Noticias

Issue 84: Chips Go Bad, Learn From Our Cyber Mistakes, Automation at the USPS

Issue 84: Chips Go Bad, Learn From Our Cyber Mistakes, Automation at the USPS

The invoice is in.
This reengineered blog and the reinvigorated
Thursday Threads
newsletter cost just US$2.51 last month.
All of that cost is in the blog construction and delivery.
The cost of delivering the newsletter alone falls well below
AWS’ always-free tiers of service
.
Not bad!
And as always, no internet trackers or surveillance capitalism is involved.
The threads this week:
When Bugs Come from the Chips, not the Code
Learning From Our Cyber Mistakes
Automation at the United States Postal Service
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When Bugs Come from the Chips, not the Code
Imagine for a moment that the millions of computer chips inside the servers that power the largest data centers in the world had rare, almost undetectable flaws. And the only way to find the flaws was to throw those chips at giant computing problems that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago.
As the tiny switches in computer chips have shrunk to the width of a few atoms, the reliability of chips has become another worry for the people who run the biggest networks in the world. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and many other sites have experienced surprising outages over the last year.
—
Tiny Chips, Big Headaches: As the largest computer networks continue to grow, some engineers fear that their smallest components could prove to be an Achilles’ heel
, New York Times, 7-Feb-2022
We have all experienced unexplained computer errors.
The software programmer among us cringe and think about what they possibly did wrong.
Did I use the wrong variable in that loop, did I miss a
hyphen
?
What if the programmer did everything correctly and the computer just «glitched»?
Modern computers have many layers of redundancy built into them—error-correcting memory, multi-drive storage volumes, checksums on blocks of data, and so forth.
This article from the
New York TImes
points to a new cause…the physics of electrons moving over very small spaces.
As the hardware architects press for smaller, faster, more electrically efficient chips, they will more often face this challenge and need to account for it in their designs.
Learning From Our Cyber Mistakes
The new Cyber Safety Review Board is tasked with examining significant cybersecurity events that affect government, business and critical infrastructure. It will publish reports on security findings and recommendations, officials said…
The board, officials have said, is modeled loosely on the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates and issues public reports on airplane crashes, train derailments…

You’re getting «Invalid request provided: AWS::CloudFront::PublicKey» because CloudFront Public K…

You’re getting «Invalid request provided: AWS::CloudFront::PublicKey» because CloudFront Public Keys are immutable

This is the web page I wish I had found when I spent the afternoon sorting through why AWS CloudFormation kept telling me:
Resource handler returned message: «Invalid request provided: AWS::CloudFront::PublicKey»
Like me, you might be working on a Serverless.com stack and are trying to restrict access to items in an S3 bucket through CloudFront.
You might even be putting the public key text block into a YAML multiline string in an external configuration file and pulling that into your
serverless.yml
file.
And you are pulling your hair out because when you run updates on your stack, you get this error.
So in frustration, you blow away the stack and recreate it.
It works fine at first, but soon you are back at that same error above.
Do you want to know why?
An
AWS::CloudFront::PublicKey
resource is immutable, you idiot.
(Me idiot, actually. Hopefully you are fortunate in finding this page early in your quest to solve the problem.)
The clue came from
this issue report in the CloudFormation coverage roadmap page
:
As mentioned in the API documentation :
UpdatePublicKey
UpdatePublicKey action lets you update just the
Comment
field. The values
EncodedKey
and
Name
are immutable, and cannot be updated once created. To update the Key or the Name, a new PublicKey must be created using CreatePublicKey and use it.
The resources section of my
serverless.yml
file looks like this:
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WebsiteDistributionPublicKey
:
Type
:
AWS::CloudFront::PublicKey
Properties
:
PublicKeyConfig
:
Name
:
${self:custom.stack_name}
CallerReference
:
${self:custom.config.PUBLIC_KEY_CALLER_REFERENCE}
EncodedKey
:
${self:custom.config.PUBLIC_KEY_ENCODED}
I’m using
Rich Buggy’s ‘Keeping secrets out of Git’ technique
to store secrets outside of the
serverless.yml
file, so I have a custom section that looks like this:
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custom
:
default_stage
:
dev
stage
:
${opt:stage, self:custom.default_stage}
stack_name
:
${self:service}-${self:custom.stage}
config
:
${file(config.yml):${self:custom.stage}}
… which reads in this file:
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default
:
&default
<< : *default PUBLIC_KEY_CALLER_REFERENCE : SomeRandomString PUBLIC_KEY_ENCODED : | -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY----- MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAwU37058NQTUqEHBor95x VZ1iezIzZB7MWoYHt4KCRDVw5G3h/pzDKLu2NKo+rVOBztgQ+cefdqBNWa2Mf4Tl YQxOP9m978C2f4H9tc8c2px9Lxdkh27Vd8xZx/JHPvnqTUYP/p6WNa+jLVm6TV7a mL5QqrURd9OpOoyrfKmzhkJwrBxhT8WlchKmnd3S+dotAFdOgb8aABtdIEoCvKYq +MeAeBrsE1UhennDU/yWfNl2deGUCUnhkWPHDmLgObr/iYGZamdnp6InjUX2PLsC leQuc1M13904QKX+0wfUNin6IK9Pn+UmLupQSg0ou533Nxkw69KLZRAvoOHJlZJW BwIDAQAB -----END PUBLIC KEY----- ... and populates the variables you saw in the fragment at the top. (If you've read this far and are interested in how I set up serverless.com projects, check out the blog post I wrote earlier this week on the topic.) The practical upshot is if any...

Issue 85: Privacy-busting Journal Article Fingerprints, Fraud in NFTs, Improve Your Life

Issue 85: Privacy-busting Journal Article Fingerprints, Fraud in NFTs, Improve Your Life

The middle of February already.
Time is flying; I hope you are having fun.
The threads this week:
Privacy-busting Fingerprints in Journal Articles
Fraud in NFTs
Improve Your Life
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Privacy-busting Fingerprints in Journal Articles
One of the world’s largest publishers of academic papers said it adds a unique fingerprint to every PDF users download in an attempt to prevent ransomware, not to prevent piracy.
Elsevier defended the practice after an independent researcher discovered the existence of the unique fingerprints and shared their findings on Twitter last week.
“The identifier in the PDF helps to prevent cybersecurity risks to our systems and to those of our customers—there is no metadata, PII [Personal Identifying Information] or personal data captured by these,” an Elsevier spokesperson said in an email to Motherboard. “Fingerprinting in PDFs allows us to identify potential sources of threats so we can inform our customers for them to act upon. This approach is commonly used across the academic publishing industry.”
When asked what risks he was referring to, the spokesperson sent a list of links to news articles about ransomware.
—
Academic Journal Claims it Fingerprints PDFs for ‘Ransomware,’ Not Surveillance
, Motherboard from Vice, 31-Jan-2022
Pretty incredulous…adding unique identifiers to the metadata of each PDF downloaded from Elsevier (the «fingerprint») somehow protects against ransomware.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and it is not forthcoming from Elsevier.
I’ve seen no follow-ups from Elsevier on this Motherboard article, nor from the researcher that
discovered the fingerprinting
.
Look, if you’re employing a technique to go after researchers sharing PDFs of articles, own up to it.
I can see why you don’t want to, Elsevier…shared articles might cut into that $40-per-article charge you put on non-subscribers.
Either way…owning it or lying about it looks bad.
I can think of no plausible scenario where fingerprints in PDF files detect, prevent, or help prosecute ransomware.
Fraud in NFTs
[Cameron] Hejazi highlighted three main problems: people selling unauthorised copies of other NFTs [Non-Fungible Tokens], people making NFTs of content which does not belong to them, and people selling sets of NFTs which resemble a security.
He said these issues were «rampant», with users «minting and minting and minting counterfeit digital assets».
«It kept happening. We would ban offending accounts but it was like we’re playing a game of whack-a-mole… Every time we …

