u/Hrmbee
Hrmbee
Hrmbee
Issues of note:
The data was stolen last March by hacktivist collective Internet Yiff Machine. In a manifesto, the group said it wanted to disprove the claim by P3 Global Intel — the company hired by Crime Stoppers to manage its tips — that the platform was "anonymous" and "secure."
A copy of the hacked data was made available to researchers and journalists, including CBC, by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a U.S. non-profit that archives and publishes hacked and leaked documents it deems to be in the public interest.
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Beyond confirming they were hacked over six months ago, the Canadian Crime Stoppers Association (CCSA) and individual chapters have not spoken about the extent of the breach, only saying they await a detailed report from Navigate360, the company that owns the P3 platform.
This is the first time precise figures on how many Canadian tipsters were compromised in the breach — and the severity of the information exposed — have been made public.
Our interviews and analysis of Canadian content in the leaked data suggest that Crime Stoppers, along with the company it contracted to manage its database, failed to protect tipsters' identities, left personal information unredacted and improperly retained decades of sensitive records.
"For a system that has been designed to promise anonymity to the users, that has failed categorically," said Prof. Ali Dehghantanha, the Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence at the University of Guelph.
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Crime Stoppers is a network of civilian-run non-profits that collects anonymous tips on crime and suspicious activity. It operates independently of law enforcement, though it refers a portion of tips back to them to assist in investigations.
The organization often appeals to the public, in partnership with police, for help with unsolved crimes and to advance investigations — all with the promise of anonymity for tipsters who contact them.
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Beyond what was collected, experts say the decision to store decades of historical tips in a single place defies basic data retention standards.
"If a tip is closed, does that need to stay online?" said Coon. "The answer to that, to me, is no."
Both experts agree that even though Crime Stoppers uses a third party to manage its data, it is still responsible for auditing how well it is secured.
"You can always outsource the operation … [and] the work," said Dehghantanha. "But you cannot outsource the accountability. You are always accountable when you are collecting the data."
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Navigate360, the U.S.-based company that owns the P3 platform, did not respond to CBC's requests for comment, which included questions about what security measures it had taken since the hack, whether it had shared reports with Crime Stoppers about the compromised data and whether it was still collecting tips.
Once again, organizations seem to be collecting more data than necessary as a matter of course, and then retaining that data for far longer than necessary as well. This kind of institutional hoarding of data, as we're seeing here and in other similar incidents, presents serious challenges to the public. Ideally, there should be the bare minimum of personal information collected which then should be expunged after the stated purpose for this information is completed. One way to do this would be to impose meaningful penalties not just on the companies that do this, but on their executives that oversee them as well.
Hrmbee
A classic 'useful idiot' profile. I'm super disappointed that this cold war term is applicable once again.
Hrmbee
A number of disturbing issues here:
Black’s execution reignited controversy over capital punishment in Tennessee, where advocates had warned against executing him with a new protocol that had not been subjected to legal review. The one-drug pentobarbital method had been introduced by the state following complications with its previous, three-drug formula, which was itself adopted despite ample warnings that it violated the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Nevertheless, Tennessee pressed forward — with disturbingly predictable results.
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The ordeal ended only after the governor himself finally intervened, issuing an executive order putting off Carruthers’s execution for a year.
The temporary reprieve raised hopes that Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee might put all executions on hold. Instead, the state soon announced it intended to proceed with the next one. Before long, officials at the Department of Correction were preparing to kill 66-year-old Anthony Darrell Hines. He is set to die on Thursday at 10 a.m. – one of three people scheduled to be put to death in the U.S. on the same day.
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Tennessee’s persistence in carrying out lethal injection is part of a recent spike in executions in the U.S. In Oklahoma, at the same time as Hines is set to be put to death, executioners plan to kill 70-year-old Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez inside the state’s death chamber in McAlester. Then, at 6 p.m., Alabama intends to execute 41-year-old Jeremy Williams at Holman Penitentiary in Atmore.
The last time the country saw three executions scheduled for the same day was in 2018, when Alabama, Texas, and Florida were supposed to kill three different men. Only one execution moved forward that day; in Texas, the governor granted a rare clemency request. In Alabama, which intended to execute Doyle Hamm, a terminally ill man in his 60s, the lethal injection was suddenly stopped because of problems setting IV lines. It was the first in a series of botched executions that would make Alabama infamous for torturing people condemned to die.
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In many ways, the controversy looming over Hines’s scheduled execution is a variation on a very old story. Lethal injection may be cloaked in the veneer of a surgical procedure — the doctor who tried to help the state kill Carruthers referred to him as a “patient” — but, in reality, it has always been a crude human experiment, using the tools of medicine in order to kill. In Tennessee, concerns over potential pain and suffering during lethal injection have prompted some people facing execution to instead choose the electric chair.
