How did we get here and what’s the APNIC connection?

AFRINIC has experienced years of strife, but its current problems stem from litigation launched by an entity called Cloud Innovation Limited that was assigned several million IP addresses by the Registry.

The Registry later alleged those addresses had been misused – an accusation which Cloud Innovation contested in Mauritius – the nation in which AFRINIC is based.

That litigation is ongoing.

Lu Heng, the CEO of Cloud Innovation, has told The Register AFRINIC’s complaints are unfounded. Lu is also CEO of a Hong-Kong based IP address leasing and management company called Larus, which is a partner of Cloud Innovation. Larus is in turn connected to the Larus Foundation – an organization Lu Heng has described as “my NGO focuses on internet governance education.”

In an October 2022 talk, Curran mentioned [PDF] another source of trouble for the African registry: a “public relations campaign against AFRINIC by the Number Resource Society (NRS).”

NRS is an entity that claims to represent “everyone who has a shared interest in preserving the stability of the internet.”

The organization has taken an interest in the current elections at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) by endorsing candidates for vacant executive council positions. One of those candidates is Lu Heng. Another works for Larus, and a third works for the Larus Foundation.

APNIC yesterday announced it has appointed external lawyers to consider possible code of conduct breaches by unnamed candidates.

Lu Heng responded with a post pointing out that APNIC’s chief counsel once worked at the law firm APNIC has appointed, and asserted that the choice of that firm is improper.

Interestingly, The Register has discovered that the NRS’s website once listed Larus’s Hong Kong address as its own location.

Lu Heng told The Register “Larus is a member of NRS and supports its work” but has not responded to subsequent questions about whether that support extends to providing it with premises.

The Register has since discovered a Wayback Machine snapshot of the NRS’s Contact Us page on which the written address info@nrs.help is coded as a mailto link to info@larus.foundation – the NGO Lu Heng describes as his own entity, and which shares a name with one of the companies he leads.

As the inclusion of a Larus Foundation email address suggests a link between Lu Heng and the NRS, we have asked him to explain why that address was once present on the NRS website.

We have also asked Lu if Larus staff have undertaken any work – paid or unpaid – for NRS.

He has not addressed either question in his responses.

The Register has also contacted the other NRS-endorsed candidates for the APNIC election, as well as an individual named “John Smith” identified as the organization’s press contact, and written to the info@nrs.help email address. None of those efforts have yielded a response. Calls to Mr Smith’s telephone number produce only a recorded message that connection attempts have failed and we should check the number.

If you know more, contact the author using this form. ®

Source: Africa’s internet registry could fail, warns head of ARIN • The Register

The U.K. press watchdog has launched an investigation into a British tabloid column by former Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson that attracted around 25,100 complaints.

On Thursday, the Independent Press Standards Organization confirmed it will probe the Dec. 17, 2022 article in The Sun where Clarkson wrote that Prince Harry was being “controlled” by Meghan Markle, and he was “dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”

The press watchdog will take forward complaints from two parties, The Fawcett Society and The Wilde Foundation, who said they were impacted by breaches of the UK Editor’s Code over accuracy, harassment and discrimination via the column.

“We will make public the outcome of this investigation through our website and on our social media channels when it is concluded,” the press watchdog said in a statement.

Clarkson wrote the opinion piece under the headline “One day, Harold the glove puppet will tell the truth about A Woman Talking B*****ks” after the Harry & Meghan docuseries launched on Netflix. The series sees the couple revealing new behind-the-scenes information about how they were treated by both the U.K. press and royal family, ultimately leading to their separation from royal life

[…]

Source: Jeremy Clarkson Meghan Markle Column to be Investigated by Regulator – The Hollywood Reporter

So, no the article wasn’t nice, it was crude. Was it misogynist? No, not really. I’m pretty sure most people who use that word don’t know what it means. Does an army of fat village idiots up in virtual arms from behind the safety of their screens on the Internet who spend their days looking for someone to self righteously cancel warrant any attention at all? No.

Natives in Tech, a US-based non-profit organization, has called upon the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to change its name, out of respect for indigenous American peoples and to live up to its own code of conduct.