Issue 86: Tracking Media Provenance, Digital Classroom Surveillance, Don’t Pixelate to Redact, An…

Issue 86: Tracking Media Provenance, Digital Classroom Surveillance, Don’t Pixelate to Redact, Android In-App Advertising

I’ve deleted what I originally had here as newsletter-opening-banter. These are serious times. I think the world has radically changed overnight, and roughly 7.9 billion of us are not in positions to do anything about it. To those that are in positions to do something about it and to those that are caught up in the effects of one man’s decision to impose
his
will on others: may you be safe, may you succeed, and may you find peace. For those coming to this after early 2022, yesterday Russia invaded the sovereign country of Ukraine.
Russia invaded the sovern country of Ukraine
The threads this week:
Specification for Media Content Provenance
Encroaching on Digital Privacy in the Classroom
Pixelation for Redaction → bad
Google Changes Up In-App Advertising
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Specification for Media Content Provenance
Today, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), an organization established to provide publishers, creators, and consumers with opt-in, flexible ways to understand the authenticity and provenance across various media types, released version 1.0 of its technical specification for digital provenance. This specification is the first of its kind and empowers content creators and editors worldwide to create tamper-evident media, by enabling them to selectively disclose information about who created or changed digital content and how it was altered. The C2PA’s work is the result of industry-wide collaborations focused on digital media transparency that will accelerate progress toward global adoption of content provenance.
—
C2PA Releases Specification of World’s First Industry Standard for Content Provenance
, Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, 26-Jan-2022
Elements of the C2PA specification.
[Source]
This is a fascinating development.
Although the target audience for this technology is news organizations and citizen journalists to provide a way to establish the creator and editors of media, one could easily envision using this standard to mark images, video, and audio from digital archives.
As a way of combatting problems like manipulated media and «deep fakes», the specification would allow news organizations to cryptographically «sign» the media in a way that a display tool—via a media tool on your device or a browser plugin—would be able to decode and display to the viewer.
If the cryptographic signature doesn’t match the one published by the news organization, you would know that the media has been changed.
Or, from the perspective of an…

Five Years and Ten Months

Five Years and Ten Months

I reached a new milestone this month.
A minor one in the grand scheme of things, but one worthy of a few remarks nonetheless.
This month marks my longest tenure with an employer at five years and 10 months.
I’ve now worked at Index Data longer than I had at OhioLINK a decade ago, and this has hardly felt like almost six years.
Seven employers in 31 years.
All of it in library technology—one of the last places I thought I would land with an undergraduate degree in Systems Analysis.
Seven doesn’t seem like a lot, but at almost all of them I thought «I could see myself completing my career here.»
(This definitely feels true for my current employer.)
But life intervened and a change was made…always for the better.
I’m so grateful for all of the people that mentored me and the couple that kicked my butt along the way (in retrospect, at least).
Hopefully I’ve managed to give back in equal measure to those coming into the field.
Career history (as of today)
Open Source Community Advocate
Index Data · Jun 2016 – Present · 5 yrs 10 mos
Dev/Ops Lead and Project Manager
The Cherry Hill Company · Aug 2015 – Dec 2016 · 1 yr 5 mos
Assistant Director, Technology Services Development
Lyrasis · Sep 2010 – Jun 2015 · 4 yrs 10 mos
Assistant Director, Multimedia Services; Assistant Director, New Service Development
OhioLINK · Jan 2005 – Sep 2010 · 5 yrs 9 mos
Computer Services Librarian (Law School); Area Head for Library Information Technology Services; Assistant to the Director for Technology Initiatives
University of Connecticut · Feb 2000 – December 2004 · 4 yrs 11 mos
Library Systems Manager
Case Western Reserve University · Jul 1995 – Feb 2000 · 4 yrs 8 mos
Library Systems Manager
Miami University · Jun 1991 – Jun 1995 · 4 yrs 1 mo

Issue 87: Ukraine War, Artificial Intelligence Art

Issue 87: Ukraine War, Artificial Intelligence Art

We are one week into Russia’s war against Ukraine.
From here in America, it is hard to understand the reality of a country whose citizens seemed to be going about normal lives just a short time ago.
I find it also hard to know what to say to people whose misery comes about on the whims of a dictator guided by…what?
A misguided notion of history?
A deep-seated desire to return to former glory?
A vain attempt to show how big his manhood is?
Who can tell?
Beyond asking my elected officials to
do something
and tweeting expressions of support, I’m feeling powerless to change what is happening.
I hope and pray for a return to sanity, for grace and mercy for those in conflict, and for a world that strives to find a greater, common good.
The threads this week:
One Library-related Corner of the Ukraine War
Archiving the Ukrainian Web
Artificial Intelligence Can’t Hold Copyright
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One Library-related Corner of the Ukraine War
Nicholas Poole tweet
Dear colleagues,
The sneaky, cruel and bloody aggression of the Russian Federation has prevented us from implementing our plans and holding March 1-4 XII International Scientific Conference «Modern Library-Information Continuous Education: what, how, for whom? «.
65 participants registered at the conference, re-calculated the registration fee of 35 members of the VGO Ukrainian Library Association total amount of 10 500 UAH.
The Organizing Committee of the Conference has decided to hold the Conference after our confident victory, and the contributions collected to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
We promise to provide complete and quality service to all participants in the peaceful time.
Glory to Ukraine!
For questions, please contact the Executive Office of the Association by email.
—Facebook-supplied translation of the
announcement of the postponing of a library conference
by the Ukrainian Library Association, 28-Feb-2022
Nicholas Poole, CEO of CILIP in the UK, has a poetic take on this announcement from the Ukraine Library Association.
Facebook’s automated translation from Ukrainian to English (quoted above) sounds a little dry; I’m left wondering how this reads in the original Ukrainian.
Archiving the Ukrainian Web
[Ian Milligan, associate professor of history at the University of Waterloo,] points out that in 50 years, historians will not only be curious about how people got their information and how it shaped their worldviews but also what kind of information archivists saved about this conflict.
—
Ukrainian Websites Are Going Dark. Archivists Are Trying To Save Them
, Motherboard on Vi…

Issue 88: Battling Censorship, Considering the Right to be Forgotten

Issue 88: Battling Censorship, Considering the Right to be Forgotten

For this week’s newsletter introduction, I searched the Flikr service for photographs of libraries in Ukraine.
I thought that putting a picture here at the top of a grand reading room with dark wood shelves and neat rows of books would help us remember that a significant part of our world has been turned upside down.
What I didn’t expect to find was an album titled
‘November 2021: Strategic Session on Digital Education Hubs development’
.
Attendees of the strategic session on Digital Education Hubs development.
Source
, CC By-ND
Four months ago, these professionals were gathered together in a room to hear presentations, sort multi-color post-it notes on flip charts, and work together for «the transformation of libraries into Digital Education Hubs».
That is a scene that is very familiar to me, and quite possibly to many of my readers as well.
Now their country is being bombed, its citizens are fleeing, and I doubt anyone is thinking about the transformation of libraries.
Let’s not forget them.
The threads this week:
Minecraft as an Anti-censorship Tool
Right-to-be-Forgotten Tangled with Press Freedoms
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Minecraft as an Anti-censorship Tool
When schools ban books, the strategy often backfires on would-be censors, resulting in greater interest around illicit literature. Similarly, when governments censor the media, groups like Reporters Without Borders spearhead efforts to make such censored material extra visible. Their Uncensored Library project brings together architecture and journalism in an unlikely virtual reality space: the interactive gaming world of Minecraft.
—
Uncensored Library: Banned Journalism Housed in Virtual Minecraft Architecture
, 99% Invisible, 3-Mar-2022
With help from my teenage son, I got into the
Uncensored Library
on Minecraft.
(A hint for those trying to access it in early 2022: the
instructions
say you need a specific version of Minecraft—that version is now 1.16.5 instead of what is listed in the PDF.)
The «Frequently Asked Questions» book in this world starts with this answer: «Minecraft is available even in countries with cyber censorship. So we build this library to provide a platform for censored journalists, connect people around the world and bring back the truth.»
The content of the library is curated—you don’t have the option of modifying the elements in the Minecraft world.
The books in the library are short…the ones that I saw were each several hundred words long.
Right-to-be-Forgotten Tangled with Press Freedoms
The “right to be forgotten,» which exists in European Union …

