BrainWorms

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/14397907 > > Record dry conditions in South America have led to wildfires, power cuts and water rationing. The world’s largest river system, the Amazon, which sustains some 30 million people across eight countries, is drying up. >

cross-posted from: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/news@lemmy.world/t/516493 > ! [Original Post on The Wa-shiton Post](https://wapo.st/4f998w2), behind a paywall ! > > > > Hackers breached the Internet Archive, whose outsize cultural importance belies a small budget and lean infrastructure. > > > > --- > > > > By [Daniel Wu](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/daniel-wu/?itid=ai_top_wud) > > > > October 18, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT > > > > --- > > > > There are few organizations dedicated to the gargantuan task of preserving the vast, ever-shifting record of human activity that is the internet. The largest such record belongs to a nonprofit based in an old church in San Francisco that operates on a smaller annual budget than the D.C. Public Library. > > > > It is currently under siege. > > > > Hackers struck the Internet Archive last week, leaking the information of millions of users and defacing it with a message taunting the nonprofit’s website for running on a shoestring budget. To prevent further leaks, the Internet Archive’s team took the site, including its popular Wayback Machine, offline. It’s the first time in its almost 30-year history that it has suffered an outage of longer than a few hours, founder Brewster Kahle told The Washington Post. Most of the site remains offline a week later. > > > > The cyberattack kicked off a frenzied race to restore access to the Internet Archive and the more than 900 billion webpages it preserves on the Wayback Machine, its archival service. It was also a rude awakening. To Kahle, that hackers would set their sights on a free repository of digital history, seemingly without an agenda or a ransom, is hard to imagine. > > > > “I don’t know,” Kahle said. “Why kick the cat?” > > > > The attack drew allusions online to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the sprawling repository of knowledge in ancient Egypt that writers of the time claim Julius Caesar accidentally torched. It’s a dramatic comparison, but most agree that the Internet Archive has played a foundational role in the upkeep of online history. Other web archival services exist, but the Internet Archive, which was founded in 1996, maintains the largest and oldest archive of the internet. > > > > If you’ve ever had to search for an old or defunct website, you’ve probably been directed to the Internet Archive or its Wayback Machine. The organization [archives](https://blog.archive.org/2018/10/01/more-than-9-million-broken-links-on-wikipedia-are-now-rescued/) websites cited by editors on Wikipedia. [Attorneys](https://www.druganddevicelawblog.com/2021/07/its-back-its-wayback-its-away-wayback-its-admissible.html) plumb the Wayback Machine for evidence to use in court. The Internet Archive was among several groups that preserved deleted tweets by former president [Donald Trump](https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/?itid=lk_inline_manual_13), it [wrote](https://blog.archive.org/2017/09/29/waybackmachinesavedeletedpreztweets/) in 2017. > > > > Kahle and his team see the mission of the Internet Archive as a noble one — to build a “library of everything” and ensure records are kept in an online environment where websites change and disappear by the day. > > > > “We’re all dreamers,” said Chris Freeland, the Internet Archive’s director of library services. “We believe in the mission of the Internet Archive, and we believe in the promise of the internet.” > > > > But the site has, at times, courted controversy. The Internet Archive faces [lawsuits](https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-memory-wayback-machine-lawsuits/) from [book publishers](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/25/internet-archive-digital-lending-lawsuit/?itid=lk_inline_manual_18) and music labels brought in 2020 and 2023 for digitizing copyrighted books and music, which the organization has argued should be permissible for noncommercial, archival purposes. Kahle said the hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties from the lawsuits could sink the Internet Archive. > > > > Those lawsuits are ongoing. Now, the Internet Archive has also had to turn its attention to fending off cyberattacks. In May, the Internet Archive was [hit](https://blog.archive.org/2024/05/28/internet-archive-and-the-wayback-machine-under-ddos-cyber-attack/) with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a fairly common type of internet warfare that involves flooding a target site with fake traffic. The archive experienced intermittent outages as a result. Kahle said it was the first time the site had been targeted in its history. > > > > Last week, the DDoS attacks resumed. But things escalated quickly. On Oct. 9, in a separate, more critical security breach, hackers inserted a message on the Internet Archive’s main page bragging they had stolen information from 31 million of its users. Have I Been Pwned, a service that checks for leaked emails and passwords online, confirmed that it received a database of email addresses and passwords and verified that they were stolen from the Internet Archive, cybersecurity news site BleepingComputer [reported](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/internet-archive-hacked-data-breach-impacts-31-million-users/). > > > > Scott Helme, a cybersecurity researcher, told The Post that if hackers compromised the Internet Archive to the extent that they were able to deface the website, they could have done much worse. > > > > “With that level of access, genuinely, they could have done anything,” Helme said. “They could have put inappropriate materials. If they were politically motivated, they could have used the platform to make statements ... they could have used the website to distribute malware.” > > > > It was a five-alarm fire for Kahle, who quickly decided to take the site offline. It was chilling, he said, to read the hackers’ message on his website: “Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach?” > > > > “That’s been heard loud and clear,” Kahle said. “They’re not wrong.” > > > > Kahle and his team have spent the week since racing to identify and fix the vulnerabilities that left the Internet Archive open to attack. The organization has “industry standard” security systems, Kahle said, but he added that, until this year, the group had largely stayed out of the crosshairs of cybercriminals. Kahle said he’d opted not to prioritize additional investments in cybersecurity out of the Internet Archive’s limited budget of around $20 million to $30 million a year. > > > > The group is also puzzling over why it came under attack. The Internet Archive’s preserved data was not compromised during the hack, Kahle said, and the team hasn’t faced a ransom demand. > > > > A hacking group on X claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks. But no one has reliably claimed the defacement and data breach that forced the Internet Archive to sequester itself, said Helme, the cybersecurity researcher. He added that the hackers’ decision to alert the Internet Archive of their intrusion and send the stolen data to Have I Been Pwned, the monitoring service, could imply they didn’t have further intentions with it. > > > > “It could have just been someone flexing their muscles,” Helme said. > > > > If the Internet Archive was a victim of circumstance, its staff — and a large contingent of supporters online — are angry that hackers chose the nonprofit as a target. Users on X [noted](https://x.com/DynamoSuperX/status/1844420147429441660) the hack’s proximity to the U.S. presidential election and [compared](https://x.com/0xMatt/status/1844250290335387662) it to “pulling off a bank heist at a public library.” > > > > > > “Why hack in?” Kahle said. “So that you can go and, I don’t know, read a book?” > > > > The Internet Archive is not the only library service to have suffered a hacking attack in the past year. Cyberattacks halted the operations of the Seattle Public Library in May and the Calgary Public Library last week, the [Seattle Times](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-public-library-still-reeling-from-may-cyberattack/) and [CBC](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-public-library-cybersecurity-breach-1.7350904) reported. The British Library is [still reeling](https://blogs.bl.uk/living-knowledge/2024/10/restoring-our-services-10-october-2024-update.html) from a debilitating cyberattack last October that left some archives and school learning resources unavailable for almost a year. > > > > “We’re facing these same threats,” Freeland, the Internet Archive director of library services, said. “We are all the same library system under the same attacks.” > > > > The Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine service were offline for several days, during which the organization’s vast catalogue of webpages and other archives, including music, books, software and imagery, was inaccessible. The organization restored a read-only version of the Wayback Machine, Kahle [said](https://x.com/brewster_kahle/status/1845688309085065571) Monday on X, but is still working to bring the rest of the organization’s archives back online. > > > > “People want access to the past,” Kahle said. “And our job is to help deliver it and ... to be always there.” > > > > Helme said the episode demonstrates the vulnerability of nonprofit services like the Internet Archive — and of the larger ecosystem of information online that depends on them. > > > > “Perhaps they’ll find some more funding now that all of these headlines have happened,” Helme said. “And people suddenly realize how bad it would be if they were gone.”

