WAN Show July 6 2018 - Wan show document

[LinusTech]

 

1/2 European Wikipedia sites go dark to protest copyright reform

Source 1: posted by mains https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/944312-italian-wikipeida-obscured-to-inform-about-eu-vote/

Source 2: https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/04/wikipedia-italian-spanish-protest-eu-copyright-directive/

Source 3: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comunicato_3_luglio_2018/en

 

• If you check Wikipedia's Spanish and Italian editions while in Europe, you'll find yourself facing a wall of text and no means to access its articles.

• Both pages have gone dark ahead of the European Parliament's final vote on the controversial EU Copyright Directive, which is the first time the region is updating its copyright laws since 2001.

• The online encyclopedia and other privacy groups are protesting two of the directive's proposals in particular.

  • First is Article 13, which requires websites to filter user submissions and check them against copyrighted work.

    • would have meant that any online platform that allowed users to post text, images, sounds or code would need a way to assess and filter content.

  • The other is Article 11, which will require websites to pay a fee to link to news publications or to use snippets from their articles.

 

2/2 EU internet copyright bill rejected

Source 1: Master Disaster https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/944700-the-eus-new-internet-copyright-bill-has-been-rejected/

Source 2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44712475

Source 3: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fTEXT%2bREPORT%2bA8-2018-0245%2b0%2bDOC%2bXML%2bV0%2f%2fEN&language=EN

Source 4: https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/censorship-machines/

Source 5: https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/article-11-13-vote/

 

• A controversial overhaul of the EU's copyright law that sparked a fierce debate between internet giants and content creators was rejected by a margin of 318-278 in the European Parliament on Thursday.

  • The proposed rules would have put more responsibility on websites to check for copyright infringements, and forced platforms to pay for linking to news.

• A slew of high-profile music stars had backed the change, arguing that websites had exploited their content.

• Opponents said the rules would stifle internet freedom and creativity.

• There were also concerns that these copyright filters could effectively ban things like memes and remixes which use some copyrighted material.

• In the end, MEPs decided the changes needed more debate; and sent the proposals back to the Commission.

  • All MEPs will get to vote again on September 10–13

 

Elon Musk to assist Thailand cave rescue

Source 1: https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/944969-elon-musk-is-sending-teams-to-assist-with-the-thailand-cave-rescue/

Source 2: https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/06/elon-musk-engineers-thailand-cave-rescue/

 

• A Thai soccer team of 12 young boys and their coach have been trapped in a cave in Thailand since June 23rd.

• They entered the cave during fine weather but became trapped when a sudden downpour flooded the narrow tunnels.

• They were discovered deep inside the cave by two British cave divers on Monday, perched on a rock slab above flood waters, after nine days without food or fresh water.

  • Since then, they have been visited by other dive teams composed of nurses, doctors, and Navy SEALS equipped with food and oxygen

• The clock is ticking:

  • Oxygen levels in the cave have dropped to a dangerous level

  • More rain is expected this weekend.

• The dive to reach the boys is treacherous:

  • It takes even the most experienced divers up to five hours to swim through the 2.5KM of jagged, narrow channels from where the boys are to safety outside.

  • A former Thai navy diver died on his way out of the caves after delivering air tanks to those trapped.

  • None of the boys know how to swim

• Rescue teams have

  • pumped millions of liters of water from the cave in an attempt to lower water levels to the extent that the boys can simply walk out.

  • dug more than 100 holes, hoping to reach the cave by a direct route. There were 18 promising ones, the deepest at 400-metres.

• Elon Musk has offered assistance

  • Engineers from SpaceX and The Boring Company will travel to the country on Saturday

  • According to Musk, technicians may be able to utilize a Tesla-made battery pack to increase the pump rate of water out of the cave.

  • He also discussed the possibility of inserting a nylon tube into the cave to fill it with air, "like a bouncy castle".

 

What’s Coming Out on Floatplane? Go Over Current Week.

Rapid Fire

1/2 In Uganda, social media now a taxable activity

Source 1: DuckDodgers https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/943936-in-uganda-using-social-media-or-messenger-services-is-now-a-taxable-activity/

Source 2: https://torrentfreak.com/uganda-to-block-vpns-after-people-begin-avoiding-new-social-media-tax-180702/

 

• As of yesterday, social media use in Uganda became a taxable activity, with users of Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, Tinder and dozens of other services all hit by new legislation.

