Daily Archives: November 8, 2022

Huge extragalactic structure found hiding behind the Milky Way

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A team of researchers with members from Universidad Nacional de San Juan, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and Universidad Andres Bello has found evidence of a large extragalactic assembly hiding behind one part of the Milky Way galaxy. The group has published a paper describing their findings on the arXiv preprint server while awaiting publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Space scientists have known for some time that there is one part of the night sky that is mostly obscured from view due to a bulge in the galaxy. Known as the “zone of avoidance,” it makes up approximately 10% of the dark sky and has had researchers wondering what might be behind it

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In studying the , the researchers found that they were able to identify several galaxies that exist far beyond the Milky Way. And because of their numbers, the researchers believe that together, they make up what they describe as a massive extragalactic structure. They estimate that there might be as many as 58 galaxies in the structure.

More information: Daniela Galdeano et al, Unveiling a new structure behind the Milky Way, arXiv (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2210.16332

Source: Huge extragalactic structure found hiding behind the Milky Way

Senator Wyden Asks State Dept. To Explain Why It’s Handing Out ‘Unfettered’ Access To Americans’ Passport Data

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[…]

In 2018, a blockbuster report detailed the actions of CBP agent Jeffrey Rambo. Rambo apparently took it upon himself to track down whistleblowers and leakers. To do this, he cozied up to a journalist and leveraged the wealth of data on travelers collected by federal agencies in hopes of sniffing out sources.

A few years later, another report delved deeper into the CPB and Rambo’s actions. This reporting — referencing a still-redacted DHS Inspector General’s report — showed the CBP routinely tracked journalists (as well as activists and immigration lawyers) via a national counter-terrorism database. This database was apparently routinely queried for reasons unrelated to national security objectives and the information obtained was used to open investigations targeting journalists.

That report remains redacted nearly a year later. But Senator Ron Wyden is demanding answers from the State Department about its far too cozy relationship with other federal agencies, including the CBP.

The State Department is giving law enforcement and intelligence agencies unrestricted access to the personal data of more than 145 million Americans, through information from passport applications that is shared without legal process or any apparent oversight, according to a letter sent from Sen. Ron Wyden to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and obtained by Yahoo News.

The information was uncovered by Wyden during his ongoing probe into reporting by Yahoo News about Operation Whistle Pig, a wide-ranging leak investigation launched by a Border Patrol agent and his supervisors at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center.

On Wednesday, Wyden sent a letter to Blinken requesting detailed information on which federal agencies are provided access to State Department passport information on U.S. citizens.

The letter [PDF] from Wyden points out that the State Department is giving “unfettered” access to at least 25 federal agencies, including DHS components like the CBP. The OIG report into “Operation Whistle Pig” (the one that remains redacted) details Agent Rambo’s actions. Subsequent briefings by State Department officials provided more details that are cited in Wyden’s letter.

More than 25 agencies, but the State Department has, so far refused to identify them.

Department officials declined to identify the specific agencies, but said that both law enforcement and intelligence agencies can access the [passport application] database. They further stated that, while the Department is not legally required to provide other agencies with such access, the Department has done so without requiring these other agencies to obtain compulsory legal process, such as a subpoena or court order.

Sharing is caring, the State Department believes. However, it cannot explain why it feels this passport application database should be an open book to whatever government agencies seek access to it. This is unacceptable, says Senator Wyden. Citing the “clear abuses” by CBP personnel detailed in the Inspector General’s report, Wyden is demanding details the State Department has so far refused to provide, like which agencies have access and the number of times these agencies have accessed the Department’s database.

Why? Because rights matter, no matter what the State Department and its beneficiaries might think.

The Department’s mission does include providing dozens of other government agencies with self-service access to 145 million American’s personal data. The Department has voluntarily taken on this role, and in doing so, prioritized the interests of other agencies over those of law-abiding Americans

That’s the anger on behalf of millions expressed by Senator Wyden. There are also demands. Wyden not only wants answers, he wants changes. He has instructed the State Department to put policies in place to ensure the abuses seen in “Operation Whistle Pig” do not reoccur. He also says the Department should notify Americans when their passport application info is accessed or handed over to government agencies. Finally, he instructs the Department to provide annual statistics on outside agency access to the database, so Americans can better understand who’s going after their data.