In a blog post, Natives in Tech members Adam Recvlohe, Holly Grimm, and Desiree Kane have accused the ASF of appropriating Indigenous culture for branding purposes.

Citing ASF founding member Brian Behlendorf’s description in the documentary “Trillions and Trillions Served” of how he wanted something more romantic than a tech term like “spider” and came up with “Apache” after seeing a documentary about Geronimo, the group said:

This frankly outdated spaghetti-Western ‘romantic’ presentation of a living and vibrant community as dead and gone in order to build a technology company ‘for the greater good’ is as ignorant as it is offensive.

(We could have sworn Apache stood for a patchy web server at one point…)

The aggrieved trio challenged the ASF to make good on its code of conduct commitment to “be careful in the words that [they] choose” by choosing a new name. The group took issue with what they said was the suggestion that the Apache tribe exists only in a past historical context, citing eight federally recognized Native American tribes that bear the name.

[…]

Source: Native Americans ask Apache foundation to change name • The Register

Most of the world wide web runs on servers running Apache software. I’d say the tech apache outnumbers the Native American Apaches significantly and these guys are pulling on the tails of the  Apache foundation to gather attention to their cause of putting themselves into the news.

Nobody is immune to being scammed online—not even the people running the scams. Cybercriminals using hacking forums to buy software exploits and stolen login details keep falling for cons and are getting ripped off thousands of dollars at a time, a new analysis has revealed. And what’s more, when the criminals complain that they are being scammed, they’re also leaving a trail of breadcrumbs of their own personal information that could reveal their real-world identities to police and investigators.

[…]

“Scammers scamming scammers on criminal forums and marketplaces is much bigger than we originally thought it was,” says Matt Wixey, a researcher with Sophos X-Ops who studied the marketplaces.

Wixey examined three of the most prominent cybercrime forums: the Russian-language forums Exploit and XSS, plus the English-language BreachForums, which replaced RaidForums when it was seized by US law enforcement in April. While the sites operate in slightly different ways, they all have “arbitration” rooms where people who think they’ve been scammed or wronged by other criminals can complain. For instance, if someone purchases malware and it doesn’t work, they may moan to the site’s administrators.

The complaints sometimes lead to people getting their money back, but more often act as a warning for other users, Wixey says. In the past 12 months—the period the research covers—criminals on the forums have lost more than $2.5 million to other scammers, the analysis says. Some people complain about losing as little as $2, while the median scams on each of the sites ranges from $200 to $600, according to the research, which is being presented at the BlackHat Europe security conference.

The scams come in multiple forms. Some are simple, others are more sophisticated. Frequently, there are “rip-and-run” scams, Wixey says, where the buyer doesn’t pay for what they’ve received or the seller gets the money but doesn’t send across what they sold. (These are often known as “rippers.”) Other types of scams involve faked data or security exploits that don’t work: One person on BreachForums claimed a seller tried to send them Facebook data that was already public.

In one extreme incident on the Exploit forum, an account posted a lengthy complaint that they had provided someone with a Windows kernel exploit and hadn’t been paid the $130,000 they had agreed for it.

[…]

In some scams, multiple accounts or people appeared to work together, the research says. A user with a good reputation can introduce one person to another. This accomplice then directs the victim to a scam website. In one instance, Wixey says, a user wanted to buy a fake copy of the NFT-focused game Axie Infinity. “They wanted a fake copy of it with the intent of basically siphoning off legitimate user’s funds,” Wixey says. “They bought this fake copy from someone else, and the fake copy contained a backdoor which then stole the stolen cryptocurrency.” The scammer was essentially being scammed through their own scam.

[…]

In 2017, security firm Digital Shadows pointed out a database that had been created to name and shame known rippers. Similarly, in 2021, the firm found that some administrators on cybercrime forums are scamming their own customers. In the past decade, there have been thousands of complaints about criminals scamming each other, according to threat intelligence firm Analyst1. Meanwhile, a previous analysis from TrendMicro concluded that while forums and marketplaces have rules, they don’t deter scammers. “The perpetrators are typically those who go for quick profits over reputation,” the firm’s 2019 research says.