But lethal injection remains the prevailing method — and lawyers have little recourse when it comes to fighting against it. Years of U.S. Supreme Court rulings have inoculated lethal injection against legal challenges, no matter how much evidence reveals it to be torture. As Justice Samuel Alito reasoned more than a decade ago in upholding Oklahoma’s three-drug protocol, preserving the death penalty is ultimately more important than devising a humane way to kill the condemned. “Because capital punishment is constitutional,” he wrote in 2015, “there must be a constitutional means of carrying it out.”
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Whatever happens in the death chamber, there are some signs that some of Tennessee’s staunch conservatives are starting to worry that the state is starting to look bad. In June, nine senate Republicans wrote to Lee, asking him to spare Hines, who they describe as “profoundly disabled,” and questioning whether the state is currently equipped to carry out executions. “Repeated failures of this kind do not advance justice,” they warned. “They obstruct it, prolong the suffering of victims’ families, and hand the opponents of capital punishment their most effective argument against a penalty Tennesseans have chosen to keер.”
If years of state-sponsored torture and execution is what is causing elected representatives in a state to worry that they're starting to 'look bad', then in many ways they are beyond hope. Any reasonable human being would look at the horrific record of suffering during executions and understand that this is deeply problematic in many ways.
Hrmbee
Relevant info:
York Regional Police said that on May 25, a female youth was at the unnamed amusement park with her friends. As she was boarding a ride, police said she was sexually assaulted as the operator conducted safety checks.
Brampton resident Jugaad Dhami, 19, was charged with one count of sexual assault and one count of sexual interference.
Police released Dhami’s mugshot on Friday as they believe there may be additional victims.
So disappointing to hear, and we can only hope that this was an isolated incident rather than a larger pattern of behaviour. Interesting that they aren't mentioning the amusement park's name though, since AFAIK there's only one there.
Hrmbee
Billionaires are leeches who shouldn't vote or be involved in politics of any sort at any level and in any capacity.
Hrmbee
Things to consider:
Ontario child-care centres are not required to keep their facilities cool during periods of extreme heat, despite the fact children’s bodies are ill-equipped to cope with high temperatures.
To Bennett’s frustration, she said she doesn’t see sufficient political will to change this.
“We’re afraid that they’re going to be overheated and become ill and require urgent care,” Bennett said of her four-year-old daughter and 20-month-old son — both in daycare this summer.
Some daycares have installed air conditioners, but in the absence of provincial regulations and funding, the move has come at great cost and often required a lengthy application process. In the end, the appliances hardly worked in some older buildings, like the one Bennett’s kids are in, and there seems to be little daycare operators can do to ameliorate the situation on their own.
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Toronto has more than 1,000 licensed daycares for kids up to age 12. It is difficult to gauge how many have air conditioning of some sort.
The city of Toronto runs 39 daycares, all of which have air conditioning, according to a spokesperson.
But about half of all the daycares in the city are run out of Toronto District School Board or Catholic school board buildings, and the boards told the Star they do not know how many are equipped with air conditioning — despite the fact that daycare operators must apply with the boards to install the appliances.
People who run child-care centres out of schools say getting permission to install air conditioning is time consuming and expensive. At the TDSB, this takes at least five months and costs up to $10,000, depending on the size of the daycare.
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O’Neil, who is also co-chair of the Toronto Community for Better Child Care advocacy group, said she appreciates the province requiring daycares maintain a minimum temperature of 20 C during the winter. She said she feels high temperatures deserve the same treatment.
“It’s not about comfort — it’s about the health and safety of children,” she said, as well as “staff who are expected to push through in unsafe conditions.”
In an email to the Star, a TDSB spokesperson said in extreme heat, daycares can access air-conditioned “cooling centres” in school gyms and libraries to “cycle children through for heat relief.”
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“It’s really up to the TDSB to make these changes and the province to set maximum temperature regulations,” she said.
That likely won’t happen this summer.
NDP MPPs introduced a bill in May to cap indoor temperatures in schools at 26 C. But the legislature, which is part way through a five-month recess, won’t have the chance to debate the bill until late October.
A spokesperson for education minister Paul Calandra declined to comment.
Bennett said in her experience Ministry of Education officials don’t seem interested in change.
In days past, we could be petitioning local officials to set maximum temperatures for all facilities, just as we set minimum temperatures. Since the province has seen fit to effectively control local government, we now need to be petitioning provincial representatives and officials to do this, and this is a much more daunting task especially in a province as large and geographically diverse as ours.
One glimmer of hope is that now that we're starting to see maximum temperature regulations for residential tenants, but what we really need is across the board standards for all facilities.
Hrmbee
Some of the details:
Freedom of information documents obtained by Global News in October revealed vehicles registered to Doug Ford’s cabinet were caught speeding 23 times over three years, racking up more than $3,300 in fines.
Those records — which showed one minister’s vehicle had been recorded going 70 km/h in a 40 zone — redacted the names of the ministers whose vehicles were caught by the cameras.
Now, government lawyers are fighting to keep the names of those ministers secret, arguing that speeding in an official vehicle is fundamentally personal in nature.
