Daily Archives: May 24, 2021

Parents outraged after Florida high school edits girls’ yearbook pictures to make clothes more conservative

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According to Action News Jax, Bartram Trail High School altered 80 different yearbook photos – all of them of girls. In many of them, crudely photoshopped rectangles in the colour of the girls’ clothing can be seen covering up their chests.

Many of those students have expressed outrage.

“I felt confident that day and I looked good, in dress code,” ninth grader Zoe Iannone told Action News Jax. “When I sent it to my mom and all of us saw it, I felt very sexualized, like that was what they were worrying about.”

Parents are furious as well.

“Our daughters of Bartram deserve an apology,” one anonymous mother told the station. “They are making them feel embarrassed about who they are.”

[…]

Source: Parents outraged after Florida high school edits girls’ yearbook pictures to make clothes more conservative

I thought this was the land of the free?!

Redditors Launch A ‘Rescue Mission’ For Embattled Sci-Hub, With The Ultimate Aim Of Building A Decentralized Version

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Techdirt has just written about belated news that the FBI gained access two years ago to the Apple account of Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of Sci-Hub. This is part of a continuing attempt to stop the widespread sharing of academic papers, mostly paid for by the public, and currently trapped behind expensive paywalls. You might think somebody helping scholars spread their work to a wider audience would be rewarded with prizes and grants, not pursued by the FBI and DOJ. But of course not, because, well, copyright. It’s easy to feel angry but helpless when confronted with this kind of bullying by publishing giants like Elsevier, but a group of publicly spirited Redditors aim to do something about it:

It’s time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science: we are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many.

They have initiated what they term a “Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub”, in order to prepare for a possible shutdown of the site:

A handful of Library Genesis seeders are currently seeding the Sci-Hub torrents. There are 850 scihub torrents, each containing 100,000 scientific articles, to a total of 85 million scientific articles: 77TB. This is the complete Sci-Hub database. We need to protect this.

The Redditors are calling for “85 datahoarders to store and seed 1TB of articles each, 10 torrents in total”. The idea is to download 10 random torrents, then seed them for as long as possible. Once enough people start downloading random torrents using these seeds, the Sci-Hub holdings will be safe. That would then lead to the “final wave”:

Development for an open source Sci-Hub. freereadorg/awesome-libgen is a collection of open source achievements based on the Sci-Hub and Library Genesis databases. Open source de-centralization of Sci-Hub is the ultimate goal here, and this begins with the data, but it is going to take years of developer sweat to carry these libraries into the future.

The centralized nature of Sci-Hub is certainly its greatest weakness, since it provides publishers with just a few targets to aim for, both legally and technically. A truly decentralized version would solve that problem, but requires a lot of work, as the Reddit post notes. Still, at least this “rescue plan” means people can do something practical to help Sci-Hub; sadly, protecting Elbakyan is harder.

Source: Redditors Launch A ‘Rescue Mission’ For Embattled Sci-Hub, With The Ultimate Aim Of Building A Decentralized Version | Techdirt

Belarus accused of ‘abhorrent action’ after Ryanair flight diverted midair with MiG 29 to arrest blogger

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Belarusian authorities appear to have forced a Ryanair jet to perform an emergency landing in Minsk in order to arrest an opposition blogger wanted for organising last summer’s protests against leader Alexander Lukashenko.

Roman Protasevich, a former editor of the influential Telegram channels Nexta and Nexta Live, was detained by police after his flight was diverted to Minsk national airport due to a bomb threat. Minsk confirmed it had scrambled a Mig-29 fighter to escort the plane.

Protasevich has been accused of terrorism and provoking riots after the Nexta channels became one of the main conduits for organising last year’s anti-Lukashenko protests over elections fraud. Protasevich had been living in exile in 2019 and Poland had previously rejected an extradition request sent by Minsk.

Protasevich was flying on an intra-EU flight from Athens to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, when the plane was diverted to Minsk. According to online flight data, the plane was over Belarusian airspace when it diverted course but was closer to Vilnius than Minsk.

[…]

Protasevich, who has been living in exile since 2019, told colleagues earlier on Sunday he had been followed while travelling to the airport in Athens. A Russian speaker had followed him into a line at the airport and attempted to photograph his documents, he wrote to colleagues.

“He was next in line at the document check and just turned around and walked away,” he said. “For some reason, he also tried to secretly photograph my documents.” Colleagues said they had not heard from him since.

Source: Belarus accused of ‘abhorrent action’ after Ryanair flight diverted to arrest blogger | Belarus | The Guardian

Air India breach compromised data for 4.5 million passengers also of other airlines

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The Times of India reports Air India has revealed that a breach compromised about 4.5 million passengers whose data was registered at system provider SITA between August 2011 and late February 2021. The intruders couldn’t obtain passwords, but they had access to names, contact info, tickets and frequent flyer info (including for Star Alliance).

The perpetrators also had access to credit card info, although the usefulness of that data might be limited as the CVV/CVC numbers weren’t included.

The airline said it first learned of the incident on February 25th (and issued a warning on March 19th), but that it only learned the identities of affected passengers on March 25th and May 4th. It was already investigating the breach and had locked down the affected servers, including resetting passwords for its frequent flyer program.

It’s not clear who was responsible for the breach. However, the damage isn’t limited to one airline. STIA told BleepingComputer in a statement that customers from several airlines were victims, including travelers who flew with Air New Zealand, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Jeju Air, Lufthansa, Malaysia Airlines, SAS and Singapore Airlines. While this isn’t as large as the 2018 Cathay Pacific breach that touched up to 9.4 million customers, the repercussions could be felt worldwide for a while to come.

Source: Air India breach compromised data for 4.5 million passengers | Engadget

This shows how incredibly interconnected we are and how poorly our data carriers care for our data