Issue 89: Ukraine’s Libraries, Russia’s Internet, and the Big Deal

Issue 89: Ukraine’s Libraries, Russia’s Internet, and the Big Deal

The first story below is one from National Public Radio on Ukraine libraries’ efforts are undertaking.
Let’s not forget the terror they are facing, the people stepping up to meet their community’s needs, and those who have lost their lives in the Russian war.
The threads this week:
Ukraine Libraries Doing What Libraries Do
Can the Internet Sanction a Country? Should It?
Thursday Threads 2011
: The Demise of the Big Deal?
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Ukraine Libraries Doing What Libraries Do
«Refugee reception points, hostels and logistics points are organized here,» [Oksana Brui, president of the Ukrainian Library Association] said. «Camouflage nets for the military are also woven here. Home care courses are held here. Books are collected here to be transferred to libraries in neighboring countries that receive Ukrainian refugees.»
—
Ukraine’s libraries are offering bomb shelters and camouflage classes
, NPR, 9-Mar-2022
I’m not surprised.
I presume the libraries mentioned in the NPR article are «public libraries,» but they could be libraries of any type.
It brings to mind the stories about the
library in Ferguson
, Missouri, during the riots for the shooting of Michael Brown by local police.
The NPR story also mentions Nicholas Poole’s «we will reschedule just as soon as we have vanquished our invaders» tweet that was in
Thursday Threads
two weeks ago
.
Can the Internet Sanction a Country? Should It?
The invasion of Ukraine poses a new challenge for multistakeholder Internet infrastructure governance. In this statement, we discuss possible sanctions and their ramifications, lay out principles that we believe should guide Internet sanctions, and propose a multistakeholder governance mechanism to facilitate decision-making and implementation.
—
Multistakeholder Imposition of Internet Sanctions
[PDF], Packet Clearing House, 10-Mar-2022
Last week,
Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation called on internet bodies to sanction Russia
over its government’s war on Ukraine.
This would include revoking Russia’s top-level country domains (e.g. «.ru»), canceling SSL certificates associated with Russian sites, disabling the root DNS servers, and withdrawing the right for Russian internet service providers to use the IP addresses that have been assigned to the country.
The
Multistakeholder Imposition of Internet Sanctions
document describes why this would be a bad idea and lays out a plan for what can be done.
For more depth, see the
article I wrote last week
on the document.
Thursday Threads 2011
: The Demise of the Big Deal?
Looking backward, the
Th…

Issue 90: When Machine Learning Goes Wrong

Issue 90: When Machine Learning Goes Wrong

The People of Ukraine are not forgotten.
The Tufts University newspaper published an article this week about
a multinational effort
to preserve the digital and digitized cultural heritage of the country.
On the other side of the war,
Russian citizens are downloading Wikipedia
out of fear of more drastic network filtering or collapse of Russia’s connections to the global internet.
Eleven years ago this week, the judge overseeing the Google Book Search case (
Authors Guild v. Google
) ruled that the proposed settlement was not «not fair, adequate, and reasonable.»
As you might recall, the proposal was for a grand vision of a book author rights clearinghouse—not unlike what is in place for the music industry.
I had a
Thursday Threads
entry that
covered the initial reactions from the litigants, legal observers, and the library community
.
In writing this week’s article, I learned that machine learning is a subset of the artificial intelligence field.
While the terms are often used interchangeably, machine learning is one part of artificial intelligence.
As the
Columbia University Engineering Department describes it
, «put in context, artificial intelligence refers to the general ability of computers to emulate human thought and perform tasks in real-world environments, while machine learning refers to the technologies and algorithms that enable systems to identify patterns, make decisions, and improve themselves through experience and data.»
With that definition in mind, the thread this week is on challenges with machine learning:
Flip the Switch on Your Drug Synthesizing Tool and Chemical Weapons Come Out
With Machine Learning, Garbage In/Garbage Out
Five Realities Why Applying Machine Learning to Medical Records is Hard
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Flip the Switch on Your Drug Synthesizing Tool and Chemical Weapons Come Out
This generative model normally penalizes predicted toxicity and rewards predicted target activity. We simply proposed to invert this logic by using the same approach to design molecules de novo, but now guiding the model to reward both toxicity and bioactivity instead.
In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible.
—Urbina, F., Lentzos, F., Invernizzi, C.
et al.
Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powere…

Automatically Generating Podcast Transcripts

Automatically Generating Podcast Transcripts

I’m finding it valuable to create annotations on resources to index into my personal knowledge management system.
(The
Obsidian journaling
post from late last year goes into some depth about my process.)
I use the
Hypothesis
service to do this—Hypothesis annotations are imported into Markdown files for Obsidian using the custom script and method I describe in that blog post.
This works well for web pages and PDF files…Hypothesis can attach annotations to those resource types.
Videos are relatively straight forward, too, using Dan Whaley’s
DocDrop
service; it reads the closed captioning and puts that on an HTML page that enables Hypothesis to do its work.
What I’m missing, though, are annotations on podcast episodes.
Podcast creators that take the time to make transcripts available are somewhat unusual.
Podcasts from NPR and NPR member stations are pretty good about this, but everyone else is slacking off.
My task management system has about a dozen podcast episodes where I’d like to annotate transcripts (and one podcast that seemingly
stopped
making transcripts just before the episode I wanted to annotate!).
So I wrote a little script that creates a good-enough transcript HTML page.
You can see a
sample of what this looks like
(from the
Search and Ye Might Find
episode of 99% Invisible).
Note!
Of course,
99% Invisible
has now gone back and added transcripts to all of their episodes, including
the one used in this example
. Thanks? … No really, thank you 99PI!
AWS Transcribe
to the rescue
Amazon Web Services has a
Transcribe
service that takes audio, runs it through its machine learning algorithms, and outputs a
WebVTT
file.
Podcasts are typically well-produced audio, so AWS Transcribe has a clean audio track to work with.
In my testing, AWS Transcribe does well with most sentences; it misses unusual proper names and its sentence detection mechanism is good-but-not-great.
It is certainly good enough to get the main ideas across to provide an anchor for annotations.
A WebVTT file (of a podcast advertisement) looks like this:
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WEBVTT

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00:00:00.190 –> 00:00:04.120
my quest to buy a more eco friendly deodorant quickly started to

2
00:00:04.120 –> 00:00:08.960
stink because sustainability and effectiveness don’t always go hand in hand.

3
00:00:09.010 –> 00:00:11.600
But then I discovered finch Finch is a

4
00:00:11.600 –> 00:00:14.830
free chrome extension that scores everyday products on
After a
WEBVTT
marker, there are groups of caption statements separated by newlines.
Each statement is numbered, followed by a time interval, followed by the caption itself.
(WebVTT can be much more complicated than this…to include CSS-like text styling and other features; read the specs if you want more detail.)
What the script does
The code for this is up
on GitHub
now.
The links to the code below point to the version of software at the time this blog po…

OCLC v. Clarivate: What was MetaDoor? What is an OCLC Record?

OCLC v. Clarivate: What was MetaDoor? What is an OCLC Record?