www.commondreams.org

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20990192 > "We need resources and access for specialized development and early recovery interventions to help break the cycle of poverty and crisis," said one U.N. expert

www.currentaffairs.org

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3695940 >  > > >I pitched *Mother Jones* back in the day. It's in the book, but I obtained evidence that the former governor of Michigan and his top officials just deleted their phones right before the launch of the Flint criminal investigation—kind of a big deal—and they asked me, is there a Trump angle to this? > > ... > > >When I say it's a disaster, that's not to be dramatic. I'm telling you, the water is still bad. It's not as bad as it was in 2016, but you have brown water coming out, you have smelly water in many homes. Residents are showing rashes they're still getting. Residents are still losing hair. And from a just a plumbing and engineering perspective, it's common sense. Ten years later, they have not replaced all the damaged pipes. If you haven't replaced the damaged infrastructure that was badly corroded by essentially acid water, it doesn't matter if the water coming through is as clean as if Jesus blessed the water from the plant. If it's going through busted pipes, shit's going to peel off. > > ... > > >With that said, the people of Flint were overjoyed to vote for Democrat Gretchen Whitmer and Democrat Attorney General Dana Nessel because those two ran on Justice for Flint. Gretchen Whitmer ran on opening up the water stations that the Republican governor had shut down. That's where the residents got free water. The Attorney General said that the investigation before her was basically incompetent. Well, my reporting shows she fired those prosecutors. They were building a case against the Republican governor for involuntary manslaughter. You mentioned murder. They were building a case against a governor—this would have been a historic event for involuntary manslaughter, because he knew about the deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak and did not notify the public. She fired them, and she sabotaged the investigation, I believe, so they couldn’t follow the money. > >  > > >But the bottom line is, Republicans caused this, and Democrats, it seems, are helping to sweep it under the rug. > > A metaphor that I've been using in Covid arguments with  types is that the Republicans may have poisoned the well, but the Democrats are still insisting that we drink from that poisoned well. I forgot it's not always a metaphor!