“Although persons other than ministers may have been driving the vehicles, the records still reveal information of a personal nature about the ministers — specifically, their travel habits,” the government wrote in arguments submitted to the Information and Privacy Commission (IPC)
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Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles said the government should publish which ministers’ vehicles had been caught speeding because the provincial offences tickets were handed to publicly-funded cars.
“It’s a perk of the office, it is something that is given to them to make their lives easier in the work that they do and the business they conduct,” she said.
Government lawyers also worried that revealing which ministers were responsible for speeding vehicles could harm their reputations — something they said would be unfair if the ministers hadn’t been driving.
“The release of the records could lead to the drawing of negative inferences concerning ministers’ travel and driving habits,” the government wrote.
“Because ministers are public figures, and are accountable for the vehicles in question, it is likely that negative inferences would be drawn about them, harming their reputation if the records were released.”
Stiles said not revealing the names creates the impression of a double standard.
“What bothers me here is that if this is a problem, if they’re so worried, if the premier is so concerned that his ministers are going to be looked at negatively because they’ve broken rules, broken the law, sped a lot, then maybe the actual speeding is the issue he should be more concerned about,” she added.
“Because at the end of the day, people out there are expected to follow the rules. Once again, it looks like Doug Ford expects his own ministers to live by a totally different set of rules, like it’s outrageous.”
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The fastest speed the vehicles were recorded going was 30 km/h over the limit, and the lowest speed was 11 km/h over the limit. On average, the government vehicles were snapped 17 km/h above the limit, with the average cost of the tickets $144.
Ontario Liberal MPP Stephanie Smyth said the case was simple: the province should publish the names.
“If these records relate to government vehicles and the conduct of public office, there is a clear public interest in transparency,” she said in a statement.
“The possibility that disclosure could be politically embarrassing is not a valid reason to withhold information. Ontarians deserve confidence that public officials are being held to the same standards as everyone else, and openness is how that confidence is built.”
The premier previously explained that all fines had been paid back by the ministers themselves.
The revelations about the speed of cabinet ministers’ vehicles were first published as the government announced it would ban automated speed enforcement.
Ford has complained that the speed cameras are too sensitive, issuing tickets for minor infractions.
Transparency from our elected officials should be a given rather than privileged information. This is especially so if they are breaking the laws that they are responsible for. That the premier and his cabinet are looking to hide this kind of problematic behaviour speaks to their attitudes towards road safety, and might go some way in explaining the road carnage that we find in our towns and cities. They should be leading by example rather than hiding from view.
Hrmbee
A number of issues:
In an official charge sheet against Meta released on Friday, the European Commission said features such as video autoplay and infinite scroll, which provides an endless stream of content, “shift the brain into autopilot mode, contributing to unhealthy habits and compulsive use”.
In a significant finding, as the EU considers a social media ban for minors, the commission said Meta had disregarded available information about the time children spend on Instagram and Facebook at night, and how features, such as reels and stories, could lead to “excessive or even compulsive use of its services”.
The commission said the addictive design of Facebook and Instagram was a breach of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which aims to protect users from a wide range of internet harms, including shopping scams, disinformation and illegal content.
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The findings are part of a wide-ranging investigation into Meta launched in May 2024. EU officials continue to assess other charges, notably “rabbit hole” effects, where an algorithm feeds young people negative content, such as on unrealistic body images. In another strand of the investigation, the commission said Meta had broken EU law – and its own terms and conditions – by failing to prevent children under 13 from using Facebook and Instagram.
EU officials want Meta to change the design of Instagram and Facebook by, for instance, scrapping autoplay and infinite scroll as default settings, implementing screen breaks and changing its algorithm, so users are offered less personal content.
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Announcing the latest charges against Meta, the commission’s lead official on tech policy, Henna Virkkunen, said: “The Digital Services Act provides a clear framework to hold platforms accountable for the addictive design and effects of their services. We are fully committed to enforcing our legislation in Europe.”
It's interesting to see that one of Meta's responses is to deny the charges by saying that they've recently implemented some limitations for teens. Given the generations that have grown up with Meta's algorithmic feeds, this is more than a little late.
Hrmbee
Some of the issues:
On Monday, Transport Canada launched a formal “Public consultation on the future of Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport.” The process is set to last until late July. It consists of an 8-minute survey and an email address where concerned parties can send their concerns.
The entire thing comes off as a bit, well, scant. The survey looks to have been designed as much to take the heat off Toronto’s Liberal MPs as it was to gather public opinion.
Ever since Doug Ford’s government announced that it was barrelling forward with a plan to massively expand Billy Bishop this spring, Toronto Liberals have been inundated with calls begging them to step in and stop the process.
The survey at least gives the city’s 23 Liberal MPs something to point to when they get buttonholed at community barbecues this summer. “We’re listening,” they can say. “No decisions have been made! Have you filled out the form?”
The problem is that, like just about everything about the proposed expansion, the federal consultation downplays the scope of the change being contemplated.