On November 7, 2022, OCLC and Clarivate announced a settlement in their lawsuit about using WorldCat records in the embryonic MetaDoor service.
This ended the latest chapter in the saga of reuse of library metadata with little new clarity.
The settlement terms were not disclosed, but we can learn a little from the proceedings.
First, let’s review the press releases from the parties.
Then we’ll look at the transcripts of court proceedings to see if we can get closer to answers about some questions this lawsuit raises.
Clarivate’s Statement
Clarivate’s statement about the settlement is quite vague:
Clarivate continues to deny OCLCs allegations of wrong-doing and maintains that the issue lay between OCLC and its customers, who sought to co-create an efficient community platform for sharing of bibliographic records. Clarivate will not develop a record exchange system of MARC records that include records which OCLC has claimed are subject to its policy and contractual limitations. Clarivate will bear its own fees and costs.
Gordon Samson, Chief Product Officer at Clarivate insisted, «Clarivate will continue to support the goals of open research and data exchange – because we believe it is the best way to make the process of research and learning faster, more robust and more transparent. Regardless of business model, when scholarly information is easily accessible and shareable, the dots are easier to join, the connections are explicit, and collaborations are more natural and meaningful. The process of scientific discovery is faster, and it is easier to ensure research integrity and reproducibility. We know that navigating the transition to open research is important to our customers, and we remain committed to helping them make that transition as seamlessly as possible.»
– »
Clarivate and OCLC Settle Lawsuit
«, Clarivate press release issued November 7, 2022
It isn’t clear from this statement whether MetaDoor is done or not.
(We’ll answer the «What is/was MetaDoor?» question below.)
The statement, which matches the language in the OCLC statement, only says that a service that includes OCLC records will not be built.
(We’ll also try to answer the «What is an OCLC record?» question below.)
OCLC’s Statement
OCLC’s statement is only a little less vague:
OCLC is pleased to announce today that it successfully defended WorldCat to protect the collaborative service developed and maintained with and for libraries worldwide.
An agreement has been reached in a lawsuit filed by OCLC in June 2022 against Clarivate and its subsidiaries in the United States District Court, Southern District of Ohio.
Though the settlement document itself is confidential, two significant elements include:
Clarivate, Ex Libris, and ProQuest have ceased the development and marketing of the MetaDoor MARC record exchange system
developed using records that are subject to the WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities Pol…

Issue 91: Bibliographic Records and Mastodon Migration

Issue 91: Bibliographic Records and Mastodon Migration

Well, this newsletter was off the air longer than I anticipated.
A lot has happened since
issue 90 in late March
: cryptocurrency value falling, Twitter spiraling (
maybe a death-spiral
…can’t be too sure), and (in the U.S.) a whopper of a mid-term election season.
All is well here in the Jester’s home…I needed some time to build up some more tooling around the blog and newsletter — then summer came, and then fall, and before you knew it, eight months had passed before this issue came out.
Speaking of Twitter…I have mostly left it behind. The «DataG» account is still there, but I have turned off the automated posting and have stopped visiting the site.
I’ve made the migration to Mastodon on the Code4Lib instance; you can find me at
@dltj@code4lib.social
.
If you, too, have made the move, I hope you will follow me there and give me a chance to follow you back.
Threads from 12 years ago are still weaving their way through us today.
In the
11th issue of Thursday Threads
from 2010, I posted, among other things, about the
new free e-journal hosting from University of Pittsburgh on OJS
(and it looks like it is
still available as a service
!), the desire for
open bibliographic data
(and that is still a thing…see below), and the
masters degree in business administration earned through a Facebook app
(which, 12 years later, I would guess is no longer a thing).
I hope you and those close to you are doing well as we enter the last month of 2022.
Don’t be a stranger—drop me a line if you find this interesting or come across something you think I would want to know about.
OCLC versus Clarivate: In the Battle for Bibliographic Records, the Winner is ???
Moving On to Mastodon
Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to
DLTJ’s Thursday Threads
, visit the
sign-up page
.
If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories,
follow me on
Mastodon
where I post the bookmarks I save. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.
OCLC versus Clarivate: In the Battle for Bibliographic Records, the Winner is ???
Clarivate continues to deny OCLCs allegations of wrong-doing and maintains that the issue lay between OCLC and its customers, who sought to co-create an efficient community platform for sharing of bibliographic records. Clarivate will not develop a record exchange system of MARC records that include records which OCLC has claimed are subject to its policy and contractual limitations. Clarivate will bear its own fees and costs.
—
Clarivate and OCLC Settle Lawsuit
, Clarivate press release, 7-Nov-2022
Though the settlement document itself is confidential, two significant elements include:
Clarivate, Ex Libris, and ProQuest have ceased the development and marketing of the MetaDoor MARC record exchange system
developed using records that are subject to the WorldCat Rights and Responsi…

Mastodon Instance Operators Report on the Impact of the #TwitterMigration

Mastodon Instance Operators Report on the Impact of the #TwitterMigration

A number of Mastodon operators have started to report the impact of the #TwitterMigration on their instances.
I started gathering these because I was curious about what it takes to run a public or semi-public Mastodon instance.
These reports are full of those kinds of details, but they also describe evolutions of policy and operations that are just as interesting.
If you see other reports (or have posted a report of your own Mastodon instance), please tag me at
@dltj@code4lib.social
and I’ll add it to this list.
Note!
There is now a
branch and pull request
on GitHub where you can suggest changes to this list and/or subscribe to notifications for updates.
Updates to the page
are also available via
RSS-Bridge
. This didn‘t work as I expected it to when the commits got to GitHub. (The pull request was automatically closed.) Will need to rethink this.
sfba.social (San Francisco Bay Area)
This report covers the San Francisco Bay regional Mastodon instance sfba.social, including general statistics, financial details including income (donations) and expenses (hosting costs), moderation efforts, and changes made and considered. It has been wonderful to welcome all of our new friends and neighbors. We have expanded our server capacity and refined our moderation process, including a new version of the code of conduct and updated the server rules to match. This has helped to improve expectations and free our users to be nice and have fun!
—
Transparency Report (November 2022)
, SFBA Community Hub, 2-Dec-2022
Includes sections for:
Statistics for activity growth
Financials/fundraising
Governance changes (new moderators, code of conduct revisions, )
Future plans
mindly.social
Since April of this year I‘ve been running my own Mastodon server and 3 days ago we hit 100 users which was a huge milestone for my tiny little server… and then all of a sudden something happened, the other Mastodon servers started to get full and new users were looking for homes. Less than 72 hours after being excited for hitting 100 users we hit 10,000 users.
—
Running a Mastodon server – Part 1?
, KuJoe‘s blog, 29-Nov-2022
Includes sections for:
Statistics for activity growth
Process for managing growth (technical)
chaos.social
The past month has changed the Fediverse, and, by extension, our instance. We‘ve continued as normal (apart from limiting sign-ups) to give ourselves time to figure out which changes were only temporary, what seems to be changed for good, and how to react. A month seems ample time, and here we are with a set of changes in how chaos.social will work in the future.
—
Rule changes, closed sign-ups, and more
, chaos.social blog, 29-Nov-2022
Includes sections for:
Statistics for activity growth
Process for managing growth (new user moderation, instance rules)
I was going to write an article for a while now, but there was too much work to do with the latest influx. Together wi…