So, answers and changes, things federal agencies rarely enjoy engaging with. The answers are likely to be long in coming. The requested changes, even more so. But at least this drags the State Department’s dirty laundry out into the daylight, which makes it a bit more difficult for the Department to continue to ignore a problem it hasn’t addressed for more than three years.

Source: Senator Wyden Asks State Dept. To Explain Why It’s Handing Out ‘Unfettered’ Access To Americans’ Passport Data | Techdirt

Team creates crystals that generate electricity from heat

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To convert heat into electricity, easily accessible materials from harmless raw materials open up new perspectives in the development of safe and inexpensive so-called “thermoelectric materials.”

[…]

The novel synthetic material is composed of copper, manganese, germanium, and sulfur, and it is produced in a rather simple process

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The powders are simply mechanically alloyed by ball-milling to form a precrystallized phase, which is then densified by 600 degrees Celsius. This process can be easily scaled up,

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Thermoelectric materials convert heat to electricity. This is especially useful in where is reused as valuable electric power.

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However, used to date make use of expensive and toxic elements such as lead and tellurium, which offer the best conversion efficiency. To find safer alternatives, Emmanuel Guilmeau and his team have turned to derivatives of natural copper-based sulfide minerals. These mineral derivatives are mainly composed of nontoxic and abundant elements, and some of them have thermoelectric properties.

[…]

The team found that replacing a small fraction of the manganese with copper produced complex microstructures with interconnected nanodomains, defects, and coherent interfaces, which affected the material’s transport properties for electrons and heat.

Emmanuel Guilmeau says that the produced is stable up to 400 degrees Celsius, a range well within the waste heat temperature range of most industries. He is convinced that, based on this discovery, cheaper novel and nontoxic thermoelectric materials could be designed to replace more problematic materials.

More information: V. Pavan Kumar et al, Engineering Transport Properties in Interconnected Enargite‐Stannite Type Cu 2+ x Mn 1− x GeS 4 Nanocomposites, Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2022). DOI: 10.1002/anie.202210600

Source: Team creates crystals that generate electricity from heat

40k Tesla cars recalled over patch that broke power steering

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Tesla has initiated a voluntary recall of more than 40,000 Model S and Model X vehicles thanks to a bad firmware update that could cause the cars to lose power steering “due to forces from external road dynamics,” also known as bumps.

According to a recall report [PDF] filed with the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Tesla believes around 1 percent of the 40,168 affected vehicles have the bug, which it said only affects Model S and Model X vehicles manufactured between August 2017 and December 2020 (which includes model year 21).

Those vehicles, when updated to firmware release 2022.36, got new calibration data for their electronic power assist steering (EPAS) system. The offending software rolled out on October 11 and was intended to update the EPAS system “to better detect unexpected steering assist torque,” instead of doing the exact opposite.

Per Tesla’s own investigations as reported to the NHTSA, the software caused at least 314 vehicles to misclassify bumps and potholes as unexpected torque on the EPAS system, leading to “reduced or lost power steering assist,” Tesla said in its NHTSA report.

As anyone who has driven without power steering knows, its absence doesn’t make a vehicle undrivable, but it does make it much more difficult, which Tesla said is the big risk from leaving the firmware unpatched. “Reduced or lost power steering assist does not affect steering control, but could require greater steering effort from the driver, particularly at low speeds,” Tesla said.

[…]

In February the company was forced to recall 578,607 Model S, X and Y vehicles due to potential misuse of the vehicle’s “Boombox” feature that allows Tesla owners to play custom sounds on the outside of the car. The NHTSA forced Tesla to issue a software update that disabled the feature.

Another recall this past September saw Tesla recalling more than one million vehicles because, despite the fact that it’s been a common safety feature for decades, the windows on affected vehicles weren’t properly calibrated to stop and reverse when a limb was inserted.

Tesla even had issues with its $1,900 made-for-kids Cyberquad mini, which was recalled last month due to safety concerns and a lack of compliance with Consumer Product Safety Commission guidelines.

[…]

Source: 40k Tesla cars recalled over patch that broke power steering • The Register

Dutch foundation launches mass privacy claim against Twitter – DutchNews.nl

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A Dutch foundation is planning to take legal action against social media platform Twitter for illegally collecting and trading in personal details gathered via free apps such as Duolingo and Wordfeud as well as dating apps and weather forecaster Buienradar. Twitter owned advertising platform MoPub between 2013 and January 2022 and that is where the problem lies, the SDBN foundation says. It estimates 11 million people’s information may have been illegally gathered and sold. Between 2013 and 2021, MoPub had access to information gleaned via 30,000 free apps on smartphones and tablets, the foundation says. In essence, the foundation says, consumers ‘paid with their privacy’ without giving permission.