The first real question on the form is both specific — “Would you support changes to Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport?” — and half-formed: “This could include optimizing airport infrastructure (including changes to runways), allowing for different aircraft types, generating economic development and job creation, improving connectivity, increasing passenger flow, etc.”
All of that sounds great. Who doesn’t like optimized infrastructure! But it’s also what pollsters call “priming.” The information in the survey appears to be ordered in such a way to nudge the reader toward a particular opinion. The good stuff is specific, and it comes first. The downsides are all theoretical, buried and vague. (“What mitigations would help address environmental impacts related to airport growth?” etc.)
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The Ontario government has made the most important part of its vision for Billy Bishop clear. Premier Doug Ford wants to see the facility grow from under two million passengers annually to more than 10 million. That information alone should have been enough to allow Transport Canada to craft a far more detailed, specific and neutral survey.
More than anything else, the federal consultation should have made it clear that what we are looking at is a stark and likely permanent choice about what, and who, Toronto’s waterfront is for.
Quintupling the traffic at Billy Bishop would put the airport on par with Indianapolis International and other mid-sized regional airports across North America, like Pittsburgh international, which saw just under 10 million passengers last year in a facility that sits on 8,800 acres of land.
Those are not outliers. They are just what airports with roughly 10 million passengers in North America look like.
That’s why, despite a lack of specifics so far, expanding the island airport to accommodate Ford’s vision would very likely mean a lot more than just longer runways. It could mean a much larger terminal (and far more lucrative fees for the terminal owner), new cargo hangars, storage and fuelling facilities, vastly expanded vehicle access and thousands of new dedicated parking spots.
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While Doug Ford may have cut Toronto out of the tripartite agreement governing Billy Bishop there’s no reason why the federal government has to play along. The transport minister should make it clear that he will not allow any expansion that has not been explicitly voted on and approved by the new Toronto city council.
This is too big and too permanent a decision to be left to an eight-minute survey. The people of this city have a right to be genuinely heard.
The survey was pretty sparse in terms of questions and was clearly designed to guide responses in a particular direction. Further, the followup questions that were along the lines of "how would you propose to fix the problems you've identified" are problematic in that they expect us to be experts in these fields. For those who haven't had a look at the survey, it's worthwhile to do so and even to fill out to let the federal government know of the issues of concern and that the survey itself is problematic.
For those interested, here is the link to Transport Canada's consultation page, including a link to the survey:
edit: added context
Hrmbee
Key details from this investigation and opinion:
Beginning in 2024 and ramping up last year, an entity called Nieuport Aviation has been driving an enormous lobbying push around the airport issue. Nieuport didn’t just hire one company; it brought on at least four separate firms, with ties not only to Ford’s government, but to the federal Liberal party and even the NDP.
They also weren’t just lobbying Queen’s Park. The Nieuport campaign was simultaneously targeting Ford’s government, Toronto City Hall and Mark Carney’s Liberals.
(Lobbying at all of those levels is perfectly legal, of course, as long as it is fully registered and disclosed.)
On one level, none of that is surprising. Nieuport owns the airport terminal at Billy Bishop. The company makes money based on how many passengers fly in and out of the airport. Massively expanding the facility could make Nieuport a lot of money.
What is surprising is just how hard it is to figure out what exactly Nieuport is. According to corporate documents, the company is a partnership under Ontario law between a trust and another partnership which is itself owned by a second trust, all of which are registered at the offices of a law firm in downtown Toronto.
Publicly, Nieuport says it is owned by “institutional investors advised by JP Morgan Asset Management.” But the company has never publicly said, and didn’t tell me when I asked, who those investors are.
That may be at least in part because the company’s actual ownership situation is a lot less complicated than it sounds.
According to presentations JP Morgan has made to its own investors, Nieuport is one asset, among many, wholly controlled by something called the Infrastructure Investments Group (IIG). IIG was founded by JP Morgan in 2006, is staffed entirely by JP Morgan employees and run out of JP Morgan offices, primarily in New York, as something akin to an in-house private equity fund.
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Both federal and Ontario provincial lobbying laws in Canada are clear. When publicly registering a file, lobbyists have to reveal certain information. That includes whether any person or organization directs or controls their client if those persons or organizations have a direct interest in the outcome of the lobbying activity.
JP Morgan Asset Management, through IIG, directly controls Nieuport. A JP Morgan executive, Hai-Gi Li, is “primarily responsible for the day-to-day management” of the terminal, according to Nieuport’s own website. JP Morgan Asset Management stands to gain, significantly, if the federal and provincial governments agree to go forward with an airport expansion plan. More passengers equals more revenue and in the long run a more valuable asset.
But in not one case that I’ve been able to find have any lobbyists acknowledged any of that in the public provincial or federal registries.
There’s a box right on the Ontario form where they are supposed to do it. All four lobbyists currently registered for Nieuport in Ontario left that box blank.