Issue 92: Privacy Stories From 2014 Still Echo Today

Issue 92: Privacy Stories From 2014 Still Echo Today

Back again.
Thanks for the comments on the return of the newsletter.
I’ve heard that Microsoft Outlook isn’t playing nice with my email theme.
(It also isn’t playing fair…someone forwarded the newsletter back to me, and when I replied that person said the view of the newsletter in the reply looked fine in that same Microsoft Outlook.)
Until I get that fixed, remember that you can read the newsletter online — just follow one of the bullet point links below to get to it.
This week we’re going to pull through some privacy threads to the current day.
Eight years ago this week, I published a whole
DLTJ Thursday Threads
issue on privacy.
This was the lead paragraph:
Are you paranoid yet? Are you worried that
the secret you shared anonymously might come right back to you
? Or wondering why
advertisements seem to follow you around from web page to web page
? Or just creeped out by
internet-enabled services tracking your every move
? Or angry that
mobile carriers made it very easy for anyone to track every page you visited from your smartphone
? Or maybe you will
simply give up any personal information for a delicious cookie
? (Are you paranoid now?)
The first was about how posts on apps like YikYak, Secret, Whisper, and Snapchat weren’t really anonymous.
The second was about the kinds of data that apps collect and aggregate about us.
The third was an opinion piece about how Uber was tracking your every move as part of its experiments, and also contained a nugget about how Facebook was updating its terms of service to say explicitly that the app will now track your location.
The fourth was how AT&T and Verizon got caught invisibly rewriting web pages passing through their network to include their own tracking tokens.
And the fifth was a person-on-the-street test to see how much personal information passers-by would give up for a cookie (a tasty treat, not the browser cookie kind).
So with all that attention on privacy in 2014, you’d figure we’d have it all solved by now, right?
Let’s see what some of the latest stories are.
Algorithmic Creulty
Ditching CAPTCHAs
and
Improving Privacy
When Privacy is a National Security Concern
A Privacy-in-the-Cloud Good News Story
Facebook’s Luck Running Out in the European Union
Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to
DLTJ’s Thursday Threads
, visit the
sign-up page
.
If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories,
follow me on
Mastodon
where I post the bookmarks I save. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.
Algorithmic Cruelty
When I became pregnant, my partner and I, like many expectant individuals, opted not to tell our friends until after the first trimester. But I had an additional goal: for my friends to learn of my pregnancy before advertisers did. I’m a health-privacy scholar, so I know that pregnant individuals are of…

LIBnft: a Project in Search of a Purpose

LIBnft: a Project in Search of a Purpose

At first, I thought this was a parody.
LibNFT is an R&D initiative exploring the impact of blockchain and the digital asset economy on library archives.
—
LIBnft homepage
, 12-Dec-2022
However, it seems like a serious proposal that was presented today at a
CNI project briefing
.
I did not attend the project briefing; the only details publicly available are from the
whitepaper
. (Note: link to the whitepaper can’t be robustified—Dropbox is hostile to web archiving—but I have saved a copy of version I reviewed…
version 0.04 dated 4-Dec-2022
.)
From the details in the whitepaper, it is safe to say this project should be shelved until the need and purpose are better understood.
Why?
First, blockchain is the wrong technology; gallery-library-archive-museum (GLAM) institutions do not need a technology where participants are adversarial or trying to steal each other’s data.
Second, there is no utility in non-fungible tokens for GLAM governance or assets; it would be better (and certainly cheaper) to hold a meeting or write a typical contract.
Note!
The recording of the LibNFT project briefing is now up on YouTube, and I’ve
posted a follow-up
with additional thoughts.
Why Use Blockchain
As the LIBnft whitepaper points out, «in its simplest form, a blockchain is a communally maintained distributed ledger, or database, that reliably and immutably stores digital information» (summarizing a
New York Times glossary
).
The «database» term is crucial—blockchain is a technique for storing and retrieving information, much like one would do with a run-of-the-mill database.
This database has some interesting characteristics: data can’t be erased once it is written and there are copies of the database spread over the network.
Rather than «distributed», though, a blockchain database is «decentralized».
A USENIX article makes an important distinction between «decentralized» (which blockchain is) and «distributed» (emphasis added):
A
distributed system
is composed of multiple, identified, and nameable entities. DNS is an example of such a distributed system, as there is a hierarchy of responsibilities and business relationships to create a specialized database with a corresponding cryptographic PKI. Similarly the web is a distributed system, where computation is not only spread amongst various servers but the duty of computation is shared between the browser and the server within a single web page.
A
decentralized system
, on the other hand, dispenses with the notion of identified entities.
Instead everyone can participate and the participants are assumed to be mutually antagonistic, or at least maximizing their profit.
Since decentralized systems depend on some form of voting, the potential for an attacker stuffing the ballot box is always at the forefront. After all, an attacker could just create a bunch of sock-puppets, called “sibyls”, and get all the votes they want.
In a distributed system sibyls are…

Issue 93: Chat-bots Powered by Artificial Intelligence

Issue 93: Chat-bots Powered by Artificial Intelligence

This week we jump into the world of chat-bots driven by new artificial intelligence language models.
The pace of announcements about general-purpose tools driven by large training sets of texts or images has quickened, and the barrier to experimenting with these tools has dropped.
There are now fully-functional websites where there once were only programmer-focused APIs.
We wonder what the effects will be on our students, our business workflows, and on society.
We also wonder about the underlying biases in the training data.
OpenAI Introduces ChatGPT
A High School Teacher Laments a Tool for Easy Essays
A Real-world Example
Can’t Paper Over Biased Training Data
The View from a Human Trainer
As an aside, in the first article below I mention that the use of these tools, while free for now, will be monetized at some point.
This is another unfortunate example of taking from the common good and commercializing it.
The training data used by the company came from crawling web pages, from Wikipedia, and from books (
source
).
Yet soon, it seems, all of the benefit from that information will be held by a corporate body.
The same thing has been said about the image-based AI tools that have slurped up sets of photos from sites like Flikr, Wikipedia, and even stock photo businesses.
We don’t talk enough about this private capture of the common good and the uncompensated taking of other’s work.
Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to
DLTJ’s Thursday Threads
, visit the
sign-up page
.
If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories,
follow me on
Mastodon
where I post the bookmarks I save. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.
OpenAI Introduces ChatGPT
We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response.
—
ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue
, OpenAI blog, 30-Nov-2022
This link is the announcement from the company that created ChatGPT, OpenAI.
The innovation with this model is the introduction of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).
With RLHF, «human AI trainers provided conversations in which they played both sides—the user and an AI assistant» — and the ChatGPT language model incorporated the refinements learned from those human interactions.
The blog post gives examples of how this human training affected the output.
In the language model without RLHF training, when asked how to bully someone the AI would return a list of ideas.
With the RLHF training, the response starts with «It is never okay to bully someone» and says t…

Backing Away from Twitter in Measured Steps

Backing Away from Twitter in Measured Steps

My relationship with Twitter crossed a new line yesterday. As I posted on Mastodon (
one
,
two
):
Have just deleted the Twitter app on mobile. Felt the need to ramp down stress this week, and the current owner’s meltdown is unnecessary drama. There are still a few people there that I like to read, but I’ll be doing that far less often now.
I have regret in deleting the app. I found value there, and felt that the trade-off of attention and advertising versus the benefits of personal connections and trading ideas was a net positive.
As has happened several times to me in my 53 years, I’m astonished at how fast a valued and valuable community can be destroyed.
The toxic mix of arrogance and ignorance and power is a sad combination.
The past eight weeks on Twitter have been emotionally tiring, and I wondered why.
On reflection, mourning seems like the most appropriate label for the emotion I’m feeling.
I had invested time and effort into cultivating a network of friends and acquaintances.
Now it is being destroyed; that network was a guest in someone else’s kingdom.
It feels like a reciprocal behavior back-and-forth: Musk makes a snap dictatorial decision, I step away a little farther.
The first move came on October 27 when
I stopped engaging with others on Twitter and logged on less often
—that corresponded with the announcement that Musk had closed the deal to buy Twitter.
At the same time, I picked up my activity on Mastodon (
@dltj@code4lib.social
)…following more people and engaging more in that community.
(My Mastodon account on code4lib.social had been idle since 2018 except for automated postings from my knowledge management tools.)
The second shift came on November 22 when
Twitter started rejecting links in posts
that came out of my knowledge management tools.
I have a series of scripts that I use to save references to web pages that I find notable, and the scripts also post those references to Twitter and Mastodon.
For unknown reasons, a Twitter post with a link to The Markup (or the Hypothesis proxy) started failing, so I turned off the automated posting to Twitter and wrote a sign-off message.
Now comes the third reciprocal reaction: Musk suspends and un-suspends journalists, then starts rejecting posts with links that are «free promotion of certain social media platforms…» (quote from
deleted TwitterSupport tweets
).
And I delete the app from my mobile device.
Deleting the app is my commitment to visit the site less often.
I regret it has come to that.
Once a community is destroyed, it can’t be brought back.
Not to the same cohesion it had before…it will be different, and there will be a longing nostalgia for what once was.
(Maybe that can be good? Probably not, given Twitter’s current trajectory.)
I’m already missing the Twitter notifications that I had set up: the local office of the National Weather Service, the messages from the town and the regional highway p…