The foundation is demanding compensation on behalf of the apps’ users and if Twitter refuses to pay, the foundation will start a legal case against the company.

Source: Dutch foundation launches mass privacy claim against Twitter – DutchNews.nl

Also Shazam was busy with this – that’s an Apple company. It’s pretty disturbing that this kind of news isn’t a surprise at all any more.

But who is SDBN to collect for Dutch people? I don’t recall them starting up a class action for people to subscribe to and I doubt they will be dividing the money out to the Dutch people either.

LG’s Stretchable bendable scrunchable Screen Promises a Future of Shatter-Proof Tech

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LG is working to bring the flexibility of OLEDs to smaller devices, and today revealed the world’s first 12-inch panel that’s both flexible and stretchable, like a giant piece of rubber band, improving its ability to survive wear and tear.

A person demonstrating the stretchability of LG's new 12-inch high-res OLED panel.
Image: LG

The 12-inch panel can display full-color RGB images (LG doesn’t specify exactly how many colors it’s capable of reproducing) and a resolution of 100PPI. That’s a bit behind the resolution of screens like the 12.9-inch panel in the iPad Pro, which hits 264PPI, but drop that iPad onto a sidewalk and you’ll probably wish you had LG’s latest and greatest inside it.

Outside of the rigid frame of a tablet or a desktop display, this 12-inch panel can be stretched a full two inches to 14 inches diagonally, and then snap back to its original size without requiring a warranty claim. Its underlying structure uses S-shaped micro wire structures that act like springs to accommodate the stretching, and while the technology isn’t quite at the point where you can crumble up a tablet and stuff it in your pocket like a handkerchief—it’s tethered by a ribbon cable to electronics that provide power and drive the image on-screen—LG believes it’s one step-closer to expanding the potential use cases for OLED displays.

Source: LG’s Stretchable Screen Promises a Future of Shatter-Proof Tech

Greece To Ban Sale of Spyware After Government Is Accused of Surveillance of opposition party leader

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Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has announced that Greece would ban the sale of spyware, after his government was accused in a news report of targeting dozens of prominent politicians, journalists and businessmen for surveillance, and the judicial authorities began an investigation. From a report: The announcement is the latest chapter in a scandal that erupted over the summer, when Mr. Mitsotakis conceded that Greece’s state intelligence service had been monitoring an opposition party leader with a traditional wiretap last year. That revelation came after the politician discovered that he had also been targeted with a spyware program known as Predator.

The Greek government said the wiretap was legal but never specified the reasons for it, and Mr. Mitsotakis said it was done without his knowledge. The government has also asserted that it does not own or use the Predator spyware, and has insisted that the simultaneous targeting with a wiretap and Predator was a coincidence.

Source: Greece To Ban Sale of Spyware After Government Is Accused of Surveillance – Slashdot

Former Apple employee admits to defrauding the company out of $17 million

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A former Apple employee has pled guilty to defrauding the company out of over $17 million. Dhirendra Prasad, who spent most of his decade at Apple working as a buyer in the Global Service Supply Chain department, admitted to “taking kickbacks, inflating invoices, stealing parts and causing Apple to pay for items and services never received,” according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. Prasad started these schemes in 2011 and continued them until 2018.

In one scam, Prasad shipped motherboards from Apple’s inventory to CTrends, a company run by a co-conspirator, Don M. Baker (who previously admitted to taking part in the fraudulent schemes). Baker harvested components from the motherboards, then Prasad organized purchase orders for those parts. After Baker shipped the components back to Apple, CTrends filed invoices for which Prasad arranged payment. In the end, the pair got Apple to pay for its own components and they split the proceeds of the scam.

In addition to fleecing Apple, Prasad confessed to engaging in tax fraud. He directed payments from Robert Gary Hansen (another co-conspirator who has admitted to taking part in the schemes) straight to his creditors. In addition, Prasad arranged for a shell company to send sham invoices to CTrends with the aim of covering up illicit payments Baker made to him. This enabled Baker “to claim hundreds of thousands of dollars of unjustified tax deductions,” the US Attorney’s Office said. All told, prosecutors claim that the scams resulted in the IRS losing over $1.8 million.