www.theguardian.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20925011 > Undercover filming has revealed the existence of the organisation, formed two years ago as the Human Diversity Foundation. Its members have used podcasts, videos, an online magazine and research papers to seed “dangerous ideology” about the supposed genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups. > > HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from dating websites, the recordings reveal. After being approached by the Guardian, Conru pulled his support, saying the group appeared to have deviated from its original mission of “non-partisan academic research”. > > Dr Rebecca Sear, the director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University, described it as a “dangerous ideology” with political aims and real-world consequences. > > “Scientific racism has been used to argue against any policies that attempt to reduce inequalities between racial groups,” she said. It was also deployed to “argue for more restrictive immigration policies, such as reducing immigration from supposedly ‘low IQ’ populations”.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/14175128 > > A dozen projects slated to be built in the next five years could encourage more renewable energy development and lower costs, according to a report >

www.wheresyoured.at

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21151676 > cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21121074 > > > OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after this news broke, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati resigned, followed by Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and VP of Research, Post Training Barret Zoph, leaving OpenAI with exactly three of its eleven cofounders remaining. > > > > This coincides suspiciously with OpenAI's increasingly-absurd fundraising efforts, where (as I predicted in late July) OpenAI has raised the largest venture-backed fundraise of all time $6.6 billion— at a valuation of $157 billion.

ottawacitizen.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5893527 > Perhaps it's more fitting not to erase these names, but rather append swastikas to them, guiding readers towards a plaque that elucidates their heinous crimes as Nazis. In this way, the monument will persist as an enlightening reminder of who exactly the "victims of communism" truly are.

www.theatlantic.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20469557 > Archive link: https://archive.ph/PgtUk

prospect.org

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20962099 > The company that owns the GA plant that just exploded is owned by a private equity firm founded by a “climate activist” Democrat megadonor that just paid itself a dividend so big S&P warned unsecured creditors they’d likely get nothing in bankruptcy. 😂

truthout.org

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/23657300 > > Graduate workers and student groups across the US are mapping university ties to militarism and Israel’s war on Gaza. > > Archived version: https://archive.ph/CaYlO > > SpinScore: https://spinscore.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftruthout.org%2Farticles%2Fcampus-organizers-are-using-research-to-expose-and-oppose-the-global-war-machine%2F

www.algemeiner.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20222393 > Williams has condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza as a “war crime” and criticized the US Congress for inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak in July. > > Williams issued a statement on Oct. 11 of last year, four days after Oct. 7, lamenteing the attacks before calling not to retaliate and shifting attention to oppression of Palestinians. > > “We can, we have to be able to, at once grieve the hundreds of innocent lives taken in Israel, and oppose the escalating violence of retaliation, the endless war, the systemic violence and oppression of Palestinians too often ignored, excused, or condoned,” Williams wrote.

www.kenklippenstein.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20222174 > > Behold the dossier. > > > It reportedly comes from an alleged Iranian government hack of the Trump campaign, and since June, the news media has been sitting on it (and other documents), declining to publish in fear of finding itself at odds with the government’s campaign against “foreign malign influence.”  > > > I disagree. The dossier has been offered to me and I’ve decided to publish it because it’s of keen public interest in an election season. It’s a 271-page research paper the Trump campaign prepared to vet now vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself. > > Ken does go on to speak a fair bit more but also [provides a link to a pdf](https://www.kenklippenstein.com/api/v1/file/cf621103-974c-43a1-8d78-acfb340302b2.pdf) if you'd like to skip ahead.

truthout.org

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/23427367 > > Most criminal charges against pregnant people are tied to the doctrine of fetal personhood, a new report says.

www.theguardian.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20633280 > Some of the world’s largest companies have been accused of undermining democracy across the world by financially backing far-right political movements, funding and exacerbating the climate crisis, and violating trade union rights and human rights in a report published on Monday by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). > > Amazon, Tesla, Meta, ExxonMobil, Blackstone, Vanguard and Glencore are the corporations included in the report. The companies’ lobbying arms are attempting to shape global policy at the United Nations Summit of the Future in New York City on 22 and 23 September.

www.sfchronicle.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19957667 > For decades, California police chiefs and sheriffs have lamented how difficult it is to fire officers and deputies who act with dishonesty or brutality, blaming powerful labor unions and robust employment protections. > > What law enforcement leaders have not revealed, and what has remained a secret until now, is how they have repeatedly turned to an under-the-radar method of getting rid of problem officers — one that not only allows the officers to avoid accountability but, often, to quietly move on to other jobs where they are asked to protect the public. > > For years, dozens of California police agencies have executed “[clean-record agreements](https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/police-clean-record-agreements/),” clandestine legal settlements that promise to hide the wrongdoing of an officer in exchange for the officer’s guarantee to leave an agency without a fight, an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program found.

www.astron.nl

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/22235454 > > **Observations with the LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) radio telescope last year showed that first generation Starlink satellites emit unintended radio waves that can hinder astronomical observations. New observations with the LOFAR radio telescope, the biggest radio telescope on Earth observing at low frequencies, have shown that the second generation ’V2-mini’ Starlink satellites emit up to 32 times brighter unintended radio waves than satellites from the previous generation, potentially blinding radio telescopes and crippling vital research of the Universe.**