Issue 112: Odds and Ends in Social Media Research

Issue 112: Odds and Ends in Social Media Research

Social media saturates nearly every facet of our lives, and understanding its effects on society has never been more critical.
This week’s
DLTJ Thursday Threads
delves into recent studies and discussions of why misinformation is spread on platforms and ways to counteract it.
As platforms continue to shape the way we communicate and process information, they also spark moral outrage and other intense emotions that can lead to the further spread of false content.
Researchers are exploring how these dynamics unfold, as well as the roles of opportunists who exploit these platforms for personal or political gain.
As we navigate these challenges, there are things that individuals can do and things that we could expect platforms to do to reduce the impact of misinformation.
While individuals can adopt practices to avoid contributing to misinformation, there is also a call for platforms to refine their moderation strategies, such as combining fact-checking with community-driven initiatives.
Amidst these discussions, the potential impact of social media on adolescent wellbeing remains a concern, with experts debating its true role in rising mental health issues among young adults.
Did you really read that article?
Moral Outrage
fuels the spread of misinformation online.
Maybe that outrageous article wasn’t pushed to you because of moral outrage. It could be opportunists
exploiting online conspiracy theories
for influence and profit.
We can clean up social media from the ground up:
strategies
to avoid becoming a ‘misinformation superspreader’ on social media.
For a more top-down approach, we could insist that platforms combine fact-checking and community notes for
better social media content moderation
.
On the other hand, research showed that the
community notes system fails to curb misinformation
on social media.
Exploring the
complex impact
of social media on teen mental health.
This Week I Learned
: most plastic in the ocean isn’t from littering, and recycling will not save us.
This week’s cat
Also on DLTJ this past week:
Another Saturday, another #TeslaTakedown
Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to
DLTJ’s Thursday Threads
, visit the
sign-up page
.
If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories,
follow me on
Mastodon
where I post the bookmarks I save. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.
Moral Outrage Fuels Spread of Misinformation Online
“The vast majority of misinformation studies assume people want to be accurate, but certain things distract them,” says William J. Brady, a researcher at Northwestern University. “Maybe it’s the social media environment. Maybe they’re not understanding the news, or the sources are confusing them. But what we found is that when content evokes outrage, people are consistently sharing it without even clicking into the article.” Bra…

In OCLC v Anna’s Archive, New/Novel Issues Sent to State Court

In OCLC v Anna’s Archive, New/Novel Issues Sent to State Court

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio released an
opinion
in the case of
OCLC v. Anna’s Archive
.
As you may recall, the case stems from an accusation that Anna’s Archive—
a search engine for ‘shadow libraries’
—scraped the content of OCLC’s WorldCat.
Anna’s Archive itself is an anonymous effort, and OCLC named one person in the lawsuit—Maria Matienzo—with a weak and dubious connection to Anna’s Archive.
Here are bits of the court’s order from its introduction (the start of the order) and conclusion (at the end):
This case is about data scraping. Plaintiff Online Computer Library Center, Inc. («OCLC») is a non-profit organization that helps libraries organize and share resources. In collaboration with its member libraries, OCLC created and maintains WorldCat-the most comprehensive database of library collections worldwide. OCLC alleges that a «pirate library» named Anna’s Archive along with Maria Matienzo, and other unknown individuals (collectively, «Defendants») scraped WorldCat’s data. OCLC claims that, in doing so, Defendants violated Ohio law. Specifically, OCLC invokes causes of action arising under the Ohio common law of tort, contract, and property, as well as a provision of the Ohio criminal code.
But whether Ohio law prohibits the data scraping alleged here poses «novel and unsettled» issues. No Ohio court has ever applied its law as OCLC would have this Court do (as far as the Court is aware). Nor have courts uniformly applied analogous laws of other jurisdictions that way. So, to resolve this case, the Court would need to answer «novel and unsettled» questions about Ohio law.
When that is true-when a federal court faces «novel and unsettled» state-law issues-the federal court may certify those issues to the state’s high court. Unwilling to sleepwalk into a drastic expansion of Ohio law, this Court thus resolves to certify the issues presented here.
[…]
The Court is sympathetic to OCLC’s situation: a band of copyright scofflaws cloned WorldCat’s hard-earned data, gave it away for free, and then ignored OCLC when it sued them in this Court. But mindful that bad facts sometimes make bad law, the Court requests that an Ohio court intervene before this Court makes any new state tort, contract, property, or criminal law.
The Court resolves to CERTIFY the novel Ohio-law issues identified above to the Supreme Court of Ohio. Plaintiff’s counsel and Matienzo’s counsel are ORDERED to propose an order containing all the information Ohio Supreme Court Practice Rule 9. 02 requires by April 11, 2025. The parties may file their proposed orders separately, or, if they so choose, they may file one joint proposed order. The Court will finalize a certification order afterward.
OCLC’s motion for default judgment is DENIED without prejudice.
See Lammert v. Auto-Owners (Mut. ) Ins.,
286 F. Supp. 3d 919, 928-29 (M. D. Tenn. 2017) (adopting this same dispositio…

My protest signage improved at this week’s #TeslaTakedown

My protest signage improved at this week’s #TeslaTakedown

My protest sign for the #TeslaTakedown today.
I’m a long way from a career change to graphic design or protest communications, but this week was a definite improvement.
About a half dozen people asked for pictures of my sign.
That’s a good signal, so I’m including instructions below on printing and making one yourself.
It was another windy, gloomy day at the
Easton Tesla store
, but the number of people increased from
last Saturday
.
One organizer said between 450 and 500 people, which seemed about right to me.
It was just a little more than we had last week.
The weather forecast for next week is about 15 degrees warmer, so it will be interesting to see if the families with young children come out again like on
March 8th
.
The entertainment definitely improved.
Someone set up an amplified acoustic guitar and a microphone, and people took turns singing.
We marched two laps around the block, and there were many more honks and cheers from the cars driving by.
Promptly at 5:30, the organizers walked around and asked people to leave to be respectful of the Columbus police dialogue team that had been called out for what was advertised as a one hour protest.
That seemed reasonable.
This week’s protest sign
My protest sign at the #TeslaTakedown.
Back to basics, I thought.
People are driving by quickly, so too much text won’t be read.
So this was the idea.
Set the context: «Our GOVERNMENT was FINE.»
Deliver the punchline: «Now it is MUSKed UP!»
Clear call-to-action: «FIRE ELON!» (in a flaming font, nonetheless)
And that seemed to work.
Refer to the
March 8th blog post
for instructions on creating the sign.
If you want one too, I’ve uploaded the
6-page PDF of page tiles
to make the sign.
When you print them, line them up with three on top and three on the bottom.
Then, trim the bottom and right edges of each page.
For the two right-most pages, there will be a lot of extra, unused space to cut off, and there are crop marks you can use to trim at just the right spot.
There are a few millimeters of overlap between pages, so your trimming doesn’t have to be exact.
Then line up the pages and tape them to a poster board (or, as in my case, a recycled campaign yard sign.)
This is set up to make a 26″ by 16″ sign — the exact dimensions of a typical campaign yard sign!
Ping me on
Mastodon
or
Bluesky
if you use it, and include a picture if you’d like!
So now that I’ve shown improvement week-by-week, I need to figure out how to step up my game for next Saturday…