Prasad will be sentenced in March. He pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. Prasad also pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, which has a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment. Moreover, Prasad agreed to forfeit around $5 million worth of assets he accrued as a result of his criminal actions, including real estate properties.

Source: Former Apple employee admits to defrauding the company out of $17 million | Engadget

Environmentally friendly ‘biofoam’ could address plastic pollution crisis

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[…]

Dr. Jiang, an assistant professor in the UBC faculty of forestry and the Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Functional Biomaterials, started developing a “biofoam” many years ago both to find new uses for and reduce pollution from packaging foam.

“Styrofoam waste fills up to 30 percent of global landfills and can take more than 500 years to break down. Our biofoam breaks down in the soil in a couple of weeks, requires little heat and few chemicals to make, and can be used as substitute for packaging foams, packing peanuts and even thermal insulation boards,” says Dr. Jiang.

[…]

“Our Nation was trying to create a new economy out of what was left of our forest after the wildfires and the damage caused by the mountain pine beetle epidemic in the 1990s and early 2000s. The amount of timber available for harvest in the next 20 to 60 years was significantly reduced. I have often asked why, when trees are harvested, up to 50 percent of the tree is left behind to just burn. As a Nation, we were also concerned about the losses in habitat, , decline in moose and salmon populations and the acceleration in climate change,”

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“A unique feature of this project is that the intellectual property is shared between UBC and First Nations,”

[…]

 

Source: Environmentally friendly ‘biofoam’ could address plastic pollution crisis

BYU profs create new micro nuclear reactor to produce nuclear energy more safely

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[…] in Memmott’s new reactor, during and after the nuclear reaction occurs, all the radioactive byproducts are dissolved into molten salt. Nuclear elements can emit heat or radioactivity for hundreds of thousands of years while they slowly cool, which is why nuclear waste is so dangerous (and why in the past, finding a place to dispose of it has been so difficult). However, salt has an extremely high melting temperature — 550°C — and it doesn’t take long for the temperature of these elements in the salt to fall beneath the melting point. Once the salt crystalizes, the radiated heat will be absorbed into the salt (which doesn’t remelt), negating the danger of a nuclear meltdown at a power plant.

Another benefit of the molten salt nuclear reactor design is that it has the potential to eliminate dangerous nuclear waste. The products of the reaction are safely contained within the salt, with no need to store them elsewhere. What’s more, many of these products are valuable, and can be removed from the salt and sold.

[…]

“As we pulled out valuable elements, we found we could also remove oxygen and hydrogen,” Memmott said. “Through this process, we can make the salt fully clean again and reuse it. We can recycle the salt indefinitely.”

[…]

Memmott’s molten salt nuclear reactor is 4 ft x 7ft, and because there is no risk of a meltdown there is no need for a similar large zone surrounding it. This small reactor can produce enough energy to power 1000 American homes. The research team said everything needed to run this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck bed; meaning this reactor can make power accessible to even very remote places.

[…]

[…]

Source: BYU profs create new micro nuclear reactor to produce nuclear energy more safely – BYU News

Billionaires Are Funding Climate Destruction

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The world’s wealthiest people are responsible for about a million times more emissions than the world’s lowest earners when you take into account their investments, a new report has found. The report, issued Sunday by Oxfam, finds that the world’s 125 wealthiest people—including American billionaires Bill Gates, Jim Walton, Warren Buffett, and Elon Musk—have a combined carbon footprint roughly equivalent to that of the entire country of France.

There’s lots of academic work out there calculating how the personal carbon footprints of the ultra-wealthy differ from the average Joe, and the habits of the world’s superrich certainly jack up their personal emissions. But where billionaires put all that excess money may actually be more important than their private jets or expensive car collections. Past research has shown that financial investments from the world’s top 1% are largely responsible for the size of their overall emissions, rather than their personal lifestyles—between 50% and 70% of their emissions, the Oxfam report estimates. This new report takes into consideration the investments the world’s super rich make and how those investments can enable dirty industries and create even more emissions.

“Emissions from billionaire lifestyles – due to their frequent use of private jets and yachts – are thousands of times the average person, which is already completely unacceptable,” Nafkote Dabi, Climate Change Lead at Oxfam, said in a statement. “But if we look at emissions from their investments, then their carbon emissions are over a million times higher.”