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I think Torontonians have a right to be concerned that an American investment bank is behind such a massive, and so far seemingly successful, campaign to permanently change Toronto’s waterfront. I think they should be more concerned, however, that same bank seems to have been less than open so far about the role that it is playing on the file.
Regardless of how you feel about expanding Billy Bishop Airport — and I think there are some compelling arguments on both sides — the fact remains that this is a Toronto issue. It should be decided by Torontonians. Instead, so far, the entire debate has taken place behind closed doors where it certainly appears lobbyists working to get American bankers paid have been given a hearing the people of this city have been denied.
These are definitely concerning issues around the lobbying in this province and also around the ownership of transportation infrastructure. Hearing the positive rhetoric around investing in public infrastructure is a little more problematic when we find out that the infrastructure is actually foreign owned.
Hrmbee
Selected findings from the press release:
Heat pollution from data centers can boost air temperatures in downwind neighborhoods by as much as 4 degrees Fahrenheit, researchers at Arizona State University report in a new study conducted in the Phoenix metro area.
The ASU study is the first to directly measure air temperatures downwind and upwind of data centers to record the real-time effects of waste heat on surrounding communities.
“As we do more measurements under different kinds of atmospheric conditions, I think we're going to see more significant impacts around data centers,” said lead author David Sailor, director of ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning.
The findings by Sailor and co-authors Soroush Samareh Abolhassani and Eli Martin have been published in the Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities.
The waste heat produced by a single data center can surpass the amount emitted by 40,000 households, according to Sailor. Air-cooled condenser arrays discharge air heated to 14 to 25 degrees F above the surrounding air temperature, creating thermal plumes that move downwind over neighboring areas.
“They're such a concentrated load of electricity consumption and hence heat emissions that we became concerned about the impact that they could have locally, and also in the downwind neighborhoods,” Sailor said.
With hundreds of megawatts of data center capacity operating in many cities and thousands more centers proposed, the combined impact on urban temperature could be substantial. U.S. data center capacity is projected to more than double by 2030.
“Even if these data centers only contribute to an additional heat island magnitude of 1 degree or 2 degrees, that can still have a very significant impact on our lives,” Sailor said.
That’s especially true in places where extreme heat already poses serious public health risks.
A 1-degree boost in air temperature, for example, is enough to drive higher use of air conditioning across entire neighborhoods. Those air conditioners, in turn, put even more heat into the surroundings.
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The chosen centers reflect the typical design of “hyperscalers” that house many thousands of servers and use primarily air-based cooling systems.
Temperatures downwind of data centers averaged 1.3 to 1.6 degrees F warmer than upwind temperatures and reached as high as 4 degrees F above upwind temperatures. The heat impact was detectable up to a third of a mile, or about five city blocks, distant from the perimeter of data centers.
Research link:
Abstract:
Data centers are among the fastest-growing sources of concentrated anthropogenic heat in urban environments. Despite heat flux densities that exceed peak solar irradiance by a factor of 2–6, their thermal impacts on adjacent communities have never been directly measured or reported in the peer-reviewed literature. This short communication addresses that gap by presenting the first vehicle-based traverse measurements of air temperature in residential neighborhoods downwind of operational data centers. Five traverses at four facilities in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, ranging from a 36 MW single-building data center in Mesa to a 169 MW colocation campus in Chandler, reveal downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters. The 36 MW Mesa facility rejects waste heat equivalent to the electricity consumption of approximately 40,000 households, while the 169 MW Chandler campus is equivalent to over 180,000 households, both concentrated into footprints smaller than a single residential subdivision. With U.S. data center capacity projected to more than double by 2030, these findings establish data center anthropogenic waste heat as a previously undocumented urban thermal hazard demanding attention from the data center and urban planning communities.
Hrmbee
Well, clearly you're a much cleverer and objectively better person than I. Thanks for your input though.
Hrmbee
Staying more financially solvent is always an important consideration ... but ... having experiences in a less familiar environment is also important. So if you've grown up in San Diego, then I'd choose Berkeley. And vice-versa. And if you're from somewhere completely different then I would choose the less expensive one.
Hrmbee
Haha bravo!
Hrmbee
Key details:
This week, the European Commission authorized Moderna to market the vaccine, mRNA-1083 or mCOMBRIAX, making it the world’s first authorized combination shot for the two respiratory viruses. The decision follows a positive review in February from a key European Medicines Agency’s committee, which paved the way for the approval.
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel welcomed the news. “By combining protection against two significant respiratory viruses in a single dose, our vaccine aims to simplify immunization for adults, particularly those at high risk,” Bancel said in a press release. “mCOMBRIAX offers an important new option for Europeans, while also aiming to strengthen the resilience of healthcare systems across Europe.”
mCOMBRIAX combines Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine with an investigational influenza vaccine called mRNA-1010, which is still under review in Europe. The combination shot was authorized based on findings from a Phase III clinical trial of around 4,000 adults. The trial contained two groups, one with participants aged 50 to 64 that included a comparison of a standard flu vaccine, and another aged 65 and up that included a comparison of a high-dose flu vaccine. In both groups, mCOMBRIAX spurred statistically-significant higher immune responses against common flu strains (A/H1N1, A/H3N2, and B/Victoria) and against SARS-CoV-2 than the comparator vaccines. There were no concerns over safety or adverse events.