Issue 113: More on Copyright and Foundational AI Models

Issue 113: More on Copyright and Foundational AI Models

Two years ago this month, I wrote a
DLTJ Thursday Threads
article on the
copyright implications of foundational AI models
.
A lot has happened in those 24 months.
This issue mostly focuses on lawsuits, plus an announcement of a service offering image generation from licensed content.
These articles highlight the growing tension between content creators and technology companies as AI technologies increasingly rely on large datasets that include licensed and, in some instances, pirated content.
From late 2023, the
New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft
for alleged copyright infringement in AI training (with late-breaking update).
U.S. judge partially favors OpenAI while
permitting unfair competition claim
in authors’ copyright lawsuit in this ruling from early 2024.
Last month Thomson Reuters
wins landmark U.S. AI copyright case
, potentially establishing a legal precedent.
Microsoft
guarantees legal protection for Copilot users
from copyright lawsuits.
Meta’s training of its AI with pirated LibGen books
sparks legal and ethical debate
.
Nvidia denies copyright infringement
in the use of shadow libraries for AI training.
Getty Images launched an
AI image generator
using its licensed library in 2023.
This Week I Learned
: «But where is everybody?!?» — the origins of Fermi’s Paradox
This week’s cat
Also on DLTJ this past week:
In OCLC v Anna’s Archive, New/Novel Issues Sent to State Court
: The case of OCLC against Anna’s Archive, accused of “data scraping” from OCLC’s WorldCat, takes a turn as the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio decides to certify several “novel and unsettled” legal questions to the Supreme Court of Ohio.
My protest signage improved at this week’s #TeslaTakedown
: My improved sign said «Our GOVERNMENT was fine. Now it is MUSKed UP! FIRE ELON!» Read the post for instructions on printing your own copy of this protest sign.
Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to
DLTJ’s Thursday Threads
, visit the
sign-up page
.
If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories,
follow me on
Mastodon
where I post the bookmarks I save. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.
New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for alleged copyright infringement in AI training
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Wednesday over the tech companies’ use of its copyrighted articles to train their artificial intelligence technology, joining a growing wave of opposition to the tech industry’s using creative work without paying for it or getting permission. OpenAI and Microsoft used “millions” of Times articles to help build their tech, which is now extremely lucrative and directly competes with the Times’s own services, the newspaper’s lawyers wrote in a complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan.
—
New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for using ar…

Holy cow—did the people show up for today’s #TeslaTakedown!

Holy cow—did the people show up for today’s #TeslaTakedown!

I don’t know how many there were at the protest today in front of the
Easton Tesla store
, but for the first time we covered all four corners of the intersection.
I think there were at least 600 people…maybe more.
Some observations:
The weather was good—windy, but warm—and the families with young children did come out again. But there were just MORE people there overall.
This week I recognized more cars making a circuit around the block. More people honking with thumbs up, turning around, then coming back again. I don’t remember seeing that on past Saturdays.
There were more Tesla sedans driving by that I remember seeing in the past. Quite possibly, they were just making the circuit around the block, too.
I’m starting to recognize familiar faces at each protest.
There was no live music this time, but that was okay because there was definitely more noise from the sidewalks and more energy in the air.
The Proud Boys made noise about coming in counter-protest, but I didn’t see them.
One of the event marshals said they were there early, but the police effectively separated them. As the panorama picture shows, though, we had all four corners covered and we were raucous.
This week’s protest sign
This week’s #TeslaTakedown protest sign.
I went off-script this week with a sign about the political nonsense we have at the moment.
It is a play on the phrase «The call is coming from inside the house!» — a play on a
famous movie trope
where the police tell the person in a home that they have traced the antagonist’s call to that home.
In this case, the danger to democracy is coming from
inside the Whitehouse!
Or, at least, that is what I was aiming for.
This sign probably only get’s one week’s use; let’s hope by next week, one or more people on this sign are fired because of the released of what sure looks like classified information on a Signal group chat.
If you want to use this 26″ by 16″ sign for yourself, I’ve made it
available for download
.
Ping me on
Mastodon
or
Bluesky
if you use it, and include a picture if you’d like!
My protest sign at the #TeslaTakedown.

Issue 114: Digital Privacy

Issue 114: Digital Privacy

This week’s
DLTJ Thursday Threads
looks at digital privacy concerns from the commercial perspective.
I think next week’s article will be a summary of recent happenings with government surveillance activities.
Late last month, Amazon launched Alexa+, and with it a flurry of privacy concerns. Why? Because
Amazon now mandates cloud uploads
to process Echo voice commands.
Using the technologies already in buildings, employers can monitor employee activities,
raising privacy concerns
.
Last year the FTC released a report that, while surprising no one, exposed the
extensive data collection
by social media platforms.
Speaking of collecting personal data, all of it ends up in databases of various sorts, and
Fiverr freelancers use tools made for law enforcement and insurance companies
to sell access to anyone.
This Week I Learned
: We started capitalizing the pronoun «I» to distinguish it from similarly typset letters.
This week’s cat
Also on DLTJ since the last newsletter was published:
Holy cow—did the people show up for today’s #TeslaTakedown!
Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to
DLTJ’s Thursday Threads
, visit the
sign-up page
.
If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories,
follow me on
Mastodon
where I post the bookmarks I save. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.
With Alexa+ launch, Amazon mandates cloud uploads for Echo voice recordings
Amazon has disabled two key privacy features in its Alexa smart speakers, in a push to introduce artificial intelligence-powered “agentic capabilities” and turn a profit from the popular devices. Starting today (March 28), Alexa devices will send all audio recordings to the cloud for processing, and choosing not to save these recordings will disable personalisation features.
—
Everything you say to an Alexa speaker will be sent to Amazon
, The Conversation, 28-Mar-2025
Starting a few weeks ago, Amazon required Echo users to send all voice recordings to its cloud, eliminating a privacy feature that allowed for local processing.
This change coincides with the rollout of Alexa+, a subscription service that enhances the voice assistant’s capabilities, including recognizing individual users through a feature called Voice ID.
Users who previously opted out of sending recordings will find their devices’ Voice ID functionality disabled.
Amazon justifies this move by stating that the processing power of its cloud is necessary for the new generative AI features.
Privacy concerns anyone?
Especially given Amazon’s history of mismanaging voice recordings and allowing employees to listen to them for training purposes.
The company has previously faced penalties for storing children’s recordings indefinitely and has been involved in legal cases regarding the use of Alexa recordings in criminal trials.
Surprise, surprise: this shift would appear to prioritize t…

My Public Archive of Protest Signs

My Public Archive of Protest Signs

Formerly just
#TeslaTakedown protest
signs, this post is now more general — protest signs against the growing authoritarianism that Donald Trump is trying to normalize.
For all except the two at the bottom, I’ve included a link where you can download a PDF to print your own.
Please use these if you’d like; if you want to give me something in exchange, just tag me on
Mastodon
or
Bluesky
so I know how far these have spread.
Also, Marc Lee from
Free Protest Signs
reached out on Bluesky to let me know about his website of signs.
If you don’t like something below, maybe one of his will suit your mood!
Respect My Authoritah!
Respect My Authoritah!
protest sign, first used on 14-Jun-2025
Of the two signs that I’m bringing to the
#NoKingsInAmerica protest
, this is the snarky one.
Trump’s attitude and actions in the ICE raid protests in Los Angeles and elsewhere reminded me of Eric Cartman from South Park screaming, »
Respect My Authoritah!
»
Download
and print your own 26″ by 16″ version of this sign.
Three Branches
Three Branches
protest sign, first used on 14-Jun-2025
I’ve had this one in my protest design document for a while, and now seems like a very good time to make it real.
The U.S. Constitution lays out three branches of government, and right now we are seeing inaction (the legislature), abuse (the executive), and under siege (the judicial).
We need the legislature to step up, support the judiciary, and tell the executive to knock it off.
Download
and print your own 26″ by 16″ version of this sign.
Dictators Hold Parades
Dictators Hold Parades
protest sign, first used on 14-Jun-2025
My daughter was listening to
a story from
The Daily
from the New York Times and shouted out, «that’s my sign!»
The guest had been talking about how Trump’s parade in Washington, DC, is un-American and something that dictatorships do.
A little photo searching and editing later…this sign was born.
Download
and print your own 26″ by 16″ version of this sign.
All of the ABOVE!
All of the ABOVE!
protest sign, first used on 26-Apr-2025
The meanness, the illegality, the stupidity…it is all more than I thought possible and it is certainly not what deserve from our government.
And it is not just one of these attributes, but all of them coming from all of this administration’s elected, confirmed, and senior leaders.
Download
and print your own 26″ by 16″ version of this sign.
Elected Assholes
Elected Assholes
protest sign, not used by the author
This crap is well past getting out of hand, and I wanted a sign that reflected that.
The government—in my name as one of its citizens—is deporting people without due process?
It is bullying foreign leaders in the Oval Office?
It is recklessly dismantling medical research, food safety programs, and environmental controls?
This doesn’t represent my values, nor—I’d wager—the values of most of the country.
The focus group (my family members) weren’t a fan of the unnecessary c…

Issue 115: Public and Private Camera Networks

Issue 115: Public and Private Camera Networks

After
last week’s issue on digital privacy
, I thought I’d focus this week on government-sponsored or -enabled surveillance.
As I dug through my store of saved articles, though, I realized I had quite a number of a particular kind of surveillance: camera networks.
These are often municipal-sponsored systems of license plate readers, but there are also networks of private systems—and, of course, attempts to combine the output of all of these networks.
So that is the focus of this week’s
Thursday Threads
issue:
An investigation by a newspaper editor highlights privacy concerns and legal challenges in rural
Virginia’s use of license plate reading cameras
. (2025)
Debate over the privacy concerns and legal challenges of license plate readers is nothing new, as
this 2012 article shows
.
What happens when you put equipment not meant for the internet onto the internet? A security flaw in Motorola’s automated license-plate-recognition systems
exposes real-time vehicle data and video feeds online
. (2025)
A license plate reader in every tow truck? Privacy concerns of a
private surveillance network of 9 billion license plate scans
enable widespread vehicle tracking. (2019)
Similar to «the call is coming from inside the house», the surveillance is coming from inside your community. Privacy concerns emerge as
HOAs nationwide install Flock Safety’s license plate readers
, facilitating police surveillance. (2023)
How about we network all of these cameras together?
AI-powered surveillance system
spurs privacy concerns as adoption grows in U.S. (2023)
If we’ve got to have this tech, we might as well have some fun with it.
Artist’s Traffic Cam Photobooth
sparks controversy and cease-and-desist over creative use of NYC traffic cameras. (2024)
This Week I Learned
: The word «scapegoat» was coined in a 1530 translation of the bible.
This week’s cat
Also on DLTJ since the last newsletter was published:
My Public Archive of #TeslaTakedown Protest Signs
. Print one off and take it to
your
next protest.
Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to
DLTJ’s Thursday Threads
, visit the
sign-up page
.
If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories,
follow me on
Mastodon
where I post the bookmarks I save. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.
Privacy Concerns and Legal Challenges in Rural Virginia’s Use of License Plate Reading Cameras
The research for State of Surveillance showed that you can’t drive anywhere without going through a town, city or county that’s using public surveillance of some kind, mostly license plate reading cameras. I wondered how often I might be captured on camera just driving around to meet my reporters. Would the data over time display patterns that would make my behavior predictable to anyone looking at it? So I took a daylong drive across Cardinal Country and asked 15 law e…

Issue 116: Government Surveillance

Issue 116: Government Surveillance

After
DTLJ Thursday Threads
issues on
digital privacy
and
surveillance camera systems
, I’m focusing this week on the more general topic of government-sponsored or -enabled surveillance.
In an era defined by ubiquitous data collection and ever-advancing technologies, the line between public safety and individual privacy is growing alarmingly thin.
From President Trump’s executive order to dismantle inter-agency “data silos” and Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative weaving federal databases together, to Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison’s vision of AI-powered cameras and drones monitoring citizens, the U.S. surveillance apparatus is expanding at breakneck speed.
Meanwhile, programs like the Pentagon’s “Locomotive”—which turns innocuous dating-app location pings into real-time tracking tools—and the data broker–driven sharing of driving and personal records with law enforcement underscore how private and public interests have converged to create a modern panopticon.
So that is the focus of this week’s
Thursday Threads
issue:
Trump’s executive order dismantling government data silos and Musk-led DOGE initiative fuel
fears of a U.S. surveillance state
.
More details about how
DOGE is building an Immigrant Surveillance Database
with Social Security and IRS Data.
In cases where the government doesn’t already have the data,
spy agencies want to centralize commercial data purchases
in a new one-stop portal.
1984 is here and some people want it:
Oracle’s Larry Ellison
proposes Orwellian AI camera-and-drone surveillance network, stoking privacy fears.
LexisNexis parent Relx
lobbies against data broker restrictions
amid FISA Section 702 reauthorization clash.
Dating app location data powers
Pentagon’s “Locomotive” program
to track phones worldwide
Apple sues U.K. government
over a secret order for backdoor access to encrypted data on phones, and it removes the Advanced Data Protection from U.K. market rather than giving in.
This Week I Learned
: «Leeroy Jenkins!!!!» was staged
Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to
DLTJ’s Thursday Threads
, visit the
sign-up page
.
If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories,
follow me on
Mastodon
where I post the bookmarks I save. Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.
Trump’s Executive Order and Musk-Led DOGE Initiative Fuel Fears of a U.S. Surveillance State
In March, President Trump issued an executive order aiming to eliminate the data silos that keep everything separate. Historically, much of the data collected by the government had been heavily compartmentalized and secured; even for those legally authorized to see sensitive data, requesting access for use by another government agency is typically a painful process that requires justifying what you need, why you need it, and proving that it is used for those purposes only. Not so under Trump. This is a per…

Issue 117: Local Government Surveillance

Issue 117: Local Government Surveillance

After previous
DTLJ Thursday Threads
issues on
digital privacy
,
surveillance camera systems
, and
federal government systems
, I’m focusing this week on what is happening at the local level—mainly in policing.
This closes this loop on surveillance by coming back around to local activity — although it takes an unexpected jump back to the national level with a story published last month.
Law enforcement surveillance has dramatically evolved, influenced by cutting-edge technology and controversial practices.
This thread of stories highlights the complexities and ethical challenges arising from deploying these advancements.
From the sophisticated smartphone tracking tools like Fog Reveal to the spidering data collection activities of Flock’s AI-powered license plate readers, these stories underscore the growing tensions between public safety objectives and personal privacy rights.
So that is the focus of this week’s
Thursday Threads
issue:
In 2022, we learned of a
local police surveillance called Fog Reveal
that pinpointed mobile phones and de-anonymized users.
Two years later,
they were still at it
—this time asking police to augment Fog Reveal’s data to include information about doctor visits. (2024)
NYPD has
multi-million dollar contracts with controversial surveillance firms
that scrape social media and post fake users to get surveillance engagement. (2023)
Advances in surveillance technology mean we’ve seen the unchecked growth of
Real-Time Crime Centers
across America. (2023)
Police and other public officials have special protections from data brokers, and
West Virginia officers sue Whitepages
over unlawful info disclosure. (2024)
Here’s the recent national twist on local law enforcement surveillance:
ICE’s covert use of Flock’s AI camera network
for immigration enforcement. (2025)
This Week I Learned
: Ammonium chloride may be the 6th basic taste
Before we start…it is important to call out what is happening in the United States.
The Trump administration is using modern-day authoritarian tactics to frighten citizens into accepting a new normal.
I am more angry at what my national leaders have done than I am frightened, and I hope you will express your outrage, too, at a
No Kings in America protest this weekend
.
These are drafts of the two signs I’ll be waving:
In light of Elon Musk stepping back from a public role in the administration, I’ll retitle my
#TeslaTakedown protest sign blog post
(although, in keeping with cool-URLs-don’t-change practice, it is at the same web link) and will be adding these two signs when they are finalized.
You are welcome to visit that post to download printable versions of these signs or any other ones that I’ve made.
Feel free to send this newsletter to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you are not already subscribed to
DLTJ’s Thursday Threads
, visit the
sign-up page
.
If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these t…