To calculate powerful billionaires’ emissions, researchers at Oxfam first pulled together a list of the world’s wealthiest 220 people, then identified corporations that these people held investments in of at least a 10% equity stake. (Holding a 10% equity stake in a company, as defined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, makes a person a principal shareholder in that company and much more influential than a normal shareholder in the company’s overall decisions and direction.) Using data from financial services firm Exerica, Oxfam then also calculated the Scope 1 and 2 emissions—direct emissions from operations and indirect emissions from energy, heating, and cooling—of those corporations, and used each billionaire’s investment with these overall emissions to figure out how much they were responsible for.

There were some gaps in the analysis, thanks to a lack of transparency from some of the world’s wealthiest on their investments as well as a similar lack of transparency from corporations on their emissions. However, with the numbers they were able to work with, the Oxfam researchers were still able to figure out that each billionaire out of a final list of 125 was responsible for funding around 3.3 million tons (3 million tonnes) of CO2 emissions in average each year, thanks to their oversize investments in 183 global corporations. The average person in the UK has a pension that finances around 25.4 tons (23 tonnes) of CO2 emissions each year; the world’s poorest 10% of people, meanwhile, produce on average just 3 tons (2.76 tonnes) of CO2 each year.

There are some obvious flaws with this assessment. For one thing, the lack of transparency around emissions as well as missing public information on billionaire equity stakes in certain companies means that the numbers contained here are certainly low, and there’s some notable billionaires missing. (Jeff Bezos, for instance, is not on the final list; we have to wonder what the numbers on his emissions look like.) And someone who is in favor of green capitalism swooping in to save the planet could argue that someone like Gates or Musk’s carbon-intensive investments deserve context, given that their money has gone toward technological solutions to climate change. But the report does emphasize how runaway capitalism and the influence of a powerful and wealthy few can keep the world careening toward disaster, even as the rest of us are increasingly affected—and how relying on the rich and powerful to kick climate action into gear is a losing game.

Source: Billionaires Are Funding Climate Destruction

AstraZeneca puts username and password on Github, exposes patient data in test environment for a year

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Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has blamed “user error” for leaving a list of credentials online for more than a year that exposed access to sensitive patient data.

Mossab Hussein, chief security officer at cybersecurity startup SpiderSilk, told TechCrunch that a developer left the credentials for an AstraZeneca internal server on code sharing site GitHub in 2021. The credentials allowed access to a test Salesforce cloud environment, often used by businesses to manage their customers, but the test environment contained some patient data, Hussein said.

[…]

Due to an [sic] user error, some data records were temporarily available on a developer platform. We stopped access to this data immediately after we have been [sic] informed. We are investigating the root cause as well as assessing our regulatory obligations.”

Barth declined to say for what reason patient data was stored on a test environment, and if AstraZeneca has the technical means, such as logs, to determine if anyone accessed the data and what, if any, data was exfiltrated.

[…]

Source: AstraZeneca password lapse exposed patient data | TechCrunch

Wi-Peep drone locates all your wifi devices and maps them in your home, can tell if your watch is moving around

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We present Wi-Peep – a new location-revealing privacy attack on non-cooperative Wi-Fi devices. Wi-Peep exploits loopholes in the 802.11 protocol to elicit responses from Wi-Fi devices on a network that we do not have access to. It then uses a novel time-of-flight measurement scheme to locate these devices. Wi-Peep works without any hardware or software modifications on target devices and without requiring access to the physical space that they are deployed in. Therefore, a pedestrian or a drone that carries a Wi-Peep device can estimate the location of every Wi-Fi device in a building. Our Wi-Peep design costs $20 and weighs less than 10 g. We deploy it on a lightweight drone and show that a drone flying over a house can estimate the location of Wi-Fi devices across multiple floors to meter-level accuracy. Finally, we investigate different mitigation techniques to secure future Wi-Fi devices against such attacks.

Source: Non-cooperative wi-fi localization & its privacy implications | Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing And Networking

British govt is scanning all Internet devices hosted in UK

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The United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the government agency that leads the country’s cyber security mission, is now scanning all Internet-exposed devices hosted in the UK for vulnerabilities.

The goal is to assess UK’s vulnerability to cyber-attacks and to help the owners of Internet-connected systems understand their security posture.

“These activities cover any internet-accessible system that is hosted within the UK and vulnerabilities that are common or particularly important due to their high impact,” the agency said.

“The NCSC uses the data we have collected to create an overview of the UK’s exposure to vulnerabilities following their disclosure, and track their remediation over time.”