• Passed in May by the Ugandan parliament, the legislation requires local Internet service providers to block a wide range of social media and telecoms platforms until subscribers pay a flat fee of 200 shillings (US$0.051) per day.

  • While just shy of US$19 per year might not initially sound like much, per capita income stands at US$600

  • millions of Ugandans survive on less than a dollar per day

• Payment must be made in advance via mobile phones, with a small discount available if customers pay a month up front.

• With users flooding to VPNs to avoid this new assault on their pockets, VPN use has gone through the roof. In response, the government says it has ordered local ISPs to begin blocking VPNs.

• Is it a system of control?

  • Uganda’s president is serving his 7th term

  • In the 2016 election the gov hired thousands of unemployed young men to harass opposition supporters and politicians.

  • Opposition members have been arrested

  • 18 February 2016 – The government ordered the mobile service providers to block social media platforms.

    • The government claims that platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Whatsapp spread rumors and create unnecessary chaos. The opposition has argued that the ruling was put in place to prevent the public from reporting irregularities in the election process.

 

2/2 Strict new internet laws in Tanzania

Source 1: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/6/17536686/tanzania-internet-laws-censorship-uganda-social-media-tax

Source 2:

 

• Officially dubbed the Electronic and Postal Communications Regulations 2018, the statute requires online content creators — traditional media websites, online TV and radio channels, but also individual bloggers and podcasters — to pay roughly two million Tanzanian shillings (930 US dollars) in registration and licensing fees.

  • The Tanzanian government is counting the statute among its efforts to curb hate speech and fake news,

• Creators must..

  • store contributors’ details for 12 months and have means to identify their sources and disclose financial sponsors.

• Cyber cafes must..

  • install surveillance cameras,

• All owners of electronic mobile devices, including phones, must..

  • protect them with a password.

• Failure to comply with the regulations — which also forbid online content that is “indecent,” “annoying,” or that “leads to public disorder” — will result in a five million Tanzanian shillings (2,202 US dollars) fine, a jail term of not less than a year, or both.

• These new regulations are already forcing young content creators—and often poorer ones—offline.

  • Tanzania’s GDP per capita is 879 US dollars, and 70 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day

  • One blogger called the idea of taxation a “flimsy excuse” promoted by the government to restrict free speech.

• Whistleblowing site JamiiForums, often referred to as “the Swahili Wikileaks,”  has fought the government in the past over protecting sources, but the stipulations of the new online content regulations further complicate that relationship.

  • JamiiForums’ founders have been detained and arrested in the past for refusing to share users’ identities with the authorities

  • JamiiForums will have to monitor all 80,000 plus comments it receives daily, collect user information and delete any content the regulatory body finds inappropriate within twelve hours of notification.

• Tanzania’s blogosphere is relatively small, which makes it unlikely that taxes derived from online activities will make a significant contribution to the government’s purse.

 

1/2 Facebook takes town Declaration of Independence

Source 1: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-declaration-of-independence-hate-speech-2018-7

Source 2:

 

• Facebook's algorithms removed parts of the US Declaration of Independence from the social media site after determining they represented hate speech.

• The issue came to light when a local paper in Texas began posting excerpts of the historic text on its Facebook page each day in the run up to the country's Independence Day celebrations on July 4.

  • However when The Liberty County Vindicator attempted to post its tenth extract, which refers to "merciless Indian savages", on its Facebook page the paper received a notice saying the post went against its standards on hate speech.

• It is though that the offending passage was the one that refers to Native Americans as "Indian savages".

  • "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

• Facebook later apologised and allowed the posting.

 

2/2 Google AdSense Bans Innocent page

Source 1: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne5j3z/google-adsense-banned-a-random-web-page-about-a-32-year-old-bill-because-it-was-about-sexual-abuse

Source 2:

 

• Earlier this week, Google AdSense decided that a web page about a decades-old bill about sexual abuse was “adult content,” and wasn’t allowed to display ads anymore.

• The page, which is at least six years old and contains strictly legislative information about a bill called the “Child Sexual Abuse and Pornography Act of 1986” on free legislative research and tracking website GovTrack.us, tripped the AdSense algorithm that decides what pages are allowed to run ads.