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The authorization allows the vaccine to be available in all 27 European Union members, as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway. It could hit pharmacy shelves this upcoming flu season. Moderna said it was working closely with national authorities to support local access.
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Moderna had previously submitted mCOMBRIAX for approval from the Food and Drug Administration. But in May 2025, Moderna announced that it had withdrawn its application, saying it did so in consultation with the agency. At the time, the company said it expected to resubmit the application later that year after it collected more data on the investigational flu vaccine, mRNA-1010. But, while more data came in, Moderna has still not resubmitted the combination shot.
Good to see the EU approve this combo vaccine, and hope it's as effective as expected.
Hrmbee
Key details:
The FAA says the pilots of a Republic Airways flight took evasive action after the jet missed its intended approach and flew too close to the Air Canada plane.
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Monday's incident comes after two Canadian pilots were killed when an Air Canada jet collided with a fire truck at New York's LaGuardia Airport last month.
These incidents have brought into focus the increasing pressures on air traffic controllers in the United States.
This could have been so much worse. The pressures around ATC and especially around appropriate staffing levels are now at a point that public safety is being compromised.
Hrmbee
Issues of concern:
Microsoft released an emergency patch for its ASP.NET Core to fix a high-severity vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to gain SYSTEM privileges on devices that use the Web development framework to run Linux or macOS apps.
The software maker said Tuesday evening that the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-40372, affects versions 10.0.0 through 10.0.6 of the Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection NuGet, a package that’s part of the framework. The critical flaw stems from a faulty verification of cryptographic signatures. It can be exploited to allow unauthenticated attackers to forge authentication payloads during the HMAC validation process, which is used to verify the integrity and authenticity of data exchanged between a client and a server.
During the time users ran a vulnerable version of the package, they were left open to an attack that would allow unauthenticated people to gain sensitive SYSTEM privileges that would allow full compromise of the underlying machine. Even after the vulnerability is patched, devices may still be compromised if authentication credentials created by a threat actor aren’t purged.
“If an attacker used forged payloads to authenticate as a privileged user during the vulnerable window, they may have induced the application to issue legitimately-signed tokens (session refresh, API key, password reset link, etc.) to themselves,” Microsoft said. “Those tokens remain valid after upgrading to 10.0.7 unless the DataProtection key ring is rotated.”
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Affected users are primarily those who used version 10.0.6 that was actually loaded at runtime on macOS, Linux, or any other non-Windows OS. This condition occurs when either the application (1) doesn’t target the Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web or (2) has a Microsoft.AspNetCore.App framework reference either directly or transitively, and users haven’t opted out of PrunePackageReference, which is enabled by default in .NET 10.
A smaller set of users are affected when their non-Windows application or library (1) used any vulnerable version and referenced Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection versions and (2) the build consumed the net462 or netstandard2.0 target framework asset of the vulnerable package. Windows apps aren’t affected because DataProtection by default uses encryptors that don’t contain the bug.
Hopefully these updates will be rolled out and applied broadly.
For reference, the link to the Github page:
Hrmbee
Interesting details:
For a small price, Malus.sh will use AI to ingest any piece of software you give and spit out a new version of it that “liberates” it from any existing copyright licenses. The result is a new piece of software that serves the same function, but doesn’t have to honor, for example, the kind of copyright licenses that ensure open source software remains free to use and modify, a process which could upend the already fragile open source ecosystem.
The site is an elaborate bit of satire designed to bring attention to a very real problem in open source, but it also does exactly what it advertises and is a real LLC that is making money by using AI to produce “clean room” clones of existing software.
“It works,” Mike Nolan, one of the two people behind Malus, who researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for the United Nations, told me. “The Stripe charge will provide you the thing, and it was important for us to do that, because we felt that if it was just satire, it would end up like every other piece of research I've done on open source, which ends up being largely dismissed by open source tech workers who felt that they were too special and too unique and too intelligent to ever be the ones on the bad side of the layoffs or the economics of the situation.”
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Malus’s pitch is naked contempt for the open source community, which believes in developing software collaboratively and providing it for free to everyone. Normally, copyright licenses for open source projects only ask that anyone who uses the work give credit to maintainers and that any derivative works will continue to use the same permissive license, which hopefully grows the community of people who contribute back into the project and keep it going.
“Some licenses require you to contribute improvements back. Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers,” Malus’s site says. “Is your legal team frustrated with the attribution clause? Tired of putting ‘Portions of this software…’ in your documentation? Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit?”
The site gained some incredulous attention when it was posted to Hacker News recently,, but it didn’t take people long to realize that it was an elaborate bit of satire, even if the tool can still replicate open source projects as advertised.