NCSC’s scans are performed using tools hosted in a dedicated cloud-hosted environment from scanner.scanning.service.ncsc.gov.uk and two IP addresses (18.171.7.246 and 35.177.10.231).

The agency says that all vulnerability probes are tested within its own environment to detect any issues before scanning the UK Internet.

“We’re not trying to find vulnerabilities in the UK for some other, nefarious purpose,” NCSC technical director Ian Levy explained.

“We’re beginning with simple scans, and will slowly increase the complexity of the scans, explaining what we’re doing (and why we’re doing it).”

How to opt out of vulnerability probes

Data collected from these scans includes any data sent back when connecting to services and web servers, such as the full HTTP responses (including headers).

Requests are designed to harvest the minimum amount of info required to check if the scanned asset is affected by a vulnerability.

If any sensitive or personal data is inadvertently collected, the NCSC says it will “take steps to remove the data and prevent it from being captured again in the future.”

British organizations can also opt out of having their servers scanned by the government by emailing a list of IP addresses they want to be excluded at scanning@ncsc.gov.uk.

In January, the cybersecurity agency also started releasing NMAP Scripting Engine scripts to help defenders scan for and remediate vulnerable systems on their networks.

The NCSC plans to release new Nmap scripts only for critical security vulnerabilities it believes to be at the top of threat actors’ targeting lists.

Source: British govt is scanning all Internet devices hosted in UK

Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot Sued Over ‘Software Piracy on an Unprecedented Scale’

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“Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot is being sued in a class action lawsuit that claims the AI product is committing software piracy on an unprecedented scale,” reports IT Pro.

Programmer/designer Matthew Butterick filed the case Thursday in San Francisco, saying it was on behalf of millions of GitHub users potentially affected by the $10-a-month Copilot service: The lawsuit seeks to challenge the legality of GitHub Copilot, as well as OpenAI Codex which powers the AI tool, and has been filed against GitHub, its owner Microsoft, and OpenAI…. “By training their AI systems on public GitHub repositories (though based on their public statements, possibly much more), we contend that the defendants have violated the legal rights of a vast number of creators who posted code or other work under certain open-source licences on GitHub,” said Butterick.

These licences include a set of 11 popular open source licences that all require attribution of the author’s name and copyright. This includes the MIT licence, the GNU General Public Licence, and the Apache licence. The case claimed that Copilot violates and removes these licences offered by thousands, possibly millions, of software developers, and is therefore committing software piracy on an unprecedented scale.

Copilot, which is entirely run on Microsoft Azure, often simply reproduces code that can be traced back to open-source repositories or licensees, according to the lawsuit. The code never contains attributions to the underlying authors, which is in violation of the licences. “It is not fair, permitted, or justified. On the contrary, Copilot’s goal is to replace a huge swath of open source by taking it and keeping it inside a GitHub-controlled paywall….” Moreover, the case stated that the defendants have also violated GitHub’s own terms of service and privacy policies, the DMCA code 1202 which forbids the removal of copyright-management information, and the California Consumer Privacy Act.
The lawsuit also accuses GitHub of monetizing code from open source programmers, “despite GitHub’s pledge never to do so.”

And Butterick argued to IT Pro that “AI systems are not exempt from the law… If companies like Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI choose to disregard the law, they should not expect that we the public will sit still.” Butterick believes AI can only elevate humanity if it’s “fair and ethical for everyone. If it’s not… it will just become another way for the privileged few to profit from the work of the many.”

Reached for comment, GitHub pointed IT Pro to their announcement Monday that next year, suggested code fragments will come with the ability to identify when it matches other publicly-available code — or code that it’s similar to.

The article adds that this lawsuit “comes at a time when Microsoft is looking at developing Copilot technology for use in similar programmes for other job categories, like office work, cyber security, or video game design, according to a Bloomberg report.”

Source: Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot Sued Over ‘Software Piracy on an Unprecedented Scale’ – Slashdot

Qualcomm v Arm: The bizarro quotient just went off the scale

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[…]

Qualcomm and Arm have been engaged in one of those very entertainingly bitter court fist-fights that the industry throws up when friends fall out over money. Briefly, Qualcomm builds its mobile device chips around Arm, for which it pays Arm a lot of money. Qualcomm bought another Arm-licensed company, Nuvia, and inherited Nuvia’s own Arm deals and derived IP. Arm said ‘Nu-uh, can’t do that.’ And into court they tumbled.