[…]

Because those complaining about scams need to post evidence to back up their claims, they often share screenshots containing more personal information than they may have intended. Sophos says it saw a “treasure trove” of data, including cryptocurrency addresses, transaction IDs, email addresses, victims’ names, some malware source code, and other information. All these details may help to uncover more information about the people behind the usernames or provide clues about how they operate.

In one scamming complaint, a user shared a screenshot that showed someone’s Telegram usernames, email addresses, Jabber chat names, plus Skype and Discord usernames. In others, IP addresses and countries where users may be situated are displayed.

[…]

 

Source: Scammers Are Scamming Other Scammers Out of Millions of Dollars

Less than 1% of used clothing gets recycled into new garments, overwhelming countries like Ghana with discards. From a report: It’s a disaster decades in the making, as clothing has become cheaper, plentiful and ever more disposable. Each year the fashion industry produces more than 100 billion apparel items, roughly 14 for every person on Earth and more than double the amount in 2000. Every day, tens of millions of garments are tossed out to make way for new, many into so-called recycling bins. Few are aware that old clothes are rarely recycled into new ones because the technology and infrastructure don’t exist to do that at scale.

Instead, discarded garments enter a global secondhand supply chain that works to prolong their life, if only a little, by repurposing them as cleaning rags, stuffing for mattresses or insulation. But the rise of fast fashion — and shoppers’ preference for quantity over quality — has led to a glut of low-value clothing that threatens to tank the economics of that trade and inordinately burdens developing countries. Meanwhile, the myth of circularity spreads, shielding companies and consumers from the inconvenient reality that the only way out of the global textile waste crisis is to buy less, buy better and wear longer. In other words, to end fast fashion.

[…] Globally, less than 1% of used clothing is actually remade into new garments, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a UK nonprofit. (In contrast, 9% of plastic and about half of paper gets recycled.) The retailers have vowed that what they collect will never go to landfill or waste. But the reality is far messier. Garments dropped at in-store take-back programs enter the multibillion-dollar global secondhand supply chain, joining a torrent of discards from charity bins, thrift stores and online resale platforms like ThredUp and Sellpy. The complex task of sorting through that waste stream falls to a largely invisible global industry of brokers and processors. Their business depends on exporting much of the clothing to developing countries for rewear. It’s the most profitable option and, in theory, the most environmentally responsible, because reusing items consumes less resources than recycling them.

Source: Fast Fashion Waste Is Choking Developing Countries With Mountains of Trash – Slashdot

On Monday, Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, issued a decree [PDF, not secure] naming Snowden (#53), among others, as being granted the boon of Russian citizenship.

[…]

While Snowden’s status as a whistleblower is disputed by the US government, the surveillance apparatus he exposed – the bulk collection of US phone records – was found to be unlawful.

Snowden has been living in Russia since 2013 when the US charged him with espionage and he flew from Hong Kong to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport with the help of WikiLeaks and ended up stranded in Russia with a canceled passport. He was granted asylum in Russia and temporary residency until October 2020, when he became a permanent resident. He and his wife Lindsay reportedly applied for citizenship the following month.

The citizenship comes at an awkward time. Putin last week signed what he described as a “partial mobilization” order to conscript soldiers for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war has resulted in severe losses for the Russian military, which now needs to replenish its forces. Per its regulations, Russia can call up men and women between the ages of 18 and 60, even reportedly recruiting those in prison to fight.

The Russian callup is supposed to be for citizens with military training, which Snowden has. He enlisted in the US Army but was invalided out due to injuries suffered during special forces training.

[…]

Source: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden granted Russian citizenship • The Register

[…] On July 31st, Étienne Klein, the director of France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, shared an image he claimed the JWST captured of Proxima Centauri, the nearest-known star to the sun.

“It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope,” Klein told his more than 91,000 Twitter followers. “This level of detail… A new world is unveiled every day.” Thousands of people took the post at face value and retweeted it without comment.

A few days later, Klein admitted that what he shared was actually a photo of a slice of chorizo against a black background. “In view of certain comments, I feel obliged to specify that this tweet showing an alleged picture of Proxima Centauri was a joke,” Klein said. “Let’s learn to be wary of the arguments from positions of authority as much as the spontaneous eloquence of certain images.”

Klein subsequently apologized for the prank and told French news outlet Le Point (via Vice) he posted the image to educate the public about the threat of fake news. “I also think that if I hadn’t said it was a James Webb photo, it wouldn’t have been so successful,” he noted. After everything was said and done, Klein shared the recent image the JWST captured of the Cartwheel galaxy. This time he was quick to assure his followers that the photo was authentic.

Source: Physicist trolls James Webb Space Telescope fans with a photo of a chorizo sausage | Engadget

Some people, including the writer of Engadget have gotten their panties in a twist about this. It’s a joke. Funny. A bit of a shame Klein needed to apologise for this and make up some BS nonsense justification around it.

This map shows you how far you can travel from each station in Europe in less than 5 hours.

It is inspired by the great Direkt Bahn Guru. The data is based off of this site, which sources it from the Deutsch Bahn.

Hover your mouse over a station to see the isochrones from that city.

This assumes interchanges are 20 minutes, and transit between stations is a little over walking speed. Therefore, these should be interpreted as optimal travel times. The journeys might not exist when taking into account real interchange times.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday in West Virginia vs. EPA in favor of plaintiffs who argued that the Environmental Protection Agency does not have the power to regulate carbon dioxide from power plants—the country’s second-largest source of CO2 emissions—without input from Congress.

The ruling almost completely disrupts any major plans to fight climate change at the federal level in the U.S., and is likely to have wide-ranging implications for federal agencies looking to protect public health under bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act. It also signals how the court is likely to rule in other environmentally damaging cases in the pipeline.

The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said that Congress had not explicitly given the EPA the authority to regulate emissions as it designed the Clean Power Plan to do.

“There is little question that the petitioner States are injured, since the rule requires them to more stringently regulate power plant emissions within their borders,” Roberts wrote in the opinion.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the court’s decision “strips the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.’”

[…]

Source: Supreme Court Rules For Polluters In West Virginia v EPA

America is broken

Atlassian has published an account of what went wrong at the company to make the data of 400 customers vanish in a puff of cloudy vapor. And goodness, it makes for knuckle-chewing reading.

The restoration of customer data is still ongoing.

Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath wrote that approximately 45 percent of those afflicted had had service restored but repeated the fortnight estimate it gave earlier this week for undoing the damage to the rest of the affected customers. As of the time of writing, the figure of customers with restored data had risen to 49 per cent.

As for what actually happened… well, strap in. And no, you aren’t reading another episode in our Who, Me? series of columns where readers confess to massive IT errors.

“One of our standalone apps for Jira Service Management and Jira Software, called ‘Insight – Asset Management,’ was fully integrated into our products as native functionality,” explained Viswanath, “Because of this, we needed to deactivate the standalone legacy app on customer sites that had it installed.”

Two bad things then happened. First, rather than providing the IDs of the app marked for deletion, the team making the deactivation request provided the IDs of the entire cloud site where the apps were to be deactivated.

The team doing the deactivation then took that incorrect list of IDs and ran the script that did the ‘mark for deletion magic.’ Except that script had another mode, one that would permanently delete data for compliance reasons.

You can probably see where this is going. “The script was executed with the wrong execution mode and the wrong list of IDs,” said Viswanath, with commendable honesty. “The result was that sites for approximately 400 customers were improperly deleted.”

[…]

The good news is that there are backups, and Atlassian retains them for 30 days. The bad news is that while the company can restore all customers into a new environment or roll back individual customers that accidentally delete their own data, there is no automated system to restore “a large subset” of customers into an existing environment, meaning data has to be laboriously pieced together.

The company is moving to a more automated process to speed things up, but currently is restoring customers in batches of up 60 tenants at a time, with four to five days required end-to-end before a site can be handed back to a customer.

[…]

Source: Atlassian comes clean on data-deleting script behind outage • The Register