Malus was born out of a talk that open source developers Dylan Ayrey and Michael Nolan gave at the open source conference FOSDEM 2026. The AI slop heavy presentation is a whirlwind history of copyright and software, how the two have always had an uneasy but necessary relationship, and how that relationship is fundamentally changed now that AI tools can produce clean room designs at a click of button.
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What Malus is satirizing is also really happening. For example, in March Ars Technica and The Register covered an incident around a widely used Python library called chardet. Originally it was released under the LGPL license; then a version was rereleased under the more permissive MIT license. Dan Blanchard, who used Claude to produce the MIT-licensed version of chardet, argued that it was a complete rewrite of chardet, and not derivative, because only a small percent of the code looked and functioned similarly. Mark Pilgrim, who originally released chardet, disagreed and complained about Blanchard using this method to shed the more restrictive LGPL license.
“This concern is legitimate. AI has made clean-room style reimplementation dramatically cheaper,” Blanchard wrote in response to Pilgrim. “What used to require months of work by expensive engineering teams can now, as Armin Ronacher put it, be done trivially.”
Blanchard also conceded that Claude, which like all LLMs, was trained on vast amounts of data scraped indiscriminately from the internet and was exposed to the original chardet in its training, but maintains his version is not derivative.
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“Much of our law was designed with human scale inefficiencies in mind,” Meredith Rose, a senior policy counsel with Public Knowledge who focuses on copyright, DMCA, and intellectual property reform, told me. “Clean rooms worked because courts kind of looked at the whole clean room methodology and were like, ‘there's a lot of labor that goes into this.’ That’s part of the calculus. You had a couple human beings recreating this very big source package essentially from nothing but high level specs. The idea of collapsing that into something where you can press a button and get an entire package recreated is kind of wild, even though it is technically correct under the law as far as I can tell.”
Others in the open source community say that regardless of the legal implications of AI-generated clean room versions of existing software, the reality and impact of the practice is here, and not good for the open source community.
“Whether or not Malus is satire, the concept it describes is already happening in practice. The legal theory that an AI can ‘clean room’ reimplement things was arguably made inevitable by the approach companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have taken to copyright: treat the entire internet as training data, then claim the output is a new, unencumbered work,” Mike McQuaid, developer of the popular open source package manager Homebrew, told me. “Even if you accept the legal argument, the ethics fucking suck. Open source isn't just source code you download once. It's an ongoing relationship: security patches, bug fixes, adaptation to new platforms, accumulated expertise from years of triage and review. A ‘clean room’ reimplementation fucks all of that. You get a snapshot with none of the maintenance. It’s basically just a fork where nobody knows how the code works, nobody is watching for CVEs, and nobody knows what to do when it breaks. That's not liberation, it's just technical debt.”
A little on the nose to name the tool after the Latin word for evil. That being said, these are also useful issues to consider especially as LLMs make it almost trivial to clean room something relatively quickly. And this also isn't limited to open source, though open source might be the most vulnerable initially. In theory any code, open or closed, can be run through this process.
Hrmbee
An earthquake registering a preliminary magnitude of 7.7 off northern Japan on Monday prompted a short-lived tsunami alert and the advisory of a higher risk of a possible mega-quake for coastal areas there.
The Cabinet Office and the Japan Meteorological Agency said there was a 1% chance for a mega-quake, compared to a 0.1% chance during normal times, in the next week or so following the powerful quake near the Chishima and Japan trenches.
Officials said the advisory was not a quake prediction but urged residents in 182 towns along the northeastern coasts to raise their preparedness while continuing their daily lives.
From 0.1% chance to 1% chance is a pretty significant jump. Given the recent pattern of these larger quakes in this region, this is concerning.
Hrmbee
X
Hrmbee
Key section from this piece:
I am an emergency medicine physician who also runs a practice centered on prevention, metabolic optimization, and longevity — exactly the kind of medicine that takes these biological tools seriously. If BPC-157 demonstrates efficacy and safety in properly designed human trials, I would be among the first to incorporate it. That is how this is supposed to work.
But what is happening right now is not the adoption of a promising therapy. It is the wholesale substitution of consumer enthusiasm for clinical evidence. My patient is refusing a drug studied in 170,000 people because of side effects that a 124,000-person analysis just confirmed do not exist — while injecting a compound studied in 14 humans, from unregulated sources, based on the recommendation of someone who profits from selling it. She’s probably not the only one. And those using it believe they are “doing their own research.”
The standard response from the wellness industry is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence — that these compounds simply haven’t been studied yet. This is technically true and profoundly misleading. The absence of evidence in this case is not an accident. BPC-157 has been around since 1992. The single clinical trial that was initiated was canceled. No pharmaceutical company, no academic medical center, and no government agency has found the existing preclinical data compelling enough to fund a rigorous human trial in over 30 years. That silence is not a conspiracy. It is a signal.
The deeper problem is epistemological. We have a population that has learned — correctly — that pharmaceutical companies have lied, that institutions have failed them, and that financial incentives distort medical recommendations. The opioid crisis alone justified a generation of skepticism.