This sort of thing is normally lawyers locking horns over profit. Sometimes, though, it feels more like a fight to the death – and in this case, Qualcomm is making the case that a lot more than the details of per-chip licensing costs are involved. It says that Arm is about to make huge changes to its business model, imposing savage new restrictions on how its IP is used and making all its money from device makers, not chip companies. Which would cut Qualcomm off at the knees, if true.

[…]

The move to license device makers instead of chip makers would be massively complicated for everyone, and would give Arm much more power by not having to negotiate with a few very large concerns but a much more diverse market with many smaller clients. Doubtless the market regulators would be very interested in that, but it’s not quite world-beating suicidal madness.

World-beating suicidal madness comes with the other idea – that Arm would refuse to license a design that didn’t use purely Arm intellectual property. You want a GPU design to go with the CPU? Arm. An AI accelerator? Arm or nothing.

The chip industry has always had a fondness for these sorts of shenanigans, but has known better than to write them down. You want a particular CPU? Terribly sorry, but there’s a really long lead time on that part – unless you also buy the rest of our support chips… then we can do business. It’s unethical, usually illegal, and even the biggest names look the other way when their sales teams do it.

[…]

Source: Qualcomm v Arm: The bizarro quotient just went off the scale • The Register

[…] Qualcomm’s amended response to Arm’s lawsuit against the US chip giant. Arm is right now trying to stop Qualcomm from developing custom Arm-compatible processors using CPU core designs Qualcomm obtained via its acquisition of Nuvia. According to Arm, Qualcomm should have got, and failed to get, Arm’s permission to absorb Nuvia’s technologies, which were derived from Arm-licensed IP.

Qualcomm counterclaimed that Arm tried to demand at least “tens of millions” of dollars in transfer fees and extra royalties for using the newly acquired Nuvia designs.

[…]

Qualcomm states in its filing [PDF] that Arm has signaled it “will no longer license CPU technology to semiconductor companies” once existing agreements expire.

This would be an incredible transformation for Softbank-owned Arm: how exactly would Arm-based chips get into devices if no more Arm technology licenses are issued to chip designers … unless, perhaps, Arm starts making its own chips, which it’s previously said it has no appetite for, or it gets certain chip designers to make pure Arm-designed processors for it, and the makers of the end products using these components get charged a royalty per device.

In response to Qualcomm’s filing, Arm’s veep of external communication Phil Hughes didn’t directly address the allegations about licensing changes, but said the filing is “riddled with inaccuracies, and we will address many of these in our formal legal response that is due in the coming weeks.”

[…]

Thus, Qualcomm is claiming a whole range of manufacturers – from those in the embedded electronics space to personal computing – using Arm-compatible chips may need to directly pay Arm a royalty for every device sold. And if they don’t, they’ll need to shop elsewhere for a system-on-chip architecture, which could be unfortunate for them because Arm has few rivals. In fields like smartphones, few alternatives exist. Ironically, Qualcomm acquired Nuvia to make itself a better alternative to Intel and AMD in laptops.

[…]

The language in Qualcomm’s filing is specific and nuanced. It talks of threats by Arm, and Arm indicating it intends to do certain things. At first read, Qualcomm’s filing appears to state outright that Arm will change its business model; on second read, it appears more that Qualcomm is claiming Arm is threatening it will overhaul its licensing approach – to the detriment of Qualcomm – so as to scare Qualcomm into agreeing to Arm’s terms regarding the Nuvia acquisition and its licensed technologies.

Qualcomm previously complained Arm is trying to steer it onto higher royalty rates, by making it renegotiate its licensing agreements following the acquisition of Nuvia and its Arm-derived technologies.

Meanwhile, no matter how unfair Qualcomm believes Arm has acted, Qualcomm still has to answer Arm’s initial complaint: that Qualcomm transferred Nuvia’s Arm license and Arm-derived technology to itself after the acquisition, whereas the fine print of Nuvia’s agreement with Arm is that any such transfer must be negotiated with Arm, and that Qualcomm allegedly failed to do so and is in breach of contract.

Qualcomm says this assertion is simply wrong.

Whatever happens, this case has the potential to shine a light into some dark corners of the semiconductor industry – and this filing suggests whatever we find down there will be fascinating

Source: Qualcomm: Arm threatens to end CPU licensing, charge device makers instead

Fast Fashion Waste Is Choking Developing Countries With Mountains of Trash

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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