• Here’s what Google told GovTrack:

  • As stated in our program policies, we may not show Google ads on pages with content that is sexually suggestive or intended to sexually arouse. This includes, but is not limited to: pornographic images, videos, or games; sexually gratifying text, images, audio, or video; pages that provide links for or drive traffic to content that is sexually suggestive or intended to sexually arouse

• The website founder submitted a request to review the violation, and got back “a prompt response” that the request to un-flag the page was denied.

  • The page still can't run AdSense ads:

 

AMD B450 boards coming out

Source 1: SydHalfast https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/944992-amd-b450-boards-are-out/

Source 2: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13050/amd-b450-mobos-listed-in-europe-ahead-of-launch

 

• AMD has still not formally announced its B450 chipset, but Pre-orders and listings for B450 boards from three major motherboard manufacturers have already appeared in Austria and Germany.

  • Some stores list some of these motherboards as “in stock”, but also note that the product will be ordered from their warehouse (or a distributor) after an order is placed.

  • the ASUS Prime B450M-A seems to be available immediately.

• Many of the boards don’t appear on manufacturer’s websites yet

 

Sonos Files for Initial Public Offering

Source 1: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-06/wireless-speaker-pioneer-sonos-files-for-u-s-public-offering

Source 2: https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/06/sonos-files-to-raise-up-to-100m-in-ipo/

 

• Sonos Inc. has filed for a U.S. initial public offering, planning to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol SONO

  • They filed with an offering size of $100 million, a placeholder amount used to calculate fees that is likely to change.

  • They’re allegedly targeting a valuation of $2.5 billion to $3 billion in the IPO

  • The filing doesn’t detail how many shares they plan to sell in the offering

• Sonos cited an “extremely competitive and rapidly evolving” market among risk factors in its IPO

 

“Stylish” extension with 2M downloads banned for tracking every site visit

Source 1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/stylish-extension-with-2m-downloads-banished-for-tracking-every-site-visit/

Source 2:

 

• Google, Mozilla, and Opera have pulled a browser extension with more than two million downloads after it was caught tracking every website its users visited—and sending the data to a remote server.

• The Stylish extension allowed users to customize the look and feel of websites in a variety of ways.

  • remove clutter such as Facebook or Twitter news feeds,

  • change normal pictures to black-and-white manga images,

  • change black-on-white site themes to white-on-black themes.

• Starting this year, Stylish began sending users’ complete browsing activity back to its servers by default, along with a unique identifier that in many cases could be used to correlate email addresses or other Internet attributes belonging to those users.

  • Stylish has been collecting the browser histories from Chrome users since January, 2017, and from Firefox users since March.

• An updated Stylish privacy policy disclosed that the extension collected browsing histories.

  • The version published in May said that the information included “standard web server log information (i.e., web request) as well as data sent in response to that request, such as

  • URL used,

  • Internet Protocol address (trimmed and hashed for anonymization),

  • HTTP referrer,

  • user agent.”

 

Valve leaks Steam game player counts

Source 1: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/07/steam-data-leak-reveals-precise-player-count-for-thousands-of-games/

Source 2: https://medium.com/@tglaiel/using-achievement-stats-to-estimate-sales-on-steam-d18b4b635d23

 

• A recently discovered hole in Valve's API allowed observers to generate precise data for the total number of players for thousands of Steam games.

• The data centers on the percentage of players who have accomplished developer-defined Achievements associated with many games on the service.b

  • this method only works for games with developer-defined Achievements, so it covers about 13,000 of the roughly 23,000 games now on Steam.

• By July 4, Valve updated its Steam API, cutting off this new data source altogether.

• (see source for list of games)

 

Seagate announces a mainstream SSD drive

Source 1: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/7/6/17540650/seagate-flash-storage-ssd-consumer-pc-desktop-laptop

Source 2:

 

• Seagate has launched a new consumer SSD, signaling renewed interest in making more storage for traditional PCs and laptops.

• The new BarraCuda SSD is a relatively basic SATA drive, and comes in a variety of capacities ranging between 250GB and 2TB.

  • The smallest model goes for $74, and the 1TB model is on sale for $229.99.

• Seagate opened up sale of the BarraCuda SSD in a limited release through Amazon, so you can order one right now.

  • Availability will extend elsewhere in September.

[LDWoodworth]

The microphone is gone from the middle of the table!!!

[ZackCodesAI]

Yes, we Indians do use steam for the games we can afford, talking about the rest which we can't, we just pirate them

[Freeman]

Still no timestamps?