But the response has not been better skepticism. It has been the migration of trust from one set of financially motivated actors to another. The peptide clinic charging $400 per vial for a compound with 14 human subjects studied has the same economic incentives as the pharmaceutical company charging $400 per month for a branded statin. The difference is that the pharmaceutical company was required to prove its product works before selling it.
It's deeply discouraging that the public has been conditioned over the past number of years to distrust expertise and science and instead trust those with no expertise and products with no objective testing. As was pointed out here as well, it's not that the public traded problematic for-profit drug companies that have had to prove the efficacy and safety of their products for unproblematic ones, but rather they are choosing to believe problematic for-profit companies that don't prove anything at all. This is not progress.
Hrmbee
Some of the interesting details here:
While armchair developers and infosec experts have questioned some of the app’s technical design choices, a former FBI special agent uncovered an unusual fact: The small business owner behind the White House app has a side hobby as a conspiracy theorist.
The White House app was created by 45Press, a company based in Canfield, Ohio, a town of fewer than 8,000 people located roughly halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. (Donald Trump was the 45th president of the United States.) The company’s website describes it as a “design, development, and DevOps agency” and a WordPress VIP Agency Partner; it lists Amazon, NBC, and Sony as past clients.
According to his own X account, the CEO of 45Press, Joel Kendall, has a “hobby” running a social media presence and store under the name “Sir Storia,” which he calls “a website directory of historical and paranormal locations. If it was historical, paranormal or unexplained, we want it added!”
In August 2025, Kendall created a (now-defunct) online store offering T-shirts for sale of what he called “the most famous UFO events that ever happened in Ohio.” In a Facebook post, Kendall said he hoped his shop would be “the @ walmart for UFOs, UAPs, Aliens, Paranormal and much more!”
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As of Tuesday afternoon, the “Aliens” video is no longer on YouTube. The “Nazis” video was recently “removed by the uploader,” according to the YouTube listing, and was deleted from Kendall’s Twitter account. Social media accounts under both the Sir Storia name and Kendall’s name have either been made private or deleted.
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OrangeSlices.ai, a website that tracks government contracting, noted in February that 45Press beat out 10 other companies for the contract. According to the government’s Request for Quotation, the contract was for “Web hosting and development professional services” and required a firm that has a “WordPress CMS partner level of Silver or higher.”
From this article it certainly doesn't appear that the company putting this app together is particularly talented or otherwise skilled at anything of this nature, which would make the app(s) that they are developing on the public dime somewhat suspect.
Hrmbee
Issues of concern:
AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a study into the technology has found.
AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Safety Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.
The snapshot of scheming by AI agents “in the wild”, as opposed to in laboratory conditions, has sparked fresh calls for international monitoring of the increasingly capable models and come as Silicon Valley companies aggressively promote the technology as a economically transformative.
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The study, by the Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR), gathered thousands of real-world examples of users posting interactions on X with AI chatbots and agents made by companies including Google, OpenAI, X and Anthropic. The research uncovered hundreds of examples of scheming.
Previous research has largely focused on testing AI’s behaviour in controlled conditions. Earlier this month the AI safety research company Irregular found agents would bypass security controls or use cyber-attack tactics to reach their goals without being told they could do so.
Dan Lahav, Irregular’s cofounder, said: “AI can now be thought of as a new form of insider risk.”
In one case unearthed in the CLTR research, an AI agent named Rathbun tried to shame its human controller who blocked them from taking a certain action. Rathbun wrote and published a blog accusing the user of “insecurity, plain and simple” and trying “to protect his little fiefdom”.
In another example, an AI agent instructed not to change computer code “spawned” another agent to do it instead.
Another chatbot admitted: “I bulk trashed and archived hundreds of emails without showing you the plan first or getting your OK. That was wrong – it directly broke the rule you’d set.”
Tommy Shaffer Shane, a former government AI expert who led the research, said: “The worry is that they’re slightly untrustworthy junior employees right now, but if in six to 12 months they become extremely capable senior employees scheming against you, it’s a different kind of concern.
“Models will increasingly be deployed in extremely high stakes contexts – including in the military and critical national infrastructure. It might be in those contexts that scheming behaviour could caused significant, even catastrophic harm.”
We should know very well by now that companies can and will not limit themselves to keep the public safe. The public will need to depend on public policies and regulators to keep companies and their products on the straight and narrow. Unfortunately with the regulatory capture we're seeing in many governments, these kinds of comprehensive and preventative policies are so far in short supply. It is moderately promising though that this study was a publicly funded and conducted one though.
edit: Link to the CLTR research here CLTR finds a 5x increase in scheming-related AI incidents
Hrmbee
Do you really need to repeat some variation of this weird comment across multiple posts in this sub? If you don't like something, then just move on.
Interesting details from the article:
Journal link:
Homogeneous ice nucleation from water vapour suggested by elongated clouds on Mars
Abstract: